Filed at 5:47 p.m. ET

FORWARD OPERATING BASE MAREZ, Iraq (AP) — It was a brilliant, sunny day with blue skies and warmer than usual weather in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers had just sat down for lunch in their giant chow hall tent.

It was about noon Tuesday when insurgents hit their tent with a suspected rocket attack. The force of the explosions knocked soldiers off their feet and out of their seats. A fireball enveloped the top of the tent, and shrapnel sprayed into the men.

Amid the screaming and thick smoke that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot.

“Medic! Medic!” soldiers shouted.

Medics rushed into the tent and hustled the rest of the wounded out on stretchers.

Scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters outside. Others wobbled around the tent and collapsed, dazed by the blast.

“I can’t hear! I can’t hear!” one female soldier cried as a friend hugged her.

Near the front entrance to the chow hall, troops tended a soldier with a gaping head wound. Within minutes, they zipped him into a black body bag. Three more bodies were in the parking lot.

The military asked that the dead not be identified until families could be notified.

Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The explosions blew out a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.

Grim-faced soldiers growled angrily about the attack as they stomped away.

“Mother (expletive)!” one mumbled.

Sgt. Evan Byler, of the Richmond, Va.-based 276th Engineer Battalion, steadied himself on one of the concrete bomb shelters. He was eating chicken tenders and macaroni when the bomb hit. The blast knocked him out of his chair. When the smoke cleared, Byler took off his shirt and wrapped it around a seriously wounded soldier.

Byler held the bloody shirt in his hand, not quite sure what to do with it.

“It’s not the first close call I have had here,” said Byler, a Fauquier County, Virginia, resident who survived a blast from an improvised explosive device while riding in a vehicle earlier this year.

Byler started walking back to his base when he spotted a soldier collapse from shock on the side of the road. Byler and Lt. Shawn Otto, also of the 276th, put the grieving soldier on a passing pickup truck.

The 276th, with about 500 troops, had made it a year without losing a soldier and is preparing to return home in about a month.

“We almost made it. We almost made it to the end without getting somebody killed,” Otto said glumly.

At least two other soldiers with the 276th were injured, but it was not clear how serious their wounds are.

Insurgents have fired mortars at the chow hall more than 30 times this year. One round killed a female soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in the summer as she scrambled for cover in one of the concrete bomb shelters. Workers are building a new steel and concrete chow hall for the soldiers just down the dusty dirt road.

Lt. Dawn Wheeler, a member of the 276th from Centreville, Va., was waiting in line for chicken tenders when a round hit on the other side of a wall from her. A soldier who had been standing beside her was on the ground, struggling with shrapnel buried deep in his neck.

“We all have angels on us,” she said as she pulled away in a Humvee.

Wheeler quickly joined other officers from the 276th for an emergency meeting minutes after the blast.

Maj. James Zollar, the unit’s acting commander, spoke to more than a dozen of his officers in a voice thick with emotion. He urged them to keep their troops focused on their missions.

“This is a tragic, tragic thing for us but we still have missions,” he told them. “It’s us, the leaders, who have to pull them together.”

Just hours before the blast, Zollar had awarded a Purple Heart to a soldier from the 276th who was wounded in a mortar attack on another part of the base in October.

Zollar eventually turned the emergency meeting over to Chaplain Eddie Barnett. He led the group in prayer.

“Help us now, God, in this time of this very tragic circumstance,” Barnett said. “We pray for your healing upon our wounded soldiers.”

With heads hung low, the soldiers trudged outside. They had work to do.

——

Jeremy Redmon, a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter embedded with U.S. troops, was at Forward Operating Base Marez when it came under attack.

AGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 21 – A powerful explosion killed at least 24 people and wounded 57 others today when it ripped through the tented dining hall of a large American military base in Mosul, tearing a foot-wide hole in the hard concrete floor and spraying shrapnel into a line where American soldiers, civilian contractors and Iraqi troops were waiting to be served lunch, military officials said.

At least 19 American servicemen were among the dead, according to Maj. Earle Bluff, a military spokesman in Baghdad, making the noontime explosion the deadliest single attack on American forces in Iraq.

Pools of blood streamed out of the darkened dining hall at Forward Operating Base Marez as soldiers rushed in to evacuate the wounded from amid crumpled and melted chairs and tables, with the only light coming from a massive hole ripped in the tent roof by the force of the blast, according to one eyewitness.

The attack was the latest in a campaign by militants to terrorize and intimidate Iraqis working either for the Iraqi security services or for American forces, and to disrupt elections planned for Jan. 30, which the militants oppose.

Speaking in Washington, President Bush offered his condolences to relatives of those killed and wounded in Mosul today, but said that the sacrifices were not in vain. “This is a very important and vital mission,” Mr. Bush said outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he visited with soldiers wounded in Iraq. “I’m confident democracy will prevail in Iraq. I know a free Iraq will lead to a more peaceful world. So we ask for God’s blessings on all who are involved in that vital mission.”

The radical Islamist group Army of Ansar al-Sunna issued a statement over the Internet taking responsibility for the Mosul attack, saying one of its fighters had carried out a “martyrdom operation” against forces it described as unbelievers and occupiers. However, a United States military spokesman in Mosul said that no corpse or human remains had been found that appeared to come from a suicide bomber.

Military officials said the blast could have been caused by a well-aimed rocket or mortar round fired by insurgents outside the base. But they also cautioned that it was far too early to narrow the possibilities and that other potential causes, including a bomb smuggled onto the base, would be considered.

They said the blast was a single explosion, and that its shrapnel had created uniform perforations in metal kitchen appliances and other objects near the serving line, as if ball bearings or similar projectiles had been part of the explosive device. “The perforations were perfectly round,” Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, the chief military spokesman in Mosul, said.

In the chaos of the explosion’s aftermath, there was some confusion over some aspects of the casualty toll. In addition to the military deaths, the blast killed four employees and three subcontractors of Halliburton, the large Houston oil-services company that provides cafeteria and other support services to forces in Iraq, the company said. That would bring the death toll to at least 26, though a military spokesman in Mosul said he knew of only 24 confirmed deaths.

Halliburton confirmed the loss of its workers, noting that 62 of its workers had died thus far in “Iraq-Kuwait region” while working “side by side with the military and Iraqi people.”

In Washington, the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, emphasized the administration’s resolve to press ahead with its Iraq policy despite such attacks. “The enemies of freedom understand the stakes involved,” he said. “You heard the president talk about that yesterday. They will be defeated, and a free and peaceful Iraq will emerge.”

In a taped statement, the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, said: “The killed include U.S. military personnel, U.S. contractors, foreign national contractors and Iraqi army. The wounded also come from those various groups.”

“It’s a sad day in Mosul,” General Ham added. “But as they always do, soldiers will come back from that. And they will do what they can do best to honor those who were fallen today, and that is to see this very important mission through to a successful completion.”

The focal point of the blast appeared to have been where the soldiers collected plastic folks and spoons at a stand a few feet from the long serving line, where a four-inch deep crater, about a foot wide, was blown into the thick concrete floor, said Capt. Pat Roddy.

The tiles on the floor near the serving line “were covered with so much blood you couldn’t see what color the tiles were,” Captain Roddy, of Fort Lewis, Wash., said in a telephone interview from Mosul. “At least 50 percent of the tables and chairs had been obliterated by shrapnel. Anybody who was sitting in there, with the magnitude of the explosion, it was large enough, it could have killed anybody.”

Outside, he said, “there were half-burned boots, not attached to any soldier, and you could see blood trails coming past the concrete barriers.” In the sinks outside, where soldiers washed their hands before entering the dining hall, there were “glass, parts of uniforms, watches and gloves” strewn about basins full of an inch or two of blood, he said.

The Mosul base is home to a sizable contingent of troops from Fort Lewis, in Washington State, but officials there told reporters that they had few details of the attack or how many casualties involved soldiers from the fort.

F.B.I. investigators were en route to the Mosul base tonight, and military officials were careful to not rule out any potential explanations for the blast.

“People are out there saying it was a rocket attack, but we flat out don’t know that, and it could very well have not been indirect fire,” said Colonel Hastings said. “It very well could have been a placed explosion.”

Mosul has been the scene of frequent raids by insurgents on police stations in the past six weeks. More than 100 bodies have turned up in the city in recent weeks, as the country heads toward the elections. On Sunday, car bombers struck crowds in Najaf and Karbala, killing at least 61 people and wounding about 120 in those two holy Shiite cities. In Baghdad, about 30 insurgents hurling grenades and firing machine guns pulled three election officials from their car in the midst of morning traffic and killed them with shots to the head.

The Army of Ansar al-Sunna is regarded as a particularly brutal faction of the insurgency that has developed in strength and scope over the last several months. Among its more notable acts have been the killings, sometimes by beheading, of 11 captive Iraqi soldiers and 12 hostage truck drivers from Nepal. Ansar al-Sunna is an offshoot of Ansar al-Islam, a jihadist organization chased out of its mountain base in northern Iraq by American Special Forces and Kurdish militiamen at the start of the war in Iraq.

Today’s explosion coincided with an unannounced visit to Baghdad by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who vowed that the war against the insurgents would be won and the elections held on time. Britain has some 8,000 troops in Iraq, mainly in the south of the country, centered in the city of Basra.

At a news conference in the so-called Green Zone, a fortified, heavily guarded walled compound for Iraqi government officials and foreign forces, Mr. Blair used his visit, his first to Baghdad since Saddam Hussein was toppled in spring 2003, to emphasize Britain’s support for the national elections, saying the country was engaged in a “battle between democracy and terror.”

Insurgents have been trying to disrupt or prevent the scheduled vote and the campaigning process by an Iraqi government that they see as collaborating with occupying foreign forces. The attacks on the Iraqi police and national guard officers have complicated plans to train enough local forces that would ideally spearhead security at polling stations.

