Petraeus Gave Student Summer VIP Tour of Iraq

Talk About Field Trips!

By Megan Greenwell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 3, 2007; C01

CAMP TAJI, Iraq -- The briefing was top secret, limited to a group of men with titles ranging from captain to four-star general -- plus one awed 19-year-old civilian.

At first, the teenager sat outside the briefing room with a handful of reporters. Then an aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, poked his head out of the door and said, "Wesley Morgan? General Petraeus wants you in here."

Morgan, a sophomore at Princeton, spent his summer vacation in Iraq on a personal invitation from Petraeus. He met with the visiting then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, and had access to multiple classified briefings. He helped patrol streets in Baghdad. His identification card read "journalist," because he keeps a blog about his experiences, but he was treated more like one of the members of Congress or other VIPs who have passed through Iraq.

The trip was the chance of a lifetime for Morgan, an ROTC cadet who said he first became interested in military history and counterinsurgency at age 6. But Petraeus's invitation also highlights his desire to attract more people like Morgan to military service -- the guys with degrees from places like Princeton (where Petraeus himself earned a doctorate), the slightly nerdy ones who are as comfortable poring over treatises on counterinsurgency tactics as going out on patrol.

"He has studied Iraq deeply and is exceedingly well read," Petraeus said of his protege. "I love to see these types of people here."

Petraeus's willingness to be a mentor stems from a desire to position himself as the man who rebuilt the Army, people who have worked with him in Iraq and elsewhere say. He has been open about his desire to shape the officer corps into a group of highly educated thinkers and has surrounded himself with Rhodes Scholars and PhDs, a group that has come to be known as his brain trust.

"I think he's universally well known for finding smart people who are interested in doing things a little differently, and I think that's a major reason for his success," says Capt. Elizabeth McNally, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who is Petraeus's speechwriter.

Still, Petraeus says this is the first time he has taken someone so young under his wing, with the exception of his own son, a junior ROTC cadet at MIT.

The seed for Morgan's improbable summer vacation in Iraq was planted last October, when he wrote a lengthy profile of Petraeus for Princeton's student newspaper. They spoke on the phone for two hours, with Petraeus asking nearly as many questions as he was answering, both men recalled.

The two began e-mailing regularly, and in March, the general asked: Wouldn't Wes like to spend a summer in Baghdad?

"It's amazing," Morgan said after the briefing at Camp Taji last month. "It's the weirdest summer vacation ever, but to finally get to see what's happening for myself is unbelievable."

Morgan's blog maintains an adulatory tone in discussing Petraeus, concluding that nobody understands the situation in Iraq as well as the general does. Each post is a several-thousand-word wrap-up of three or four days spent in the field in which Morgan demonstrates a deep knowledge of Army operations, slipping easily into Army jargon and painstakingly detailing conversations and sights with a sense of awe.

"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."