by Greg Jaffe
When Major General Jay Garner, who was overseeing the relief effort, flew in a few days later, he headed straight for Abizaid. “John Abizaid, that was one of the greatest examples of military skill that I have ever seen,” he said, sticking out his hand.
During their four months in Iraq, Abizaid and his troops lived in crumbling buildings without electricity or running water and washed in streams and lakes. Without firing a shot, they slowly pushed the Iraqis south. They blasted them with loud music, buzzed their living quarters at 2:00 a.m. with Apache helicopters, and fired illumination rounds—artillery shells that light up the night sky—at their positions. As a final resort, they blocked mountain passes to prevent Baghdad from ferrying in reinforcements.
Abizaid had little sympathy for the Iraqi soldiers, who had salted Kurdish fields and gassed Kurdish women and children several years earlier. But he soon realized that the Kurds, motivated by decades of persecution and massacres, could be just as brutal. It made for a dauntingly complex battlefield. Sometimes the Americans found themselves mediating between warring Kurdish factions; other times bedraggled Iraqi soldiers ran to U.S. checkpoints seeking protection. The viciousness seemed to dwarf even what he had seen in Lebanon. A few weeks before he was scheduled to depart, Abizaid was walking on a craggy ridgeline with a Peshmerga commander when he noticed three Iraqi corpses, their bodies covered with burn marks and their eyes gouged out.
“Why do you torture everybody?” he asked. “Why not just kill them?”
“Nobody fears death,” replied the commander, his rifle slung over his shoulder and a scarf wrapped around his head. The survivors, he explained, needed to see the mutilated bodies of their fellow soldiers so that they understood what could happen to them if they fought the Kurds. The conversation stuck with Abizaid for years, along with other memories of brutality from his previous tours of the Middle East. The region’s combustible mix of tribes, repressive regimes, and culture of revenge seemed to breed violence that swelled at times to all-out war before settling back into hit-and-run ambushes, revenge attacks, and terrorism. None of it truly threatened an army as powerful as the United States’. But Abizaid also recognized that his military couldn’t stop it, either. It was especially foolish to expect short, swift victories of the sort the American people had come to demand in the wake of Vietnam.
The battalion’s withdrawal in midsummer was a fittingly surreal end to its mission. They were the rear guard—the last to leave Iraqi soil across a single bridge spanning the river that formed the Iraqi-Turkish border. “This is the single most important place that has to be protected,” Abizaid told Captain Sean Callahan, his best company commander. “Don’t let yourself get closed in around the bridge.” The first two companies from Abizaid’s battalion crossed the bridge early on July 13 and began to pack up their weapons. A few minutes later, hundreds of Kurds, worried that they were being abandoned by their American protectors, surged toward Callahan’s troops, forcing his men into a tight knot right in front of the bridge.
The demonstrating Kurds carried banners that read “We Love You America” and “Your Job Is Halve Done.” When it became clear the Americans were leaving for good, the hysterical crowd began to hit the soldiers with their signs. A mother carrying a young child threw herself into the razor wire strung across the border, slicing her hands and face; another woman bit the battalion sergeant major on the arm. On the Turkish side of the bridge the local commander scrambled his soldiers, who looked as if they were preparing to open fire.
A furious Abizaid, his uniform drenched in sweat, rushed to find Callahan, whose men had fixed bayonets and were trying to hold their ground. “Do not allow anyone to set foot on this bridge!” Abizaid yelled as he called the rest of the battalion back across the border to augment his force. Standing on the hood of a Humvee, he assured the crowd that the United States would continue to protect them with planes and helicopters based in Turkey. As the temperatures rose, the exhausted and angry Kurds, held back by bayonets and razor wire, slowly drifted away.
Abizaid doubted the tenuous peace his soldiers left behind in northern Iraq would hold. His troops were replaced by jet fighters that patrolled in the skies over northern Iraq, ready to strike if Saddam Hussein tried to attack again. Surprisingly, a relatively prosperous enclave emerged, aided by ample international aid. But, as with most conflicts in the Middle East, it wasn’t clear how long the calm would last.
