CHAPTER SIX
If the Army continues to resist, organizing training and equipping itself to fight and win the “wars” it is currently being asked to fight, it may no longer have a sufficiently professional officer corps when the next big war occurs.
—MAJOR JOHN NAGL, INSTRUCTOR,
WEST POINT DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1999
Vicenza, Italy
April 1991
The shooting war had been over for two months when John Abizaid’s battalion was ordered to Iraq. There was something deflating at being sent in for the Gulf War’s messy aftermath. He and his men weren’t even going to the desert, where the fighting had occurred, but to Iraq’s mountainous north as part of a humanitarian operation to protect Kurdish refugees. Pentagon planners hadn’t given much thought to the Kurds until a few days before. But in a way it was another example of Abizaid’s talent for being in the right place. Although few realized it then, the deployment offered an important glimpse into the Army’s future and its post-Vietnam failings.
At first the Pentagon treated the operation like a reinvasion, ordering a massive parachute drop to intimidate the Iraqi troops in the area. Flown to a NATO air base in southern Turkey, Abizaid and his 1,400 soldiers had already begun loading aircraft when word came around 2:00 a.m. that plans had changed. Worried that the airborne assault would be misinterpreted as a resumption of hostilities, the Pentagon devised a new mode of entry—so Abizaid and his men loaded onto rattletrap Turkish buses and drove across the rugged border, like tourists on a cut-rate excursion.
Their objective was Zakho, a border town ringed by snowcapped mountains. Making camp with a contingent of Marines, they found an almost apocalyptic scene—abandoned houses, overturned cars, and boarded-up shops. As the sun set that first night, the Americans saw hundreds of flickering campfires in the surrounding peaks, where the townspeople had fled. Prior to the ground war, President George H. W. Bush had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Kurdish fighters, badly miscalculating the dictator’s weakness and the willingness of the United States to help them, had gone on the attack. To hold on to power, Hussein launched a brutal offensive against the Kurds. Now half a million refugees were huddled in the makeshift mountain camps, often without shelter or food. With winter bearing down and disease rampant, as many as a thousand Kurds were dying every day.
Once the scale of the calamity became clear, U.S. and European governments rushed in forces, including Abizaid’s battalion, to face down Hussein’s troops and coax the Kurds home. How to accomplish this was murky. Abizaid had little to guide him other than a few out-of-date maps and orders torn from a field notebook that read: “Mission: Conduct security operations in sector to protect displaced civilians. Be prepared to provide rapid reaction force to respond to requirements by headquarters.”
On one point his superiors had been adamant: worried about restarting a war they had just won, they barred Abizaid from using force unless his men were attacked. For the moment things were quiet. Iraqi units had moved a few dozen miles south and dug in. But it was a volatile situation, with the potential for shooting to erupt unexpectedly, especially early in the operation. Perhaps their biggest advantage was that the Iraqis didn’t know the Americans were barred from attacking unless threatened. “I know you understand the rules of engagement,” Abizaid told his young commanders, referring to the guidelines for firing their guns. “Your responsibility is to accomplish your mission and protect your force. I trust your judgment and I trust you.”
Abizaid’s years in the Middle East, his fluent Arabic, and his talent for improvisation made him a logical choice for this undefined mission. Most of the other military men involved had barely heard of the Kurds’ long struggle to carve out their own independent homeland from parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. “We all took our cues from John,” recalled General John Shalikashvili, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who oversaw the operation from neighboring Turkey.
Abizaid’s experience in the Middle East gave him a view different from the one held by most of his peers, the colonels and majors who had just fought and won the Gulf War. They returned home certain that Iraq could not withstand the awesome might of the American military. Abizaid in many ways drew the opposite conclusion. His four-month mission exposed him to the barely suppressed hatreds of Iraq, a place where countrymen fought and killed each other with stunning viciousness. He emerged from the mission even more skeptical of the ability of his soldiers or any occupiers to impose their will on the country. A decade later, neoconservatives in the Bush administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, insisted that if Saddam Hussein were forced from power, democracy would quickly flower, just as it had in the Kurdish enclave. Abizaid never believed that. A foreign force like his could stop the worst of the killing and, with civilian government agencies and aid groups, carve out small enclaves of relative peace and prosperity. Sooner or later, though, an occupying army, even one with the purest of motives, would find itself hated and attacked.
