by Greg Jaffe
Petraeus went directly into the operating room at the Fort Campbell hospital. When the chief surgeon emerged he marveled at Petraeus’s toughness, telling Keane that he had shoved a tube into the bullet hole in Petraeus’s chest to prevent infection—a procedure done without anesthetic that normally causes patients to cry out from the intense pain. Petraeus had only grunted. The bleeding was under control, but he needed more surgery as soon as possible by a specialist, the doctor said, suggesting Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. Since it was a weekend, Keane called ahead and insisted on the best surgeon on the staff to do the operation.
When the helicopter landed at Vanderbilt, tubes were protruding from Petraeus’s chest, draining blood so he wouldn’t suffocate. The hospital’s emergency staff was waiting, along with a tallish doctor dressed like he had come from the golf course. After Keane’s call, the Vanderbilt staff hunted down the hospital’s chief of thoracic surgery, Dr. Bill Frist, a future senator from Tennessee. Frist did an initial examination and returned to speak to Keane, shocked at the grapefruit-sized exit wound. Used to treating hunting injuries, he had never encountered the trauma that the high-velocity rounds used by the military could cause. Rather than wait for Petraeus to stabilize, he was going directly into surgery. “Obviously, you know we have a very serious injury here,” Frist told Keane.
The surgery took nearly six hours. The bullet had severed an artery and damaged his right lung, part of which had to be removed. When it was over, Petraeus was resting, still sedated, in a recovery room. He was on a respirator as a precaution, but the worst danger had passed. Frist told Keane and Holly, who had arrived by then from Fort Campbell, that the prognosis was good but recovery would take at least ten weeks. That was too long for Petraeus. His battalion’s first big field test was approaching, and Petraeus didn’t want to miss it, even with a gaping scar on his torso. A few days after his operation, he requested a transfer back to the Fort Campbell hospital.
Soon he began pestering his doctors and nurses. He was feeling fine and should be released, he said. His demands eventually became so bothersome that the hospital commander, Colonel Steve Xenakis, came to Petraeus’s room to order him to quiet down. “Everybody recovers and heals differently,” Petraeus told him. “I’m ready to go home.” With Xenakis’s help, he removed the intravenous tubes from his arm, got down on the floor, and started doing push-ups in his flimsy hospital gown. Running out of strength at fifty, Petraeus stood up. “Well?” he said. Xenakis said he could leave in a few days, but made him promise not to rush back to work or resume exercising anytime soon.
He broke his promise. Petraeus worried that losing part of his lung would leave him unable to match the blistering running pace he had turned in before the shooting. Being one of the fittest soldiers in the Army was part of the superhuman persona that Petraeus had strived for since he was at West Point. His stamina was part of what, many years later, he would call the “Petraeus brand,” the carefully crafted identity that protected him, in his own mind anyway, from those officers who wanted to lump him with other brainy officers who were unable to handle the physical rigors of leading men in combat. A few days after he came home, Petraeus went to the Fort Campbell gym, planning for an easy workout. He started off on an exercise bike, pedaling gently. Feeling okay, he moved on to light jogging around the track. When that brought only mild discomfort, he decided to time himself in a 440-yard sprint. He dashed two times around the track and was reasonably pleased with his time, given the rolls of tape wrapped around his torso. Although he didn’t realize it, the exertion had caused his lung to bleed again. His doctors warned him that if he did it again, he might need emergency surgery. “They read him the riot act, and he backed off for a while,” Holly Petraeus recalled. But not for long. In less than a month, he was back with his battalion when it went to the field for their first big training exercise. His only concession to medical necessity was carrying a lighter-than-usual rucksack to avoid aggravating his incision.
Over the years, he shaped the shooting into a tale of toughness and resilience. He retold it often, joking that he had arranged to get himself shot to erase the stigma of missing the Gulf War. Admirers and journalists cited his escape from death as evidence he was destined for great achievement. Rather than degrading the Petraeus brand, the accident ended up adding to its aura.
