The teetotaling son of a hard-drinking welder, Sanchez grew up on the banks of the Rio Grande in a house without indoor plumbing. “I still consider myself a poor Mexican kid who was blessed to have some unbelievable responsibilities and successes in my life,” Sanchez tells me over coffee, “and I am still firmly grounded in the values and principles my parents instilled in me growing up in South Texas.” We’re at the kitchen table in the brick colonial home he shares with his wife of 37 years in a gated enclave of San Antonio, but his plebeian roots are easy to see. The last Army lieutenant general I met with sipped coffee from a blue mug emblazoned with three gold stars. The mug Sanchez hands me has a dishwasher-faded photo of his boyhood pal, Chuy Trevino, posing in deer-hunter camouflage with a trophy buck.

Before deciding to lambaste the White House’s prosecution of the war, Sanchez tells me, he went through three years of “tremendous soul-searching.” He sought advice from several four-star officers, who, he says, supported his decision to come forward and even helped him shape his message. But after he first delivered that message in a speech to military journalists in October 2007, when he accused the Bush administration, Congress, and the State Department of incompetence and of engaging in partisan politics at the risk of troop safety, “nobody wanted to get involved, because of potential fratricide across the board, and they began to very quickly walk away.”

Sanchez was working part-time as a paid consultant to the military, mentoring other generals in joint and interagency war-fighting operations as well as senior noncommissioned officers assigned to top leadership positions. The Joint Forces Command stopped calling Sanchez after this speech, he says, and his mentoring contract was not renewed—a decision he believes came straight from Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen’s spokesman, Captain John F. Kirby, said that his boss “was, in fact, troubled by some of the public positions” Sanchez took after leaving the service, but denied that Mullen played any role in ending Sanchez’s contract.

The lucrative consulting jobs that have come to many of his retired peers have eluded Sanchez: not a single company doing business with the federal government has ever contacted him about full-time employment. Fellow flag officers he once considered friends have shunned him, he says, as “radioactive.” The only general to lend him a hand in retirement, according to Sanchez, has been Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and 2004 Democratic candidate for president, who helped him land a seat on the board of Asynchrony Solutions, an information-technology consulting firm headquartered in St. Louis.

“As a Christian, I must do what’s right regardless of what my personal consequences are, and that’s what I have embarked on,” he tells me. “It’s not just a duty for me as a believer. It’s also a duty to my subordinates and to all those young men and women who sacrificed their lives for this nation. And it’s just appalling to me that I have fellow general officers and superiors who’ve not had the courage to do that.”