Abizaid’s biggest worry was what would happen when the Kurds finally came down from the mountains. If the refugees pushed south to their homes, the Iraqi troops might resume their massacre. If the Iraqis retreated, Abizaid feared, the Kurdish rebels would slaughter the stragglers. To prevent either scenario, he planned to use his soldiers as a buffer, positioning them between the returning Kurds and the Iraqi troops. His troops had to move much sooner than he expected. A few days after Abizaid’s battalion arrived, Kurdish guerrillas, known as Peshmerga, began racing down from the mountains in white Toyota pickup trucks, clearly intent on revenge. At 7:00 a.m., in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, he ordered his battalion to move. They headed south, not knowing what lay ahead.
Forty kilometers into the bone-chilling drive, worried inquiries from headquarters started coming over Abizaid’s radio. “Where are you?” his higher headquarters asked. His troops had outrun the protective umbrella of U.S. artillery. Soon he was being told to stop. Abizaid continued south, passing a column of Saddam Hussein’s tanks fleeing the advancing Kurds. It was like a scene from the movie Mad Max. One tank was missing its treads and was spewing sparks as the bare wheels scraped over the blacktop, the driver too scared or indifferent to stop. When the Americans ran into an Iraqi army roadblock at the only mountain passes leading into the provincial capital of Dahuk, Abizaid’s lead company commander tied a white rag to a spare antenna and moved forward tentatively, waving his arms. The Iraqis didn’t budge.
Driving up a few minutes later, Abizaid radioed two Air Force jets in the vicinity and told them to make low, thundering passes over their location. When the Iraqi commander still refused to move, Abizaid had his troops dig in as if preparing to fight. The bluff worked. The soldiers sullenly moved south. Abizaid pressed on as well. Encountering another Iraqi unit outside Dahuk, he charged up to the commander and demanded that he withdraw or face destruction. Uncertain what to do, the Iraqi colonel excused himself to answer a ringing phone. “The Americans are here,” Abizaid heard the flustered officer say into the phone. He paused to listen and then repeated himself. “No, you don’t understand! I’m telling you the commander is standing right here in my office,” he said, handing over the phone to Abizaid, who told the officer on the line that they had twenty-four hours to withdraw. Eventually they left as well.
When Major General Jay Garner, who was overseeing the relief effort, flew in a few days later, he headed straight for Abizaid. “John Abizaid, that was one of the greatest examples of military skill that I have ever seen,” he said, sticking out his hand.
During their four months in Iraq, Abizaid and his troops lived in crumbling buildings without electricity or running water and washed in streams and lakes. Without firing a shot, they slowly pushed the Iraqis south. They blasted them with loud music, buzzed their living quarters at 2:00 a.m. with Apache helicopters, and fired illumination rounds—artillery shells that light up the night sky—at their positions. As a final resort, they blocked mountain passes to prevent Baghdad from ferrying in reinforcements.
Abizaid had little sympathy for the Iraqi soldiers, who had salted Kurdish fields and gassed Kurdish women and children several years earlier. But he soon realized that the Kurds, motivated by decades of persecution and massacres, could be just as brutal. It made for a dauntingly complex battlefield. Sometimes the Americans found themselves mediating between warring Kurdish factions; other times bedraggled Iraqi soldiers ran to U.S. checkpoints seeking protection. The viciousness seemed to dwarf even what he had seen in Lebanon. A few weeks before he was scheduled to depart, Abizaid was walking on a craggy ridgeline with a Peshmerga commander when he noticed three Iraqi corpses, their bodies covered with burn marks and their eyes gouged out.
“Why do you torture everybody?” he asked. “Why not just kill them?”
