The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  He and Holly had spent the previous four years at the U.S. base in Vicenza in a parachute infantry brigade. They had loved life in Italy, or he had anyway. The only work Holly could find as the wife of an officer was tutoring soldiers seeking their high school GEDs. Petraeus, however, spent weeks at a time traveling around Europe on joint exercises with parachute units from other NATO countries. In 1976, he and a couple of dozen soldiers from his unit went to France to train with its paratroopers. After ten days, they ended up in the Pyrenees Mountains, executing a tricky drop onto a hilltop. From there the Americans and their hosts marched several miles to a rustic château, where they were served a memorable meal by black-coated waiters. A picture snapped that evening by one of his men shows a youthful Petraeus standing outside the farmhouse in his paratrooper beret, looking deeply happy.

  On the trip Petraeus noticed a larger-than-life portrait of a French officer displayed in the regimental mess and asked about it. The painting was of Marcel Bigeard, his hosts told him, a revered French general. He had fought in Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, was taken prisoner during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and later forged the counterinsurgency tactics that French units used in their war in Algeria. After returning to Vicenza, an intrigued Petraeus began reading about Bigeard, poring over a copy of Hell in a Very Small Place, Bernard Fall’s classic account of the French war in Indochina, and a translation of the The Centurions, Jean Lartéguy’s novel whose hero, Raspeguy, was loosely modeled on Bigeard.

  Petraeus became a fervent admirer of the combat-hardened paratrooper who had helped revive the French spirit after its crushing defeat in Vietnam, a decade before the United States sent troops there. The Centurions quickly became one of his favorite books. The novel recounts how Raspeguy and his tight-knit band of men returned from the war to an indifferent France and re-formed their unit to fight in Algeria, this time more effectively battling Arab guerrillas on their own ground. One of Petraeus’s prized possessions was an autographed picture of Bigeard, given to him as a Christmas present in 1976 by Holly’s father, General Knowlton, who had left West Point for an assignment at NATO. Petraeus would hang the picture on his office wall for decades afterward. He would read and reread sections of The Centurions, too. Thirty years later, Petraeus would pull a copy of the novel off his bookshelf at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and lecture a visitor on what it taught about small-unit infantry tactics.

  Petraeus wasn’t planning on staying long in the plodding 24th Infantry Division. Although he hadn’t mentioned it to Shelton, he had lobbied to come to Fort Stewart for one main reason—there was also a Ranger battalion headquartered there that he badly wanted to join. His career plan in many ways resembled the plot of The Centurions. After the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, the Army had chosen the Ranger battalions to function as a nucleus of competence in an otherwise deeply dysfunctional service. They got the best equipment, the toughest soldiers, and the most realistic training. Over time, the theory went, this brotherhood of warriors would repopulate the rest of the Army, saving the institution, much as Raspeguy (and Bigeard) had done, until sold out by politicians. After doing his stint in Shelton’s brigade, Petraeus planned to shift over to the elite unit that represented everything he loved about the Army. The Rangers were selective, but Petraeus wasn’t worried about making the cut.

  Petraeus had arrived at Fort Stewart at a time of growing alarm about the Middle East. In 1979, massive protests toppled the shah of Iran. Later in the year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Unlike in Europe, the United States had no ground forces in the Middle East and little ability to move troops rapidly to the region.

  The most troubling scenario for Pentagon strategists was a thrust south into Iran by the Soviet Union, potentially interrupting the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. To a lesser extent, Army planners worried they might be asked to prop up Saudi Arabia or another ally threatened by a hostile neighbor or Islamic radicals. In a nationwide address in early October, President Jimmy Carter announced the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force, an armada of ground, naval, and air units trained and equipped to deploy to the Middle East in a crisis. The 24th Division, where Petraeus had landed, was designated as a key part of the force.

