by Greg Jaffe
Even at that type of warfare, the Army wasn’t very good. At the National Training Center, a 1,000-square-mile training ground in the Mojave Desert, tanks and artillery cannons faced off in laser-tag battles against a mock enemy meant to resemble the Soviet army. After each fight, the soldiers who ran the training center critiqued the visiting units. In his first test, Casey quickly realized that he and his raw troops had no idea what they were doing. Casey, riding with the senior intelligence officer from his unit, got hopelessly lost. The two officers tried calling for help, but their antiquated radios didn’t work. After the fight, his brigade commander called the officers together and chewed them out. “You all are a bunch of dumb asses,” he screamed. “That was the sorriest excuse for an attack I have ever seen.” Casey agreed. “We don’t know what the hell we are doing, and this has got to change,” he told himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Abizaidland
Their life was the land, their families, and Allah.
Nothing could change that, and I had the distinct impression
that nothing ever would.
—JOHN ABIZAID
Amman, Jordan
Fall 1978
Well, we have finally made it to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” John Abizaid declared in a letter home on September 15, 1978. Just writing those words was exciting. At last, he and his family were where he had longed to be—in the Middle East with two years ahead of them to explore. Abizaid, whose great-grandfather was Lebanese, had been fascinated by the region since he was a cadet at West Point, but it had been a difficult journey to get there—a year in the 82nd Airborne Division, three years in the Rangers, and six months studying Arabic with his wife, Kathy, at the Defense Language Institute. The Army had to be convinced that sending one of its brightest young officers to the Middle East was worthwhile. He had won an Olmsted scholarship, which paid for a handful of officers each year to study abroad, but the seven other winners that year had all gone off to Europe—to the University of Geneva, the University of Grenoble, the University of Heidelberg, and other venerable institutions. The poster child for the program was Robert “Bud” McFarlane, a Marine artillery officer in Vietnam who had studied Cold War strategy in Geneva and who would go on to become Reagan’s national security advisor. That wasn’t the path Abizaid had chosen. The last time an Olmsted Scholar had proposed going to the Middle East, it was to Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Abizaid was the first to go to an Arab country.
He had ditched his initial plan to study in Egypt when the university he contacted failed to respond to his letters seeking admission. His backup was Jordan, the impoverished kingdom in the heart of the Middle East, surrounded by wealthier and more powerful neighbors. Even with his scholarship in hand, getting there hadn’t been easy. The University of Jordan had accepted him, which was better treatment than he received in Egypt, but the school seemed at best indifferent to having an American officer join its student body. The U.S. embassy discouraged him, warning about his safety and telling him it would offer him no special assistance. Kathy was pregnant with their second child and had never traveled outside of the United States. She was wary about moving to a part of the world that made news mostly for terrorist hijackings and brushfire wars. Her parents back in Coleville panicked when they learned their pregnant daughter was moving to the Middle East. “Wouldn’t Germany be easier?” she wondered. It had taken a while, but Abizaid had convinced her that this could be the adventure of their lives.
The Jordanian capital, perched in the hills above the desert, was a backwater, with none of the opulent skyscrapers and elegant hotels that were beginning to appear in Baghdad, Cairo, and the oil-rich ministates of the Persian Gulf. The city had absorbed thousands of Palestinian refugees, who had come in waves across the Jordan River after the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967. Dilapidated slums spread out into the distance. On a clear day, the city of Jerusalem could be seen to the west. Arriving in Amman ten days ahead of Kathy and their young daughter, Abizaid rented a dank basement apartment and registered for classes at the university, a short walk away. He quickly felt at ease. It took Kathy longer. When she stepped off the plane in Amman’s tiny airport, the heat and the long journey from San Francisco to New York to Greece and now Jordan had left her feeling woozy. As she collected her bags in an atmosphere she would later recall as “absolute chaos,” an unknown Jordanian man approached her. “I take baby now,” he said, grabbing the toddler and rushing off. Kathy screamed and went running after him until the unknown man passed the child over the customs barrier to John, who was waiting with his daughter’s favorite blanket.