“Nobody fears death,” replied the commander, his rifle slung over his shoulder and a scarf wrapped around his head. The survivors, he explained, needed to see the mutilated bodies of their fellow soldiers so that they understood what could happen to them if they fought the Kurds. The conversation stuck with Abizaid for years, along with other memories of brutality from his previous tours of the Middle East. The region’s combustible mix of tribes, repressive regimes, and culture of revenge seemed to breed violence that swelled at times to all-out war before settling back into hit-and-run ambushes, revenge attacks, and terrorism. None of it truly threatened an army as powerful as the United States’. But Abizaid also recognized that his military couldn’t stop it, either. It was especially foolish to expect short, swift victories of the sort the American people had come to demand in the wake of Vietnam.
The battalion’s withdrawal in midsummer was a fittingly surreal end to its mission. They were the rear guard—the last to leave Iraqi soil across a single bridge spanning the river that formed the Iraqi-Turkish border. “This is the single most important place that has to be protected,” Abizaid told Captain Sean Callahan, his best company commander. “Don’t let yourself get closed in around the bridge.” The first two companies from Abizaid’s battalion crossed the bridge early on July 13 and began to pack up their weapons. A few minutes later, hundreds of Kurds, worried that they were being abandoned by their American protectors, surged toward Callahan’s troops, forcing his men into a tight knot right in front of the bridge.
The demonstrating Kurds carried banners that read “We Love You America” and “Your Job Is Halve Done.” When it became clear the Americans were leaving for good, the hysterical crowd began to hit the soldiers with their signs. A mother carrying a young child threw herself into the razor wire strung across the border, slicing her hands and face; another woman bit the battalion sergeant major on the arm. On the Turkish side of the bridge the local commander scrambled his soldiers, who looked as if they were preparing to open fire.
A furious Abizaid, his uniform drenched in sweat, rushed to find Callahan, whose men had fixed bayonets and were trying to hold their ground. “Do not allow anyone to set foot on this bridge!” Abizaid yelled as he called the rest of the battalion back across the border to augment his force. Standing on the hood of a Humvee, he assured the crowd that the United States would continue to protect them with planes and helicopters based in Turkey. As the temperatures rose, the exhausted and angry Kurds, held back by bayonets and razor wire, slowly drifted away.
Abizaid doubted the tenuous peace his soldiers left behind in northern Iraq would hold. His troops were replaced by jet fighters that patrolled in the skies over northern Iraq, ready to strike if Saddam Hussein tried to attack again. Surprisingly, a relatively prosperous enclave emerged, aided by ample international aid. But, as with most conflicts in the Middle East, it wasn’t clear how long the calm would last.
After Iraq, Abizaid spent a year at Stanford University as a military fellow, reflecting on his experiences and writing about the need to prepare for guerrilla conflicts and peacekeeping missions. He visited Somalia, where the Bush administration in its waning months had sent troops as part of a UN effort to secure a cease-fire between the country’s warring militias and feed its starving population. General Colin Powell, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supported the intervention, with the proviso that the U.S. force would be massive and would remain only a couple of months. By the time Abizaid got there, most of the U.S. soldiers had been replaced by poorly equipped UN troops from countries like Pakistan. President Clinton had taken over in the White House, and the mission had expanded from feeding starving Somalis to stabilizing the country’s government and arresting troublesome warlords.
The warlords fought back. First they attacked the poorly armed Pakistanis and then the remaining Americans. Four U.S. soldiers were killed when their unarmored Humvee drove over a hidden bomb. On his visit, Abizaid met with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division who were trying to separate warring clans south of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. A few months after he departed, a team of Rangers and Delta Force commandos was sent to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. The mission triggered a bloody and unexpected battle in which untrained fighters, armed with only AK-47s and grenade launchers, downed two Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. troops. Americans reacted with outrage to the horrific television footage from the battle. “I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks,” Clinton screamed at his aides as they watched images of howling Somalis dragging the body of a dead U.S. pilot through the streets.
Unable to justify a humanitarian mission that had suddenly turned into a war, the White House ordered a withdrawal, abandoning Mogadishu to its warring clans. Many military officers blamed Clinton for the disaster, insisting that it was a mistake to commit the U.S. military to such ill-defined and unwinnable missions. General Powell had retired from active service a few days before the Mogadishu disaster. “We can’t make a country out of that place,” he later recounted warning Clinton on his last day in uniform.
