The Fourth Star Part 2

The Army that had entered World War II had been, in General George Marshall's words, that of a "third-rate power." West Point wasn't much better. For years it had staffed its teaching posts with recent academy graduates who sometimes had only pa.s.sing familiarity with the subjects they were teaching. After World War II Lincoln and Marshall believed that the Army had to change if it was going to meet its obligations as a global power. To keep the peace in this era dominated by atomic weapons, Lincoln envisioned a new breed of officer, schooled in disciplines beyond just blunt killing. They needed to understand politics, economics, and international relations. To staff his department he demanded the brightest captains and majors he could get, men (they were all men then) who could get into and excel in top civilian national security studies programs at places such as Harvard and Princeton and then take on teaching a.s.signments at Sosh that would convert the department into an intellectual powerhouse.

Sosh, unlike some other departments at West Point, wanted its instructors to be provocative and versed in the latest scholarship. Not only cadets would benefit, argued Lincoln, the department's founder. The chosen officers would mature as much as or more than their students by taking a break from the regimented life of a soldier and spending a few years in an academic environment where they would be encouraged to think broadly and publish scholarly articles before heading back to combat units. In short, Lincoln had in mind an elite corps of officers whose talents and schooling would prepare them for major roles in the postwar Army.

As he began his teaching duties, Chiarelli discovered his University of Washington education was not as much of a handicap as he had imagined. He had read William Appleman Williams and other revisionist historians who argued that the United States deserved more blame for starting the Cold War than the Soviet Union. a.s.signing readings from Williams kindled lively debate in a cla.s.s of patriotic cadets. Pacing back and forth with arms waving, Chiarelli enthusiastically held forth on how the j.a.panese attack on Pearl Harbor had been a justifiable response to the encirclement it was facing in Asia from the United States. "I thought all this stuff was absolutely ludicrous," Chiarelli said, "but I loved walking into a cla.s.sroom and pretending like I believed it."

Chiarelli began to think that he might want to spend the rest of his career teaching at Sosh. Most instructors spent three years in the department before returning to the regular Army, but he decided to stay a fourth year to help edit a book on reforming the Defense Department that had grown out of the department's annual summer national security conference. He also hoped that staying the extra year would help him win one of the half-dozen permanent teaching positions there-a job that would have meant an end to leading soldiers. The teaching job, however, went to another officer who had already finished his doctorate, had auth.o.r.ed a well-received book on Lebanon, and wrote pieces for the New York Times New York Times and and Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times critiquing U.S. foreign policy. Chiarelli's gamble put him in a hole. After two years at graduate school and four years in Sosh, he had been away from the regular Army a long time. The armor branch personnel managers responsible for Chiarelli's next a.s.signment had all but given up on him. In their eyes, going to Sosh was, at best, a dilettantish diversion from real soldiering. "I am going to take your file and I am going to keep it upside down so I won't see your name. And when this is all over with, your career is finished," Chiarelli remembered his personnel officer saying. critiquing U.S. foreign policy. Chiarelli's gamble put him in a hole. After two years at graduate school and four years in Sosh, he had been away from the regular Army a long time. The armor branch personnel managers responsible for Chiarelli's next a.s.signment had all but given up on him. In their eyes, going to Sosh was, at best, a dilettantish diversion from real soldiering. "I am going to take your file and I am going to keep it upside down so I won't see your name. And when this is all over with, your career is finished," Chiarelli remembered his personnel officer saying.

In reality, getting promoted depended at least as much on having good connections, which Sosh had. When he took over as head of the department in 1954, Lincoln began identifying bright young cadets who one day might make good Sosh professors. If they expressed interest in returning to teach, he tracked their early Army careers. Every year, after winnowing down the list to the most promising candidates, he sent a dozen or so names to the Army personnel office, asking them to be a.s.signed to his department. After three years of teaching, Lincoln used his connections to place them throughout the Army. Over time they started thinking of themselves as members of a special group of thinkers and achievers, and others did, too. Often they were drafted by the Army's senior generals to deal with Congress, the White House, and other Washington types. Sosh officers served as trusted aides, speechwriters, and senior strategists. At least to each other, these officers began referring to their tight little fraternity as the "Lincoln Brigade."