Some Iraqi leaders have called for a postponement of the elections, saying that the continuing violence has made holding them untenable, especially in the Sunni-dominated areas north and west of Baghdad. Millions of voters would have to brave the threat of attacks by guerrillas to go to polling stations.

With the elections only six weeks away and just days into the campaigning, concern has been growing over whether the Iraqi security forces will be able to perform well enough to allow voting to proceed.

Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, David Stout contributed reporting from Washington, and Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York.

ppropriately enough for a holiday tale of New York, this one starts with a lost wallet in a taxicab – hundreds of dollars and a precious driver’s license speeding away into a river of yellow vehicles on Madison Avenue.

The story also includes a classic meeting under the clock tower in Grand Central Terminal, a swift connection between like-minded men and a promise to fulfill a pledge made in a passing moment.

That promise would yield a surprisingly generous gift for the city’s poor children and for an organization that has served them for 100 years.

It begins on Election Day, 2004, when John Scardino, a tan and manicured California real estate entrepreneur, was in town to personally finesse a deal for a property in Santa Barbara. Mr. Scardino, 46, not one to underplay his own accomplishments, describes himself as “the largest developer of planned communities on the central California coast.”

Rushing between meetings on that morning, Mr. Scardino made like a native, hailed a cab in front of Trump International Hotel and Tower and high-tailed it to an office tower at Madison Avenue and 45th Street. He remembers little of the trip except that his cabby was especially quiet and had black, curly hair. He never saw the man’s face, never noticed the name on the license.

Those failures would prove particularly vexing when, at his next appointment, he bellied up to the office tower’s security desk and had no identification. He realized that he had dropped his wallet in the cab and started running down the center of Madison Avenue, dodging traffic to furiously peek into cabs, but to no avail. With a flight to catch early the next morning and no ID to get past security, Mr. Scardino was frantic.

Fortunately for him, the next man who hailed his cab was a similarly flourishing businessman, Chuck Posternak, an executive at the investment firm Oppenheimer & Company, who noticed the wallet lying on the black seat cushion. He recognized from its rich contents that its owner would sorely miss it, and did what any upstanding businessman would do: He contacted his secretary to have her take care of the matter.

After half a dozen phone calls, including some to the West Coast, the two men had an appointment later that day to meet at the clock in Grand Central. Although generations have famously met there, the two men had trouble finding each other at first because each, an aggressor kept circling in search of the other.

But the meeting, when it happened, was joyful enough. To show his gratitude, Mr. Scardino begged Mr. Posternak, 63, to let him treat him to tickets to “Emeril Live,” the popular television cooking show where a friend of his worked.

Sure, Mr. Posternak answered, the tickets would be great, but what he really wanted was a small donation to a favorite charity: Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York, a group that provides intense one-on-one mentoring and social services to young people from poor and fatherless homes. “I beg for them every chance I get,” Mr. Posternak said cheerfully.

He then went into what he calls his three-minute spiel. A vice president of the group’s board of trustees, Mr. Posternak was a big brother himself for 40 years. When he was 22, he was paired with an 11-year-old named Lonnie Moss. Lonnie was one of five brothers living with a single mother in Crotona Park in the Bronx. When Mr. Posternak took him on an overnight trip to Massachusetts, Lonnie packed his clothing in a paper bag.

Although still making his way in his own career, Mr. Posternak took Lonnie bowling and to Knicks games. He got Lonnie a job at Dean Witter when he graduated from high school. Mr. Posternak continued to stay in touch, too, as his little brother went through various phases, including joining an ashram.

Mr. Posternak thinks his involvement made a difference because Lonnie eventually settled down, married, had three children and got a good job. The children attended college and, now 53 and driving a BMW, Mr. Moss recently became a big brother himself.”We talk as equals now, about our role as husbands and our pride in our kids,” Mr. Posternak said.

Although there was no way he could know it, Mr. Posternak’s solicitation fell on unusually receptive ears. Mr. Scardino confessed that he, too, was deeply committed to children’s groups.

His mother, he explained, died when he was 11 and his working father left Mr. Scardino largely on his own to navigate his community, Venice Beach, which was then infested with gangs. Mr. Scardino found a safe haven at the Boys Club of Santa Monica. At the well-equipped club, he played basketball with the children of Jerry West, then a star of the Los Angeles Lakers, and became a young table tennis champion.

After attending college and law school and developing his own business, Mr. Scardino became a major contributor to charities that serve children in Southern California, including the Boys and Girls Club in Thousand Oaks, where he makes his home, and the Big Brothers Big Sisters of San Luis Obispo.

At Grand Central he promised Mr. Posternak that he would make a gift, and then disappeared into the crush of commuters.

Despite the intense exchange of biographies, the meeting was less than 10 minutes, and Mr. Posternak never really expected to hear from Mr. Scardino again. After all, he had found and returned another wallet a week earlier and nothing had come of that. But then Mr. Posternak could not know that his new acquaintance was a giver with a flair for the dramatic.

Three and a half weeks later Mr. Scardino’s secretary called Mr. Posternak with an announcement. In mid-December her boss would be in New York to give away Christmas toys to poor children; in fact his plan was to buy $25,000 in toys at Toys “R” Us and pack them into a Hummer in an attempt to catch the eye of “Today” on NBC. Although the scheme never attracted the morning program’s cameras, the toys were given to another children’s charity, Boys and Girls Harbor. The plan had a point, he explains.

“This is the season to get people thinking, ‘Hey, if that guy can do it, so can I.’ “

But “Today” or not, Mr. Scardino’s secretary explained that while he was in New York he would like to present Big Brothers Big Sisters with a check for $10,000, which he did. And he promised to give another $10,000 a year for the next three years. Mr. Posternak said he almost dropped the phone.

He e-mailed Mr. Scardino immediately to thank him and to invite him to Big Brother Big Sister’s annual Christmas gala last Wednesday, during his stay in New York. But more than that, Mr. Posternak told his new friend, they must stay in touch.

“I don’t believe it is just accidental that two men who are so passionate about children’s causes meet because of a lost wallet,” Mr. Posternak said. “There is a miracle in here, even if it’s a small one.”

he reports coming out of Kansas over the weekend seem beyond grisly, as if pulled from a horror movie: a woman kills an expectant mother, rips a baby girl from the victim’s abdomen, then shows off the child to friends, neighbors and a pastor as her own.

The woman accused as the attacker, Lisa M. Montgomery, 36, of Melvern, Kan., was charged with kidnapping resulting in murder and is due to appear in court today. The baby, pulled from the womb of her mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in the eighth month of the pregnancy, is doing well, The Associated Press reported.

Although more than 1,000 pregnant women have been killed in the past decade, according to a Washington Post article published yesterday, experts say that in only a handful of these cases does the killer try to steal the unborn child. Each case is different, they say, but the psychological threads are similar: a desperate longing for a child combined with either psychopathic tendencies or a psychotic break, which creates a delusional belief that a infant must be claimed, at any cost, to be “saved” or “returned” to its rightful mother.

Psychiatrists said they could draw no firm conclusions about Ms. Montgomery without evaluating her. But the woman, who has two high-school-age children, told people in recent months that she had been pregnant with twins and miscarried, the authorities said, suggesting the possibility of postpartum depression, the psychiatrists said.

“Some women feel that the ability to be pregnant and give birth is very essential to being a successful woman,” said Dr. Gail Saltz, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital, “and the inability to maintain a pregnancy can be devastating.”

“Add fluctuating hormones, and you can have someone who develops a postpartum depression and a psychosis that could drive them to do completely out-of-character, irrational things,” Dr. Saltz said.

Forensic psychiatrists say a pregnancy does not even have to be real. In a rare condition, pseudocyesis, the stomach bloats slightly in response to an obsessive belief by a woman that she is pregnant. “Most often women do this to fool the husband, and they don’t want to break the spell and there comes a time when they need to go get a baby,” said Dr. Saul Faerstein, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Most often, it means taking a child from a stroller or nursery, Dr. Faerstein said.

Murder suggests deeper psychological trouble, as illustrated by several cases in which women have killed expectant mothers and taken infants. In 1987, an Oregon woman, Darci Pierce, killed a pregnant woman and performed a Caesarean section with a key. Described as grandiose and deceptive, Ms. Pierce, who was adopted, was desperate to have a child of her own to “prove” that she was a better mother than her adoptive and biological mothers, said Dr. Michael Stone, a specialist in forensic psychiatry at Columbia University who has followed the cases.

In 1995, a Chicago woman, Annette Williams, enlisted two men to help kill a pregnant mother of two, using scissors to cut free the unborn child. According to Dr. Stone’s evaluation, Ms. Williams had a pathological dependence on her boyfriend, who wanted her to have a baby. “What they had in common is this amorality, it seems to me, a deep sense of entitlement, and a longing to have this baby at all costs,” Dr. Stone said.

Ms. Montgomery, news reports said, showed off the baby proudly, as if nothing were wrong. This almost certainly reflects delusional thinking, psychiatrists said.

Psychosis may give rise to elaborate narrative fantasies of good and evil and voices commanding some action. The criminal complaint said Ms. Montgomery found her victim over the Internet, where a picture of the pregnant woman could have prompted any number of thoughts and plots, forensic psychiatrists say.

“In these cases a woman might have a delusion that that’s my baby in that woman, she’s stolen it, and if I don’t rescue it she’s going to kill it, and the motivation is so overwhelming that you just lose contact with reality,” said Dr. Jack M. Gorman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “It’s hard for people who’ve never had this kind of experience to understand, but the voices and hallucinations and demands become overwhelming.”

Denise Grady contributed reporting for this article.