Abizaid didn’t disagree with Powell. No one could reasonably expect the military to forge a country out of a collection of warring tribes. But he didn’t think the Army could completely avoid future Somalias, either. The military’s instinct—to go in big and get out fast—was not acceptable. Its focus on large-scale combat and quick wars after Vietnam had left it unprepared for a whole series of smaller, messier threats that only the military could handle. “We must recognize that peacekeeping is no job for amateurs,” he wrote in Military Review, an Army journal, during his Stanford fellowship. “It is dangerous, stressful duty that requires highly disciplined, well educated soldiers who understand the nature of the peacekeeping beast. As we get ready to fight the next war, let us also keep thinking about how we might have to keep the peace in some far off corner of the world.”
It was a plea to study the operations in northern Iraq and Somalia and not dismiss them as aberrations. Abizaid believed deeply that the military didn’t get to choose the kinds of wars that it would fight, and that it was likely the Clinton administration or its successors would send U.S. troops on similar peacekeeping missions in the future, probably without fully thinking through what they were taking on. He was right, just as Petraeus had been a few years earlier when he had argued the same point in his Princeton dissertation. Less than a decade passed before the U.S. Army found itself again battling lightly armed fighters who relied on stealth and hit-and-run attacks to nullify America’s overwhelming might—this time in Iraq.
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
September 1991
After two years as a general’s aide in the Pentagon, Dave Petraeus was finally back in a combat unit. He was taking over one of the 101st Airborne Division’s most storied units. His battalion was one of three that traced its lineage back to the 187th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had been activated during World War II to fight in the Pacific. The Japanese had dubbed the parachutists Rakkasans, a term meaning “falling-down umbrella men,” and the name stuck, even after the battalion converted into a helicopter assault force. The Rakkasans later fought in Korea, Vietnam, and, only a few months before Petraeus took command, in Iraq, where the battalion moved hundreds of miles behind enemy lines as part of a massive helicopter assault to cut off Republican Guard units fleeing Kuwait.
Most of the captains and majors now working for him had been to war; he hadn’t. But he had been prepping for the day when he would take over command since arriving in Vicenza sixteen years earlier as a green second lieutenant, vacuuming up ideas and depositing them in a folder marked “First Day of Command.” Now he began putting his ideas into practice. He wanted to foster a culture of competitiveness, he told his officers. Always an exercise fanatic, he instituted a demanding physical fitness test with standards far tougher than the Army required of even its youngest soldiers. Petraeus goaded his men into taking it and then stood over them at the track counting off push-ups, sit-ups, and dips one by one. He dubbed the winners “Iron Rakkasans” and engraved their names on a plaque at the battalion headquarters. Everything was a competition for Petraeus, and every competition was a way to prove the superiority of his unit. Even a chili cook-off in the town outside Fort Campbell was treated like a major operation, with soldiers dispatched a day ahead of time to secure a space near the judges’ table and scout out the competition. Some officers loved Petraeus’s gung-ho spirit; others thought he was trying too hard. It was as if he believed you could become a great commander the same way he had become a West Point Star Man—by breaking the assignment into all of its thousands of components and then studying them harder than anyone else for the big test. The reality was tougher. There was much more to command than knowing small-unit tactics or winning a chili cook-off. A good officer had to convince soldiers to follow him, sometimes to their deaths. A few, like Abizaid, were naturals. Petraeus wasn’t. He had moved so quickly through his relatively few rotations with frontline combat units and spent so much time at the hip of senior generals that he hadn’t learned how to seem natural in front of regular troops.
He used Boy Scout language like “gosh” and “golly.” He frowned on officers who chewed tobacco. He mangled words that every infantryman was supposed to know—even “hooah,” the all-purpose Army reply. Every soldier learned in basic training that it was uttered in a throaty roar, meant to signal you were up for anything. Petraeus’s “hooah” sounded flat and unconvincing, causing his officers to cringe inside. Several put together a list of soldier slang terms and gave it to their new boss so that he would come off better when addressing his troops. He accepted it good-naturedly. On the wall of his new office he hung his prized photo of Marcel Bigeard, the French paratrooper and guerrilla war expert, right above the framed French paratrooper certificate he had earned in 1976. Petraeus liked to quiz visitors on the identity of the foreign-looking officer in the photo; no one at Fort Campbell had ever heard of Bigeard. Choosing a French general as a role model marked him as unusual in the American Army. It made it seem like he had developed his ideas about how to be a soldier from history books and going to seminars—or, worse yet, in the salons of Paris. His men started calling their Ph.D.-degreed commander “Doc,” which summed up his intellect and their misgivings about his street smarts.