When she saw their apartment, which John had dubbed the “Führer bunker,” she cringed. They didn’t have the money to live in a westernized enclave like most of the embassy staff and other American expatriates, but Kathy had been hoping for something slightly more comfortable. The basement apartment had concrete floors, no windows, and little furniture beyond two beds and an old couch. The arrival of an American family in the neighborhood created a minor sensation. Night after night neighbors appeared at their door, bearing food and offering welcomes. Kathy discovered that her months of Arabic-language training were almost useless. She could make out only bits of what her guests, who spoke an unfamiliar Jordanian dialect, were saying. She and John learned they were expected to ply them with tea, sludgelike Bedouin coffee, and frequently dinner as they discussed family, politics, and life in the United States for hours. A few weeks into their stay their American-made washing machine overflowed, flooding the apartment. Kathy was trying to contain the water when her landlady appeared for her daily visit. She pushed past her disheveled, pregnant, and obviously angry tenant, asked how everyone was doing, and began mopping up without apparent concern. “Fifteen minutes later we were sitting sipping tea as she advised me on the proper way to cook rice,” Kathy wrote in a letter several weeks later. “My feelings were difficult to describe. I was irritated at the house she had rented us and her unceasing advice, but glad to have the company.” This was the “Arab way of dealing with life’s daily annoyances,” she concluded. “One does what one can, and then turns to more important things like tea and company.”
John’s classes didn’t commence until the second week in October, ten days later than scheduled. There was no explanation. It was just the way things worked. When Abizaid scheduled meetings with professors, they often showed up late or not at all. Keeping up with lectures conducted in Arabic was a trial, especially until he adjusted to the local dialect. “It is quite a surprise for the Arabs to see an American taking a course with them in Arabic and they will always marvel at my ability to understand what is going on in class,” he said at the time. “If they were ever able to look beneath my confident expression of understanding they would see the stark terror of a student who understands much less than they think he does.”
Many mornings after John left for the university, neighborhood women arrived at the apartment, offering to help Kathy with washing and cooking. They peppered her with questions: Why wasn’t her mother here? How could she allow her four-year-old daughter to freeze in only a sweater? Why weren’t her sisters married? “Don’t worry. God will bless you with a son,” they reassured her after their second daughter was born. Soon Kathy was communicating in rudimentary Arabic and teaching them English in return. “There were times when both Kathy and I would curse as our doorbell rang, yet open the door with a huge smile,” Abizaid recounted in an early report to his scholarship sponsors. “Thankfully this period has now passed. We are now members of the neighborhood and very comfortable.”
Even a newcomer to the Middle East, such as Abizaid, could see that the region was undergoing tumultuous change. In January 1979, as he was getting ready to begin his second semester, the shah of Iran, America’s strongest ally in the area, was driven from power. The return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran a month later marked the first successful takeover of a major Middle Eastern country by Islamists.
Khomeini’s ascendance unleashed a wave of political unrest across the region. In Jordan, which was ruled by King Hussein, a non-Palestinian monarch from the Hashemite tribe, the Iranian revolution revived the Palestinian nationalism long repressed by the regime’s security services. Abizaid was studying in the history department one day when he looked out the window and saw demonstrators marching toward the five-story building and chanting Khomeini’s name. A Jordanian friend urged him to leave, worried about what might happen if the mob found an American on campus. As Abizaid raced down the back stairs he could hear the demonstrators growing louder and angrier as they denounced the king. Another group of students, outraged at the insult, was massing to avenge his honor. Emerging from the back door, he threaded his way through the angry throng and sprinted home to find Kathy peering over the concrete wall surrounding their apartment. As Abizaid came through the front gate, a convoy of riot police in armored vehicles sped by in the direction of the university. A few minutes later they heard automatic weapons fire. The police were firing over the demonstrators’ heads to break up the melee.
