That’s why he’s here, hunting down the last Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters in the rural Arab Jabour district, south of Baghdad. Hollenbeck and his troops live in an abandoned farmhouse with no running water or electricity, only a generator to run their radios and a light or two. He doesn’t mind roughing it; that’s part of the strategy. The main thing is to protect the people: you have to live among them, not on heavily fortified bases, as Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual says. When the book first came out, Hollenbeck was at Fort Benning, taking classes in conventional warfare between deployments to Iraq. He remembers how good it felt to read something that actually applied to the unconventional conflict he had seen in Iraq.
In these croplands and orchards along the Tigris, the war is less about good and evil than about managing ambiguities (although the “wanted” list at the farmhouse is headed “Bad Dudes”). “As a counterinsurgent, you’re winning when more and more of the people in the middle are leaning to you.” Hollenbeck’s father, an Army Ranger officer, saw close-up how Vietnam turned into a disaster. Compared with that war, Iraq these days is looking good.