Shortly after arriving, he and six of his officers found themselves camping out near a runway at a small air base in rural Tennessee. The soldiers and their new commander talked into the evening about their lives, families, and careers. Eventually the question went around the circle: Which of them had spent a night in jail? Everyone had except Petraeus. That summed up their new commander: physically tough and smart but lacking in real-world experience.
Fred Johnson, one of his company commanders, noticed that Petraeus didn’t wear a “high and tight,” a military haircut that was closely shaven on the sides and back. Many infantrymen at Fort Campbell believed the shorter-than-regulation trim made them look like warriors, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. It set them apart from the rest of the peacetime Army. When Johnson raised the subject, Petraeus explained that Holly didn’t like his hair that short. Some of the men, Johnson replied, had commented on it. It wasn’t true—nobody had mentioned it—but he wanted Petraeus to succeed, and in a unit full of combat veterans, the commander couldn’t afford to appear less than warriorlike. The next day, he recalled, Petraeus walked into the battalion headquarters sporting a high and tight and promptly issued a new directive: from then on, the standard haircut for Iron Rakkasans was a high and tight.
The 1990s were known as the era of the “zero-defect Army,” a time when a single mistake by an officer—or even his troops—could doom his chances for advancement. With the end of the Cold War, the Army was shrinking, and a below-average fitness report was usually enough to convince a promotion board to pass over an otherwise exemplary soldier. Petraeus exemplified this mania for detail, though his goal was not to weed out the unfit but to bind his soldiers together. Shortly after arriving, he published a booklet that laid out page after page of detailed instructions about how the battalion should look, act, and think. There were instructions on everything imaginable, and some that defied easy explanation. Every Rakkasan was required to fasten the top button of his combat fatigues, the one right under the chin, ostensibly so uncamouflaged necks wouldn’t show. Some U.S. soldiers in the 101st thought all that Petraeus’s “battle button” did was make them look stupid. Actually, that was his intention. “It made others joke about us, which pulled us together,” Petraeus later explained. He had borrowed the idea from The Centurions, the novel he had first read in 1976 that was loosely based on Marcel Bigeard’s experiences fighting insurgents in Vietnam and Algeria. The hero of the book and his paratroopers wear distinctive floppy hats known as “lizard caps” that are mocked by other French troops but bind the unit together.
He also had elaborate rules for attaching equipment to the load-bearing web belts, known as LBEs, worn by every soldier in the field. During inspections, he made a point of examining the belts to make sure his troops had tied the knots just right and that they had burned off the ends of the parachute cord to prevent fraying. His own LBE was outfitted flawlessly. It had taken him hours to get it just right.
His other priority after taking command was training—often with live ammunition. One Saturday morning a month after assuming command, Petraeus and the assistant commander of the 101st, Brigadier General Jack Keane, were watching a company of soldiers practice clearing a bunker. Ahead of them, Specialist Terrence Jones tossed a training grenade through the doorway, flattened himself against a wall, and waited for the dull thud. Then he began running to rejoin his squad. Jones could hear the popping of automatic weapons and the whiz of real bullets as he lumbered over twenty yards of open ground. Reaching his squad’s position, he threw himself down on the ground, using the butt of his SAW machine gun to break his fall. As he landed, his finger inadvertently squeezed the trigger. Thirty yards away, Petraeus grunted in pain and dropped to his knees. The bullet from Jones’s weapon had hit him in the chest, right over the A in his uniform name tag.