“Order was restored, certain activists disappeared from campus, and we completed the year in calm,” Abizaid wrote, describing the episode in a letter to the American administrator of his scholarship program. “In all truthfulness experiences such as this are worth as much as classroom study.”
He found his fellow students more assertive and angry, emboldened by Khomeini’s rise. When sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Tehran that November, many students skipped classes to celebrate. Almost overnight women began donning head scarves and the campus took on a more Islamic identity. Abizaid saw the signs of religious radicalization as ominous for the United States. “It was inevitable that something big was coming our way in the Middle East. You could just sense it,” he recalled years later.
After registering for a course on Islamic history, he spent hours poring over the required reading—verses from the Koran, which many other students already knew by heart. By the end of the semester he had eked out a passing grade and gained deeper insight into the power of the new Islamist movement. “I cannot say that I mastered the finer points of Islamic law nor understand the historical background of certain Islamic practices today. I can only say that I now understand that Islam is much more than a religion. It is a way of life that guides Muslims in every aspect of their lives,” he wrote in December 1979.
When school wasn’t in session, Abizaid traveled, studying the region and its many conflicts. He and a fellow officer drove out into the Yemeni desert to watch the hit-and-run battles between the U.S.-supported North and the Soviet-backed South during that country’s civil war. In Sudan, the U.S. embassy enlisted him to negotiate the return of one of its vehicles, which had been claimed by a warlord after it broke down and was abandoned on the side of the road. In the winter of 1980 he traveled with a team of U.S. diplomats and officers to a dirt airstrip at the base of a soaring desert escarpment near the Oman-Yemen border. There he met a British lieutenant in command of a motley group of Pakistani soldiers and local tribesmen, clad in colorful garb, who were attempting to put down an uprising against the sultan of Oman. As he wandered through the dirty camp, he was amazed that a few dozen British officers oversaw the wide-ranging effort—fighting insurgents, overseeing aid projects, and advising the sultan’s government. Abizaid envied the small detachment of British soldiers, who actually seemed to be achieving something, as tiny as their effort was. “It was one of these rare instances in the twentieth century where an insurgency is quelled,” he recalled.
The United States proved clumsier in its attempt to intervene in the region. Although Abizaid didn’t realize it at the time, he and his fellow officers were in Oman that winter scouting for airfields to use in a secret mission to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. Abizaid was brought along as a translator. The operation was conducted later that spring by Delta Force—the counterterrorism unit that Casey had tried out for a year earlier—and ended in disaster when a U.S. military helicopter crashed into an Air Force C-130, killing eight commandos. The debacle made a deep impression on the U.S. Army, which was still recovering from Vietnam. Instead of surgical strikes by clandestine commandos, Pentagon generals would insist that the key to success in future operations was to overwhelm the enemy with troops and firepower.
Toward the end of his stay Abizaid decided to run the entire length of Jordan, a 270-mile journey that took him from the Iraqi border in the north to Aqaba, the port city that had been captured by Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab allies during World War I. Abizaid was trying to soak up as much of the country as he could before he left. As he jogged through the desert he was joined by Jordanian army officers, including one lieutenant who smoked cigarettes as he plodded alongside him in the searing heat. The Arabs reproached him for guzzling water, saying no Bedouin would need to drink so much. Stopping at desert encampments at night, he was served bread and tea—and called “Abu Zaid” by the nomads.
His family had grown to feel at home in the country as well. Kathy bargained with local food vendors for bruised tomatoes and taught herself how to serve Arabic coffee to their Bedouin guests, filling their shot-glass-sized cups again and again until they shook them, the signal that they were finished. She gamely put up with even the most intrusive guests. Abu Latif, a Bedouin sheikh who had played host to the Abizaids several times in the Byzantine ruin on the outskirts of Amman where his tribe lived, arrived one rainy evening in his flowing robe, accompanied by a dozen family members. “We’ve come to bathe,” he announced in Arabic. For the next several hours they rotated through the Abizaids’ bathroom, washing and raiding the medicine cabinet.
