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.

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.

I knew instantly what he meant. Scholars and pundits can analyze the strategic outcomes and judge the winners and losers from a safe distance. But there is none of that as war unfolds. There are just moments.

They come in every imaginable form: a car bomb's lethal spray of metal and glass, a unit pinned down by an ambush, neighbors turning on neighbors, a soldier packing for another tour, the pre-dawn salute of President Barack Obama at Dover Air Force Base for 18 soldiers killed in Afghanistan in a single week.

It's these countless fragments that have built the narrative of the post-Sept. 11 years. We pore over them to try to make sense of where we are and seek clues about what could come.

It was just the beginning of America's second war when I sat with Dr. Yacoub. He said: Come find me in five or six years, God willing. Then we can talk more about the wars and what they mean.

I told him I would try my best.

We are now at that point.

The doctor was right about one thing. There is much to discuss.

In Iraq, it's now about holding the gains.

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.