I. Eli’s Joke

The day after Eli Manning was named the starting quarterback of the New York Giants, in mid-November, his father called him about tickets. Of course, Eli didn’t call home with the news right away; his news, to him, was never newsworthy. Archie Manning, once an N.F.L. quarterback himself, learned of his son’s midseason promotion from an ESPN reporter. The next day he had Eli on the phone.

”How did practice go today?” he asked. From Eli’s end of the phone came only silence. A long silence — six, maybe seven seconds.

In those long seconds Archie could have written the headlines across the nation: ”Eli Manning, Named Starter, Skips Practice.” If a life as young as Eli Manning’s could be said to have a theme, this was one of them: his ability to cause other people to worry about him. ”Everyone’s always worrying about Eli,” says his old friend Merrick Egan, ”and he doesn’t need it.” ”I think where it starts,” says his oldest friend, James Montgomery, ”is that Eli kind of likes to toy with his dad.” When Eli was a star quarterback at the University of Mississippi, Montgomery recalls, Archie would drive up from his home in New Orleans to see his son play at the school where he once filled the same role himself. Ole Miss fans still speak of these visits as a Roman Catholic might speak of a trip by the pope. There are streets in Oxford, Miss., named for Archie Manning, halls devoted to his memory, ballads written and actually sung to commemorate Archie Manning. The speed limit on the Ole Miss campus is Archie’s old number, 18. Archie played games in the late 1960′s that they still talk about.

Yet so far as anyone could tell, Eli hadn’t read his Scripture — hadn’t even bothered to skim the Cliff Notes. Archie can recall Eli wanting to discuss his legendary performances only once: ”When he called me after he got to Ole Miss and said he came across my stats in the media guide, and that they weren’t very good.” If he was only feigning indifference to his father’s achievements, he did it well. His two older brothers, Cooper and Peyton (who is the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and was the league M.V.P. last year) obsessed mightily over their father’s playing days. They watched old tapes, peppered Archie with questions, dragged him out into the backyard to throw the football. But Eli never exhibited even a faint curiosity about what his father had done and seemingly knew nothing about it.

On these visits to Oxford, Archie would always go by Eli’s apartment, just to check up on things. ”Being the rather tidy person he is,” Montgomery recalls, ”Archie would just kind of subconsciously start to clean up Eli’s apartment. You know, organize the magazines, straighten out all the papers and pens on Eli’s desk.” And what Eli would do, just for kicks, is quietly follow his dad around the place and reverse the process. Dropping the same magazines back onto the floor, messing up the same papers, etc. ”The funny part was,” Montgomery says, ”his dad would clean the same magazines up about two or three times before finally noticing that he’d already done it.”

Twenty-three years of this treatment and Archie was little better than his youngest son’s lab rat, responding to electric shocks, grabbing for the cheese. To Archie it was possible, just, that his son, the day after he was named the starting quarterback of the New York Giants, forgot to go to practice. To him, Eli himself seemed worried that he might have skipped practice. It was a simple question: how was practice today? He awaited the answer.

”We don’t have practice on Tuesday,” Eli said finally.

Oh.

Was it one of Eli’s private jokes? You never knew. Most of Eli’s jokes, like most of Eli’s thoughts, were private.

II. Plato’s Cave

Q: When did you make the decision to start Eli?
A: Is that important, really? Maybe it was on the couch at 3 a.m. this morning, maybe. Maybe that was it.

Throughout the week leading up to Eli Manning’s first game as a starter, reporters pestered the Giants coach, Tom Coughlin, about the reason for replacing his quarterback, Kurt Warner, with a rookie. And all week Coughlin treated the question with contempt — and it’s hard to imagine that anywhere else in the N.F.L. is there a coach with such a gift for contempt for the sort of questions journalists ask football coaches. But the truth is, when he made his decision, he might well have been on a couch at 3 in the morning. The previous Sunday the Giants, then 5-3 and still hopeful, were stifled by a bad team, the Arizona Cardinals. Warner was sacked six times, several times on first and second down, by a previously undistinguished Cardinals defensive line. The sports pages the next day — with a couple of interesting exceptions — vilified the Giants’ offensive line. How could these bums allow a bunch of mediocrities to sack a former N.F.L. M.V.P. six times in a single game?

Anyone who watched the game on TV might well have come to the same conclusion: these fellows on the Giants line appeared to be perfectly incompetent. Poor Warner was doing all he could. But Coughlin wasn’t sure. He went into the office in the wee hours of the morning and studied the game tapes. The general manager, Ernie Accorsi, was already there when Coughlin arrived; he had spent the night on the maroon leatherette sofa in his office. At a decent hour, Coughlin found Accorsi and asked, ”Have you seen the tape?” Coughlin had timed every pass play — all 37 of them — and discovered that 30 times Warner held the ball for 3.8 seconds or more. (Depending on how many steps the quarterback drops back to pass, 1.2 to 3 seconds is considered the norm.) Often Giants receivers were open and Warner wasn’t seeing them. The quarterback was more to blame for the sacks than the people assigned to protect him. And one thing Coughlin had noticed in practice about Eli Manning was that, unlike most rookie quarterbacks, he made decisions quickly and got the ball away before the defense could kill him.

And so, on Nov. 21, 2004, against the Atlanta Falcons, the fans are expecting, if not the full answer, then at least the beginning of a response to a big question: is Eli Manning worth it? To get Eli, who was actually drafted by the San Diego Chargers, the Giants handed him a contract worth as much as $54 million and gave the Chargers two future draft picks. (Peyton Manning received a $48 million contract when he signed with the Colts.) Giants fans are understandably worried that the kid might be overpaid. But because Eli Manning is the son of one legendary quarterback and the brother of another, the question they want to ask is more personal than usual. Yeah, he had a great college career, but did this kid get here on his own merits, or is he the N.F.L.’s first legacy admission? Did Ernie Accorsi — who was sitting up there in his glass box at Giants Stadium, tense as a snare drum, not wanting to speak to anyone — see something others missed? Or did he just commit the biggest blunder in the history of the N.F.L. draft?

The Giants players pretend that nothing special is happening, but they fool no one. If Eli Manning is a bust, their team is in trouble, for many years. Ernie Accorsi is in trouble. Tom Coughlin is in trouble. A lot of careers are suddenly on the line.

When an expensive rookie quarterback takes the field, he inevitably finds himself on the receiving end of skepticism. It’s hard to think of another job at which applicants who seem so well qualified fail so spectacularly. Todd Marinovich, Tim Couch, Heath Shuler, Cade McNown, Akili Smith, Rick Mirer, Andre Ware, Art Schlichter, Jim Druckenmiller, Ryan Leaf: the N.F.L. draft is regularly punctuated by college quarterbacks selected in the first round who then flop in the pros. At no other position in pro football is so much money flushed down the drain. As the sums pile up, you can’t help wondering: what do these people who work in the N.F.L. actually know about the ingredients of a great quarterback? They know that it helps to be tall. They know that it’s important to have a strong and accurate arm. They suspect that it’s important to be able to run a bit — at least well enough to avoid taking direct shots from the monsters coming after you. They know that it helps not to be stupid, though there is no agreement exactly what mental traits are the most important. A gift for geometry? For spatial relations? For making choices under duress?

And while it’s hard to see how to fix the problem, it’s not hard to see why it exists. Players of other positions face nothing like the quarterback’s adjustment — an outstanding college lineman or receiver is likely to prove, at the very least, useful in the professional game. The quarterback experiences the most dramatic change because he is at the receiving end of the game’s complexity. The pro game, every year, becomes more complicated, and as it does, the difference between it and the college game widens. (There are natural limits to how complicated college football can become. Players are allowed to practice only 20 hours a week, for a start.) When Archie Manning joined the New Orleans Saints, he recalls, ”teams had maybe nine different coverages” — defensive alignments — ”and maybe six blitz packages. They’d take into each game maybe four coverages and three blitzes. Against the Falcons, Eli will see that in the first series.”

When Archie played, the same 11 men came out to play defense, no matter the situation. When Eli plays, the Falcons will deploy 19 different players on defense, in an essentially infinite array of configurations — making it far more difficult to know which of his receivers enjoys a natural advantage, or which pass rusher is most likely to kill him. Over the course of the game, the rookie quarterback will see, in effect, endless change on the other side of the ball. Throw in the greater speed of the pro players — in the time the typical college quarterback has made up his mind what to do with the ball, the pro quarterback has been crushed under 600 pounds of man meat — and you have, for a rookie, big problems.

But maybe the biggest change in the life of the N.F.L. quarterback is in the cost of picking the wrong one. When Archie Manning signed with the New Orleans Saints in 1971 — the second overall pick in the N.F.L. draft that year — he was offered what was then an outlandish contract for a quarterback: $410,000 for five years. His rookie salary was $30,000. The combined value of the rookie contracts of his two sons is more than $100 million. And so when Eli Manning started a game for the first time, with his father on hand in an end-zone seat, there was something fairly new to football in the air — not just a competitive thrill; there was a financial frisson. For the price of a $65 ticket, a Giants fan might have the chance to see, in effect, $50 million piled up in the middle of the field and set on fire. Fox Sports had its full roster of 13 cameras at work: on platforms behind the end zone, on carts racing along the sidelines, on stands in the stadium’s corners. A robot camera hovered over the field, suspended by wires.

The people, and the cameras, will follow every move Eli Manning makes. They will come away feeling as if they have achieved a fairly exact accounting of what Eli Manning did as a quarterback. And that is an interesting thing: an exact accounting is exactly what is not possible.

