CHAPTER FIVE
Grafenwohr, West Germany
June 1987
Lieutenant Ed Massar poked his helmet out of the turret as his M1 Abrams tank rumbled to the starting line and halted, its main gun raised to fire. Three more sixty-ton M1s drove up and took positions on his flanks as the soundtrack to Top Gun, Hollywood’s unabashed celebration of American military prowess, blared over loudspeakers. In a nearby observation area, Major Peter Chiarelli watched anxiously through binoculars as the four tanks of Delta Company’s 1st Platoon prepared to move out. Chiarelli had spent eleven months training for this moment, the last run on the last day of NATO’s prestigious tank gunnery competition. Unfortunately, nothing was going according to plan. Just a few minutes earlier, the electronic gun sight in one of the tanks had failed, forcing Chiarelli to rush one of the four-man crews into a replacement tank. Freak weather on a previous run had left the U.S. in third place. Now as he watched and waited, Chiarelli silently prayed nothing else went wrong.
Spread out below him was the gently sloping countryside of Range 301 at Grafenwöhr, a vast training area near the Czech border that once had been used by the Nazis and now was a main training range for NATO. The competition had been under way for four days, and multiple teams from Britain, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, and West Germany had already motored through the range, blasting their main guns at the pop-up plywood targets as though it was a carnival shooting arcade. Chiarelli knew that 1st Platoon needed a flawless run to have any chance of beating the Germans, who days before had hit all thirty-two targets without a miss.
The winner would take home the sterling silver Canadian Army Trophy (CAT) as NATO’s best tank platoon. Chiarelli and the two- and three-star generals watching in the reviewing stand weren’t the only Americans desperate to claim the prize. Interest stretched all the way back to the Pentagon and the White House, where Colin Powell, national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan, was awaiting the results. The United States had never won the competition, an embarrassing record of futility by the alliance’s most powerful member. Even after Congress appropriated billions of dollars to build the new M1 tank, the Germans had dominated the contest, winning six out of the last eight times in their Leopard tanks. “If Military Contests Were Real War, U.S. Might Be in a Pickle,” read the headline on a front-page Wall Street Journal story about the 1985 competition, where the United States had eked out second place. This year no effort had been spared to bring home the trophy. Massar and his men were in an improved M1, rushed to Europe for the competition. When several of the main guns were found to be slightly warped, every tank was outfitted with a brand-new one, hand-selected for straightness as they came off the assembly line. Over the previous eleven months, Chiarelli’s team had trained nonstop in the field and on simulators that re-created the terrain on Range 301. Hundreds of Thanksgiving dinners had been sent by helicopter to the men at Grafenwöhr, rather than letting them spend the holiday with their families. The Army even had dispatched a sports psychologist from West Point to tutor the tank crews in relaxation techniques. It was time to show Congress a return on its money, and the pressure fell on Pete Chiarelli’s battalion.
He had been training the three American platoons from the 3rd Armored Division since joining the unit the previous summer. Delta Company’s other two platoons had made their runs on Tuesday and Thursday and had come up short. Now the Americans were down to their last chance. That morning, a senior officer from the 3rd Armored Division staff had pulled Chiarelli aside and said he had learned the pattern of pop-up targets that Massar’s platoon would see on their final run. Knowing where the targets would appear on the range and in what order was like getting the answer sheet the night before a big exam. Chiarelli copied down the information into a notebook. The division officer told him to brief 1st Platoon before they made their run. Chiarelli knew what this meant and it shocked him. His Army was determined to win the trophy, even if it had to cheat.
Chiarelli had arrived at Frankfurt Airport a year earlier with Beth, eleven-year-old Peter, and seven-year-old Erin. He was assigned as a staff officer in a tank battalion in the 3rd Armored Division. His first overseas tour did not start auspiciously. Before leaving Seattle, Chiarelli had sliced his right hand working in the yard with a hedge trimmer. After doctors initially told Beth they would have to amputate three fingertips, they had been able to reattach them with only a small loss of feeling. But as he walked down the ramp, Chiarelli’s left hand was still heavily bandaged. He was in a foul mood. His stitches had begun bleeding during the six-hour plane ride. There to greet them was Captain Joe Schmalzel, an officer on the staff of his new battalion, with more bad news: the family quarters that had been promised to them not far from Coleman Barracks, their new post on a hillside outside the town of Gelnhausen, had been given away to another officer. The Chiarellis would have to find rental housing off-post.
