Talk About Field Trips!

"Advancing toward the sound of the guns with a squad of armored Manchu infantrymen in a damp, muddy palm jungle -- definitely an exhilarating feeling, even if to them the procedure was routine," he wrote in describing a patrol just north of Baghdad.

With the exception of professions of admiration for Petraeus, Morgan expresses few opinions in his blog. He describes himself as a moderate and advertises his support on Facebook for both John McCain and Barack Obama.

"I don't think I have enough information or experience to really have strong opinions one way or the other," he wrote after the day at Taji with Petraeus.

Morgan's path toward becoming the youngest American civilian known to have spent time in Iraq started at least 15 years before he actually landed in Baghdad. In fact, when the e-mail from Petraeus came, Morgan's mother wasn't even surprised.

"I really think this interest and this aptitude is hard-wired into him," says Kerry Tucker, who lives with Morgan's father and younger brother near Boston. "So the fact that he's been able to take it to this level is wonderful, but I can't say it's totally unexpected."

Morgan once came home from preschool nearly in tears after learning that teachers at the school, which served a politically liberal population in Cambridge, Mass., had gone through illustrated books about cars and trucks and torn out the pages showing military vehicles.

"He said, 'Why did you send me to Dandelion School?' " she recalls, laughing. "It was a lovely school that was the worst possible place for him."

As Morgan got older, he largely contained his military interest to his bedroom, where he would spend hours reading and building hundreds of G.I. Joe-inspired action figures dressed in uniforms from various wars in world history. Once he built a scale model diorama of Kandahar, Afghanistan, then constructed a pulley system that would raise and lower helicopters as he rolled across the floor in his desk chair. His parents began calling his bedroom "the situation room."

Through his research, Morgan began following Petraeus's career 10 years before most Americans had ever heard his name. He read Petraeus's highly regarded guide to counterinsurgency and started to think that someday he could be one of Petraeus's "designated thinkers," as the general calls his circle of advisers with advanced degrees and combat experience.

"General Petraeus was one of the first people to legitimize his interest," Tucker says. "I was hoping this day would come when he wasn't sitting alone in his room drawing maps of Iraq and reading."

Petraeus has encouraged Morgan to take classes at Princeton's prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which admits a few undergraduates each year, to learn Arabic and to improve his performance on physical tests like push-ups, sit-ups and running. Whenever the general visits Princeton, which he does as often as possible, he competes against ROTC cadets -- and generally wins.

Petraeus scoffs at the notion that the man running the war in Iraq should not be taking time to mentor teenagers.

"This is someone who is knowledgeable enough to be an officer here right now," he says. "We need all the brilliant young people we can get. I'll just have to wait three years or so for this one."