  For its new mission, the division was converted from light infantry into a mechanized division, which meant that hundreds of new tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks poured into Fort Stewart. Keeping the vehicles repaired suddenly became the company commanders’ responsibility, one unfamiliar to Petraeus, who had spent the first part of his career in an airborne unit. So he began spending one day a week in the motor pool, overseeing his mechanics. He donned a pair of pressed coveralls and sat with a megaphone and a maintenance manual open in front of him, reciting step-by-step instructions for greasing an axle or changing an oil filter. Accustomed to being left alone, many of the mechanics grumbled that they could handle the job themselves. But with Petraeus riding herd, the amount of time the company’s vehicles spent undergoing repairs declined. “If you want to show seriousness of purpose, you personally commit to it,” Petraeus explained later, admitting, “We probably committed a little bit more to it than some.”

  Few officers spent as much time thinking about the details of their job. When a fellow captain had to deliver a eulogy for a decidedly average soldier who had been killed in a car accident, Petraeus asked him for his notes, filing them away to consult in case he was ever called upon to give similar remarks. Most mornings he would sprint the two miles from his house to Fort Stewart, and then lead the company on its early-morning run, followed by calisthenics. He was always smiling and pleasant, but there wasn’t a tougher competitor on the base. After reading in the post newspaper one day about three Rangers who claimed to have set a new record running from Savannah to Fort Stewart, he handpicked a team of hardened athletes like himself and they blew the Ranger time away, with Petraeus handling the anchor leg.

  While coaching his men in the post basketball league, he promised he would make sure a four-star general turned up to watch if the team made it to the championship game. He was one of the few captains who could actually deliver on such a pledge, however uninspirational it might have been to his soldiers. When the team made the finals a few months later, he hurriedly called General Knowlton, who happened to be in Washington for meetings, and he agreed to fly down to see his daughter and to sit in the stands for the evening game. Petraeus’s squad won, of course.

  There was another reason for Knowlton to make a special trip to Fort Stewart. The next morning, he stood beside Colonel Shelton on the Fort Stewart parade grounds for a special ceremony. His son-in-law’s company had won an award for having 65 percent of its nearly 100 soldiers qualify for the Expert Infantry Badge, which required mastering more than a dozen soldiering skills. Most officers didn’t know or care about the award. But Petraeus had made winning the EIB unit citation his obsession, devising a grueling training regime that included twelve-mile road marches in less than three hours wearing full rucksacks, long hours on the rifle range, and tromping around the woods with maps and compasses. “We just drilled and drilled and drilled,” he remembered. On the day of the ceremony, he was standing at attention, with his men behind him in formation, as Knowlton presented him a blue unit streamer to be flown on Alpha Company’s guidon, the swallow-tailed flag carried next to the commanding officer during parades and formations.

  His success in the EIB competition “put Petraeus on the map,” his battalion commander later recalled. But it also rubbed some peers the wrong way—he was too ambitious, too competitive, and too perfect. Petraeus didn’t seem to be bothered by the sniping, and it was impossible to dispute the results. “Some guys didn’t like him because they thought he was a show-off,” Shelton said. “I thought he was the most amazing young officer I had.”

  After a job as the battalion operations officer came open, Shelton decided to promote his hardest-working captain, even though it was a major’s billet and Petraeus was only ten months into his company com
mand. A week later, Shelton got a rare call from the often-absent division commander, Major General James Cochran, who had just learned about the promotion. “I thought I was running this division,” Cochran fumed. “We’ve got three or four majors who have been waiting for a job like that.” Shelton fired back: “We thought he was the best guy for the job.” Cochran backed down, and Petraeus vaulted over his fellow officers into a plum position.

  The operations shop hummed under its new captain. He could write a military plan and the standard five-paragraph operations order faster than anyone Shelton had ever seen. Training exercises were bigger and more realistic than had been done for years. In one case, three companies, joined by tanks and helicopters, conducted a simulated attack using live ammunition that went on for more than hour. It was like the Fourth of July, only with real rockets. Families invited to observe from nearby bleachers broke into cheers at the cacophony of rifle fire and explosions. Once it was over, Petraeus rushed up to the battalion executive officer, Major Marty Gendron. “Wasn’t that great?” he gushed. “Yeah, Dave,” replied a nonplussed Gendron, who worried the exuberant captain had just expended much of the year’s ammunition budget.

