The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  Dave Petraeus also wanted to go to war, maybe worse than Chiarelli. He had packed his desert uniforms, taken his shots for the Middle East, and even updated his will. But he was trapped in the Pentagon, working as the personal aide to General Carl Vuono, the Army’s four-star chief of staff. At least once a week, he would ask Vuono to release him and assign him to a combat slot—or any job close to the action. Although Vuono had laid down strict orders that the officers working for him were going to stay put, Petraeus had spent his career defying the rules set for lesser officers. So he lobbied, schemed, and begged. One week he’d try the “selfless service” angle. The next week he’d rattle off the names of other officers who had been allowed to leave their Pentagon posts. When that didn’t work, he asked the Army’s vice chief of staff to intercede with the chief. Nothing worked, and it was driving Petraeus crazy.

  Vuono had come to rely so heavily on Petraeus that he couldn’t imagine doing without him. Each day before dawn Petraeus arrived at Quarters One, the chief’s residence on the edge of Arlington Cemetery, and drove with him to the Pentagon. In the evening, almost always after seven o’clock, they would return home together. Petraeus edited his speeches and helped draft his congressional testimony. On Saturdays he sat with Vuono in his study, dialing commanders all over the world to check on their war preparations. Sundays were the day they watched football games and read through binders full of newspaper articles, think tank papers, and internal Army studies. Petraeus’s talents were working against him: he’d become Vuono’s primary sounding board.

  George Casey was also stuck in the Pentagon, working for Vuono. It was the first decent job that he had been able to land since arriving in Washington four years earlier. Unfortunately, it looked as if it had come too late to save his career. Casey had spent most of the late 1970s and early 1980s at Fort Carson, Colorado, a base whose units were at the very bottom of the Army’s Master Priority List, meaning that they were the least likely to deploy and the last to get new equipment. Returning to the sleepy post after turning down a spot in Delta Force had been a big letdown. In 1978, bored with the Army, he briefly broke away to study for a master’s degree in international relations at the University of Denver. He earned mostly A’s but realized that the academic life wasn’t for him.

  He volunteered for a yearlong tour as a United Nations observer in the Sinai, where he and a group of Russian officers would share a tiny outpost on the Suez Canal for two weeks each month. In February 1982, Casey said goodbye to Sheila and his two sons at the Colorado Springs airport. “It’s the only time I have ever seen my dad cry,” recalled his son Sean, who was ten years old at the time. Casey wasn’t going to be in any danger, but saying goodbye had dredged up his own memories of seeing off his father as he deployed to Korea and Vietnam. After a few months, Sheila decided to leave her job as an accountant and moved with their two boys to Cairo, where they rented a small apartment. Many Army families would have been put off by the chaos of the Middle East. The Caseys used Cairo as a base to tour Damascus, Jerusalem, and the ruins at Petra in Jordan.

  By 1982, he was back at Fort Carson, which, thanks to the Reagan-era defense buildup, was bustling with activity. Casey rarely questioned the direction the Army was headed, as Abizaid or Petraeus did. He didn’t write scholarly articles on defense policy, like Chiarelli. But he had other talents that the 1980s Army, which was remaking itself to fight the Soviets, valued immensely. He knew how to motivate and train soldiers. His troops referred to him admiringly as “George the Animal” for his energy, work ethic, and enthusiasm. And he had learned how to fight. In the absence of a real war, the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert was the place where officers proved themselves in battles against the Soviet-style opposition. As Chiarelli was preparing for the CAT competition in Germany, Casey’s 700-soldier battalion got its shot in the California desert. His commander at the time was Colonel Wesley Clark, a hypercompetitive Rhodes scholar and Sosh alum. Clark nervously confided to his wife that the soft-spoken Casey didn’t seem particularly driven. “I worry he’s not committed to winning,” Clark fretted.