After Iraq, Abizaid spent a year at Stanford University as a military fellow, reflecting on his experiences and writing about the need to prepare for guerrilla conflicts and peacekeeping missions. He visited Somalia, where the Bush administration in its waning months had sent troops as part of a UN effort to secure a cease-fire between the country’s warring militias and feed its starving population. General Colin Powell, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supported the intervention, with the proviso that the U.S. force would be massive and would remain only a couple of months. By the time Abizaid got there, most of the U.S. soldiers had been replaced by poorly equipped UN troops from countries like Pakistan. President Clinton had taken over in the White House, and the mission had expanded from feeding starving Somalis to stabilizing the country’s government and arresting troublesome warlords.
The warlords fought back. First they attacked the poorly armed Pakistanis and then the remaining Americans. Four U.S. soldiers were killed when their unarmored Humvee drove over a hidden bomb. On his visit, Abizaid met with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division who were trying to separate warring clans south of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. A few months after he departed, a team of Rangers and Delta Force commandos was sent to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. The mission triggered a bloody and unexpected battle in which untrained fighters, armed with only AK-47s and grenade launchers, downed two Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. troops. Americans reacted with outrage to the horrific television footage from the battle. “I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks,” Clinton screamed at his aides as they watched images of howling Somalis dragging the body of a dead U.S. pilot through the streets.
Unable to justify a humanitarian mission that had suddenly turned into a war, the White House ordered a withdrawal, abandoning Mogadishu to its warring clans. Many military officers blamed Clinton for the disaster, insisting that it was a mistake to commit the U.S. military to such ill-defined and unwinnable missions. General Powell had retired from active service a few days before the Mogadishu disaster. “We can’t make a country out of that place,” he later recounted warning Clinton on his last day in uniform.
Abizaid didn’t disagree with Powell. No one could reasonably expect the military to forge a country out of a collection of warring tribes. But he didn’t think the Army could completely avoid future Somalias, either. The military’s instinct—to go in big and get out fast—was not acceptable. Its focus on large-scale combat and quick wars after Vietnam had left it unprepared for a whole series of smaller, messier threats that only the military could handle. “We must recognize that peacekeeping is no job for amateurs,” he wrote in Military Review, an Army journal, during his Stanford fellowship. “It is dangerous, stressful duty that requires highly disciplined, well educated soldiers who understand the nature of the peacekeeping beast. As we get ready to fight the next war, let us also keep thinking about how we might have to keep the peace in some far off corner of the world.”
It was a plea to study the operations in northern Iraq and Somalia and not dismiss them as aberrations. Abizaid believed deeply that the military didn’t get to choose the kinds of wars that it would fight, and that it was likely the Clinton administration or its successors would send U.S. troops on similar peacekeeping missions in the future, probably without fully thinking through what they were taking on. He was right, just as Petraeus had been a few years earlier when he had argued the same point in his Princeton dissertation. Less than a decade passed before the U.S. Army found itself again battling lightly armed f
ighters who relied on stealth and hit-and-run attacks to nullify America’s overwhelming might—this time in Iraq.
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
September 1991
After two years as a general’s aide in the Pentagon, Dave Petraeus was finally back in a combat unit. He was taking over one of the 101st Airborne Division’s most storied units. His battalion was one of three that traced its lineage back to the 187th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had been activated during World War II to fight in the Pacific. The Japanese had dubbed the parachutists Rakkasans, a term meaning “falling-down umbrella men,” and the name stuck, even after the battalion converted into a helicopter assault force. The Rakkasans later fought in Korea, Vietnam, and, only a few months before Petraeus took command, in Iraq, where the battalion moved hundreds of miles behind enemy lines as part of a massive helicopter assault to cut off Republican Guard units fleeing Kuwait.