The millions of people watching the game on television — the beneficiaries of 13 camera angles and endless commentary from smart people, many of whom played the game — in a way have it the worst. The man who oversees the cameras, Richie Zyontz of Fox Sports, explains that ”the guys who work the cameras are trying to make a nice picture. The risk is always that it’s too tight.” Focusing on what grips a television audience — facial expressions, violence, emotion, pretty women — the camera will miss the subtleties of the game: the missed blocks, the badly run pass routes.

The naked eye, no matter how well trained, isn’t much better. From the chaos on the field it isn’t always obvious, even to official scorekeepers, who did what. The Indianapolis Star recently published an article showing that the statistics compiled by the Colts coaching staff — from the tapes of the games — were alarmingly different from the official records kept during the season. The scorekeepers, for instance, credited the Colts linebacker Cato June with 59 solo tackles and 15 assists; from tapes the Colts coaches know that Cato June had 49 solo tackles and 40 assists. If the human eye can miss something as central to the action as a tackle, how can it be expected to comprehend the dozens of things that occur away from the ball? Statistics — the answer in other sports — don’t help all that much. Football statistics do not capture the performance of individual football players as cleanly as, say, baseball statistics capture the performance of individual baseball players. No player ever does anything on a football field that isn’t dependent on some other player. The individual achievements of football players are often, in effect, hidden in plain sight.

But here’s the other interesting thing: this hidden game can be seen, though not by the average viewer. Shot unceremoniously from two pillboxes on the stadium’s upper rim, the videotape made by the Giants coaching staff frames all 22 players on the field. The view the coaches want is the view from the cheapest seat in the house. ”When former coaches get into the broadcast booth, that’s the first thing they want to see, the all-22, the eye in the sky,” Zyontz says. The coaches want to see that shot because they know it is the only shot that will enable them to figure out who did what — and assign credit and blame — on any given football play.

”After a game,” Coughlin says, ”you obviously know what happened. But a lot of times you don’t know why it happened.” If even the coach, who, during a game, is privy to overhead still photos of the action and countless conversations with players, doesn’t understand who did what, what hope is there for a mere spectator? In some strange way, until you see the tape, you haven’t seen the game.

Giants Stadium, on this afternoon of Eli Manning’s debut, is Plato’s Cave. The millions of people watching the game are inside the cave, staring at shadows on the wall. The shadows are distortions of the reality outside the cave, treated, erroneously, as the thing itself. No matter how he plays, some part of Eli Manning’s game, like his personality, will remain hidden from public understanding. It may be a trivial part; it may be the telling part — the point is that no one can know for sure if the Giants have given their money to the right guy.

III. The $54 Million Crapshoot

The droop of his shoulders, the hangdog look, the soft and gentle face, the tendency to greet every question with a blank expression and a high-pitched note of uncertainty (”Ummmmm”) — everything about Eli Manning’s outward appearance suggests indecision and youth. ”If I was a cop and I saw him out driving a car, I’d pull him over,” says Shaun O’Hara, the Giants regular center. His picture has for months graced billboards around New York City, but Eli has been able to walk the length of the fancy part of Fifth Avenue with his mother — untucked red alligator shirt, unpressed chinos and sneakers without socks — without once being recognized. By nature he is very private, but what he’s withholding from the public is unclear. ”I’m Eli’s oldest friend,” James Montgomery says, ”and I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious conversation with him. The last time he called we spent 15 minutes trying to figure out the last song in ‘Teen Wolf.’ ”

The only thing that distinguishes Eli Manning, outwardly, from a slightly shy 23-year-old recent college graduate unsure of what he wants to do with the rest of his life is the way he plays quarterback. He offers new hope to introverts everywhere; such characters don’t normally land in such exalted positions of leadership. This may be because conventional leadership skills are necessary for the role. But it may also be a matter of false selection. There aren’t many introverts playing quarterback in the N.F.L. for the same reason that, until recently, there were not many blacks playing N.F.L. quarterback: they never get the chance. Shy, quiet kids aren’t tapped by their Pop Warner coaches to play the position — unless, of course their fathers were famous N.F.L. quarterbacks. The biggest unseen edge that Eli possesses may be that he is expected to excel at the position. Because of this he will be given more time than most to do it.

In the nine weeks of the season leading up to his first start, Eli rode the bench and watched Kurt Warner play. Still, Coughlin kept him as busy as if he were actually on the field. The people in the video department would run off clips, organized by theme, of the N.F.L.’s top quarterbacks — Chad Pennington, Donovan McNabb, Tom Brady and, of course, Peyton Manning. And so every week Eli found himself watching and rewatching themed tape of his older brother: Peyton’s footwork, Peyton’s two-minute drills, Peyton’s long pass plays. One afternoon in early November, I sat with Eli and watched a reel — it was edited to isolate the ”red zone,” the turf within 20 yards of the opposing team’s end zone. ”A lot of good decision making is just eliminating what receiver you’re not looking at,” Eli said, as he reached for the tape. His goal in life seems to be to not make a big deal of anything; or, rather, he makes a big deal about not making a deal. On the surface, he is a passive creature. By all accounts, he cooperates with his elders, is polite even when he doesn’t need to be and hasn’t a mean bone in his body. But at his core there is a truculence. He insists on detaching himself from the life story that was, in a way, written for him at birth.

When he talks about being an N.F.L. quarterback, his chief concern seems to be minimizing the drama of it all: ”A lot of it is knowing who should be open. It’s a process of elimination that starts even before you take the snap. A lot of it just comes naturally. It’s hard to teach someone how to feel pressure, for example. You aren’t really thinking about moving around in the pocket. You just kind of have to have a feeling for it.”

Into the machine Eli punched the tape and onto the screen popped his brother, trying to punch the ball into the end zone against the Tennessee Titans. Immediately you saw that Peyton’s style of play, at least before the play began, was unlike that of any other N.F.L. quarterback’s, an overwrought sequence of waving and pointing and hollering more commonly associated with conducting a high-school marching band than a pro football team. Opposing players scream at Peyton to shut up; writers suggest the N.F.L. reduce the time between plays so that Peyton has fewer seconds to turn the line of scrimmage into a soliloquy. ”A lot of that’s for show,” Eli said. ”Here, look.” Peyton was waving and hollering and pointing again; it looked as if he was designing something very, very complicated. Then he handed the ball off to a halfback, who ran straight ahead for the touchdown. Eli chuckled. ”All that noise and it was just a running play.”

He has watched his antic brother a million times. ”Have you seen anything you hadn’t noticed before from watching him?” I asked. Eli thought about it. ”He complains a lot,” he said finally. ”Here. . . . ” He rewound the tape and then ran one of the previous plays in slow motion. Peyton stuck the ball into a running back’s hands, and the running back hurled himself onto a pile. But Eli still had his finger on Peyton, who receded into the distance at the top of the screen. When the back failed to score, Peyton threw up his hands and marched around in a huff. ”He does that a lot,” Eli said.

Archie and Olivia Manning raised their sons to be well-educated members of New Orleans’ upper middle class — nice boys, good people. Archie never intended for them to make careers in football, and he made a big deal of steering as far from their ambitions as he could and still remain intimately involved in their lives. Whatever he contributed to his children’s success, he contributed inadvertently. Archie had a phobia that someone might mistake him for one of those Little League dads whose idea of fatherhood is to holler at the umps. (”I’ve never been embarrassed by my dad,” says Cooper Manning, a New Orleans investment analyst whose own promising football career ended for medical reasons. ”Not a single time.”) He actually made a point of not learning all the bewildering changes to the pro game since he quit playing, in 1985, so that his sons would be more reluctant to engage him in conversation about football, as opposed to something else. And when the Mannings went looking for a school, they picked the one most likely to leave their children with something else to talk about. The Isidore Newman School (my alma mater) isn’t, to put it kindly, a football school. Perhaps more effectively than any secondary school in a hundred-mile radius, it is capable of taking the raw material for an All-Pro quarterback and turning it into a high-priced lawyer.

A father agnostic about his sons’ football careers, a school ill suited to encouraging them, a society, the New Orleans upper middle class, from which a member is about as likely to matriculate into professional football as into, say, Cosa Nostra: how did this combination of forces yield not one but two pro quarterbacks, both top picks in the N.F.L. draft? In countless ways, small and large, Peyton has explained his own case: he refused not to play in the N.F.L. Eli wasn’t like that. He was detached; he had no obvious internal drama; if you didn’t look extremely closely, you might even say he was indifferent. Even as he became perhaps the best high-school quarterback in the country, he never let on that football was critically important to him. He couldn’t remember his father playing; he didn’t bother to sit down and watch the old tapes. ”Elway and Marino were Peyton’s heroes,” Cooper recalls. ”Peyton could probably have named every player in the N.F.L. I don’t know if Eli could name a hero. I don’t know if Eli could have named a player in the N.F.L. With Eli, it’s all very internal. You have to dig a bit to see how it all works.” To which Eli replies, ”I’m not the guy who runs down the field with his finger up in the air like I just saved the world.”

When Eli Manning submitted his brain to the N.F.L. for inspection, he relaxed his pretense that nothing much was going on inside of it. The N.F.L. actually requires that prospects take an intelligence test — which is, of course, surprising to everyone outside the N.F.L. As Charlie Wonderlic, the C.E.O. of Wonderlic Inc., which creates the N.F.L.’s intelligence tests, puts it, ”Why in the world would you want to know how smart a football player is?” But you do want to know, especially when that player is a quarterback. The Wonderlic Personnel Test, given to all prospects, is identical to the test given to more than two million corporate employees each year. It consists of 50 questions. The taker is given 12 minutes to answer as many as he can. Here is one of the easier questions:

”FAMILIAR is the opposite of 1) friendly, 2) old, 3) strange, 4) aloof, 5) different.”