  Casey was more driven than he appeared. He spent hours drafting forty-page playbooks that his troops could stuff into a pocket of their cargo pants and were expected to memorize prior to their training center battles. On predawn bus rides to Fort Carson’s training range, he stood at the front of the rolling bus and crammed in an hourlong lecture on Soviet tactics. He also spent weeks puzzling over the best way to surprise the enemy forces. His innovation was simple but effective. Most commanders at the National Training Center never employed their antitank missile weapons in the fight. Mounted atop 1960s-era armored vehicles, the launchers typically were trapped behind faster-moving tanks. Casey snuck his antitank weapons out onto the flanks of his battalion, where they pounded away at the unsuspecting enemy.

  Two decades after the mock battle in the Mojave Desert, his former troops still marveled at their success. A few kept framed Polaroid snapshots of a 1980s computer screen showing the battalion’s kills that day. “Never underestimate the killing power of a few well-positioned antitank missiles,” Casey had written on one such photo, which in 2008 hung in the Pentagon office of one of his former lieutenants.

  Although his family connections would have made it easy for him to land a job as a general’s aide, Casey had spent most of his career seeking out positions that allowed him to roll up his sleeves with sergeants in the motor pool. He embraced the Army ideal of the hardworking commander who focused on training men for war and left the bigger strategic questions to politicians and academics. And the Army had rewarded him by promoting him earlier to major and lieutenant colonel.

  It wasn’t until he arrived in Washington that he realized that he hadn’t made the kinds of connections that he’d need to rise to the military’s top ranks. He did a one-year fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to NATO issues. Afterward the best job he could find was in the Army’s congressional liaison office, housed in a windowless Pentagon office known as the “hog pen.” There he spent eighteen months answering arcane questions from congressional staffers about the defense budget.

  Eventually, one of his former commanders from Fort Carson helped him land a better job working on Vuono’s staff, helping the chief push the glacial Pentagon bureaucracy to implement his priorities. As other officers scrambled to get to the Gulf War in the winter of 1991, Casey focused on his duties. Like Petraeus, he longed to prove himself in combat and confessed to Sheila that he badly wanted to go. But he could never quite bring himself to ask for special favors. He told himself that if the Army really needed him, it would reassign him to a combat unit. He was the kind of officer who believed that the system would work.

  In February 1991, after a lengthy bombing campaign, the United States and its allies pushed Saddam’s army out of Kuwait in a stunning 100-hour thrashing. Petraeus and Casey watched from the Pentagon, where they were working for Vuono. At Fort Lewis, Chiarelli did his best to mask his disappointment when he learned his unit would be staying put. Standing in front of his battalion, he told his troops that they were going to get their chance, and quoted Plato: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Privately he thought he had missed the last great tank battle. Abizaid, who was commanding a battalion in Europe, didn’t make it to Iraq for the fighting either. He deployed two months after the end of the combat on a military-humanitarian mission to protect northern Iraq’s Kurds, who had risen up against Saddam Hussein, prompting the dictator to launch a cruel assault on them. To Abizaid it became clear that the war the United States thought it had won was far from over.

  That, of course, wasn’t the lesson being drawn at the White House and Pentagon, where the triumph in the Middle East was regarded as vindication of the lessons that the American military had taken from Vietnam. “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula,” a delighted President George H. W. Bush boasted days afte
r the cease-fire between U.S. and Iraqi troops had been signed. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

  In June 1991, four months after the war ended, Vuono announced that he was retiring from the Army. Most of his staff headed on to other jobs. Petraeus moved on to command an infantry battalion in the 101st Airborne Division. Casey had nothing lined up and assumed his career was over. The phone lines in his office were disconnected and the nameplate pried off the door. For several weeks he came into work to read the Washington Post before heading over to the Pentagon gym.

  Eventually he got a job for himself evaluating arms control agreements. Casey knew that back-to-back Pentagon assignments were an absolute career killer for an Army colonel, so he applied to George Washington University’s business school, figuring that an MBA would help him land a better civilian position when he retired.

