with Adam Frankel

Henry Holt. 275 pp. $25

Patrick Murphy was one of them. He left a job teaching constitutional law at West Point to go to Iraq as a lawyer with the 82d Airborne Division. He arrived in Baghdad three months after the 2003 invasion on a seven-month deployment. There, he advised commanders on military law, helped settle small claims by Iraqi civilians seeking redress for damages caused by American troops, and counseled soldiers on legal matters back home.

After he returned to the States, Murphy ran on an antiwar platform for the House of Representatives and became the first Iraq war veteran to serve in Congress.

That's an impressive record of accomplishment for a 34-year-old Irish-Italian guy who grew up in a rowhouse in Northeast Philadelphia, the son of a cop and a legal secretary, and it's tempting to say he should have quit while he was ahead.

Instead, he went on with coauthor Adam Frankel to write his memoir, called Taking the Hill: From Philly to Baghdad to the United States Congress.

This is not a book for anyone looking for new insights into the war, or a raw perspective of what it's like for the boots on the ground.

The Iraq section of the book is largely a series of anecdotes, the most intriguing of which are not fully explored before meandering on to another story of generally tough-but-fair military men and women.

The collective message is that despite a few bad apples, most American soldiers are doing a valiant and admirable job that we can all be proud of, no matter what we think of the war.

Well, stop the presses.

Murphy, now representing Pennsylvania's Eighth Congressional District, by turns describes the war as "fundamentally flawed" and "criminally negligent." He dedicates his book to 19 men he served with who never made it home. He admits struggling with conflicting emotions as he expresses his disapproval of the war while trying not to dishonor those who died in it.

If you can shrug off the hackneyed prose and the irrelevant detail (does it really tell us anything to know he grew up eating hot dogs and beans, meat loaf and Swanson's TV dinners?), Murphy comes across as a decent man who has tried to live up to his principles.

Murphy signed up for ROTC at King's College in Wilkes-Barre after learning he could make $150 a month, then went on to the Widener University School of Law in Harrisburg. He entered the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in May 1999.

Murphy arrived in Baghdad in late June 2003, several weeks after President Bush had stood on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln before a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Already, Iraqis who had been overjoyed to be rid of Saddam Hussein were growing impatient with Americans who did nothing to stop the looting of the national museum and seemed incapable of restoring basic electricity.

Murphy took over leadership of a six-member Brigade Operational Law Team. Its most pressing task was to set up a system for making restitution to Iraqi civilians claiming property damage, injury and loss of life caused by troops.

Riding in Humvees with no armor to protect them from snipers or roadside bombs, the BOLT team drove around the Al Rashid district, Baghdad's largest and poorest, carrying thousands of dollars to pay claimants, some as little as $20. "Each time we passed through the front gate, it felt like we were playing a game of Russian roulette," Murphy writes.

He also was responsible for bringing criminal charges against errant soldiers. In one of the book's most haunting anecdotes, Murphy tells of an American lieutenant who put his pistol to the head of a captured looter, then fired in the air, leaving the prisoner sobbing in a fetal position. In another incident, two sergeants made a looter believe momentarily that they had executed his son.

"Ultimately, the lieutenant resigned, the sergeants were given a summary court-martial, and the incident was lost in the fog of war," Murphy writes in the two short pages he devotes to it.

A more reflective writer would have explored how that incident and the handful of other instances of bad behavior that came to his attention affected Murphy's transformation from a West Point teacher who had voted for George Bush in 2000 to an ardent opponent of the war. On his way out of Iraq, a soldier Murphy had served with turned to him and asked, "Sir, what were we doing here? What really was our mission?" Murphy had an answer of sorts then: To depose Saddam Hussein, to find the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and to help the Iraqis build a representative government.

At the time, about 400 Americans had been killed in Iraq. Now the number is approaching 4,000.

"For generations to come, historians will scour White House documents - whenever this secrecy-obsessed White House releases them - to understand exactly what happened, exactly how our nation was led into the worst foreign policy blunder in American history," Murphy writes. "It will be their task to understand how this senseless war came about. It is now our task to end it."

Taking the Hill does not help with the first task.