Petraeus’s plan after completing his battalion command at Fort Campbell was to spend the 1994–95 academic year on a fellowship at Georgetown University. There were clear giveaways that he had no intention of spending the year in quiet academic retreat. His choice of Georgetown meant that Petraeus was in Washington, where the action was. His research topic was the crisis in Haiti, which was still unfolding. The Clinton administration had spent more than a year readying a plan to restore to power Haiti’s democratically elected president, who had been toppled by a military junta. With memories of Somalia still fresh, the White House readily acceded to the Pentagon’s insistence that it deploy a massive force to the country and severely limit the overall goals for the operation. President Clinton promised there would be no long-term U.S. occupation or attempt to remake Haiti’s shattered economy or government. The 20,000 American troops were supposed to move in, restore security, and after a few months turn the operation over to a United Nations force.
Several months after arriving at Georgetown, Petraeus used his Sosh connections to secure an interview with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was deeply involved in the U.S. effort to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Impressed by Petraeus’s questions, Talbott invited him to an upcoming White House meeting on Haiti for a glimpse into the workings of the government at the highest level. Wearing his best suit, Petraeus walked into the White House Situation Room, the wood-paneled nerve center in the basement of the West Wing, and took a seat along the wall. “Who are you?” Sandy Berger, Clinton’s deputy national security advisor, barked at him, noticing an unfamiliar face. Petraeus uneasily explained he was there at Talbott’s invitation. Off the hook, he listened quietly as senior officials from the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and Justice Department debated the pros and cons of a plan for a new Haitian police force.
Several weeks later, Petraeus ran into Colonel Bob Killebrew, a fellow alumnus of Vuono’s staff, in the Pentagon. Killebrew was assembling the headquarters for the 6,000-soldier UN peacekeeping force that was taking over from the United States in Haiti. It included 2,500 American troops along with soldiers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and seventeen other countries. He needed a handful of U.S. officers to oversee the effort and asked Petraeus if he was interested. Absolutely, he replied. He just needed to get out of his Georgetown fellowship.
Killebrew was pleased. Top-notch officers weren’t exactly crawling over each other to go to Haiti and work for the UN. Petraeus, however, had long been interested in peacekeeping. He also knew that the only deficiency in his otherwise golden resume was a lack of field experience. He needed his ticket punched in a war zone, or as close to one as he could get. He flew into Port-au-Prince in February of 1995, a few weeks ahead of the U.S. handover to the United Nations. The Americans had achieved their modest goals: Aristide was in office, violence had been reduced, and the tide of refugees heading for Florida on rickety boats had stopped. There had been only one U.S. combat death—a Special Forces sergeant shot and killed at a checkpoint.
Still, Haiti was a mess. The government ruled in name only. A hastily recruited police force was incapable of even basic law enforcement. Vigilante killings and political reprisals were common. There were more than a hundred murders throughout the tiny country the month the UN arrived, including forty-five classified as assassinations. These were now problems for the UN, which at first was a tiny operation. “There were just a handful of us, literally less than the fingers on one hand, pulling this thing together in Haiti,” Petraeus recalled.
With little help, Petraeus churned out detailed plans and orders covering every conceivable facet of t
he upcoming operations. There was Operational Plan 95-1, a comprehensive blueprint for the UN military mission, followed by a 159-page manual of standard operating procedures that covered topics as broad as “the practice of peacekeeping” and as basic as “two-way radio communications.” In early March, with the 170-man headquarters staff finally nearing full strength, he ran a weeklong officer training course at the makeshift UN headquarters, an abandoned industrial park that had been converted into a sandbagged fortress. The wide variations in training and experience made it important to build cohesion in the motley force. He arranged for detailed briefings on when UN soldiers could fire their weapons, the basics of peacekeeping, working with humanitarian groups, and Haiti’s unusual history and Creole culture. The training ended with a two-day war game, meant to prepare the headquarters staff for a Black Hawk Down–like crisis.
