CHAPTER THREE
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.
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 command. 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 alter 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.”
There was a passage in the novel describing Massengale that captured the Army’s scorn for officers who rose by using their connections rather than by leading men in battle: “He will go far, she thought, watching the proud, ascetic discipline in his face, the strange amber eyes. He will become Chief of Staff, if events follow a logical course; or even if they don’t. Yet—her eyes rested for the briefest second on his ribbons—he had no combat decorations.”
Petraeus knew that real combat leaders were supposed to be out in the field getting dirty with soldiers, not working as a general’s aide. He hadn’t given up on his goal of joining the Rangers, and asked about a transfer to the Ranger battalion at Fort Stewart, which would have established his credentials as a warrior. Galvin frowned on the idea and suggested he consider graduate school instead. Soon the issue became moot. Petraeus had been chosen to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where the Army sends the top 50 percent of its officers for advanced training. Although the school is usually reserved for majors, Petraeus was one of only a few officers selected to go early as a captain. He had to report in twelve months. When he asked the Rangers about joining the battalion for a short tour, he was told that it was impossible.
Shortly before Petraeus left Fort Stewart, Galvin’s division faced its first big test at the National Training Center, an area in the Mojave Desert that the Army had opened in the early 1980s to practice tank warfare on a vast scale. The Pentagon expected that a conflict in the Middle East, where the 24th Division was supposed to fight, would be nothing like Vietnam, a war that most officers were eager to forget. In the Middle East the likely adversary was the Soviet Union or one of its proxies. Generals assumed the battles there would be very similar to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt launched a surprise attack against Israeli positions in the Sinai, followed by Syrian assaults in the Golan Heights. Despite horrendous losses, Israel counterattacked, using its air force and American-designed tanks to knock out the Arabs’ air defense, then break through their ground formations and destroy them. This was the kind of war that Galvin’s division was preparing to fight.
But in the desert of California Galvin’s troops were regularly outmaneuvered by the more experienced Soviet-style opposition force, played by American soldiers. For two weeks, he and Petraeus crisscrossed the battlefield in their jeep, studying the 24th Division as it fought. The situation got so bad that Galvin ordered his chief of staff, who had stayed home at Fort Stewart, to fly out to the desert so that he could see firsthand the drubbing they were taking. After returning home, Galvin ordered large tracts of forest cleared to replicate the conditions in the desert. Day after day, soldiers were in the field conducting maneuvers. Over the next year, units from the 24th returned to the California desert four more times, with better results each time. The same lessons were being learned all across the Army. Everywhere units were training for the big battles between armored formations that the Pentagon had decided were the future of warfare. The buildup was fueled by massive Reagan administration defense spending, which was buying thousands of new tanks, personnel carriers, and helicopters.
But Petraeus’s career was taking a new direction. After his year at Command and General Staff College, he planned to attend graduate school at Princeton University and then return to West Point as an instructor. As Galvin had urged, he was beginning to think deeply about his profession and the wars to come. For the first time since he joined the service, the conclusions Petraeus came to would put him at odds with the prevailing view of warfare in the Army. Other young officers were reaching the same point, only by less conventional paths.
Naqoura, Lebanon
Summer, 1985
As Major John Abizaid had predicted when he left Jordan, war had brought him back to the Middle East. He had taken a yearlong assignment as a member of the United Nations observer force in southern Lebanon, where Israel was bogged down in a bloody hit-and-run conflict that looked nothing like the big tank battles that Petraeus and Galvin were preparing for in the Mojave Desert.
He had been on the ground for a week when he saw the remains of his first suicide bomber. He and his partner, a Swedish officer, heard the boom and took off in their white jeep, zipping around dun-colored hills on serpentine roads until they reached the blast site, a smoking, black gash that cut through the middle of the road. Abizaid was surprised at how little of the bomber was left—a few shreds of clothing, a couple of body parts, and some blood. From the bits that remained, he guessed that the only casualty had been the bomber himself. He probably had been on his way to a nearby Israeli checkpoint when the explosives he was carrying detonated prematurely. Abizaid scribbled some notes and snapped a couple of photographs for his report on the incident, the first of dozens he would submit over the next year.
The Israelis had portrayed their incursion into Lebanon three years earlier as a limited action aimed at driving out Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters, who for years had attacked northern Israel with rockets and terror attacks. Once across the border, the Israeli army drove north to Beirut, surrounding and laying siege to the city. The assault crippled the PLO and led to the departure of its leadership to Tunisia. But instead of withdrawing, the Israelis stayed. Like the United States two decades later in Iraq, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon were determined to install a friendly government as part of its grander ambition to remake the Middle East. Up to that point, Israel’s fight had been with the Palestinians. Once they became an occupying power, the Israelis found themselves battling a new enemy—Shiite Muslims, who had originally welcomed their offensive against the PLO but now turned hostile.