  Without Casey knowing, Vuono was quietly working to get his career back on track. A couple of weeks before he officially retired, the Army chief called the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, the unit Casey’s father had commanded in Vietnam. The division needed a new chief of staff, a coveted assignment usually reserved for a colonel who has already commanded a brigade. Casey’s name had been left off the last two brigade command lists. “Could you help this guy Casey out?” Vuono asked. Major General John Tilelli, the division commander, saw that Casey had been a successful battalion commander at Fort Carson. Tilelli, who had served two tours in Vietnam and had just led his division in the Gulf War, also liked the idea of bringing Casey back to the division his father had been commanding when he was killed.

  Casey arrived at Fort Hood in August, a sprawling post in central Texas where the base library was named in honor of his deceased father. The base was crammed with the latest tanks, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers just back from Kuwait. Soldiers with the yellow 1st Cav combat patches, indicating that they had fought in the Gulf War, strutted across its training ranges. The division had played a comparatively minor role in the fighting, but it didn’t matter. Anyone who was in the combat zone got to wear the patch on his right sleeve.

  Casey had always told himself that if his father hadn’t been killed, he would have left the Army after two years. He couldn’t stand the idea of living in his dad’s shadow. But the 1st Cavalry Division he was joining at Fort Hood wasn’t anything like the exhausted force that his father had been commanding in Vietnam when he was killed. The place was full of energy, and Casey felt a surprising surge of pride as he stepped onto the base. This was the Army he had helped rebuild. Although he was one of the few senior officers not wearing the coveted patch, Casey felt at home.

  CHAPTER SIX

  No Job for Amateurs

  If the Army continues to resist, organizing training and equipping itself to fight and win the “wars” it is currently being asked to fight, it may no longer have a sufficiently professional officer corps when the next big war occurs.

  —MAJOR JOHN NAGL, INSTRUCTOR,

  WEST POINT DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1999

  Vicenza, Italy

  April 1991

  The shooting war had been over for two months when John Abizaid’s battalion was ordered to Iraq. There was something deflating at being sent in for the Gulf War’s messy aftermath. He and his men weren’t even going to the desert, where the fighting had occurred, but to Iraq’s mountainous north as part of a humanitarian operation to protect Kurdish refugees. Pentagon planners hadn’t given much thought to the Kurds until a few days before. But in a way it was another example of Abizaid’s talent for being in the right place. Although few realized it then, the deployment offered an important glimpse into the Army’s future and its post-Vietnam failings.

  At first the Pentagon treated the operation like a reinvasion, ordering a massive parachute drop to intimidate the Iraqi troops in the area. Flown to a NATO air base in southern Turkey, Abizaid and his 1,400 soldiers had already begun loading aircraft when word came around 2:00 a.m. that plans had changed. Worried that the airborne assault would be misinterpreted as a resumption of hostilities, the Pentagon devised a new mode of entry—so Abizaid and his men loaded onto rattletrap Turkish buses and drove across the rugged border, like tourists on a cut-rate excursion.

  Their objective was Zakho, a border town ringed by snowcapped mountains. Making camp with a contingent of Marines, they found an almost apocalyptic scene—abandoned houses, overturned cars, and boarded-up shops. As the sun set that first night, the Americans saw hundreds of flickering campfires in the surrounding peaks, where the townspeople had fled. Prior to the ground war, President George H. W. Bush had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Kurdish fighters, badly miscalculating the dictator’s weakness and the willingness of the United States to help them, had gone on the attack. To hold on to power, Hussein launched a brutal offensive against the Kurds. Now half a million refugees were huddled in the makeshift mountain camps, often without shelter or food. With winter bearing down and disease rampant, as many as a thousand Kurds were dying every day.

  Once the scale of the calamity became clear, U.S. and European governments rushed in forces, including Abizaid’s battalion, to face down Hussein’s troops and coax the Kurds home. How to accomplish this was murky. Abizaid had little to guide him other than a few out-of-date maps and orders torn from a field notebook that read: “Mission: Conduct security operations in sector to protect displaced civilians. Be prepared to provide rapid reaction force to respond to requirements by headquarters.”