He wasn’t sure what had happened. The pain was in his back, and his first thought was that he had been struck from behind by a grenade. He tried to steady himself, but then his head started to swirl and pain enveloped his torso. He felt like he was staring down a long tunnel. Keane, who had been standing nearby, eased him down to the ground and opened his camouflage uniform. “Dave, you’ve been shot. You know what we’re going to do here. We’re going to stop the bleeding,” he said in his booming voice. From the front, the wound didn’t look so bad. Blood was trickling from a small hole over his right nipple. But Petraeus couldn’t see the exit wound, where the bullet had come out. A four-inch chunk of his back was torn away and oozing blood. Smoke was still wafting out of the hole. Keane bellowed for a medevac helicopter and then turned back to Petraeus. Two Army medics rushed up and began cutting open his fatigues. Petraeus in his fog worried about all the work he had put in getting his knots correct. “Don’t cut my LBE,” he muttered. “I just got it to standard.” They ignored him, swiftly cutting off his web gear and pressing gauze bandages on the wounds. “Dave, I want you to stay with us,” Keane said. “Yes, sir,” Petraeus replied.
As the minutes passed, Keane kept up a steady chatter, all but commanding him not to slip into unconsciousness. Petraeus was speaking less and less. Soon he started going blank, his eyes wide but unresponsive. His face was turning ashen. He vomited greenish fluid and a chunk of something. Finally the thump-thump of an arriving helicopter was heard in the distance. Keane announced he was going with Petraeus to the base hospital. “We all know what happened here. A soldier accidentally shot his commanding officer. Pull that unit together and get them back on the range,” he bellowed. The Army Black Hawk set down twenty yards away, and Petraeus was rushed aboard on a stretcher with Keane at his side.
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 the 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 agreement 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.
Little in his career, however, had prepared him to mediate ethnic civil wars or rebuild broken societies, like Bosnia. In the gathering darkness Casey waited as the last of the Muslim returnees’ homes were searched to make sure that they had abided by their promise to get rid of all of their weapons. Standing alongside Casey were several Serb officials and the town’s former deputy mayor, a Muslim who had come back with the other returnees. The Muslims warily eyed the Serbian observers. Their presence was a bit like “having Darth Vader in your house,” Casey recalled. An hour passed. Nothing was uncovered in any of the nearly three dozen houses searched, until only the residence where Casey was waiting remained. He began to think he had pulled it off, the peaceful return of refugees to their communities, a small but unmistakable success on his first foray into real peacemaking. Then a Serb policeman found two AK-47s, two hand grenades, and a bag full of ammunition in the very last house—the one where Casey was standing. The weapons belonged to the Muslim deputy mayor. Casey was staggered. The agreement that he’d spent weeks negotiating between the Muslims and Serbs was off. “I’m looking at this guy going, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’” he recalled.
A standoff ensued. When the Serb police tried to arrest the deputy mayor, dozens of Muslim women lay down outside the house, blocking their departure. Trapped in a surrounded Muslim home as night fell, the Serb police were growing noticeably nervous. Fearing the situation could escalate into violence, Casey took custody of the deputy mayor and left the village. Crestfallen, he returned to the U.S. camp and told Lieutenant General Bill Nash, the cigar-chomping commander of the multinational force, about the collapsed deal.
“George, never forget it’s their country,” Nash told him. It was Nash’s way of saying that even a force as powerful as the U.S. Army couldn’t resolve centuries-old sectarian and ethnic hatreds and shouldn’t try. U.S. troops could separate the Serbs and Muslims and provide basic security, but they should leave the lengthy job of building a functioning country to the civilian experts or the Bosnians themselves. No one could force these people to get along, certainly not the U.S. military. It was a lesson Casey never forgot, and one the entire Army would take with it to Iraq.
A few months later General John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, came through Bosnia. He noticed that Nash was talking at length with John Abizaid, who was Shalikashvili’s executive officer, about the situation on the ground. Before Shalikashvili left to return to the Pentagon, he pulled Nash aside.
“You want Abizaid?” he asked. Nash had worked with Abizaid several years earlier and knew his reputation as one of the Army’s brightest minds. He immediately said yes. When Abizaid arrived a month later, Nash gave him Casey’s job overseeing daily military operations. A crestfallen Casey was shifted to a less prestigious position as the assistant division commander overseeing logistics and supply issues.