By mid-1985, when Abizaid arrived in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces had withdrawn from all but a narrow strip of territory along the southern border, which they had declared a security zone vital for protecting northern Israel. The zone itself was far from secure. Israel found itself attacked by fighters from numerous Shiite factions and the remnants of the PLO, all of which competed to be seen as most dedicated to forcing out the occupiers. It was a sectarian stew. Both Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group, and Amal, its more secular Shiite rival, turned to suicide car bombs, mines, booby traps, and ambushes against Israeli soldiers and the South Lebanon Army, an Israeli-backed militia composed largely of Christians.
On March 10, 1985, a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into an Israeli convoy at a border crossing, near the Israeli town of Metulla. Twelve Israelis were killed and fourteen wounded. The Israelis responded with the “Iron Fist” policy that included artillery barrages on Muslim villages and reprisal raids that rounded up hundreds of Shiites at a time. Still the attacks continued. Dispirited Israeli troops castigated Abizaid and his fellow UN observers as the “United Nothing,” because they did nothing to stop the increasingly powerful and frightening bombs.
By this point in his career Abizaid had experienced combat firsthand. After returning from Jordan he had spent a year at Harvard, where he earned a degree in Middle Eastern studies, and then taken command of a 120-soldier Ranger company at Fort Stewart. In 1983 he and his men parachuted onto the Caribbean island of Grenada, as part of an invasion to restore the island’s pro-Western government to power following a coup. They had only been on the ground a short time when a bullet from a Cuban machine-gun position sliced through the neck of one of Abizaid’s soldiers, killing him. With enemy fire snapping over his head, Abizaid ordered a sergeant to hot-wire a bulldozer that had been abandoned nearby and charge at the Cubans with the blade raised as he and his fellow Rangers advanced behind it. Abizaid and his troops soon overwhelmed the Communist troops. The bulldozer assault, which was re-created in the Clint Eastwood movie Heartbreak Ridge, later made Abizaid a celebrity within the Army—one of the few genuine combat heroes to emerge in the decade following Vietnam. But real combat was nothing like the Hollywood adaptation. A few hours after the airport skirmish, another four soldiers from Abizaid’s company were gunned down after straying into an ambush.
After Grenada, he spent a year in the Pentagon assigned to a twelve-person study team that worked for General Max Thurman, the Army’s iconoclastic vice chief of staff. Although the mainstream Army was heavily focused on preparing to fight the Soviets, Thurman believed that the United States was far more likely to be drawn into a war in the developing world. If he was right, the service needed a cadre of leaders who not only knew combat but also had a deep understanding of the Third World backwaters where they might be asked to fight—the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Abizaid became his model officer. Speaking to newly promoted majors at Fort Leavenworth, Thurman told his audience that if they wanted to become generals, they should imitate Abizaid’s career. It wasn’t enough to learn tactics and leadership. They needed to know languages and foreign cultures, to spend time abroad away from the day-to-day Army, as Abizaid had done. Eager to tap Abizaid’s knowledge of the Middle East, Thurman assigned him to a group examining the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. The study focused on the technology and tactics the Israelis had used during their lightning push to Beirut, but it ignored the bloody and largely unsuccessful occupation of the country. The oversight wasn’t surprising; ever since Vietnam, the Army had decided it could simply choose not to fight messy guerrilla wars. It instead planned on using overwhelming firepower and superior technology to defeat foes in short, sharp battles. The study was completed just before Abizaid headed out for Lebanon, where an entirely different kind of war was being waged.
He and the four dozen or so other United Nations observers—Argentines, Canadians, Swedes, and fellow Americans—lived and patrolled unarmed out of a main base in the small city of Naqoura and from a half-dozen smaller cinder-block outposts perched along winding roads and barren hills.
Though the UN was officially neutral, Abizaid’s time in the country summoned up a stew of conflicting emotions. More than once, he found himself watching from a distance as Shiite fighters set up launchers to fire Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, where his wife and children were living. He was appalled by the brutality of the Israelis’ allies, often hearing screams of tortured prisoners emanating from an old French fort used by the South Lebanon Army as an interrogation center. But he also came to understand the debilitating effect a long and unsuccessful occupation has on an army, even one as disciplined as the Israel Defense Forces. “War in southern Lebanon is difficult to imagine by common standards of reference,” he wrote in a report after completing his tour. “It was neither guerrilla war of the Vietnam style nor was it the urban battle of Beirut. It was low-intensity conflict where UN sources routinely recorded over 100 violent incidents per month, ranging from ambushes to kidnappings to suicide car bombs.”