Nothing in the Army ever came smoothly for Pete Chiarelli, it seemed. Returning to a combat unit after a seven-year academic sojourn, he had to prove himself all over again. Sosh had a track record of getting its people good assignments back in the regular Army, but plenty of them still saw their once-glittering careers plateau. They had stayed away from real soldiering too long and seen their less academically inclined peers bypass them on the path to colonel and general. Eventually the up-or-out rules forced them into retirement. General Barry McCaffrey, who had taught in the department in the early 1970s, joked that teaching at Sosh was the “best way to become a general and the worst way to become a lieutenant colonel.” Chiarelli was in danger of proving the punch line. He had saved himself, not for the last time, with help from Olvey, the head of Sosh, who had called his contacts to secure Chiarelli this job in Germany. Olvey had sent him off with assurances that he was certain to make general one day. Maybe so, or maybe Olvey was just letting him down gently after not choosing him for the permanent faculty at Sosh. Either way, Chiarelli needed to prove he could do things his service valued and do them well. By coincidence, a month after he arrived, Colin Powell had taken over as commander of the Army’s V Corps in Germany, giving him overall responsibility for two divisions and 75,000 American troops. Always attentive to the political currents in Washington, Powell informed his officers that winning the Canadian Army Trophy would be one of his goals. Word soon reached Gelnhausen, a forty-five-minute drive from Frankfurt. As the operations officer, Chiarelli got the job of training the battalion’s Delta Company for the contest.
The assignment came as the Chiarellis were still settling into their new life. For the first few months, as they searched for off-post housing, the family crammed into the unused attic in the officers’ quarters at Coleman. There was no bathroom, so they had to walk a few doors down to Joe Schmalzel’s place to use his. When the attic finally became intolerable, they moved to a nearby hotel before finally finding a charming house for rent in a small farming village. The locals were used to the Americans after forty years of living side-by-side with the U.S. soldiers, and the kids went to the post’s Gelnhausen Elementary School with other American kids. Officers and their wives socialized on Friday nights at the officers’ club. Beth’s biggest complaint was the same one she always had with the Army—Pete was always working. It got so bad that when their son Patrick was born, she rearranged his sleeping schedule just so he would be awake when her husband arrived home in the evening, usually sometime after 10 p.m.
There was no mistaking the importance the brass attached to winning the trophy. A few weeks after taking command, Powell came to Gelnhausen, ostensibly for a get-acquainted dinner at the officers’ club. One of his motives was to make clear that anything less than first place was unacceptable. The post held special memories for Powell. His first assignment as a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant was as commander of an infantry platoon at Coleman Barracks. Then as now, such dinners were boisterous affairs with thick steaks and plentiful German beer. Colonel Stan Luallin, the commander at Coleman, escorted Powell and his wife, Alma, into the club a little after seven in the evening for cocktails. Chiarelli had not been able to attend the dinner, but Schmalzel and a few other junior officers watched the youthful-looking general circulate around the wood-paneled room in his sharp blue dress uniform. Powell shook hands and made small talk with his new subordinates, eventually making his way around to the CAT team. He said he expected them to bring home the trophy that year. “Well, we’ll either win or we won’t,” a nervous Schmalzel replied with a cartoonish chuckle. Powell fixed the twenty-seven-year-old captain with a stare. “I don’t joke with company-grade officers,” he said, abruptly moving on.
