Journal-News.com

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq — When Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch was a junior at Taft High School, he told his guidance counselor he wanted to go to college but his parents didn't have enough money to send him.

Eileen Lowell said he could apply to the U.S. service academies, where tuition is free. He followed her advice and received an acceptance letter from West Point one day before the Naval Academy, the reason he chose the Army, he said.

On his last visit to Hamilton, where his parents and stepbrother, Jim Lynch, still live, he visited Howell to thank her for her advice. He also looked up his high school math teacher, Gary Mozingo. It was the first time he had seen them since high school.

"Teachers touch your lives. You owe it to them to say, 'thanks,'" he said.

Lynch recently marked 30 years in the Army and is in the midst of his second tour in Iraq. He commands the 3rd Infantry Division, including two combat brigades deployed since last year as part of the troop surge, and is the commander of 20,000 coalition forces in south-central Iraq.

His office, the nerve center for U.S. troop movements across a broad swath south of Baghdad, was once an Iraqi mint and was later converted to an Iraqi Army barracks and then a U.S. Army barracks. Near his desk stands a life-size stuffed toy black Labrador, which reminds him of his two female labs back home, 14-year-old Harley and 5-year-old Maggie.

The area he controls, like much of Iraq, has witnessed a drop in violence and sectarian strife. Attacks on U.S. troops have decreased from an average of 25 a day to just three a day. Civilian casualties have diminished by 75 percent to just one a day, according to Army statistics.

He attributes the improvements to the surge strategy of aggressively pursuing insurgents and moving U.S. forces into patrol bases in neighborhoods in order to maintain security gains.

Newly formed volunteer paramilitary forces — predominantly Sunni Arabs who largely work to secure their own neighborhoods and are supported by the U.S. military — have also contributed to the downturn in violence, he said. In the same breath, he called the advances "tenuous."

On the day he spoke, bombers killed 22 Iraqis, underscoring the challenges.

Two of the four provinces under his control — Babil and Wasit — are slated to be handed over to Iraqi provincial authority by the fall, assuming a series of security benchmarks are met. Eight of Iraq's 18 provinces, all in the relatively peaceful south, are currently under Iraqi control.

Success hinges on the future of the volunteer paramilitary forces, some 80,000 men, an estimated 60 percent of whom once fought as insurgents, he said, and are looking for steady work. U.S. officials are pressuring the Shiite-dominated central government to accept some one-third as police officers; the rest are being steered toward newly-designed works progress programs.

"They can be part of the solution or part of the problem," he said. "The government of Iraq has to recognize the legitimacy of the (volunteer forces)."

Lynch said he is encouraged by reconciliation between feuding Sunnis and Shiites on local levels, even if the national government is slow to follow.

"What I see now is an Iraqi identity that I didn't see on my previous tour here," he said.

Lynch is scheduled to return home this summer — he and his wife, Sarah, live outside 3rd Division headquarters in Fort Stewart, Ga. — and is awaiting word of his next assignment.

The 52-year-old said his first job was bussing tables at age 14. He later painted houses. "What my parents taught me is a work ethic."

They both retired after working shifts for 30 years at the local paper mill, Champion International Corp. Lynch said that's where he would have ended up if he hadn't gone to West Point.

He said he never planned to make the Army a career, but he's one of five of his 690 West Point classmates still serving.

"I have no intent to leave (the Army) until the nation doesn't need me anymore," he says, but he can already picture his retirement.

"When I grow up, I'm going to open a bar in Austin, Texas," he says. He developed an affinity for Central Texas and its warm climate during 14 years stationed at Fort Hood.

"Ohio is great. But, there's winter. I don't do winters anymore."

He says he'll ride his Harley Davidson motorcycle and live on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country.

"We're going to have a whole bunch of Labrador retrievers. We're going to have horses. We're going to have cattle just to say we have cattle. I wouldn't know what to do with them."

His bar will be called "The Black Lab Inn."

"I've already got the sign made," he said. "I've just got to find a place to hang it."

Robert W. Gee's e-mail address is bgee@coxnews.com.