Many officers in Casey’s position would have felt threatened by the high-flying Abizaid, who at the time was the youngest general in the Army. Casey chose to embrace the newcomer, who exuded the confidence and street smarts that he lacked. Prior to Bosnia, Casey had long believed that the best Army officers focused on tough field training, taking care of their soldiers and maintaining their equipment. This muddy-boots mentality had helped the service recover from its nadir after Vietnam and had proved its value in the Gulf War. Abizaid was a different kind of officer who sought answers to problems that most officers didn’t see. Instead of focusing downward on his troops, he thought about how forces such as radical Islam were transforming the Middle East and could create new problems for the United States. He was comfortable working with foreign militaries. Where Casey had struggled to win the trust of the Russian officers in Bosnia, Abizaid seemed instinctively to know how to make former Soviet officers, who bristled at their second-tier status, feel valued.
Working together in Bosnia turned Casey and Abizaid into close friends. Both were outwardly easygoing and unflappable. Over the next decade, their careers would move in parallel. Casey, in particular, seemed to study his younger friend’s progress through the Army and emulate it. He would follow Abizaid in a series of increasingly important jobs at the Pentagon over the next five years.
Casteau, Belgium
June 11, 1999
After seventy-eight days of bombing, the Kosovo war was over and Brigadier General Pete Chiarelli thought he could finally relax a little. Chiarelli was working for General Wes Clark, the NATO commander running the war. Clark typically arrived at his headquarters around 7:00 a.m., so Chiarelli made it a point to get into the office by five-thirty. That way he’d have an hour to sort through the overnight traffic and pull out key pieces of intelligence that Clark needed to see first thing in the morning. Usually he didn’t make it home until 11:00 p.m. It was like that seven days a week.
The Clinton administration started the war in an attempt to thwart Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s ruthless assault on ethnic Albanians living in the Serb province of Kosovo. The thinking was that Milosevic would buckle in a few days, but he had held on far longer than expected. Finally he’d agreed to withdraw his troops from the tiny province and allow in a peacekeeping force. That morning, Chiarelli updated Clark on the timetable for sending in the troops and then returned to his desk just outside the NATO commander’s door.
Then the telephone rang. On the other end was an Army major with an urgent report: hundreds of Russian troops stationed in Bosnia were heading for Kosovo, several hours’ drive away. The Russians, who had ties to the Serbs, had been insisting for weeks that they wanted to control their own sector of the province. The Clinton administration and Clark were deeply opposed to it. Chiarelli rushed back into Clark’s book-lined office. “Sir, the Russians are moving forces,” he warned. The two officers dashed out of the office to a videoconference on the crisis.
George Casey, who had left Bosnia for a high-profile job as the deputy director for political military affairs on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, was also at the center of the action. He’d spent weeks shuttling back and forth between Washington and Moscow with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott negotiating the terms of the Russians’ participation in the Kosovo peacekeeping force. Landing the important job had been especially satisfying. A decade earlier when Casey had tried to find a slot in the office he was now running, he had been summarily dismissed. “No, no, no. He’s never been in the Pentagon. We can’t use him,” he’d heard someone yelling in the background when he called to ask about the job. But his Bosnia tour had given him on-the-ground experience in the region that many senior officers lacked.
Around 6:00 p.m. Clark was still trying to get a fix on what the Russians were doing when he broke away to take a call from Casey, who was in Moscow a day earlier. The head of the Russian military had threatened to seize a sector in Kosovo as soon as NATO troops deployed. The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, was taking a softer line. Casey told Clark that he didn’t think the Russians could move that quickly.
Clark disagreed. In fact, reports from the ground in Bosnia suggested that several hundred Russians were already moving. Across the border in Kosovo, Serbs who had learned of the deployment were getting set to welcome them. The key decisions were being made not in Moscow but rather on the ground in Bosnia and Kosovo. For both Casey and Chiarelli, the aftermath of the Kosovo war was an introduction to political and military crisis solving at the highest levels, and their involvement pushed them ahead of many of their Army peers in the endless competition for the next job.