In Haiti Petraeus was exposed in depth to the problems of reconstructing a society whose government and economy had all but ceased to function. There was no insurgency of the sort he’d face later in Iraq, but many of the problems were similar. In both places, the U.S. military’s plan assumed that civilians from the UN or other entities could quickly restore a working government, electricity, and other essential services. It was a wildly optimistic assumption.
So Petraeus improvised. He worked closely with aid workers and humanitarian groups, scheduling helicopter flights to move them around the country and providing Army engineers to help with quick construction projects. He brought in noncommissioned officers to train the new Haitian police force. He coordinated raids to arrest the fugitive leaders of the paramilitary groups who had gone underground. The UN had not reserved any money for the military to do its own projects, opting to funnel reconstruction through civilian groups. But Petraeus and his boss, Major General Joe Kinzer, sidestepped the restrictions, spending U.S. funds to repave roads and build police stations when it became clear the normal UN process would take months. They gave a French-speaking U.S. lieutenant colonel the job of getting the lights back on in Port-au-Prince. Without any money, the staff officer went door-to-door to embassies asking for contributions and managed to raise $250,000, which was spent on generators. UN officers remember Petraeus constantly on the phone late at night with Washington, briefing officials at the White House or lobbying the Pentagon’s Joint Staff for more cash.
He believed that he was creating a blueprint for a new kind of military operation, and he wanted his peers to know it. Shortly after returning home, Petraeus and Killebrew penned a military journal article that was triumphantly titled “Winning the Peace.” They argued that “in detail of planning and degree of coordination the effort to stand Haiti back up after taking it down broke new ground… An environment conducive to political, social and economic development has been created in Haiti.” It was exuberant overstatement. His three-month tour was not enough time to make any lasting improvements, and when the last U.S. troops left the island a year after Petraeus, conditions rapidly deteriorated.
The military wasn’t quite sure what to make of the new operations it faced in places such as northern Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti. As the 1990s progressed, it began referring to them as “peace operations,” and later, when that came to seem too narrow, as “military operations other than war,” or MOOTW (pronounced “mootwah”). These clunky terms reflected confused thinking. Every conceivable military operation other than conventional Gulf War–style battles was crammed under this ever-broadening rubric. The list included combating terrorism, providing humanitarian assistance, protecting shipping lanes, interdicting narcotics, enforcing arms control agreements, and ten other unrelated missions. Also buried on the list was helping foreign governments fight insurgencies, a task the United States would eventually take on in Iraq.
Though these jobs required new skills, the Army and the Marines did very little to prepare for them. Too much time spent on peacekeeping would dull the Army’s combat edge, generals reasoned. The conventionally trained military could always adjust on the fly. It was an idea Abizaid and Petraeus explicitly rejected. As Abizaid had noted in his military journal article, published when Petraeus was in Haiti, the Army still lacked the training, equipment, and specialized personnel for these demanding new missions. “Doctrinal voids exist at every level,” Abizaid warned. “We should avoid the notion that combat-ready troops are ready for peacekeeping.”
In Haiti, Petraeus had picked up lessons that would prove valuable a decade later in Iraq. Near the end of his three-month rotation, he pinned on the silver eagles of a full colonel at a small headquarters ceremony. On June 9, he flew home, heading for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and his next plum assignment. He was taking command of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade—John Abizaid’s brigade.
On the morning of the change-of-command ceremony, Abizaid walked into his office and noticed Petraeus’s possessions stacked on his gray desk and peeling linoleum floor. There’s a rigid protocol surrounding changes of command, and one of the rules is that the old commander is entitled to keep his office until the swallow-tailed unit streamer changes hands at the official parade ground ceremony. Overcome by eagerness and an ambition that was always propelling him forward, Petraeus had broken it. When Abizaid saw Petraeus’s boxes piled in his office, he was annoyed. “Who does this guy think he is?” he barked to his executive officer.
