Nathaniel Fick, the Dartmouth-educated Marine platoon commander and Iraq veteran, hadn’t crossed my radar screen since I came across a review of his war memoir, Only One Bullet Away, in late 2005. Deployed soon after 9/11 to Afghanistan and assigned a year later to U.S. operations in Iraq, Fick was that rare anomaly, a pro-military Ivy League intellectual from an affluent background who was hungry to meet the physical and psychological challenges of combat. He quickly learned the martial virtues of courage, honor and loyalty to his men, along with an abiding conviction that smart planning and discipline save lives.

More than two years later, with a bestseller under his belt and a joint masters degree in his sights at Harvard, the trim, sandy-haired former Marine officer still possessed the same unabashed military pride and the same impressive ability to articulate his experience – but with a surprising and even shocking twist. For all his well-groomed, inside-the-system manner, Fick had undergone a personal transformation since finishing the book that gave him at least as much in common with Vietnam veterans a generation ago as with young officers now leading U.S. forces in Mosul or Jalalabad.

Before a rapt audience of students and faculty at Hartford’s Trinity College recently, Fick made it clear that, knowing what he knows now, he no longer believed Iraq ever posed a strategic threat to the U.S. that justified the death of a single U.S. Marine under his command. He explained later that he had come to this conclusion only after much hard thinking about his Iraq tour commanding an elite Marine reconnaissance unit.

Fick left the Marines in 2003. “I led platoons in two wars, and brought all my men home alive,” he said. “Would I want to try a third time? Getting a Marine killed would have been, for me, a fate worse than my own death.” Several of his men were killed in battles or accidents later in the occupation; but his heartfelt pride in his personal accomplishment did not diminish his indictment of the war. His message was vivid and personal: the Iraq war had not been worth the loss of a single American life. Rather, it had become a misbegotten and badly managed mistake.

He now readily conceded that the American occupation had triggered the terrorist insurgency in Iraq in the first place, and that a continued U.S. military presence was a provocation that would only fuel further Iraqi civil strife and terrorist activity. Yet Fick also believed that U.S. forces were now the only thing standing between Iraqis and genocidal civil strife. American voters, he contended, were facing a false choice in Iraq, as President Bush and John McCain urged the U.S. to stay the course while opponents like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pushed large-scale withdrawal.

For his money, Fick supported a radically pared-down U.S. presence of between 20,000 and 40,000 troops. This small U.S. force, he proposed, should rely heavily on Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency tactics in close cooperation with Iraqi government forces. U.S. troops, he said, should work to ensure security in Iraq by concentrating on three missions: countering real al Qaeda terrorist threats, training Iraqi troops and police, and serving as a buffer between the Baghdad government and
mischief-making by Tehran. He opposed permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.

U.S. forces, said Fick, had no business supporting Iraqi Army operations against hostile Shiite militias in Basra or Sadr City in Baghdad on behalf of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki’s government. Fick, who plans to return this year to Afghanistan to help train government troops and favors aggressive recruitment of former Sunni soldiers for the Iraqi army, even hinted he would have a problem with orders commanding him to take his troops into such a fight.

His hands-off, pared-down view of U.S. involvement in bloody Iraqi sectarian rivalries may rankle hardliners. But like his predecessors in the Vietnam era, Fick earned the
right to his critical view of the war the hard way, and bluntly favored immediate U.S. military withdrawal and rejected the easy bromides of Washington Republicans about staying the course.

Yet unlike an earlier generation of anti-war vets, Fick placed his bets on the sort of controversial withdrawal strategy that should get a full airing on the Democratic side in the upcoming presidential campaign: a dramatically curtailed and refocused U.S. military mission steeped in new warfighting tactics embraced by Pentagon reformers who are now busy reshaping U.S. military doctrine on the fly.