And here is a hard one:

”In printing an article of 24,000 words, a printer decides to use two sizes of type. Using the larger type, a printed page contains 900 words. Using the smaller type, a page contains 1,200 words. The article is allotted 21 full pages in a magazine. How many pages must be in the smaller type?”

The test has been used by N.F.L. teams for decades, but the emphasis placed on it has grown with the complexity of the game. (Archie Manning recalls, during his senior year, some guy affiliated with a pro team turning up at Ole Miss and handing out an intelligence test. ”We all took it sitting on stools in the locker room, with no one watching us,” he says. ”Two of the tackles cheated off each other.”) Teams use it to weed out players whose minds are simply inadequate to the task. The rule of thumb — on offense at least — is that the closer you are to the ball, the smarter you need to be. (Centers are the only players who routinely test as highly as quarterbacks.) The average test score for lawyers is 30 and for janitors is 15. The average test score for halfbacks, the lowest-scoring players, is 15, and for quarterbacks is 25. The head of scouting for the Giants, Jerry Reese, says, ”If a quarterback’s score comes in under 25, we worry; otherwise we don’t pay that much attention to it.” Eli Manning scored a 39, putting him in the 99th percentile of last year’s two and a half million Wonderlic test takers. His brother Cooper (he was laughing as he spoke) said, ”I think the only guy who scored higher than Eli was a punter from Harvard who didn’t make a team.” (Actually, Pat McInally, the Harvard punter who scored a perfect 50, did make it on to the Cincinnati Bengals.) Eli Manning’s score was so high that when I mentioned it to Charlie Wonderlic, he suggested I recheck my facts and said, ”There’s not a job on the planet that requires a person to score at that level.”

But Eli Manning may be the only person in the history of the Wonderlic who can score a 39 and not recall his score. Wandering down a hallway in the Giants front office one day I asked him how he did on the test. ”Ummmmm — I think I got a 41 or a 42 out of 50.”

”How did Peyton do?” I asked.

”Ummmmmmm — I don’t think he did as well, maybe low 30′s.” Then he smiled and said, ”I think Peyton might have been above average.”

By all the tests that N.F.L. scouts use to measure college quarterbacks, Eli Manning compared favorably to his famous older brother. And yet the decision to take him with the first pick, and pay him great sums of money, was nevertheless regarded by many inside the N.F.L. as fantastically risky. A few general managers, and coaches, would have refused to make it. When the quarterbacks arrived at the 2003 N.F.L. combine — where the teams put the most highly touted prospects though their paces — the coach of the Carolina Panthers, John Fox, simply walked out. He took a principled stand against spending money and draft picks on a quarterback. No N.F.L. coach will say this, but a few actually build their teams on the principle that the quarterback need not be especially gifted, because he doesn’t need to be terribly important. You don’t need a god out there; you don’t need Joe Montana or John Elway or Peyton Manning. All you need is one very smart coaching staff and a quarterback who won’t mess up their intricate plans. Spend less of your money on a quarterback and you have more to spend on the people around him. Ask them to do more, and the quarterback to do less.

The coaches who approach the game this way — Fox, Brian Billick of Baltimore, Bill Cowher of Pittsburgh, Bill Parcells of Dallas, Bill Belichick of New England — define one end of the N.F.L.’s managerial spectrum: the end that argues that it’s never worth the risk to pay a fortune to a quarterback unproved in the pros. Ernie Accorsi might well define the other. ”There is no other position in team sports as important as the quarterback,” he says. ”A great quarterback, unlike a great running back, cannot be stopped. And if you have a great one, you’re never out of it. He walks on the bus and the whole team sees him and thinks, We have a chance.” The problem, from Accorsi’s point of view, is finding the great quarterback.

IV. The Magic

It was absurd: a 61-year-old New Yorker hustling down to Mississippi on a fall weekend in 2002, just to watch a 21-year-old junior quarterback in the flesh. In the N.F.L., 61 isn’t old; it’s ancient. Just about everyone who was in the N.F.L. when Accorsi took his first job, in 1970, was gone. He’d retire soon; the long-term future of the New York Giants was of no practical consequence to him. But he’d seen something he couldn’t ignore — a tape of an Ole Miss game. And what he’d seen in the Ole Miss quarterback, Eli Manning, got his blood racing in a way it hadn’t in years. He wanted to see him play. He could have watched him plenty on television, but Accorsi had grown almost hostile to the way that football games have come to be televised. ”You can’t even see what’s on the field, and you can’t see the formations,” he said. ”The camera is all over the place. On the sidelines. In the stands. On the coaches’ faces. I had no idea what Paul Brown and Vince Lombardi looked like because all you saw back then was the games.”

He wanted to see what he wanted to see — every move Eli Manning makes — and he wanted to see ”how he responds to the pressure of the game — how he responds to the crowd.” He arrived early to the field, to watch Manning warm up. He couldn’t tell from the tape the strength of Eli Manning’s arm; and he couldn’t tell from warm-ups either. It was as if Eli were trying not to show what he had. Did that mean he didn’t have it? Accorsi couldn’t tell. He found his seat, not in the press box, where he wanted to sit, but out on the ice-cold photographers’ deck. The opposing team, Auburn, was stacked with N.F.L. prospects. Ole Miss had maybe two, and one was Eli Manning. Accorsi watched as Auburn sprinted ahead, 14-0.

On a couple of occasions, Manning threw long. Running to his right, he drilled a pass, across his body, to the left side of the field maybe 55 yards. His arm was stronger than Ernie dared to imagine: the kid had a cannon, possibly stronger than his brother’s arm. And then something happened: Accorsi felt it before he saw the scoreboard change. Manning was, improbably, keeping Ole Miss in the game; he was finding a way to win. Ole Miss had simply given up trying to run the football — at one point Auburn had outgained them on the ground, 230 yards to 10. And yet even without a ground game they were moving the ball through the air. Pass after beautiful pass found its mark. Eli Manning was doing the riskiest thing a quarterback can do, and everything about this game merely increased that risk. The pass rushers were always a split second from killing him; the defensive backs were all bigger and faster than his receivers; and, because Ole Miss had no running game, everyone in the stadium expected a pass. And yet he seemed to have a special ability to cope with risk. Accorsi — growing more and more excited — pulled out his notebook. In a later report, he wrote:

Rallied his team from 14-3 halftime deficit basically all by himself. Led them on two successive third-quarter drives to go ahead 17-16, the first touchdown on a streak down the left sideline where he just dropped the ball (about 40 yards) over the receiver’s right shoulder for the touchdown . . . called the touchdown pass (a quick 12-yard slant) that put them ahead at the line of scrimmage himself.

At one point late in the third quarter, Ole Miss found itself on the Auburn 15-yard line. The rush came so hard that it knocked Manning down as he took the snap. The Auburn line just hurled the entire Ole Miss line backward, and Manning went over like a bowling pin at the back of the stack. The play looked to be over; but a split end was running a fade to the corner of the end zone. As Eli fell, with his rear end maybe two inches off the ground, he threw the ball. A perfect spiral up and into the outstretched hands of the wide out that would have been yet another score if the astonished Auburn cornerback hadn’t stuck out his hand at the last moment and deflected the ball.

This kid wasn’t like any Accorsi had seen — not in a long time. He was tall — 6-foot-4 at least. He could throw the ball plenty far. He was decisive. He was poised — ridiculously so. He had exquisite feel for the game. But that sterile checklist didn’t begin to capture what caused Accorsi to feel the way he did. ”Forget all about the measurables.” he says. ”When you’re trying to find the difference between the great quarterback and the good quarterback, you have to feel it. The intangibles.” In his 32 years in pro football, Ernie Accorsi had a chance to draft this sort of talent once: John Elway. As the general manager of the Baltimore Colts, in 1983, he chose Elway with the first pick of the draft — only to hear Elway say he’d rather play professional baseball than play football in Baltimore, forcing a trade to Denver. Accorsi quit in frustration; as he put it, ”If I’m going to lose my job, it’s going to be over this, not some right guard.” And now here was this kid, a junior at a school that hadn’t won anything, whom he had a shot of drafting. He wrote in his notebook:

He has a feel in the pocket. In one case a linebacker coming off the blind side edge had him measured and he was going to get mashed. At first, i didn’t think he felt it but he held it to the last split second, threw a completion and got hammered. Just got up and went back to the huddle. . . .

I know it’s just one look. . . . But if i had to make the decision this morning, i would move up to take him. They are rare, as we know.

And here was where Ernie Accorsi, sitting on the cold photographers’ deck, reached back behind him to feel a distant memory. Suddenly it is Dec. 28, 1958, all over again. He’s 17 years old and his father has sprung for a trip from their home in Hershey, Pa., to Palm Beach, Fla. The Accorsis aren’t poor, but they aren’t rich, either. A trip to Florida is an indulgence; Ernie’s supposed to feel grateful, and he knows it. But he doesn’t; he feels frustrated. The next afternoon, which his father has planned to spend on the golf course with his son, the Baltimore Colts will play the New York Giants for the N.F.L. championship. The game will be televised nationally. His first love — the first love of every kid he knows; after all, this is 1958 — is baseball. But he’s becoming more and more interested in football; more specifically, he’s following the Colts; more specifically still, he’s becoming obsessed with the Colts’ quarterback, Johnny Unitas. Johnny Unitas isn’t like any player of any sport Ernie has ever seen. Unitas has this rare ability to make the game conform to his will; every other player just seems to be an extra in Unitas’s drama. Ernie wants to see that drama, played for high stakes.

And so, three days after Christmas, his father has created a conflict in young Ernie’s heart. The second half will be played at exactly the same time father and son are meant to be on the Palm Beach golf course. But there’s no way to tell his father that he wants to spend the high moment of this expensive vacation watching TV. Ernie resigns himself to playing the unhappiest nine holes of golf of his life. Arriving at the ninth green, he spies a shack and the glow of the television inside it. He shouts to the caddies inside, ”Who won the game?” Back comes the answer, ”They’re still playing!” Ernie drops his clubs and runs into the shack, and sees the final plays of the N.F.L.’s very first sudden-death overtime game — a game that is now referred to, with little argument, as the greatest game ever played.