He loosened up a little after dinner, recalling that in his day young lieutenants and captains after a night of drinking in the very same officers’ club used to climb out onto a small second-floor balcony and leap off in a show of toughness. “I came to understand GIs during my tour at Gelnhausen. I learned what made them tick,” Powell later wrote in his autobiography. “American soldiers love to win” and “they respect a leader who holds them to high standards.” Neither victories nor high standards had been common early in Powell’s career. After Germany, he had done two tours in Vietnam and soldiered through the 1970s. He and other officers of his generation had emerged from those traumatic times vowing to resist being drawn ever again into an insurgent war where they were prevented from using the full might of the U.S. armed forces, as many felt they had been barred from doing in Vietnam. “Many of my generation … vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support,” Powell wrote.
The lessons of Vietnam may have been all the rage in Sosh and at Southern Command. But most of the Army wanted nothing to do with training to fight limited wars. It had spent much of the last two decades trying to restore the fighting prowess it had lost in Vietnam. By the second half of the 1980s, the Reagan-era military buildup was beginning to pay off. New advanced equipment was pouring into Army units. Along with the bruising M1 tank, there were the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, the Bradley troop-carrying vehicle, and the Patriot antimissile defense system—all of them expressly designed for fighting the mechanized armies of the Soviet Union or its proxies. After years of tight budgets, money was plentiful for better soldier pay and training. American officers were being schooled in an aggressive new conventional fighting doctrine called “Air-Land Battle,” which preached the importance of precision strikes on the enemy and swift maneuvers by large armored formations. Now it was time to show off the new American capabilities. Short of war itself, nothing would demonstrate more clearly to enemies and allies that the U.S. Army was back than a victory at CAT.
There was a satisfying continuity to his new assignment, Chiarelli thought. Once his father had stood in the turret of his Sherman tank as it motored into the Nazi heartland. Now he was in Germany, too, still dreaming, as he had as a kid, of one day commanding hundreds of tanks in wartime. There were many times when he felt in over his head. He was an armor officer but had never commanded a tank company and, after nearly a decade out of a frontline unit, had only a rudimentary understanding of the new technology in the M1 tank. But in a volunteer army that increasingly saw itself as separate from the larger American society it protected, Chiarelli was a throwback to the citizen soldiers of the draft era. There was something about him that soldiers responded to. Anybody who spent more than five minutes with him could see it. He could be demanding and intense, but people liked him and worked hard for him. When Powell traveled to Grafenwöhr to observe the battalion during maneuvers that fall, he noticed it, too. A lieutenant colonel was nominally in command, but the men looked to Chiarelli to make all the decisions. “You have a problem,” he warned Luallin, the commander at Coleman. “That Major Chiarelli is running the battalion.” Luallin assured him they had the situation under control.
Chiarelli soon began remastering the intricacies of tank gunnery. Several of the Army’s best tank gunners from Fort Knox were brought over to Germany to tutor the teams. One of the reasons the United States was continuing to lose at CAT, Chiarelli learned, was that its gunners weren’t taking full advantage of the tanks’ revolutionary technology. Under the competition rules, each tank team training for the competition was permitted to fire a total of only 134 live rounds in the twelve months before CAT. The idea was to replicate the amount of training a normal tank crew might receive, to stop teams from skewing the competition by spending day after day at the gunnery range. Chiarelli ordered his gunners to expend precious ammunition zeroing their guns, a process that often took as many as five or six rounds for each tank. If his men learned to calibrate their weapons precisely, he reasoned, the payoff in accuracy would be much greater than if they simply did more target practice. A properly zeroed gun could repeatedly hit an eight-inch-wide bull’s-eye at a distance of 2,000 meters. Whatever rounds were left could then be used for target practice. “We were going to give these guys confidence that this tank really worked,” Chiarelli recalled.
He was in the observation tower at Grafenwöhr one day after losing yet again, watching his tanks drive off the range. Lieutenant Colonel John Abrams, an officer from division who was overseeing the training, stood next to him. One of the M1s suddenly started belching plumes of smoke before clanking to a halt. Abrams was the son of Creighton Abrams, the legendary general for whom the M1 tank was named. Enraged, the younger Abrams summoned Lieutenant Joe Weiss, the maintenance officer. “What the hell happened?” he demanded. As Weiss tried to explain that a part had failed, Abrams cut him off. “You guys don’t get it!” he yelled. “You’ll never win this thing. What we need is excellence. Do you understand?” Chiarelli, standing nearby, was incensed that Abrams was bellowing at his soldier. “Don’t talk that way to a member of my team again,” he said icily.