  On one point his superiors had been adamant: worried about restarting a war they had just won, they barred Abizaid from using force unless his men were attacked. For the moment things were quiet. Iraqi units had moved a few dozen miles south and dug in. But it was a volatile situation, with the potential for shooting to erupt unexpectedly, especially early in the operation. Perhaps their biggest advantage was that the Iraqis didn’t know the Americans were barred from attacking unless threatened. “I know you understand the rules of engagement,” Abizaid told his young commanders, referring to the guidelines for firing their guns. “Your responsibility is to accomplish your mission and protect your force. I trust your judgment and I trust you.”

  Abizaid’s years in the Middle East, his fluent Arabic, and his talent for improvisation made him a logical choice for this undefined mission. Most of the other military men involved had barely heard of the Kurds’ long struggle to carve out their own independent homeland from parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. “We all took our cues from John,” recalled General John Shalikashvili, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who oversaw the operation from neighboring Turkey.

  Abizaid’s experience in the Middle East gave him a view different from the one held by most of his peers, the colonels and majors who had just fought and won the Gulf War. They returned home certain that Iraq could not withstand the awesome might of the American military. Abizaid in many ways drew the opposite conclusion. His four-month mission exposed him to the barely suppressed hatreds of Iraq, a place where countrymen fought and killed each other with stunning viciousness. He emerged from the mission even more skeptical of the ability of his soldiers or any occupiers to impose their will on the country. A decade later, neoconservatives in the Bush administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, insisted that if Saddam Hussein were forced from power, democracy would quickly flower, just as it had in the Kurdish enclave. Abizaid never believed that. A foreign force like his could stop the worst of the killing and, with civilian government agencies and aid groups, carve out small enclaves of relative peace and prosperity. Sooner or later, though, an occupying army, even one with the purest of motives, would find itself hated and attacked.

  Abizaid’s biggest worry was what would happen when the Kurds finally came down from the mountains. If the refugees pushed south to their homes, the Iraqi troops might resume their massacre. If the Iraqis retreated, Abizaid feared, the Kurdish rebels would slaughter the stragglers. To prevent e
ither scenario, he planned to use his soldiers as a buffer, positioning them between the returning Kurds and the Iraqi troops. His troops had to move much sooner than he expected. A few days after Abizaid’s battalion arrived, Kurdish guerrillas, known as Peshmerga, began racing down from the mountains in white Toyota pickup trucks, clearly intent on revenge. At 7:00 a.m., in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, he ordered his battalion to move. They headed south, not knowing what lay ahead.

  Forty kilometers into the bone-chilling drive, worried inquiries from headquarters started coming over Abizaid’s radio. “Where are you?” his higher headquarters asked. His troops had outrun the protective umbrella of U.S. artillery. Soon he was being told to stop. Abizaid continued south, passing a column of Saddam Hussein’s tanks fleeing the advancing Kurds. It was like a scene from the movie Mad Max. One tank was missing its treads and was spewing sparks as the bare wheels scraped over the blacktop, the driver too scared or indifferent to stop. When the Americans ran into an Iraqi army roadblock at the only mountain passes leading into the provincial capital of Dahuk, Abizaid’s lead company commander tied a white rag to a spare antenna and moved forward tentatively, waving his arms. The Iraqis didn’t budge.

  Driving up a few minutes later, Abizaid radioed two Air Force jets in the vicinity and told them to make low, thundering passes over their location. When the Iraqi commander still refused to move, Abizaid had his troops dig in as if preparing to fight. The bluff worked. The soldiers sullenly moved south. Abizaid pressed on as well. Encountering another Iraqi unit outside Dahuk, he charged up to the commander and demanded that he withdraw or face destruction. Uncertain what to do, the Iraqi colonel excused himself to answer a ringing phone. “The Americans are here,” Abizaid heard the flustered officer say into the phone. He paused to listen and then repeated himself. “No, you don’t understand! I’m telling you the commander is standing right here in my office,” he said, handing over the phone to Abizaid, who told the officer on the line that they had twenty-four hours to withdraw. Eventually they left as well.