WASHINGTON -- Long, lean Texan Tommy Franks, a college dropout who enlisted in the U.S. Army and found himself and a career calling down salvos of artillery fire in the Vietnamese jungle, now leads the most awesome array of military firepower ever assembled.

Few generals ever command in wartime. But General Franks, 57, the commander of American forces in the Persian Gulf, is directing his second war. It will be a much bigger and even more difficult conflict than his first effort, the unconventional but quickly successful campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001.

Today's well-educated, all-volunteer army is a far cry from the often ill-trained conscripts who slogged in Southeast Asia. Yet an ordinary soldier can still identify with a leader who has shared their fears and hardships, and Gen. Franks is known as a "muddy boots soldier."

"Tommy was there to fight the war; he wasn't like a lot of guys that tried to dodge as much stuff as possible, do their time and get out," said Charlie Taylor, who fought with young lieutenant Franks in the Mekong Delta 35 years ago. He was a "lanky, tobacco-chewing 21-year-old, a real bright guy, who took all the risks we had to take," Mr. Taylor said in an interview yesterday from his home in Skull Valley, Ariz.

In his addresses to assembled troops waiting for war, Gen. Franks has often rolled out the story of meeting his high-school principal as a four-star general.

"In high school," he would recall the principal saying, "you were not the brightest bulb in the socket." Gen. Franks would pause, then deliver the punch line: "Ain't this a great country?"

His "aw shucks" attitude, his slow west Texas drawl and his reluctance to be interviewed has left the general an enigma to most Americans -- in sharp contrast to burly, media-savvy Norman Schwarzkopf, who led U.S. forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

But to the massive strike forces assembled in the Kuwaiti desert, he is a combat veteran -- wounded three times -- with a proven record of taking minimum risks with their lives.

On Sept 11, 2001, Gen. Franks was on holiday, shopping for olives in Crete. He was barely a year into his new job as head of central command, a disparate region sprawling from the Middle East to Central Asia that is one of the Pentagon's half dozen global divisions. It was to have been the pinnacle of an impressive military career, a four-star job in the role of regional proconsul, headquartered in pleasant Tampa, Fla.

Exactly 25 days later -- barely time to plan a small-scale military exercise -- Gen. Franks had assembled and launched one of the most unorthodox military attacks in history.

Laser-guided bombs blasted the Taliban's military strongholds while U.S. aircraft dropped saddles and feed to special-forces soldiers operating with ragtag militias. Drones led gunships to mountain hideouts and Marines were airlifted 500 kilometres to seize a desert airbase. The high-tech, low-tech military marriage worked, confounding the naysayers who had predicted mass starvation and a quagmire for U.S. troops.

Still, the Afghan war was hardly an unvarnished success. Osama bin Laden slipped away and murmuring soon started that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was upset with the general.

But if Mr. Rumsfeld wanted Gen. Franks out, he would have been long gone.

Instead, the general has designed a new war plan for Iraq, signed off on by Mr. Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, that has been made enormously complex by near-contradictory aims: Saddam Hussein must be ousted, but Iraqis must welcome U.S. troops as liberators. Iraq's military must be defeated or scared into surrender, but it must survive to help rebuild the country. Casualties must be minimal on all sides.

How well the plan pans out will play a huge role in determining Mr. Bush's political fate and his place in history, and the President recently invited his fellow Texan to his Prairie Chapel ranch.

He's a "down-to-earth, no-nonsense guy," said Mr. Bush, whose wife Laura was two years behind Tommy Franks at high school in Midland, Tex.

But although the two men share a love of Texas, sports and country music, their military careers couldn't be more different.

While Mr. Bush was flying for the Texas Air National Guard, where the biggest risks were recurring hangovers, Lieut. Franks was getting his legs shot full of shrapnel in Vietnam,

"He always wanted to get involved, to understand what was going on and he had an opinion on everything," recalled Bill Doherty, who led the Third Platoon of Bandido Company, which suffered horrific casualties in 1967, when Lieut. Franks was attached to the company as a forward observer.

After Vietnam, the young officer went back to university on the army's "Bootstrap" program and stayed in the military during an era when it was barely regarded as honourable.

His rise up the ranks was rapid, especially remarkable considering that he wasn't part of the West Point elite.

He did a stint in Germany with an armoured division, another in Washington as congressional liaison officer. He worked investigating abuses of senior officers.

By 1991, he was an assistant divisional commander with the 1st Cavalry, part of Gen. Schwarzkopf's "big left hook" that smashed the best elements of the Iraqi army.

Then it was on to South Korea, to command the 2nd Infantry Division.

Military associates say the general is still a prankster, fully capable of carefully balancing a piece of fruit on the head of a sleeping comrade during the course of a long flight.

Former subordinates say he can chew out an offender with a hard-to-match thoroughness and plenty of profanity.

Almost everyone wearing a U.S. uniform calls him "sir," but Mr. Rumsfeld, old friends and his Vietnam buddies still call him "Tommy."

His two granddaughters call him "Pooh," which, the general says he thinks is very funny.