Most of the captains and majors now working for him had been to war; he hadn’t. But he had been prepping for the day when he would take over command since arriving in Vicenza sixteen years earlier as a green second lieutenant, vacuuming up ideas and depositing them in a folder marked “First Day of Command.” Now he began putting his ideas into practice. He wanted to foster a culture of competitiveness, he told his officers. Always an exercise fanatic, he instituted a demanding physical fitness test with standards far tougher than the Army required of even its youngest soldiers. Petraeus goaded his men into taking it and then stood over them at the track counting off push-ups, sit-ups, and dips one by one. He dubbed the winners “Iron Rakkasans” and engraved their names on a plaque at the battalion headquarters. Everything was a competition for Petraeus, and every competition was a way to prove the superiority of his unit. Even a chili cook-off in the town outside Fort Campbell was treated like a major operation, with soldiers dispatched a day ahead of time to secure a space near the judges’ table and scout out the competition. Some officers loved Petraeus’s gung-ho spirit; others thought he was trying too hard. It was as if he believed you could become a great commander the same way he had become a West Point Star Man—by breaking the assignment into all of its thousands of components and then studying them harder than anyone else for the big test. The reality was tougher. There was much more to command than knowing small-unit tactics or winning a chili cook-off. A good officer had to convince soldiers to follow him, sometimes to their deaths. A few, like Abizaid, were naturals. Petraeus wasn’t. He had moved so quickly through his relatively few rotations with frontline combat units and spent so much time at the hip of senior generals that he hadn’t learned how to seem natural in front of regular troops.
He used Boy Scout language like “gosh” and “golly.” He frowned on officers who chewed tobacco. He mangled words that every infantryman was supposed to know—even “hooah,” the all-purpose Army reply. Every soldier learned in basic training that it was uttered in a throaty roar, meant to signal you were up for anything. Petraeus’s “hooah” sounded flat and unconvincing, causing his officers to cringe inside. Several put together a list of soldier slang terms and gave it to their new boss so that he would come off better when addressing his troops. He accepted it good-naturedly. On the wall of his new office he hung his prized photo of Marcel Bigeard, the French paratrooper and guerrilla war expert, right above the framed French paratrooper certificate he had earned in 1976. Petraeus liked to quiz visitors on the identity of the foreign-looking officer in the photo; no one at Fort Campbell had ever heard of Bigeard. Choosing a French general as a role model marked him as unusual in the American Army. It made it seem like he had developed his ideas about how to be a soldier from history books and going to seminars—or, worse yet, in the salons of Paris. His men started calling their Ph.D.-degreed commander “Doc,” which summed up his intellect and their misgivings about his street smarts.
Shortly after arriving, he and six of his officers found themselves camping out near a runway at a small air base in rural Tennessee. The soldiers and their new commander talked into the evening about their lives, families, and careers. Eventually the question went around the circle: Which of them had spent a night in jail? Everyone had except Petraeus. That summed up their new commander: physically tough and smart but lacking in real-world experience.
Fred Johnson, one of his company commanders, noticed that Petraeus didn’t wear a “high and tight,” a military haircut that was closely shaven on the sides and back. Many infantrymen at Fort Campbell believed the shorter-than-regulation trim made them look like warriors, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. It set them apart from the rest of the peacetime Army. When Johnson raised the subject, Petraeus explained that Holly didn’t like his hair that short. Some of the men, Johnson replied, had commented on it. It wasn’t true—nobody had mentioned it—but he wanted Petraeus to succeed, and in a unit full of combat veterans, the commander couldn’t afford to appear less than warriorlike. The next day, he recalled, Petraeus walked into the battalion headquarters sporting a high and tight and promptly issued a new directive: from then on, the standard haircut for Iron Rakkasans was a high and tight.