  Better training was badly needed—and not just in the sleepy 24th. In November 1979, while Petraeus was commanding his company at Fort Stewart, General Edward “Shy” Meyer, the Army chief of staff who had once worked for George Casey’s father in Vietnam, gathered with the other Joint Chiefs at Camp David to brief President Carter on the following year’s defense budget. The foreign policy crises bedeviling the administration had worsened as the months passed, especially in the Middle East. In Tehran, radical students who had stormed the U.S. embassy were holding sixty-six hostages. Carter warned Iran’s new leaders that he might take military action if the hostages were harmed. But could he? Meyer had come to Camp David with a distressing message. “Mr. President,” he said when it was his turn to speak, “basically what we have is a hollow Army.” It was an Army that couldn’t fight, and not just in the Middle East.

  Pentagon war plans called for rushing ten divisions to Europe in two weeks if the Soviets invaded, but most of the active-duty divisions in the United States were like the 24th—undermanned and poorly equipped, incapable of picking up and moving on short notice. Even if they could deploy, Meyer said, there weren’t enough ships and transport planes to move them, or the logistics to sustain them for more than a couple of weeks. The Rapid Deployment Force, which Carter had announced in a nationally televised address months earlier, existed mainly on paper. When a New York Times reporter showed up at Fort Stewart to investigate the Army’s ability to fight in the Middle East, Shelton was pessimistic. “My brigade’s ready to fight,” he said. “But as for the big picture, who knows? We’d probably be stretched very thin very soon. We’d give a good account of ourselves at the start, but I’d hate to say how long we’d survive.”

  Now that Petraeus was on the battalion staff, other officers who once saw him as merely amusing or annoying had to operate at his relentless pace, and some rebelled. Captain Dan Grigson was summoned one day to battalion headquarters and told by Petraeus that he was being “counseled” for not keeping up with his paperwork and ignoring tasks assigned to him by the operations shop. “If I ask anybody else to do something, they do it. With you, it’s always a fight,” he said. Grigson reminded him that his boss was the battalion commander, not the operations officer. “The difference between you and me, Dave,” Grigson later remembered remarking, “is that you want to be chief of staff of the Army someday and I don’t.”

  The truth was Petraeus wasn’t thinking much beyond his immediate goal of transferring into the Ranger battalion. That changed in May 1981, when the 24th Division got a new commander, Major General John Galvin, who was returning to the United States from a job in Germany. Galvin’s assignment was a sign that the Army was taking the once-sleepy 24th more seriously. The new tanks, armored troop carriers, and trucks were, on Galvin’s orders, being repainted in a shade of tan, to blend in better in Middle Eastern deserts.

  Before Galvin arrived, he had heard about the superstar captain on the battalion staff. He needed a personal aide and decided to give Petraeus the job on a temporary basis. If they meshed, he promised, he’d make the assignment permanent. Galvin didn’t expect his aide to stay at his side every minute. “I don’t want you to click your heels and keep my cigarettes,” he told Petraeus. He wanted Petraeus to be his eyes and ears, to carry out sensitive assignments, and to be a confidential advisor—an aide-de-camp the way the term had been understood in Napoleon’s army. Most important, he wanted criticism. “It’s my job to run the division, and it’s your job to critique me,” he insisted. “I want you to give me a report card every month on how I’m doing.”

  Petraeus was immediately drawn to his new boss. Bookish, with a streak of Yankee stubbornness, Jack Galvin started as an enlisted man in the Massachusetts National Guard before attending West Point and being sent to Vietnam. He had been relieved from his first assignment in Vietnam after refusing his commander’s order to inflate a Viet Cong body count after a battle. Exiled to a public affairs job, he was close to leaving the Army, but stayed in after he was assigned to help write a classified history of Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The experience gave him a behind-the-scenes look at the blunders that had led the country into a losing war. Returning to Vietnam for a second tour, he was assigned to the 1st Air Cavalry, working under George Casey Sr. Later, he attended Columbia University for a master’s degree in English, and taught literature at West Point. In his spare time, he wrote books of popular history and articles about strategy for military journals. He carried around a Spanish-English dictionary to teach himself the language. He was a soldier-scholar, like Petraeus’s father-in-law in many ways, but more of an iconoclast, someone who had struggled to make general, was often at odds with the Army, and had emerged with contrarian self-confidence. Petraeus was the straightest arrow around and had never been crosswise with the Army brass, but he had a curious mind and loved history. For those reasons alone, he knew he would enjoy his new boss.

