The Weekly Reader

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/magazine/23sassaman.html?pagewanted=print

October 23, 2005
The Fall of the Warrior King

By DEXTER FILKINS NY Times

The body had not yet turned up. Indeed, at that point, early in January 2004, it wasn't clear there was a body at all. Months later, at the trial, the lawyers would still be arguing about it, the puffy, wrinkled corpse that was finally found floating face down in an irrigation canal off the Tigris. But even then, even before the dead man surfaced, it was clear that something had gone wrong on that cold Iraqi night down by the river, something wild by the American military's standards of discipline and force, and the problem had wended its way up the chain of command to the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman.

ED NOTE: War consumes everything, even its own. All is grey as the landscape merges into the obscuring moral fog. This is the story of an excellent officer and his downfall. To long to post here I attach the beginning of this piece and refer you to the original.

Follow up:

Even in an Army in which ferocious competition produced nearly perfect specimens of brains and lethality, Sassaman stood apart. Commanding some 800 soldiers in the heart of the insurgency-ravaged Sunni Triangle, Sassaman, then 40, had distinguished himself as one of the nimblest, most aggressive officers in Iraq. From his base in Balad, a largely Shiite city in a sea of Sunni villages, Sassaman bucked the civilian authorities and held local elections months earlier than in most of the country's other towns and cities. His relations with the locals in Balad were so warm that on each Friday afternoon, inside a circle of tanks on an empty field, his men would face off against the Iraqis for a game of soccer. He was a West Point grad and the son of a Methodist minister. As quarterback for Army's football team in the 1980's, he ran for 1,002 yards in a single season and carried West Point's team to its first bowl victory. Everyone in the Army knew of Nate Sassaman.

Yet as his junior officers briefed him in January about what had happened to two Iraqis his men detained that night by the Tigris, the straight lines and rigid hierarchy of the Army that had created him seemed, like so many other American ideas brought to this murky land, no longer particularly relevant. More important, Sassaman told me later, were his own men, most of them 19- and 20-year-old kids plunked down in this seething country, wearing themselves out to keep the enterprise going, coming under fire four or five times a day. The same day that his men took the two Iraqis down to the river, he attended a memorial service for one of his ablest junior officers, Capt. Eric Paliwoda, whose heart had been punctured by mortar shrapnel and whom Sassaman had lifted into a medevac helicopter as the last of his life drained away.

There would be a fuss if his superiors discovered what his men had done that night, Sassaman did not doubt. It would be the kind of indignation you could expect from people who didn't really know what it was like to fight and live in this place. Sure, it was a dumb thing, but his men had assured him that neither of the Iraqis had been hurt. His best platoon commander even jumped into the water a couple of days later to prove the point. And so Sassaman, standing on the porch of the battalion's command post, decided to flout his 19 years in the Army and his straight-and- narrow upbringing. He turned to one of his company commanders, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, and told him what to do.

"Tell them about everything," Sassaman said, "except the water."

The events that would end the career of one of the Army's most celebrated midlevel officers sent a shock through the American force in Iraq. It is only now, with the Army's investigation complete and Sassaman's career over, that the story can be pieced together from interviews with him, his comrades and the Iraqis. Twenty-two months after that night on the Tigris, it is a tale that seems like a parable of the dark passage that lay ahead for the Americans in Iraq.