The 1990s were known as the era of the “zero-defect Army,” a time when a single mistake by an officer—or even his troops—could doom his chances for advancement. With the end of the Cold War, the Army was shrinking, and a below-average fitness report was usually enough to convince a promotion board to pass over an otherwise exemplary soldier. Petraeus exemplified this mania for detail, though his goal was not to weed out the unfit but to bind his soldiers together. Shortly after arriving, he published a booklet that laid out page after page of detailed instructions about how the battalion should look, act, and think. There were instructions on everything imaginable, and some that defied easy explanation. Every Rakkasan was required to fasten the top button of his combat fatigues, the one right under the chin, ostensibly so uncamouflaged necks wouldn’t show. Some U.S. soldiers in the 101st thought all that Petraeus’s “battle button” did was make them look stupid. Actually, that was his intention. “It made others joke about us, which pulled us together,” Petraeus later explained. He had borrowed the idea from The Centurions, the novel he had first read in 1976 that was loosely based on Marcel Bigeard’s experiences fighting insurgents in Vietnam and Algeria. The hero of the book and his paratroopers wear distinctive floppy hats known as “lizard caps” that are mocked by other French troops but bind the unit together.
He also had elaborate rules for attaching equipment to the load-bearing web belts, known as LBEs, worn by every soldier in the field. During inspections, he made a point of examining the belts to make sure his troops had tied the knots just right and that they had burned off the ends of the parachute cord to prevent fraying. His own LBE was outfitted flawlessly. It had taken him hours to get it just right.
His other priority after taking command was training—often with live ammunition. One Saturday morning a month after assuming command, Petraeus and the assistant commander of the 101st, Brigadier General Jack Keane, were watching a company of soldiers practice clearing a bunker. Ahead of them, Specialist Terrence Jones tossed a training grenade through the doorway, flattened himself against a wall, and waited for the dull thud. Then he began running to rejoin his squad. Jones could hear the popping of automatic weapons and the whiz of real bullets as he lumbered over twenty yards of open ground. Reaching his squad’s position, he threw himself down on the ground, using the butt of his SAW machine gun to break his fall. As he landed, his finger inadvertently squeezed the trigger. Thirty yards away, Petraeus grunted in pain and dropped to his knees. The bullet from Jones’s weapon had hit him in the chest, right over the A in his uniform name tag.
He wasn’t sure what had happened. The pain was in his back, and his first thought was that he had been struck from behind by a grenade. He tried to steady himself, but then his head started to swirl and pain enveloped his torso. He felt like he was staring down a long tunnel. Keane, who had been standing nearby, eased him down to
the ground and opened his camouflage uniform. “Dave, you’ve been shot. You know what we’re going to do here. We’re going to stop the bleeding,” he said in his booming voice. From the front, the wound didn’t look so bad. Blood was trickling from a small hole over his right nipple. But Petraeus couldn’t see the exit wound, where the bullet had come out. A four-inch chunk of his back was torn away and oozing blood. Smoke was still wafting out of the hole. Keane bellowed for a medevac helicopter and then turned back to Petraeus. Two Army medics rushed up and began cutting open his fatigues. Petraeus in his fog worried about all the work he had put in getting his knots correct. “Don’t cut my LBE,” he muttered. “I just got it to standard.” They ignored him, swiftly cutting off his web gear and pressing gauze bandages on the wounds. “Dave, I want you to stay with us,” Keane said. “Yes, sir,” Petraeus replied.
As the minutes passed, Keane kept up a steady chatter, all but commanding him not to slip into unconsciousness. Petraeus was speaking less and less. Soon he started going blank, his eyes wide but unresponsive. His face was turning ashen. He vomited greenish fluid and a chunk of something. Finally the thump-thump of an arriving helicopter was heard in the distance. Keane announced he was going with Petraeus to the base hospital. “We all know what happened here. A soldier accidentally shot his commanding officer. Pull that unit together and get them back on the range,” he bellowed. The Army Black Hawk set down twenty yards away, and Petraeus was rushed aboard on a stretcher with Keane at his side.
