As Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, I delivered the Pentagon’s message to Melinda. Not surprisingly, she was adamant about staying. She felt safe enough in the Palestine Hotel, which was removed from the government ministries and major military installations that were the primary U.S. targets. But the orders for her to leave Iraq were coming from on high. Donald Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Co., which at the time owned Newsweek, called me to say he hoped we were pulling Melinda out. It fell to Richard Smith, Newsweek’s chairman and editor in chief, to give the order. Melinda was furious. What had she been doing living under one of the world’s deadliest regimes for the past two months if not preparing to cover the war? She agreed to leave—but not before sitting down at her laptop and writing a letter of resignation.

In the end, it didn’t come to that. In the chaos and confusion of the war, Melinda was unable to get an exit visa from the Information Ministry. It quickly became clear that it would be too dangerous to try to flee Iraq overland without the proper papers. She had to stay. Back home we were all concerned about Melinda’s safety. At the same time, there was something comforting about having Melinda, pro that she was, on such a big and important story. Instead of resigning, Melinda, the only newsmagazine correspondent still in Baghdad, got to work.

The next evening the bombs began to fall. Watching the spectacle unfold from the balcony of her hotel was like having a front-row seat at an IMAX war movie. As she described the scene in Newsweek, “The night sky pulsed with crimson fireballs and Iraqi tracer fire, the concussion had knocked the plaster from my hotel’s ceilings and an entire riverbank of government buildings had disintegrated as I watched from an upper floor.” That night, Melinda filed in short bursts as a precautionary measure in case they were hit or lost power. In New York, her editors weaved together her dispatches into a brilliant diary that vividly captured the surreal quality of Saddam’s final days, as well as the spreading chaos and fear as war gripped the city.

The sandy fields were filled with American tanks, and their turrets beaded on us as we passed, swiveling in unison and following us until we were out of sight again. We slept in our cars, in the lees of dunes, or on the open ground. At night, the far horizons glowed with bombing, and it became impossible to distinguish what manner of destruction was hurtling earthward—human-made or otherwise. Soon it just seemed to merge. The fighter planes flew over it all, racing in and out on bombing runs. Some nights I wanted to leave—just turn around and go home. One night I called a colleague and told him so. Come on back, he told me. But I couldn’t, really; I didn’t trust my own navigation skills. So I kept going. As we raced on to Baghdad, the world smelled tangy with diesel. Long hours passed when all I followed was the dust trail Luc’s truck left for me as track. Helicopters sometimes thundered by above us, the bodies inside impassive. I had no idea where I was. But the small lines of the GPS led us north. It was a vast landscape we were in, and we were the only things that seemed to be moving. The sound of the wind was furious, and I rolled my window up quickly.

Suddenly, I saw a man standing by the side of the road. He was wearing green fatigues. He was tall, bearded, and wore a green hat with a bill, Nicaraguan-style. He had a very big gun, and was holding it at waist level. As soon as Luc’s car reached him, the man began to fire. By the time I came within his range, it was too late to turn around. I had hardly realized he was armed until I was on him. I realized that they were shooting at me too. I sped up. It had rained earlier, so the ground was wet and dark, including parts of the road, and alongside the road were ditches of mud streaked with shallow and putrid pools of waste. I heard the rounds as they hit my truck. They punctured the metal, penetrating the car and exiting on the other side. There was more than one man firing now. I ducked this way and that. I sped up; I slowed down. I heard glass shatter. The bullets were getting louder, more pronounced, and more frequent. Suddenly, the back of my vehicle caught on fire—I could smell it burning. They must have hit the gas tank.

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of our second invasion of Iraq, and the questions that were never answered about our nearly nine-year occupation are no longer being asked. Americans, our allies, and the Iraqi people are still owed an honest answer from the leaders who created the war and kept us in it: why were we there?

Hundreds of thousands of Americans protested at the start of the war, but bombing inevitably began on March 19, 2003. The next day U.S. and British forces drove through a breach in the high berm dividing Kuwait from Iraq. I entered as part of the invasion force sent to disarm Iraq. Colin Powell told the U.N. that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to 9/11. Rumsfeld said we would be done within a few months at a cost of around $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz said Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction with oil revenue. Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators. President Bush declared an end to major combat operations 44 days later under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” We were not briefed on a post-hostilities plan, and even Saddam Hussein managed to evade capture for another seven months.

One day let's hope Iraqis will write their own books about the Iraq War. When they do, their stories in their words should be required reading for all.

Finding Words For Fiasco

“What does fiasco mean?” asked the round English teacher, Mr. Abbas, with dark eyebrows arched. He waddled when he walked, books under arm and sheets of paper in hand–a happily disheveled image that made me grin. Iraq had become defined by rage and revenge. Adrenaline followed by grieving on all sides. Abbas represented a chance at better relations. He wanted to help. Half a year earlier, he presciently said Sunnis had begun to “awaken” (his word) in Anbar Province. Longstanding Marine outreach efforts to tribal leaders, including in Amman, were finally paying off.

The Teamster

I arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2003 from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York City only to be assigned, as I saw it, the role of Jimmy Hoffa on behalf of the Coalition Provisional Authority. My Iraqi counterparts would not be Foreign Ministry officials, but Iraq’s truckers. I liked the unexpected challenge ... in a way. I just didn’t want to meet the same fate as the elder Mr. Hoffa.

