War of the Decade: US-Iraq battle

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It was early April 2003. The city of Mosul in northern Iraq was in free fall.

The holdout units of Saddam Hussein's military had abandoned their posts sometime during the night. By midmorning, looters were helping themselves and vigilantes were beginning their revenge.

In a traffic circle, the garroted bodies of Saddam loyalists were propped up like scarecrows. At the university, libraries and labs were picked clean - right down to someone wheeling away a model skeleton that jiggled in a noisy dance of flailing arms and snapping jaw.

This is where I made a promise to a doctor I met amid the mayhem.2

I had come across Dr. Salim Mohammed Yacoub after he banded together with colleagues to defend their hospital against the street pirates. We talked for a long time. It began with his views on the American-led invasion of his country but soon drifted into a broader conversation about the utter helplessness of civilians, like himself, caught in conflict.

He then said something as profound as anything I've ever heard about war.

''Remember, we don't live our lives in history books,'' Dr. Yacoub told me.

Image: This Aug. 29, 2009 file photo shows Iraqis walking past destroyed cars after a massive bomb attack in front of the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad, Iraq. The country is moving toward some level of stability. But it came only after years that pushed Iraq perilously close to civil war between the Sunnis who lost power after Saddam's fall and the majority Shiites who took control of the aftermath. The tallies: more than 4,350 U.S. soldiers dead; at least 87,500 Iraqi civilians killed, according to government figures.

Text and Images: AP