Few Army wives would ever throw themselves into a foreign culture the way Kathy did, Abizaid thought. He delighted in watching his four-year-old daughter Sherry laugh and shout with her Jordanian playmates in self-taught Arabic. And he reveled in the disorder of everyday life in Jordan: the ten o’clock news that some nights didn’t start until after 10:30; the total disregard for traffic laws. “I can’t think of a time when we’ve been happier or closer as a family,” he wrote in a letter to the Olmsted Foundation. On their last night in Amman, the Abizaids hosted a small goodbye dinner, inviting their neighbor Asma Ali and several close Jordanian friends and their children. Kathy later described the gathering in a letter: “As the evening wore on, I could see that they were delaying their departure. I was sitting and watching all of our children playing and turned to ask Asma something. She was playing with the baby and crying. I found that I was crying too. In a country where families live in the same village for centuries the departure, perhaps permanent, of a friend is so much of a loss. We both felt that then.”
Abizaid’s two-year sojourn had caused him to fall behind his fellow West Point classmates. In his first two Army assignments with the 82nd Airborne Division and the Rangers he’d received glowing reviews. “One of the most intelligent officers I have ever known,” an early battalion commander wrote in his personnel file. “Destined to become one of the truly great leaders of the U.S. military,” another boss said. Now the Pentagon officer charged with placing him in his next assignment warned him in letters typed on Department of the Army stationery that he needed to get back to leading troops “as soon as possible.” He briefly considered switching from infantry officer to foreign area officer so that he could remain in the Middle East, which he and Kathy had grown to love. “Arabist or infantryman?” he asked in one letter home. The more he thought about it, the clearer the answer became. Ever since hearing his father’s stories from World War II as a teenager, Abizaid had longed to lead soldiers. He chose infantryman, confident that growing unrest in the Islamic world would draw him back one day.
CHAPTER THREE
The New Centurions
Fort Stewart, Georgia
1979
Colonel James Shelton had never seen anything like it. The letter from a captain named David Petraeus went on for two pages, ticking off all the
honors and achievements he had accumulated in his short career—Star Man at West Point, promoted early to captain, master parachutist badge, top of his class at Ranger School, exemplary fitness reports. Shelton and Petraeus had met each other exactly once. A few years earlier they had shared a tent one night during a NATO exercise in eastern Turkey. Petraeus had cracked up when Shelton pulled a bottle of scotch from a spare boot in his rucksack, and the two soldiers had shared a drink. Now it was Shelton’s turn to chuckle. This brash captain was lobbying for command of a rifle company in his brigade. He passed the letter around his headquarters, and everyone got a kick out of it. “What do you want to do with Superman here?” the brigade’s personnel officer asked. “Let’s give him a shot,” Shelton replied. He had only taken over command a few months earlier and already had bawled out several shoddy junior officers. If Petraeus was half as good as he claimed, he would be an improvement.
Petraeus and his wife, Holly, pulled into Fort Stewart in their yellow Corvette a few weeks later, newly assigned to Shelton’s brigade in the 24th Infantry Division. Everything moved at a languid pace in rural Georgia, they found. Holly could speak French fluently, but she had a harder time with southern drawls. When, shortly after arriving, she heard a radio commercial referring to “Vince’s Dawgs,” she had no idea it was a reference to the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team and its coach, Vince Dooley. The 24th Division headquarters was in a creaky white clapboard building built in the early months of World War II. Beyond the main post lay the vast training grounds, nearly 300,000 acres of dense scrub pine and swamp. But training wasn’t much of a priority. The commanding general spent long hours on his boat, which he kept moored near Savannah, twenty-five miles away. Days at a time would go by without him saying a word to his staff. “You’re in command,” he told his deputy. “Just tell me if something goes wrong.” A lot was going wrong. The year Petraeus arrived, the 24th was rated “not combat ready” in the Army’s internal unit assessments.