Casey spent the next several weeks shuttling from the Pentagon to the Kremlin and Macedonia as part of a team hammering out the broad outlines of a deal that would place the Russian peacekeepers under NATO control but also salvage some measure of Russian pride. Chiarelli also found himself busier in the weeks after the end of the conflict than he had been during the bombing campaign. More tense issues would arise, including the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the disarming of Kosovar Muslims on whose behalf the war had been fought.
Chiarelli owed his career to Clark. A few years earlier he had been finishing a year at the National War College in Washington and had no job lined up. He sat in his basement in suburban Virginia and typed out letters on his Commodore 64 home computer to every division commander in the Army, asking for a job as an operations officer, or G3 in Army parlance. Landing such a position was essential if he was ever going to be promoted again. “This may not be the normal way of doing business,” he wrote. “However, I would like your help as I look for a division G3 job.” Only Clark, who was the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, invited him for an interview. Although they had never met, Clark had been an instructor in the West Point Social Sciences Department in the early 1970s after returning from Vietnam. He hired him after a twenty-minute interview. Chiarelli never knew why. The best theory he could come up with was that the Sosh connections had saved him again. When Clark was named NATO commander he hired Chiarelli as his executive officer, essentially his senior aide.
Chiarelli learned a lot from Clark. Clark was an activist general who was comfortable using military power to prevent humanitarian disasters and stabilize failing states. As NATO commander he quietly encouraged U.S. troops in Bosnia to arrest mafia-like criminals and strengthen the country’s moderate political opposition, knowing such moves would draw the ire of his more conservative Pentagon bosses who were opposed to anything that smacked of nation building. “You have to push the envelope,” he told his soldiers. “If you put this strategy down [on paper] and circulate it, it’s dead.”
Chiarelli also learned a good deal about how not to handle himself from Clark, a brusque, highly intelligent man who had made lots of enemies during his long Army career. He never cared how hard he drove his subordinates. He wasn’t deferential to his superiors, and his unrivaled ambition left him with few allies in the Army or the Pentagon. Six weeks after the Kosovo war ended, Clark got a call from Joint Chiefs chairman General Hugh Shelton, who told him that he would be replaced the following April as NATO commander. Clark, who was in Lithuania at the time, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Normally it was a three-year job, often extended to four. He had just finished his second year and had fought and won the first war in NATO’s fifty-year history. “I stood there stunned. Was I being relieved of duty?” he wrote in his memoirs.
It was 3:00 a.m. back in Belgium when Chiarelli was awoken at home by a call from his apoplectic boss. They were firing him, Clark said. Not only that, Clark railed, but within minutes of hanging up with Shelton he had gotten a call from a Washington Postreporter who already knew he had been dismissed. The Pentagon had leaked the news to make it impossible for him to lobby the White House to reverse it. “He was definitely upset, and rightfully so,” Chiarelli recalled. “This guy had just won a war and here he was being shown the door.”
In Kosovo, Clark’s Pentagon bosses resented his demands for more forces, especially a request for two dozen Apache helicopters. Clark wanted to use the low-flying helicopters to destroy Serbian military forces at close range, but Defense Secretary William Cohen was deeply opposed to the plan. The helicopters were too vulnerable to ground fire and might lead to U.S. casualties. In a war fought primarily for humanitarian reasons, he believed, there was no compelling reason to put U.S. troops’ lives at risk. Cohen also suspected that Clark was using his back-channel contacts with the White House and State Department to reverse Pentagon decisions that he opposed.
Although Clark had the backing of the White House and the State Department on many of his initiatives in Kosovo, he had alienated his most important boss: the defense secretary. His high-profile dismissal wasn’t soon forgotten in the Army. “The lesson I took from it is that your chain of command is your chain of command and that you are obligated to do your best to work within it to the extent that you can,” recalled Abizaid.
In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in the Pentagon deeply opposed to using the military for nation-building ventures. Within weeks of taking office he asked the Joint Staff to draw up plans for pulling American troops out of the Balkans, insisting that such missions should be handled by the same civilian agencies that had repeatedly proven themselves incapable in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Rumsfeld also was convinced that activist commanders, such as Clark, had been given too much latitude by the Clinton administration to use military power to help stabilize weak or failing states. He wanted to rein in the generals.