A Soldier's Legacy.(Alan Rogers)

In a handwritten letter to himself, dated December 13, 1990, Specialist Alan Rogers, a twenty-three-year-old African-American chaplain's assistant, grappled with the issue of fear as he prepared for his first combat tour. Aboard Flight 104 from Germany to Saudi Arabia, as part of Operation Desert Shield, he wrote, "It seems like only yesterday that we were initially alerted that our unit would be deploying to the Persian Gulf to support the multinational force buildup already operating in the Middle East theater. Yet, in the midst of all the preparations and briefings, frenzied activity and excitement, there exists a general feeling of numbness. This really isn't happening . . . this world crisis is not going to affect me. . . ." Rogers was an unusually soft-spoken and cerebral enlistee--he'd been voted "most intellectual" in his high-school class--and he found himself replaying the lyrics to Diana Ross's "Theme from Mahogany" in his head ("Do you know where you're going to?").

Rogers went on to a distinguished military career. After earning two Kuwait Liberation medals with the 8th Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery, which provided Patriot-missile support against Saddam Hussein's Soviet-made Scuds, he returned home and, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship at the University of Florida, earned his bachelor's degree, in religion. Then he accepted a commission as an intelligence officer. While stationed in Arizona, as an aide-de-camp at Fort Huachuca, he received a master's degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, and later, after serving two tours in South Korea, and returning to the Middle East in 2002 for the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he pursued a second master's, in policy management, at Georgetown. The Georgetown stint was part of an elite Defense Department internship program offered to twenty captains across the services, and it included an assignment to the Pentagon--in Rogers's case, as a special assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. After the internship, he worked at the Pentagon as the lead biometrics officer in Army Intelligence--"the stuff that you see on 'C.S.I.: Miami,' " as one of his friends put it, referring to the use of advanced fingerprinting techniques and retinal scans, which are particularly useful in counter-insurgency warfare, and in tracking the sources of improvised explosive devices, the primary killer of U.S. troops. Biometrics was a notorious mess, but Rogers excelled in the role, owing in large part to his facility for reconciling the technological demands of civilian contractors with the Army bureaucracy. "Every biometrics staff in the Pentagon and beyond--every single one, and I'm not joking here--contacted me and asked if they could borrow Major Rogers to help them work out their biometrics problems," his supervisor later recalled. "Every meeting--fights, pandemonium--heads would turn to Alan."

The measure of a soldier can fairly be said to consist of his ability to maintain the respect of his peers and his subordinates while earning it anew from his superiors. Rogers rarely talked about himself, which helped contribute to a widespread sense among his troops that he was there "solely for them," as one Pentagon colleague said recently, but he was also fearless when it came to briefing two- and three-star generals. "If the sun was coming up and Alan said, 'You know, it's still kind of dark outside,' people would say, 'Yeah, maybe it is kind of dark outside,' " the colleague recalled. Rogers was deeply attracted to the symbolism of the Army, frequently leading civilian friends on tours of the Pentagon and of Arlington National Cemetery, and after he began his third tour in Iraq, last December, he took note of the weather in Baghdad, which wasn't so different from Florida's, and declared, "This is an ideal time to be here." Major Rogers was by then approaching twenty years' service, and was on track to be eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel. He believed in the nobility of the mission.

In Baghdad, Rogers was assigned to the 1st Division National Police Transition Team, which involved embedding with Iraqi military units in an effort to train them for eventual self-sufficiency. He was part of an eleven-man unit known as Team Stiletto, working closely with several Iraqis who were nicknamed Steve, Mike, Leo, Kiwi, and Dave. "It is an understatement to say this is a significant paradigm shift for our conventional army," he wrote in an e-mail to friends, after arriving at Forward Operating Base Shield, on the site of the former Olympic Training Center. "Throw into the mix the deadly I.E.D.'s that continue to produce casualties daily, rampant corruption and mixed allegiances, a Shia/Sunni divide that threatens all of our progress, coupled with a myriad of other elements, and it makes for the very complex battlespace which is Iraq today."

At the end of January, Rogers spent the better part of a Saturday night checking back in with home, by e-mail and using a "morale phone" that he shared with a couple of other soldiers. He had a two-week leave coming up, so that he could stand as the best man in his friend Shay Hill's wedding, in Jacksonville, and he called Hill, who was heading out to a rugby game and couldn't talk. He was able to reach another friend, Kelly O'Connor, an Army recruiter stationed in St. Augustine; they talked about the relevance of his pre-deployment training at Fort Riley, in Kansas (so far, so good), and about the upcoming bachelor party they were planning for Hill, in Orlando. Rogers had no siblings, and had lost both his parents to illness in 2000. He thought of Hill and O'Connor as surrogate brothers. By the time Hill returned Rogers's call, it was four in the morning in Iraq, and he could tell that he had woken Rogers up, so he kept the conversation brief. The next night, while helping his fiancee, Theresa, sort through the effects of her grandmother, who had recently died, Hill got a call from one of his neighbors in Jacksonville, who said that there were two men in uniform standing outside his door.

Several hours after the inadvertent wakeup call, it turned out, Rogers was sitting in the right rear seat of an armored Humvee, in East Baghdad, on a routine morning patrol, as it passed a guardrail concealing an I.E.D. The force of the explosion blew straight through the vehicle, knocking an Iraqi interpreter, in the left seat, into the street. The interpreter and an American gunner who was standing beside Rogers in the Humvee were injured. Rogers died instantly. He was forty.

Deputy Secretary England attended a memorial service at the Pentagon, where Thomas Gandy, a director of counterintelligence and human intelligence, hailed Rogers as "simply the most ...