But Chiarelli was worried. A month before the competition, Delta Company’s tanks were consistently hitting only twenty-six of thirty-two targets, which was not enough to win the trophy, if past competitions were any guide. In May, Chiarelli’s parents visited from Seattle. It was their first chance to see their new grandson, Patrick, who was turning one year old, and Pete took some time off to spend with his father, who was back in Europe for the first time since World War II. A few days after arriving, his father complained that he wasn’t feeling well and checked into the U.S. Army hospital in Frankfurt. He had suffered a heart attack a few years earlier, and the long plane ride from Seattle had left him fatigued. He returned to his son’s house some days later with doctor’s orders to rest, but his condition soon deteriorated. Rushed one night to a nearby German hospital, he died on May 7. The Chiarellis flew home to Seattle for the funeral.
Two weeks later Chiarelli, still grieving, was back in Germany for the start of the CAT competition. He had started smoking again and looked haggard. But Schmalzel greeted him with some welcome news for a change: the three platoons had fired the last of their 134 rounds the previous week and scored their best results so far. Not only had they hit most of the targets but, after a year of training, the crews had cut the amount of time it took them to reload and fire a round to just seconds.
It was overcast and raining lightly the first morning of the competition when Chiarelli’s best platoon, commanded by Lieutenant John Menard, rolled onto Range 301. With a booming shot from its main gun, the lead tank fired at the first target, putting a hole right in the center. Turrets swiveling, the M1s advanced down the sloped range, four abreast. Each pop-up target, a plywood silhouette of an enemy tank, appeared for forty seconds. Menard’s men hit the first twenty-eight pop-up targets without a miss. But fifteen minutes into their run, the downpour intensified. It was so severe that Menard could barely see five feet in any direction. Four final targets appeared over the next forty seconds, but Menard’s men, unable to make out any of them, didn’t fire another shot. They finished with twenty-eight hits out of thirty-two targets, a decent showing but not good enough for first place even on the first day of competition. Chiarelli demanded the chance to rerun the course but was rebuffed. At the end of the first day, the Dutch were in the lead, having missed only two targets in their first run. The next American platoon, competing on Wednesday, had clear weather and earned a better score, hitting thirty of thirty-two targets. But Thursday afternoon, the Germans’ 124th Panzer Battalion completed a perfect run, a feat that had only been accomplished one other time.
Going into the final day, the Americans’ last chance rested with Massar’s platoon, the weakest of the three. Even if the Americans matched the Germans’ perfect score, they could only win outright—and claim the trophy as the best tank unit in NATO—by finishing their round in a faster time, giving them a higher overall score. The night before, to get fired up, they had watched a rerun of the U.S. hockey team’s improbable victory over the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Massar’s platoon made the second run of the day, in the afternoon, after the British finished on the course. By then, it had been several hours since Chiarelli had received the sequence of targets the Americans would face. Chiarelli had gone to his boss, Luallin, and told him he wasn’t going to pass along the information. It would only confuse them, he told his superior, insisting that they were ready. As Chiarelli watched the four tanks roar onto the range, he knew he was taking an extravagant risk. Another loss at CAT would only intensify questioning in Washington about whether the Abrams tank was worth the money.
As the four tanks of 1st Platoon started onto the range, the thumping Top Gun theme song was playing at top volume over the loudspeaker until a gruff voice rang out from grandstand, “Turn that goddamn music off!” The recording cut off abruptly. The order came from General Glenn Otis, the top U.S. Army commander in Europe, one of several three-and four-star generals in the VIP grandstand. As the M1s began moving four abreast down the range, the two tanks on the right side of the formation fired almost at once, the explosions from their main guns sending tongues of flame ripping toward the targets. For the next twenty minutes, Chiarelli got reports from his observers as 1st Platoon tanks tore around Range 301, hitting target after target. They completed the course without a miss.