  Galvin liked his new aide, too. A few weeks after arriving, he told Petraeus he was serious about wanting regular criticism. “I don’t want to grade you, sir,” Petraeus protested. But Galvin insisted, so Petraeus began leaving the reports in the commander’s in-basket every month. “Sir, your April evaluation,” read the cover sheet on one of his early efforts. Galvin scrawled “OK!” on top after reading it.

  One of his peeves was that Galvin wasn’t in shape. Petraeus prided himself on physical toughness, a trait that he thought won him respect in enlisted men’s eyes, and he tended to rate other officers by their ability to keep up with him on a run. He thought a commander should be up front, leading by example. Galvin, who was often huffing and puffing midway through a three-mile jog, liked to run in the back of the pack. “You learn more in the rear,” he said. Petraeus knew he would never turn his boss into a jock, so he hid his boss’s candy bars and came up with other ways of buffing up Galvin’s image. After a long run with troops, while everyone else was doubled over gasping, the general and his aide would jog off, as if barely winded, saying they had to get back to headquarters. Once out of sight, they hopped in a vehicle stashed nearby and drove to the office.

  Galvin had plenty of advice for Petraeus, too. He urged him not to focus narrowly on his job as an infantry officer. Success was not only a matter of being in great shape or getting top marks on evaluation reports. Think beyond the foxhole, about history and strategy, about relations between the military and their civilian bosses in Washington, about the next war, he urged. It amused him that someone with as supple a mind as Petraeus had would never admit a mistake. He needed to loosen up a little, Galvin thought. Consider going to graduate school, where he would meet civilians with different experiences and ideas. “I used to say you can’t get too smart to be an infantryman,” he recalled.

  Petraeus soon became Galvin’s al
ter ego, responsible for balancing his schedule, drafting his speeches, and issuing orders in his name. Their close relationship did not always go over well with the division senior staff, who thought the confident captain sometimes overstepped his bounds. Colonel Pete Taylor, the chief of staff, chewed out Petraeus several times for presuming to direct the division staff, which was his job. He found it especially annoying when Petraeus would walk into Galvin’s office and close the glass door behind him, shutting out the rest of the staff. “I made it very clear to Dave that if I caught him doing it again, I would have the post engineers come over and take the door off its hinges,” he said.

  Being a general’s aide was a double-edged sword. It was an opportunity to latch on to a powerful mentor and get a glimpse into the inner workings of the Army. But it had its downsides. It could mark an officer as a bit too eager to please and at worst as a self-serving sycophant. Most of Petraeus’s peers had read or at least heard of Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer’s 1968 novel that follows the lives of two officers from World War I through the early years of the Cold War. The protagonist, Sam Damon, is a battletested hero who marries the French-speaking daughter of a general and puts his soldiers’ interests ahead of his career. A stoic warrior, he dies on a mission attempting to keep the United States out of war in Southeast Asia. His rival, Courtney Massengale, disdains the rank-and-file soldiers under his command and attaches himself to generals, eventually rising to four stars himself. The thick novel and its simple parable about duty and sacrifice resonated with generations of officers, including those at Fort Stewart in the early 1980s. Martin Rollinson, a captain in the 24th Infantry when Petraeus was there, remembered talking with other officers about whether Galvin’s aide was like the selfless Damon or the conniving Massengale. “Some people compared Petraeus to Massengale,” Rollinson recalled. “It wasn’t fair, but he was so good he made people feel inferior.”