Fighting Words

When he was a kid, growing up on Long Island, his parents took him to Gettysburg and that sparked an interest in military history. "My heroes were not basketball players, they were soldiers," he says. "I thought, I want that experience. I think I wanted to test myself against those soldiers, to see how I stacked up."

He joined Army ROTC in 2000, while he was studying at George Washington University Law School. He graduated in 2003 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Maryland National Guard. He was working on an insider-trading case at Porter Wright when the unit he'd trained with was called up for duty in Iraq. By then, Tiffen was in another unit but he got a call from his old platoon sergeant, Thomas Thompson.

"He's the lieutenant I wanted to go to war with," Thompson says. "I called him on the phone and said, 'I need a platoon leader. Have you thought of coming back?' "

Tiffen volunteered to go. "When soldiers you respect ask you to go with them, I couldn't say no," he explains. "I couldn't stay home and wave goodbye to these guys."

They arrived in Iraq in May of 2005, assigned to an area outside Baghdad, near a town called Saba al-Bor. For a few days, the guys they were replacing showed them around.

"We would drive past Saba al-Bor and they would say, 'Don't go in this town, nobody's been in there for six months, you don't want to go there,' " Tiffen recalls. "So it built up in my mind that it was a town occupied by the boogeyman. And then my company commander came up to me and said, 'Take your platoon and go into Saba al-Bor and occupy the building next to the police station.' "

"Insurgents were using the town as a staging point for moving weapons into Baghdad," says Capt. Brian Borakove, Tiffen's company commander. "That's why it was very important for us to take it under our control."

So Tiffen took his 40-man platoon into Saba al-Bor and occupied the municipal building next to the police station.

"We put .50-caliber machine guns on the roof and parked the Humvee in front of the gate and started sandbagging windows," Tiffen says.

They called it the Alamo and chalked the name on the roof. In his blog, Tiffen described the place:

Inside the building, soldiers sleep on dirty concrete floors, often using their hard body armor as a pillow. They sleep where they have collapsed, exhausted from a long day and night of continuous dismounted patrols and sandbag details . . . I walk to the north wall of the roof . . . No man's land stretches before me in the darkness, a half kilometer of broken ground, trash, feral dogs, and half-grown, stunted weeds . . . I can't help but reflect that if Hell had a Central Park, it would be a lot like this.

From their base at the Alamo, Tiffen and his platoon patrolled Saba al-Bor and the nearby farmland, setting up roadblocks, searching houses, trying to catch insurgents. Every day or two, whenever he got the chance, Tiffen would take out his laptop, write about what he'd seen and upload it to his blog.