The two dozen teams stood in formation as the judges tallied the final scores. A few minutes later, the announcement came over the loudspeaker: “The high-scoring platoon was 1st Platoon, Delta Company!” The American troops erupted in raucous cheers, embraces, and backslaps. The U.S. and German teams had both hit all the targets, but the final result was a blowout. Massar’s men had taken an average of a full second less than every other competitor to fire, reload, and fire again. The U.S. team ended with a total score of 20,490, a comfortable 800 points ahead of the 124th Panzer Battalion.
Walking up to Chiarelli afterward, the division officer who had slipped Chiarelli the target sequence said, “Well, congratulations, but you had some pretty good intel, didn’t you?”
“Yes I did, but I didn’t tell them a goddamn thing,” Chiarelli fired back.
“You took a hell of a chance,” the officer said finally.
Driving back to the barracks to celebrate over a beer with his men, Chiarelli found a pay phone and called his mother in Seattle. His father would have been so proud, his mother told him as they both cried. Chiarelli had worked hard. He had come back from near-irrelevancy in an Army that only a year before had been ready to cast him aside. Maybe for the first time he could be confident there was a future for him in the military. Word of the victory was quickly relayed back to Colin Powell at the White House. He had lasted only five months in Germany before being summoned to Washington to be national security advisor in the waning days of the Reagan administration. But Powell allowed himself the general’s prerogative of claiming credit. “Two initiatives that I had set in motion paid off soon after I left,” he wrote in his memoirs, referring to the victory at CAT and another NATO competition that the United States had won around the same time. “These competitions may mean little to the layperson, but in NATO this was the equivalent of winning the World Series and the Super Bowl in one season.”
The victory party continued when Chiarelli’s men arrived back at Gelnhausen by rail car. For the first time anyone could remember, they were allowed to drive their massive M1s through the front gate, pulling up in formation to cheers from the soldiers and families who had assembled to welcome them home. The division band played the theme to the movie Patton as generals made speeches and handed out medals to every member of the platoon. Originally, the Army brass had wanted to decorate only Massar’s men. But Chiarelli had insisted on medals for the other two platoons, too. This was a team, he declared, and they had trained just as hard. He got his way. He was still just a major, but for the moment he might as well have been Patton himself.
A few months after the CAT competition, a Pentagon study examining the U.S. victory began with an unusually worded introduction addressed to the Soviet Red Army and its allies. “Warning to the Warsaw Pact,” it read. “If you make the decision to attack NATO ground forces in Western Europe, the most highly-skilled, best equipped and supported armored forces in the world will cut you to ribbons… We, the American victors in the 1987 Canadian Army Trophy competition, issue this warning on behalf of our allies and from a position of strength.”
The next war came not against the Warsaw Pact but in the Middle East after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq’s army had been equipped by the Soviet Union and was familiar to the vast U.S. force sent to eject them from Kuwait. There was another fortunate coincidence about the 1991 Gulf War: Saddam and his generals decided to fight a conventional war in the open desert. The big tank battle that the Army had been preparing for at Grafenwöhr in Germany and in the Mojave Desert of California actually came to pass. Chiarelli was certain he was going to be sent to the fight. He was back at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, commanding a motorized infantry battalion. At a Christmas party in December his boss, who was a bit tipsy, had even broken the news to his wife, Beth. “Don’t tell anybody, but by February fifteenth you guys will be out of here,” he whispered to her. The Chiarellis drove down to the Rose Bowl to watch their beloved Washington Huskies beat Iowa and made a quick stop at Disneyland with their three kids. Chiarelli and Beth were on edge the entire trip. Finally, in early February, he was told to have his men ready to go to the Middle East in six days. A week passed and the orders to move never came. Then they were told that they were going in two days. Again nothing.
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 after 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.