Pudgy and bearded with baseball mitt-size hands and trained as a mechanic, Bassam had risen to be a chief representative of Iraq’s hundreds-strong teamster high command. This group controlled massive fleets of Volvo trucks crucial in supplying the country and therefore maintaining stability. He and his men moved food—tons of it, daily. Wheat flour, rice, sugar, beans, salt, cooking oil, and tea were common staples. Iraqis depended on them to feed their families ever since the U.N. had authorized stiff economic sanctions following the 1991 Gulf War. Bassam himself loved eating three-foot-long Tigris River carp, called masgouf—a bony, local delicacy also favored by Saddam and, it was rumored, former French president Jacques Chirac, who had the fish flown to Paris.

“Hey Grandma!” said one Asian-American soldier who had been the first up the statue. “That was me who pulled down Saddam!”

It was a rather jubilant moment—if one did not look out my side window and see the looting of Baghdad had begun. I did look, and I saw Iraqi men running with office furniture on their heads and men smashing windows to rob storefronts, taking fistfuls of goods. Comically, and rather metaphorically, an Iraqi man was dragging the head of Saddam—the one from the statue—down a street with a rope, like a dog on a leash.

I went to look for my Iraqi driver, but he had disappeared. My translator was also gone. So was the much-feared minister of information, who had made my life hell for the two months I lived in Baghdad under the Saddam regime in the run-up to the invasion. Anyone who had been part of that now felled system had wisely run for the hills.

Coughlin was previously associate professor of epidemiology and director of the program in public-health ethics at Tulane University and is a former chair of the writing group that prepared the ethics guidelines for the American College of Epidemiology.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Coughlin said that whenever he spoke out about any alleged unethical activity, his bosses “intimidated and admonished” him. He says they first tried to silence him after he spoke out about a major health study of 60,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Coughlin believed that the nearly 2,000 subjects who self-identified as suicidal should have been checked up on afterward by mental-health clinicians. Instead, he says, the researchers interviewed them and moved on.

“Many of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he says. “It’s very unfortunate. My supervisors did all they could to block my efforts.”

Today marks International Women’s Day, and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is asking us all to be aware of and consider the 2013 theme of “elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.”

On this International Women’s Day, I call on our military leaders to recognize that eliminating and preventing sexual violence within the ranks involves much more than simply improving reporting, cracking down on offenders, or enforcing a “battle-buddy” system. It requires a cultural shift that can only happen from within the organization, starting with leadership.

The irony of this year’s theme in our domestic context is readily apparent. Because of the Department of Defense’s decision to lift the 1994 ban on women serving in combat roles, women will now have equal opportunity to stand up for the American values and institutions that should protect all women against sexual violence. But as we charge women with this duty, we must take steps to ensure that they do not live in fear of the threat of sexual abuse within the military.

Meanwhile, Kathy was suffering from a series of chronic illnesses, including an auto-immune disorder. In recent years, Allen had offered to retire from the military—to “drop his letter,” as he put it—should she be overwhelmed. Kathy always said no, soldiering on with little complaint. She has been a “weary stoic,” says a friend of the family who didn’t want to be named discussing their private affairs.

Those who know Allen say he was extremely devoted to his wife. “John’s kind of old-fashioned, almost high Victorian,” says Marc Chretien, a State Department official and Allen political adviser. “He’s the kind of guy who holds his wife’s hand under the table.”

Over a decade ago, we surveyed elite military, elite civilians, and the general population about their views on a wide range of foreign policy and national security issues. We wound one especially noteworthy pattern: Civilian elites were more supportive of using military force, and for a wider range of scenarios, than were military elites (defined as up and coming mid-range officers at key stages of their career). We asked, for instance, about the importance of using the military to “meet humanitarian needs abroad.” Civilian elites who had never served in the military were five times as likely as military elites to call this “very important.”  To be sure, military elites still tended to rate such missions as “somewhat important,” but such differences in enthusiasm for humanitarian missions are significant when making difficult decisions about the use of force.

The views of veterans like Senator Hagel – who served in the enlisted ranks – generally fell somewhere in between the civilian elite non-veterans and military officers, but tended to be closer to their military counterparts. 

This war-hardened Marine infantry officer could not shake the image of watching a “guilty” man die, as cameras thousands of feet above beamed live streaming video footage to Camp Leatherneck’s command center. The feed showed how the missile severed both legs of one of the men, who then tried to drag and conceal what was left of himself into the new crater that became his grave. Marines watched from half-a-province away as the man bled to death, nowhere to hide. Those in the White House and Pentagon would be pleased: another kill added to the long list. This time a bullseye from a distance made clean, easy, and effective.

“Let’s talk about it,” I replied. If anyone wanted revenge, we did.

The bad guys, after all, were linked (but not indisputably) to a suicide bomber who blew up two Marines and a Navy Corpsman in a market the day after a Marine commanding general and I had visited them. We shook their hands as they began a new mission at the edge of America’s military empire, overstretched and unforgiving to frontline troops on third tours.

The VA's disability claims crisis has only been made worse by the department's high-tech new computerized system intended to streamline the benefits process, according to the strongly worded report (PDF) from the department’s Office of the Inspector General. The $500 million computerized Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS) has no implementation plan and is riddled with problems, including disorganized electronic claims folders and improper management of hard-copy claims.

While VA spokesman Randy Noller tells The Daily Beast that the department still believes that it can live up to Shinseki’s pledge to eliminate the backlog by 2015, reduce the processing time on all claims to 125 days or less, and cut the error rate to 2 percent, the OIG concluded that given the slow and complex nature of this transition from paper to computers, the VA will “continue to face challenges in meeting its goal of eliminating the backlog of disability claims” by 2015—and veterans' advocates dismissed the goal as nearly impossible to meet.

In December, the VA touted its “paperless, digital disability claims system” as “a lasting solution that will transform how we operate and eliminate the claims backlog.”