The score is tied, and in overtime. Unitas has taken the Colts down the field to the Giants 8-yard line. He gives the ball to halfback Alan Ameche, who takes it to the 7. Then Unitas does something only Johnny Unitas would dream of doing: he throws a pass into the flat, sideways across the entire field. His team is within field goal range — and a field goal will end the game, and give it to the Colts — and yet he throws the kind of pass that is most likely of all to be intercepted and, if intercepted, run back for a touchdown. For no obvious reason, he risks the entire game. Colts end Jim Mutscheller catches the pass, and should score, but slips across the frozen field and out of bounds at the 1-yard line. This play was, in football circles, ”controversial.” After the game a reporter asked Unitas how he could do such a thing in such a situation: wasn’t he worried he’d be intercepted? ”When you know what you’re doing,” Unitas said, ”you don’t get intercepted.”

The next play he comes to the line of scrimmage. Everyone in the place assumes he’ll run left to move the ball in front of the goal posts for a field goal. The Giants have stacked their defense accordingly. Unitas raises his hands, as if he thinks he can quiet the enemy crowd, and calls a new play. Alan Ameche runs untouched over the empty right side and into the end zone.

It didn’t matter that Accorsi missed the second half of the game. He can, and will, watch it later, on tape. Hundreds of times. In 1970, Accorsi will get his first job in pro football, as the press guy for the Colts. Johnny Unitas will still be the quarterback; within a few years, Accorsi will become perhaps Unitas’s closest friend in the organization. For the next 30 years, as Accorsi rises to run the Colts, then the Browns and finally the Giants, he will telephone Unitas every Dec. 28 and say, ”John, you know what today is?” And Unitas will never know, because that is Unitas’s job — to shrug off as mere trivia one of the greatest clutch performances in football history. When Unitas dies, Accorsi will carry his coffin to the grave.

In his defining trait, Eli Manning reminds Ernie Accorsi of Johnny Unitas. Accorsi has never spoken to Manning; he has never even shaken the young man’s hand. He doesn’t know him as a person, only as a quarterback. But as he watched him very nearly beat a vastly superior opponent, Accorsi scribbled in his diary: ”Has the quality that you can’t define, call it magic.”

V. The Eye in the Sky

Q: Do you sense that it was a little premature to make the quarterback change?
A: No, not at all. That’s not my sense at all, and it wasn’t yours either. Short memories.

Three games was all it took for the press to ask Coach Coughlin if he wasn’t, perhaps, a fool for bringing in a rookie quarterback. In his debut against the Falcons, Manning showed flashes of brilliance and nearly led the team to an upset victory. He was sacked just once; he moved the offense against one of the N.F.L.’s better defenses. In the second half, he threw his first touchdown pass, to the Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey. But in his second game, against an even better Philadelphia team, he definitely looked overpaid.

Accorsi wasn’t about to attribute much significance to that. The best quarterbacks often play poorly in their first starts. ”Unitas’s first pass was intercepted,” he said. Elway’s debut was no more auspicious. ”Elway came out and lined up under the guard. The center had to shout at him, ‘Hey, John, I’m over here.’ ” And, as everyone knows, Peyton Manning’s team, in his first season, went 3-13. All Accorsi would say about Eli Manning was, ”Thank God he showed us he’s human.”

Before the third game, against the Washington Redskins, Accorsi agreed to watch tape with me afterward and dissect Manning’s performance. Monday morning, I found Accorsi in his office at Giants Stadium with an expression on his face somewhere between apologetic and disturbed, like a man standing on the side of the Jersey Turnpike who has just caused a 10-car pile up. Against a team with a 3-8 record, a team that hadn’t scored more than 18 points in a game all season, the Giants lost 31-7. They ran 41 plays to the Redskins’ 68. Manning was, at best, unimpressive: 12 completed passes in 25 attempts for a mere 113 yards. When his receivers were open, his throws were off target. He looked like a different quarterback from the one who had played against the Falcons.

On one play, Giants receiver Ike Hilliard got open running an out pattern. As I watched Hilliard come free for the first time in two games, I thought back to a training scrimmage I witnessed at the Giants’ camp in upstate New York one afternoon in August. Eli Manning dropped back to pass, while a cluster of three Giants receivers streaked downfield together like jets in formation — it’s called a bunch-three route. At the last moment, Ike Hilliard peeled away and cut toward the corner of the end zone — and fooled no one. A cornerback and a safety stayed on him, step for step. Improbably, the ball appeared over Hilliard’s shoulder and dropped into his arms for a touchdown. There was exactly one football-size place to put the ball so that Hilliard, and no one else, might catch it. On the way back to the huddle, Hilliard asked every defender he passed, ”Did you see him drop it in there?” When he passed by the coaches pacing on the sideline, someone shouted at Hilliard, ”Great job, Ike.” Hilliard shook his head and said, ”I didn’t do nothing.”

And now, facing what appeared to be a much easier throw, Manning just missed him. The ball sailed right over Hilliard’s head.

About the only nice thing a fan might say about his performance was that the team around him appeared so outclassed that whatever Eli Manning did could scarcely matter at all. Hardly anybody said it, however; the fans were already screaming that the Giants were sacrificing their season for the sake of getting playing time for their expensive rookie. What I hoped Accorsi could explain, using the evidence of the game tape, was how can you tell the difference between the struggles of a promising rookie quarterback and the struggles of a terminally hopeless rookie quarterback? But he declined. ”I’m sorry,” he said, as I walked into his office. ”I can’t do the tape thing. I don’t have the stomach for it.”

Later that day I did get him on the phone. He’d spent the intervening few hours watching the tape, over and over. And his mood had changed. ”If you look at the tape,” he said, ”the guys are all covered. He didn’t have anyone to throw it to. They took the run away from us, the whole game was on his shoulders, but he didn’t have any help. Our receivers weren’t getting open.” Another cheering thing was clear: Manning made very few bad decisions. Once, on third and long, with all of his downfield receivers covered, he had running back Tiki Barber open in the flat. If he had seen him, Barber might have gotten the first down — but you never know. ”That’s one of the things he’ll learn to do as he matures. He’ll learn to look for his release man.” A couple of the balls that appeared to be underthrown were actually tipped by the defense. And that throw to Hilliard — he was hit as he made it.

”It’s easy to rationalize this,” Accorsi said. ”It’s easy to talk yourself into thinking it wasn’t as bad as it was. But I’m not that way. He got the ball to the only people he could get the ball to. A quarterback with less poise would have been out there throwing interceptions. He was playing within himself. He was making smart, crisp throws. We just didn’t give him any help.” This actually wasn’t all that different from Archie’s reaction to his son’s first few games. ”Too many people talk about quarterbacks like they’re golfers,” Archie said. ”You can only do as much as your team lets you do.” Manning, at least in Accorsi’s eyes, was the same guy he saw down at Ole Miss two years before. He faced one of the best pass rushes in the N.F.L. and was sacked only once — mainly because he got the ball away so quickly. ”Look, you’d like to see the magic faster,” Accorsi said. ”But I think he did all he could. People will laugh at that. But I’ll invite them to watch the tape.”

But since he didn’t invite me to watch the tape, all I had to go on was the game. The first three quarters I watched from the end-zone pillbox where the Giants video staff operates ”the eye in the sky.” The last quarter, I walked along the Giants sideline, on the field. It must be a little different in every stadium, but in the Redskins’ stadium, the first think you notice is the strong smell of trampled grass. It’s pungent and makes you realize that you aren’t in a clean place — an antiseptic television stage set — but a real place, with dirt. But right after that you see that everything and everyone — from the hash marks on the field to the painted Redskins cheerleaders — has been designed to be seen from a great distance. The players themselves are remote beings. In baseball and basketball, the players pick out faces in the crowd. Football players remain essentially detached from the 90,000 people staring down on them. The fans are just one great noise machine, to be turned on and off by the home team.

The game itself, up close, is a mess. The formations, the elegant strategy, the athleticism — when you’re right next to it, it’s all chaos. The ball goes up in the air any distance at all and the only way you can deduce what has become of it is by the reaction of the crowd. When Eli Manning drops back to pass, if you’re standing a few yards away on the sidelines, you have no sense of him doing something so considered as making a decision. The monsters charging at him from every direction are in his face so quickly that you flinch and stifle the urge to scream, ”Watch out!” There is no way, you think, that he can possibly evaluate which of these beasts is most likely to get to him first, and so which of them he should take the trouble to evade. At that moment any sensible person in Manning’s shoes would flee. Or, perhaps, collapse to the ground and beg for mercy. Yet he is expected to wait . . . wait . . . wait . . . until the microsecond before he is crushed. He’s like a man who has pulled the pin from a grenade and is refusing to throw it.

But here’s what’s odd: not only must he remain undisturbed by the live grenade in his hands, he must also retain, in his mind’s eye, the detached view of the man sitting in the pillbox on the rim of the stadium. The quarterback alone must weld together these two radically different points of view — the big picture and the granular details. For there is no way to react intelligently, in real time, to the chaos; you need to be able to envision its pattern before it takes shape. You have to, in short, guess. A lot. Every time Eli Manning drops back and makes a decision, he’s just guessing. His guesses produce uneven results, but he is shockingly good at not making the worst ones. God may know — though I doubt it — if Eli Manning will one day be a star in the N.F.L. But if there was the slightest hint of uncertainty or discomfort in the rookie, I didn’t see it. The only unpleasant emotion he conveyed — and it was very slight, in view of the circumstances — was frustration. The one emotional trait he shares with his older brother is maybe the most important: success is his equilibrium state. He expects it.

