MG: We actually reconstructed many of the battles, which have not really been well-covered. But I think the embedded reporters did a pretty good job, under difficult circumstances. It was a fast-moving war, they didn’t stay in the same place for long, and they were operating under security constraints. For example, when a colleague of mine was at the Kifl bridge [a hard-fought and decisive battle on the drive toward Baghdad] the day after the fight, he couldn’t identify where the bridge was located. It’s hard to explain the significance of the battle if you can’t give the location of the bridge.


I actually went back to many of these battle locations with the people who fought there, because when I was in Baghdad the Third Infantry Division was doing — for its own purposes — a reconstruction of what happened … So I’ve been to most of these places, with the guys who fought there, and they would reenact it and describe it and I had my tape recorder and I would take it down and I kept in touch with these people. And because I did that, I was able to put a lot of this together, and when you put it together it’s not just a story of this or that battle, but it’s a tale of how the U.S. military encountered a different enemy than it had anticipated and how the forces in the field, I think, adapted very well to it, but the senior level officers at CENTCOM and Secretary Rumsfeld failed to adapt at all.