MEET THE GENERAL

A good piece on LTG Sanchez, the senior military officer in Iraq.

His is a true American dream story...read it all.

Outside the American headquarters, Sanchez clambered on a tank to chat with crewmen who, like others in the American garrison at Abu Saida, have been retrained as infantrymen for patrols, firefights and other duties around the town. As he talked with the crewmen, one, Hector Quijada, 20, from the Bronx, N.Y., stepped forward and spoke in Spanish. The two men, the general and the specialist, then spoke quietly for several minutes.

Afterward, Quijada, speaking in fractured English, said that he and his family had migrated to the United States four years ago, settling in New York, where his father worked in a plastics factory. What he wanted the general to know, he said, was that he was a hero among Mexican-Americans, and among Quijada's friends in his hometown of Cancun. "I told him that the people of Mexico always talk about General Sanchez, everybody gets excited about him."