Fighting Words

Still, Tiffen thought he was making progress in Saba al-Bor. "We rolled up some of the insurgent operations there," he says. "We secured the town and we brought in some of the local sheiks and we built a town council to address their problems."

After about six months, Tiffen's soldiers handed Saba al-Bor over to a new group of American replacements, then spent a few months escorting military convoys across the desert near the Syrian border.

Back Home

"When I first got back, it was very uncomfortable," Tiffen says. He's sitting in an Arlington restaurant, ignoring his cheeseburger and fries.

"It bothered me that people weren't talking about Iraq," he says. "People go through life like nothing is happening when so many Americans are in harm's way. We just hit the 3,000 casualty mark and nobody batted an eye. I mean, Britney Spears is more important."

When he returned, he spent about 10 days seeing his family and friends and his girlfriend, then he flew to Israel.

"I studied religion in a school there for a couple weeks," he says. "They say there are no atheists in the foxholes and after spending a year in Iraq, you sort of come back a little more religious than when you left."

He studied the Torah and lived in the Old City of Jerusalem, near the Wailing Wall, and watched the Israeli soldiers patrolling. "I felt more comfortable there, surrounded by soldiers and checkpoints, than I was here," he says. "I was used to it."

Last August he returned to work at Porter Wright, doing litigation and international trade work. McGrath, his boss, says Tiffen is doing a great job. But Tiffen says the transition is tough.

"It's hard to go back and sit at a desk when you think about all the stuff that's going on and you remember what you've been through," he says. "You come back and you say to yourself: Should I be different? What did it all mean? I don't think anybody comes back the same."

He thought about the war every day. He toyed with the idea of turning his blog into a book. He made a video of the footage he shot in Iraq, set to Loreena McKennit's mournful song "Dante's Prayer," and posted it on YouTube.

Then one day in November, sitting in his office at work, he got an e-mail from one of his soldiers with a link to an article from USA Today. The dateline was Saba al-Bor. The headline read: "Hard-won turf easily lost in transfer to Iraqis."

Saba al-Bor was so peaceful last summer, the article said, that the American troops left, handing the Alamo over to Iraqi police in a ceremony on Sept. 20. "Fifteen days later, on Oct. 5, U.S. troops had to return to Saba al-Bor to restore order," the story continued. "Most of the town's police had fled, Sunni and Shiite residents were at war with each other, and sectarian death squads roamed the town. The progress built over months had evaporated."

Tiffen read on. Sunnis had hit the Shiite section of town with 44 mortar shells. Shiite militants responded by killing Sunnis. American troops found 44 bodies dumped around the city, some of them decapitated.

Tiffen was stunned. He left his office, took a walk. "I needed to get some air," he says. "I walked past the White House. I don't know why. My feet just carried me there. My reaction surprised me. I didn't realize how much I'd invested in that town."

Nearly two months later, the story still bothers him. "It's astonishing," he says. "The whole place went to [excrement] when they pulled U.S. troops out. And yet it was considered a success story -- that's why they turned it over to the Iraqis. All our efforts over all that time -- I don't want to say it was for nothing. All I want to say is that it hit me really hard because we invested so much time and energy in the people that lived there. I felt like I was part of the town. And a year later, to read that because the U.S. troops left, people are being executed, that hurt. That really hit home."

He eats his cheeseburger, sips his Coke, talks about other things for a while. But then he returns to the story of Saba al-Bor.

"What does that say?" he asks, not expecting an answer. "Something has to change. I really don't know what it is. Maybe putting 30,000 more troops in will help. I don't know. I don't think anybody knows."