After one ambush, the Israelis and their allies emptied a Shiite village of its 2,000 residents at gunpoint. As Abizaid and his fellow observers watched from a nearby hill, the soldiers set fire to the town. UN observers couldn’t intervene to stop the destruction. Abizaid consoled himself with the thought that the forced evacuation might have degenerated into a massacre if he and his fellow observers hadn’t been there.
Since Abizaid was one of the few UN soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic, he was made the observer force’s director of operations, overseeing the outposts and patrols. He and the unit’s commander, an American lieutenant colonel, regularly loaded their jeep with cartons of cigarettes to bribe the locals, removed the American flags from their uniforms, and ventured out into the Lebanese countryside. It was a rugged area with deep wadis and small villages inhabited mostly by poor farmers. Shopkeepers and mosques peddled martyr videotapes and posters, lionizing local suicide bombers who had killed Israelis. “There was no shortage of willing martyrs,” Abizaid later wrote. “The martyrs who volunteered to undertake the attacks became instant celebrities, invariably leaving behind a videotape describing why they felt it necessary to sacrifice themselves. As one might imagine, these videos were given prominent display on the various militia-controlled television stations.”
Town elders would scream at the UN officers that the Israelis and their Christian allies were killing civilians and preventing basic necessities from reaching their villages. The central government in Beirut was absent in southern Lebanon, and with the PLO also gone, Hezbollah and other Shiite militias filled the void, sweeping streets, fixing homes, and ferrying the elderly to medical appointments. With help from Tehran and Damascus, the militias learned how to meld violence, propaganda, and social aid programs to bring supporters to their side.
Five years earlier, Abizaid had watched as the Iranian revolution had energized his fellow students at the University of Jordan. In Lebanon, the Iranians were working through Hezbollah and other Shiite Muslim militias. Once an underground organization, Hezbollah leaders now spouted Iranian dogma and handed out Iranian funds to rebuild homes damaged by the Israelis and the South Lebanon Army. Tehran also provided powerful and sophisticated roadside bombs that terrorized Israeli convoys.
Hezbollah soon displaced Amal as the leader of the anti-Israeli resistance. “Moderates in Amal, unable to deliver on promises to force an Israeli withdrawal, lost ground to more radical Shia,” Abizaid recounted. In that way, occupation of the security zone “actually worked contrary to the long-term interests of Israel by weakening the forces of moderation in southern Lebanon to the benefit of the radicals dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state.”
Abizaid could sense a feeling of doom spread through the dwindling Christian community, too. He dined with Christian village elders, greeting the men with a traditional kiss on each cheek and choking down kibbeh nayye, a dish made of raw minced lamb. “We are fighting against Islamic extremism,” they told him, hoping that the young American officer could rally his country or the UN. There was little Abizaid could do. Stopping the suicide bombs was impossible for the Israeli soldiers, as it was for the UN. The only way to stop it was for Israel to withdraw, but that would only embolden the Shiite militants and their Iranian patrons. “There is going to be a lot more of this,” Abizaid announced to his fellow observers at one point. “What’s preventing Iran from doing the same thing someplace else?”
Two years later Abizaid was serving at the U.S. base in Vicenza, Italy, when the telephone rang late one evening at his house. It was General Thurman, the vice chief of staff who remembered Abizaid from his time at the Pentagon several years earlier. “I’m going to take a trip to the Middle East and I want you to go with me,” he barked. It was typical Thurman. Known as the “Maxatollah” for his abrasive manner and monastic dedication to the Army, he expected his protégés to drop everything when he called. The general himself had never married, giving his life to the Army.
A few days later Abizaid met Thurman in Cairo. From there they traveled to Israel, where they met with the prime minister and toured the Golan Heights and the Lebanon border. The Israeli occupation, now in its sixth year, was grinding down its soldiers and sapping morale. As they stared out into the occupation zone, the Israelis insisted that they had to remain in southern Lebanon to protect their farms and cities from rocket attacks and terror attacks. Back at their hotel that evening, Thurman asked Abizaid for his view. To Abizaid the answer was obvious. The heavy-handed Israeli presence was radicalizing Shiites, strengthening Iran and Hezbollah. It wasn’t making anyone more secure. He told Thurman so.
Shortly after he returned, Thurman marched down one of the Pentagon’s corridors in search of a personnel officer. He didn’t even pause to say hello. “Where is Abizaid going on his next assignment?” the half-deaf, bespectacled Thurman shouted. “Who is Abizaid?” replied Colonel John Miller, who was unaccustomed to having four-star generals suddenly appear in his windowless Pentagon office bellowing questions about low-ranking officers. “Major John Abizaid,” Thurman snapped. “I need you to find out and let me know.”
Abizaid’s career was now being guided and nurtured at the Army’s highest levels.