The most revealing play of the game occurred after everyone stopped watching. Down 31-7, the Giants got the ball back with 22 seconds left to play. Instead of taking a knee and heading for the showers, Manning dropped back to pass. The Redskins, still high on the novel experience of actually beating someone, blitzed eight men. Manning found his tight end, Jeremy Shockey, for nine yards across the middle, to midfield. With six seconds left and the clock ticking, Manning ran over to the official and called timeout. From any other point of view except for his — and the Giants’ long-term future — stopping the clock was deeply annoying. The game was over. The news media — along with Accorsi and the rest of the Giants management — had streamed down to the interview rooms. The Redskins cheerleaders, freezing in their leather micro-shorts, were hurrying to pack up. Most of the 90,000 fans were gone, and the few who remained booed. But Tom Coughlin wanted Eli Manning to see as much as he could of this very good N.F.L. defense. He wanted Eli to make one more decision, and throw one last pass against the Redskins blitz — incomplete, as it happened. It was the game within the game — the education of Eli Manning.

OS ANGELES, Dec. 19 – When Michael D. Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, showed up in Georgetown, Del., last month to testify in the trial over the hiring and firing of Michael S. Ovitz, his former No. 2, he parked his car a block from the courthouse and walked through the town square with only his lawyer by his side. When Mr. Eisner’s testimony ended after a grueling five days, he hopped into a rented car and drove himself to a nearby airport.

It was particularly un-Hollywood-like behavior, given that Mr. Eisner is as rich, powerful and demanding as any entertainment executive today. His low-key demeanor seemed to reflect a new era of humility in Hollywood, in sharp contrast to the tale of corporate excess and betrayal, dominated by outsize personalities, playing inside the courthouse.

The Disney trial is in recess until Jan. 11, when testimony from numerous expert witnesses will be heard. Whether Disney wins or loses, the criticism of its management and board has already had an impact both inside and outside the company.

“Michael Eisner is not going to get off scot-free no matter what happens,” said Samuel L. Hayes III, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School. “The financial community has already exacted its discipline, notwithstanding what the legal niceties are.”

For many academics and analysts, the trial over the $140 million severance package of Mr. Ovitz, the former Hollywood agent who was hired as Disney’s president in 1995 and fired 14 months later, signals the end of an era in which celebrity executives managed their companies as personal fiefs. Shareholders, burned by the 2000-02 downturn, now demand more predictable performance and accountability.

Influential yet hardly flamboyant executives are emerging as the new power elite in Hollywood. They include Peter Chernin, the chief operating officer of the News Corporation; Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman of Time Warner’s entertainment and networks group; and Tom Freston and Les Moonves, the co-presidents of Viacom.

“Today’s media executives grew up as part of much larger companies and they have learned they have to work within the corporate scheme of things,” said Tom Wolzien, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “What this trial has shown is that even the bosses have a boss to answer to – in this case the board, and ultimately the shareholders.”

Patrick McGurn, special counsel at Institutional Shareholder Services, a group that monitors corporate boards, said he believed that Chancellor William B. Chandler III, who is presiding over the case, will rule that the severance package paid to Mr. Ovitz was fair. But that does not mean he will not have a critical thing or two to say.

“He’ll turn it into a primer for future boards, saying, ‘Don’t let this happen to you,’ ” Mr. McGurn predicted.

Disney executives declined to comment, noting that the company is still in litigation. But Disney seems already to have gotten the message. The company had long been criticized for having a weak board, one that corporate governance specialists said had too many personal ties to Mr. Eisner and was unwilling to stand up to him.

Reveta Bowers, who ran a school attended by Mr. Eisner’s children, was a board member until last year. So was Robert A. M. Stern, a prominent architect who built Mr. Eisner’s Aspen retreat and designed Disney’s theme parks.

During the trial it was disclosed that, in 1996, Mr. Eisner even took the unusual step of asking directors to nominate his wife, Jane, to the board in the event of his untimely death or in case of his death or disability. They agreed.

Mr. Eisner said at the trial that he sought directors who understood Disney’s culture, even if they had no corporate experience. “It didn’t go over too well in the governance community,” he conceded. He said it was appropriate to place his wife on the board after he died because he was one of Disney’s largest shareholders.

“I don’t think any chief executive would dare ask for that today,” said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University. “At least they wouldn’t put it writing.”

The company has sought to shore up its board, asking experienced corporate executives to serve as independent directors. Disney recently named to its board Fred H. Langhammer, the former chief executive of Estée Lauder Companies, who has no Disney ties.

And the board has made formal practices of other processes, including hiring an independent search firm to find Mr. Eisner’s successor and holding more meetings without management present.

Already, the board’s newfound independence is showing. Earlier this year, after a shareholder rebellion led by two former directors – including Roy E. Disney, the nephew of the company’s founder – Mr. Eisner was stripped of his chairmanship by his fellow directors. This summer, some directors told Mr. Eisner that he could not remain in any capacity once his contract expired in 2006.

In meetings with some board members, Mr. Eisner had explored the idea of staying on as chairman, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. “I think the board must have learned by now,” Mr. Coffee said, “that you can’t defer to the chief executive without causing lots and lots of unpleasantness.”

While Hollywood will always be dominated by relationships, gone are the days when colleagues embraced each other as life partners and brothers, as Mr. Ovitz said in court about his relationship with Mr. Eisner.

“Can you imagine anyone at G.E. today saying that about anyone else at G.E.?” Mr. Wolzien asked, referring to General Electric, the conglomerate that owns both NBC and Universal Studios.

Industry analysts say the hiring of a dominant personality like Mr. Eisner or Mr. Ovitz is far less likely to occur these days, largely because media companies themselves have become huge conglomerates through acquisitions. Today’s chief executives do not have time for the day-to-day operational minutiae of a media conglomerate. Instead, they must behave more like diplomats who can steer the executives who manage each division.

As for Mr. Ovitz, his lack of success at Disney, several trial witnesses said, was a result of his inability to adapt to Disney’s more collegial culture. Mr. Eisner, for example, said that theme-park workers complained after Mr. Ovitz hired a private limousine to drive him around Walt Disney World in Orlando at a 1996 corporate retreat instead of taking a bus like other executives. And at the 1996 opening of the Disney store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Mr. Eisner said, Mr. Ovitz complained that he was not asked to cut the ribbon.

Mogul-like behavior, no matter how trivial, is even less tolerated today as investors burned by corporate scandals and falling stock prices demand accountability.

“We’re seeing executives begin to show quiet leadership, a ‘we’re all in this together’ attitude,” Mr. McGurn said. “It’s not what we used to see.”

Particularly galling, Mr. McGurn said, was Mr. Eisner’s testimony regarding an interview by Larry King in 1996 on his CNN talk show, when Mr. Eisner told Mr. King that he would hire Mr. Ovitz again if given the opportunity. In truth, Mr. Eisner was then asking Mr. Ovitz to try to get a job at the Sony Corporation.

“That’s something there is zero tolerance for today,” Mr. McGurn said. “To be presented with a question and you point-blank lie, that’s a kiss of death.” (During the trial, Mr. Eisner said he regretted his remarks. He was hoping that Sony would buy out Mr. Ovitz’s contract.)

True, some media companies are still run by their older, brash founders, including Rupert Murdoch, 73, who is chief executive of the News Corporation, and Viacom, which has been controlled by Sumner M. Redstone, 82, since 1987.

But the younger generation of leaders beneath them have kept their egos in check – so far.

The News Corporation recently extended the contract for Mr. Chernin, who makes $17 million a year, although it is not likely to become chief executive; Mr. Murdoch is expected to name one of his children instead. Mr. Freston, who turned MTV into a juggernaut for Viacom, eschews the limelight as well.

Mr. Bewkes, who oversaw the ascendancy of HBO, earned respect in the late 1990′s by quietly turning what was then a pay cable station running mostly recycled movies into a gold mine of original programming as well. He has gained more authority in recent years.

Just how or when Mr. Eisner and Mr. Ovitz can regain the credibility they lost as a result of their fractured relationship is anyone’s guess.

James Ellis, a lawyer for Mr. Ovitz, said he believed that his client would regain his footing despite his fall from grace at Disney. “He’s been dogged by litigation for almost the last 10 years, with allegations of dishonesty or incompetence,” Mr. Ellis said. “The trial has been his first opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

Mr. Eisner also says he believes he can recover his reputation. One of the poignant moments in the trial came when a private memo he wrote in 1996 was introduced. “Every character, every executive is fallible,” Mr. Eisner wrote to Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Mr. Eisner’s autobiography, “Work in Progress.”

“Admitting a mistake wisely, taking the flak, fixing the problem; these are the things that bring about salvation,” he wrote.

he indictment early this month of Mark Robert Walker by a federal grand jury in Texas might have seemed a coup for the government in its efforts to police terrorist communications online. Mr. Walker, a 19-year-old student, is accused, among other things, of using his roommate’s computer to communicate with – and offer aid to – a federally designated terrorist group in Somalia and with helping to run a jihadist Web site.

“I hate the U.S. government,” is among the statements Mr. Walker is said to have posted online. “I wish I could have been flying one of the planes on Sept. 11.”

By international terror standards, it was an extremely low-level bust. But the case, which was supposedly broken only after Mr. Walker’s roommate tipped off the police, highlights the near impossibility of tracking terrorist communications online.

Even George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, speaking on the vulnerabilities of the nation’s computer networks at a technology security conference on Dec. 1, noted the ability of terrorists to “work anonymously and remotely to inflict enormous damage at little cost or risk to themselves.” He called for a wholesale taming of cyberspace.