“On that day I think the two of them really didn’t like each other,” the executive officer recalled. The two men had radically different command styles. Within hours of taking over, Petraeus had already pulled a young soldier out of formation and made him produce his dog tags. “The old commander would have never done that,” Frank Helmick, a battalion commander in the unit, thought. Abizaid trusted his sergeants to check such details. He was loose, funny, and even a bit sarcastic. Soldiers who wandered into his office were always struck that his desk and file cabinets were virtually empty. He seemed to run the entire 3,000-soldier brigade out of the notebook stuffed in his cargo pants. Petraeus, meanwhile, maintained binders full of rules and regulations. There was even a rule for labeling the binders, complained his officers, who were accustomed to Abizaid’s more laid-back approach.
Despite those outward differences, the two men shared a remarkably similar view of their Army’s future. The U.S. military’s massive technological and firepower edge made it unlikely that anyone would challenge it to a tank-on-tank fight. Instead, they believed, civilian political leaders were far more likely to send soldiers to deal with murky ethnic conflicts, humanitarian crises, and internal civil wars. Only the U.S. Army could get manpower and supplies to such backwaters. Only the military was capable of interceding between these warring parties. To perform these missions well, the Army had to change, they insisted. Theirs was a view that was decidedly out of step with most mainstream military thinking at the time.
Dugi Dio, Bosnia
October 10, 1996
It was late afternoon and already growing dark when Brigadier General George Casey and a force of twenty soldiers drove into the tiny mountain village of Dugi Dio. Normally, one-star generals don’t lead patrols. Casey, the assistant commander of the U.S. peacekeeping force in northwest Bosnia, was there because of elderly peasants who had trudged through the mud with their belongings in bundles and on oxcarts, heading home.
The refugees were Muslims who had once lived in Dugi Dio and in nearby Jusici. They had been driven out years before in one of the first Serbian offensives of the war. Now that the fighting was over and the U.S.-led peacekeeping force had arrived, they were going back to their destroyed houses, which currently happened to be in Serb territory. Accompanying the elderly villagers were young, hard-looking men armed with guns to defend them from their former Serb neighbors who were now their enemies.
Their arrival sparked a tense standoff, with Serb police threatening to arrest the Muslim returnees. The refugees, in turn, vowed to defend themselves, by force if necessary. Casey and several UN officials had spent three weeks negotiating an ag
reement that allowed the returnees to remain, provided they met two conditions: they had to prove their claims to own property, and they had to promise to get rid of all weapons.
The U.S. Army had crossed the Sava River into Bosnia a year earlier to enforce a peace agreement that ended more than three years of horrific killing among Bosnia’s Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The force was gigantic, with 20,000 U.S. troops and 40,000 more soldiers from European countries, including Russia. The U.S. military was supposed to stay for only one year (a deadline that was repeatedly extended) and its mission was tightly constrained to exclude anything that smacked of nation building or put soldiers at risk. “The U.S. and NATO are not going to Bosnia to fight a war. They are not going to Bosnia to rebuild the nation, resettle refugees, and oversee elections,” Defense Secretary William Perry told reporters. “The tasks of our soldiers are clear and limited … They will enforce the cessation of hostilities.”
In theory the job of forging Bosnia into a functioning, multiethnic state was supposed to be handled by the UN-led civilian administration and the Bosnians themselves. As in Haiti, the civilians were quickly overwhelmed, and there was pressure on the military to expand its role—to fill the massive civilian gaps, to arrest war criminals, and to protect refugees who wanted to return home. When officers such as George Casey did try to undertake these tasks, they found out how difficult they could be. Casey had spent four years after the Gulf War with the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, overseeing the division staff and then commanding a 4,000-soldier brigade from 1993 to 1995. He readied his troops to deploy to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait in case Saddam Hussein decided to try to reinvade, and fought big mock-tank battles at the National Training Center against the same Soviet-style enemy that U.S. forces had battled for much of the Cold War. It was demanding work that required smarts and an obsessive attention to detail. Casey had performed well.
