Fighting Words

He wrote about the heat: By 12:00 it was 120 degrees. Imagine putting your face into a lit oven, turning a powerful hairdryer on your face and throwing sand in your eyes."

He wrote about searching a house and arresting a suspected insurgent while his wife pled for mercy: Trembling, she turns to me and starts asking questions in Arabic. "What has he done? Where are you taking him?" . . . The pain in her voice is obvious. She is terrified for her family and for her husband. The soldiers have come to take him away, and for all she knows, she may never see him again. My heart is in my mouth.

He wrote about getting hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb: I feel a sharp blow to my abdomen below my body armor, just as my mind registers the blast. The blow doubles me over, and knocks me back on my feet. I don't want to look. Gingerly reaching down, I feel for wetness, for the sign that I am cut and bleeding. I close my eyes and check for pain. Nothing. Breathing a sigh of relief, I open my eyes.

He was fine, not hurt at all, but the story scared his sister, Margo, who fired back an e-mail saying: "Sheesh, boy! You're giving us heart attacks over here."

His parents checked the blog every day. "It was a lifeline," says his mother, Michelle Goldsmith.

Bill McGrath, his boss at Porter Wright, was reading it, too, and sending back news of the insider-trading case Tiffen had been working on back in Washington. (Their client was convicted on 19 out of 27 charges.)

Tiffen loved getting e-mail from friends and family, of course, but he was really floored by the ones he received from strangers. "If I didn't post something for a few days," he says, "I would get dozens of panicked e-mails from people I'd never met, saying 'Are you okay?' "

Meanwhile, Tiffen was fighting a war, trying to keep his soldiers alive and learning to deal with Iraqis.

"I watched him question prisoners and he was very good," Thompson recalls. "He treated the Iraqis with respect until they gave him reason to do otherwise. But he was no pushover."

The view from the Alamo was confusing. In Saba al-Bor, it was tough to tell what side people were on. Many of the locals supported the Americans and several became informants, providing information on the insurgents. But Tiffen suspected that one of his Iraqi translators was secretly working for the other side. And his men arrested several of the local cops for aiding the insurgents.

"One of them tried to kill one of our informants," Tiffen says. "They were taking him out to execute him and he managed to open the trunk he was in and crawl out of the moving vehicle and he ran to the Alamo and told us about it."

In Saba al-Bor, a death squad was at work. Tiffen wrote about it in his blog: Across from the mosque, in a small woodworking shop, a man has just been murdered. An hour ago, three insurgents entered his shop and shot him in the head. The weapon was held so close to his head that the muzzle blast burned and blackened his ear. Only 300 meters from the Alamo, he was left to die, four AK-47 shell casings lying next to his body.