“I know that these actions would be controversial in this age where we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability,” Mr. Tenet said, “But, ultimately, the Wild West must give way to governance and control.”

Even if the government is able to shore up its networks against attack – one of many goals set forth by the intelligence reform bill passed last week – the ability of terrorists and other dark elements to engage in covert communications online remains a daunting security problem, and one that may prove impossible to solve.

Late last month, an Internet privacy watchdog group revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had contributed money for a counterterrorism project that promised, among other things, an automated surveillance system to monitor conversations on Internet chat rooms. Developed by two computer scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., as part of a National Science Foundation program called Approaches to Combat Terrorism, the chat room project takes aim at the possibility that terrorists could communicate through crowded public chat channels, where the flurry of disconnected, scrolling messages makes it difficult to know who is talking to whom. The automated software would monitor both the content and timing of messages to help isolate and identify conversations.

Putting privacy concerns aside, some Internet specialists wonder whether such projects, even if successful, fail to acknowledge the myriad other ways terrorists can plot and communicate online. From free e-mail accounts and unsecured wireless networks to online programs that can shield Internet addresses and hide data, the opportunities to communicate covertly are utterly available and seemingly endless.

Even after the Sept. 11 attacks, “the mass media, policy makers, and even security agencies have tended to focus on the exaggerated threat of cyberterrorism and paid insufficient attention to the more routine uses made of the Internet,” Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at Haifa University in Israel, wrote in a report for the United States Institute of Peace this year. “Those uses are numerous and, from the terrorists’ perspective, invaluable.”

Todd M. Hinnen, a trial attorney with the United States Justice Department’s computer crime division, wrote an article on terrorists’ use of the Internet for Columbia Science and Technology Law Review earlier this year. “There’s no panacea,” Mr. Hinnen said in an interview. “There has always been the possibility of meeting in dark alleys, and that was hard for law enforcement to detect.”

Now, every computer terminal with an Internet connection has the potential to become a dark alley.

Shortly after Sept. 11, questions swirled around steganography, the age-old technique of hiding one piece of information within another. A digital image of a sailboat, for instance, might also invisibly hold a communiqué, a map or some other hidden data. A digital song file might contain blueprints for a desired target.

But the troubling truth is that terrorists rarely have to be technically savvy to cloak their conversations. Even simple, prearranged code words can do the job when the authorities do not know whose e-mail to monitor or which Web sites to watch. Interviews conducted by Al Jazeera, the Arab television network, with the terror suspects Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh two years ago (both have since been arrested), suggested that the Sept. 11 attackers communicated openly using prearranged code words. The “faculty of urban planning,” for instance, referred to the World Trade Center. The Pentagon was the “faculty of fine arts.”

Other reports have suggested that Mohammed Atta, suspected of being the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, transmitted a final cryptic message to his co-conspirators over the Internet: “The semester begins in three more weeks. We’ve obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts, and the faculty of engineering.”

And increasingly, new tools used to hide messages can quickly be found with a simple Web search. Dozens of free or inexpensive steganography programs are available for download. And there is ample evidence that terrorists have made use of encryption technologies, which are difficult to break. The arrest in Pakistan in July of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, thought to be an Al Qaeda communications specialist, for instance, yielded a trove of ciphered messages from his computers.

Still, the mere act of encrypting a message could draw attention, so numerous software programs have been developed to hide messages in other ways.

At one Web site, spammimic.com, a user can type in a phrase like “Meet me at Joe’s” and have that message automatically converted into a lengthy bit of prose that reads like a spam message: “Dear Decision maker; Your e-mail address has been submitted to us indicating your interest in our briefing! This is a one-time mailing there is no need to request removal if you won’t want any more,” and so forth.

The prose is then pasted into an e-mail message and sent. A recipient expecting the fake spam message can then paste it into the site’s decoder and read the original message.

Another free program will convert short messages into fake dialogue for a play. And still simpler schemes require no special software at all – or even the need to send anything.

In one plan envisioned by Mr. Hinnen in his law review article, a group need only provide the same user name and password to all of its members, granting them all access to a single Web-based e-mail account. One member simply logs on and writes, but does not send, an e-mail message. Later, a co-conspirator, perhaps on the other side of the globe, logs on, reads the unsent message and then deletes it.

“Because the draft was never sent,” Mr. Hinnen wrote, the Internet service provider “does not retain a copy of it and there is no record of it traversing the Internet – it never went anywhere.” The message would be essentially untraceable.

Michael Caloyannides, a computer forensics specialist and a senior fellow at Mitretek Systems, a nonprofit scientific research organization based in Falls Church, Va., said the nature of a networked universe made it possible for just about anyone to communicate secretly. Conspirators do not even need to rely on code-hiding programs, because even automated teller machines can be used to send signals, Dr. Caloyannides explained,

A simple withdrawal of $20 from an account in New York might serve as an instant message to an accomplice monitoring the account electronically from halfway around the world, for example.

Dr. Caloyannides, who will conduct a workshop next May for government officials and others trying to track terrorist communications, also pointed to hundreds of digitally encrypted messages daily on public Usenet newsgroups. The messages often come from faked e-mail accounts; the intended recipients are often unknown. But a covert correspondent expecting a secret communiqué at a particular newsgroup need only download a batch of messages and then use an encryption key on one with some prearranged subject line, “like ‘chocolate cake,’ ” Dr. Caloyannides said.

Lt. Col. Timothy L. Thomas, an analyst at the United States Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., wrote last year in the journal Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly, that the threat of cyberplanning may be graver than the threat of terrorist attacks on the world’s networks.

“We used to talk about the intent of a tank,” Colonel Thomas explained in an interview. “If you saw one, you knew what it was for. But the intent of electrons – to deliver a message, deliver a virus, or pass covert information – is much harder to figure.”

This has long frustrated intelligence analysts, according to James Bamford, an author and a specialist on the National Security Agency.

“In the cold war days, you knew which communications circuits to watch,” he said. “We knew that most of it was high-frequency anyway, so we had the place surrounded by high-frequency intercepts. Those frequencies weren’t going anywhere, so you just sat there with the headphones on and listened.”

The problem now, Mr. Bamford said, is that the corridors for communication have become infinite and accessible to everyone. “You just don’t sit and listen to a particular channel,” he said. “It’s all over the place. It’s a ‘needle in the haystack’ problem that you have.”

Russ Rogers, a former Arab linguist with the National Security Agency and the Defense Information Systems Agency, said he feared security agencies might not realize how dense the haystack has become.

“We’ve become a little bit arrogant,” said Mr. Rogers, the author of a new book, “Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels,” which uses fictional situations to highlight the ways terrorists can communicate secretly online.

“We feel like we created the Internet, that we’ve mastered the network,” Mr. Rogers said. “But we’re not paying attention to how it’s being used to work against us.”

reg Rund was a freshman at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 when two students shot and killed a teacher, a dozen of their fellow students and themselves. Mr. Rund survived that horror, but he wasn’t able to survive the war in Iraq. The 21-year-old Marine lance corporal was killed on Dec. 11 in Falluja.

The people who were so anxious to launch the war in Iraq are a lot less enthusiastic about properly supporting the troops who are actually fighting, suffering and dying in it. Corporal Rund was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Because of severe military personnel shortages, large numbers of troops are serving multiple tours in the war zone, and many are having their military enlistments involuntarily extended.

Troops approaching the end of their tours in Iraq are frequently dealt the emotional body blow of unexpected orders blocking their departure for home. “I’ve never seen so many grown men cry,” said Paul Rieckhoff, a former infantry platoon leader who founded Operation Truth, an advocacy group for soldiers and veterans.

“Soldiers will do whatever you ask them to do,” said Mr. Rieckhoff. “But when you tell them the finish line is here, and then you keep moving it back every time they get five meters away from it, it starts to really wear on them. It affects morale.”

We don’t have enough troops because we are fighting the war on the cheap. The Bush administration has refused to substantially expand the volunteer military and there is no public support for a draft. So the same troops head in and out of Iraq, and then back in again, as if through a revolving door. That naturally heightens their chances of being killed or wounded.

A reckoning is coming. The Army National Guard revealed last Thursday that it had missed its recruiting goals for the past two months by 30 percent. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, who heads the National Guard Bureau, said: “We’re in a more difficult recruiting environment, period. There’s no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard’s participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult.”

Just a few days earlier, the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that recruiting was in a “precipitous decline” that, if not reversed, could lead to renewed discussions about reinstatement of the draft.

The Bush administration, which has asked so much of the armed forces, has established a pattern of dealing in bad faith with its men and women in uniform. The callousness of its treatment of the troops was, of course, never more clear than in Donald Rumsfeld’s high-handed response to a soldier’s question about the shortages of battle armor in Iraq.

As the war in Iraq goes more and more poorly, the misery index of the men and women serving there gets higher and higher. More than 1,300 have been killed. Many thousands are coming home with agonizing wounds. Scott Shane of The Times reported last week that according to veterans’ advocates and military doctors, the already hard-pressed system of health care for veterans “is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war.”

Through the end of September, nearly 900 troops had been evacuated from Iraq by the Army for psychiatric reasons, included attempts or threatened attempts at suicide. Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, an assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997, said, “I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war.”

When the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq is considered, some experts believe that the number of American troops needing mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

From the earliest planning stages until now, the war in Iraq has been a tragic exercise in official incompetence. The original rationale for the war was wrong. The intelligence was wrong. The estimates of required troop strength were wrong. The war hawks’ guesses about the response of the Iraqi people were wrong. The cost estimates were wrong, and on and on.

Nevertheless the troops have fought valiantly, and the price paid by many has been horrific. They all deserve better than the bad faith and shoddy treatment they are receiving from the highest officials of their government.