Olvey, who carried on Lincoln's traditions, told his instructors when they returned to the regular Army: "A member of the department is always always a member of the department." In other words, there would be someone looking out for them. He lobbied Sosh department alumni to get Chiarelli a job at a tank unit in Germany that would put him back in the running for command of a battalion, the next step on the career ladder. Jeff McKitrick, his close friend in the department, bucked up his spirits, predicting he'd be a three-star general someday. a member of the department." In other words, there would be someone looking out for them. He lobbied Sosh department alumni to get Chiarelli a job at a tank unit in Germany that would put him back in the running for command of a battalion, the next step on the career ladder. Jeff McKitrick, his close friend in the department, bucked up his spirits, predicting he'd be a three-star general someday.

"Why not a four-star?" Chiarelli's wife, Beth, interjected.

"Pete's not political enough," McKitrick replied.

Chiarelli was amused by the conversation. If he couldn't be one of the Sosh department's provocateurs, maybe he could be a general. But before that could happen, he knew, he had to prove himself as a conventional Cold Warrior to the Army's armor branch, his once and future tribe.

When Donne Olvey offered to send Dave Petraeus to graduate school in return for three years at Sosh, Petraeus had misgivings. At the time he was a student at Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where the Army schools its top officers on strategy and doctrine. He was on his way to finishing first in his cla.s.s, ahead of more than a thousand other officers, most of them already majors. The program at Leavenworth ate up a year. If he took two years more in graduate school and then went to Sosh, it would mean being away from the real Army for six years, a risky proposition for any officer, but especially for one with Petraeus's intense ambition. But General Jack Galvin, Petraeus's most influential mentor, urged him to take the detour, telling him that if he wanted to rise to the top of his profession, he needed to broaden himself. Galvin could be stiff and even a bit awkward around soldiers, but he also had a reputation as one of the Army's sharpest minds. Petraeus, who admired him immensely, decided to take the gamble.

In the fall of 1984, Petraeus entered Princeton University, joining the master's program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He and Holly and their young daughter lived in a small townhouse not far from campus. She had been hopeful for a relaxed break from Army life, but Petraeus had planned out his two years at Princeton as if it were a military campaign. Every morning, he made the drive to campus and spent most of the day in cla.s.s or in the library. He discovered it was just possible to cram the coursework for both a master's degree and a doctorate into his two years, though it meant taking on a punishing academic load. With his usual gusto, he convinced John Duffield, a former Peace Corps volunteer also in the master's program, to go for a Ph.D. as well. Sitting in adjoining carrels at the library, Petraeus and Duffield studied in the mornings, then took grueling runs around the Princeton campus before returning to their books for a few more hours of work.

His foray into civilian graduate school had its humbling moments. Used to top grades and glowing reviews, Petraeus received a D on his first exam in advanced microeconomics. A seminar paper in his second semester came back marked with a B. "Though the paper is reasonably well-written and has some merit, it is relatively simplistic and I am left feeling that the whole is less than the sum of the parts," his professor, Dr. Richard Ullman, had written on the cover sheet. Petraeus had worked hard on the paper, and Ullman's blase reaction had taken him down a peg. "I had been the number one guy in my cla.s.s at Leavenworth and a few other things over the years. I wanted to prove to myself that I could really measure up," he recalled. A chastened Petraeus asked if he could take a shot at writing a new seminar paper that looked at how the Vietnam War influenced the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations' calculus on using military force. He threw himself into the project, even volunteering to shuttle Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been national security advisor during the Carter administration, back to Washington following a speaking engagement at Princeton so that he could interview him during the four-hour drive. Ullman gave the paper an A, and Petraeus decided to write his doctoral thesis on Vietnam's impact on the American military. He crammed in as much research as he could before leaving Princeton, and then wrote his dissertation while teaching at Sosh.

It was an unexpectedly rich time to revisit Vietnam-especially in the intellectual hothouse of the Sosh department. The war was a painful subject that held little interest for most Army officers. Sosh instructors, however, debated it incessantly. In June 1985 the department hosted an academic conference on the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Olvey a.s.signed William Taylor, a fiery infantry officer with a Ph.D. who had served in Vietnam, to help Petraeus expand his Princeton paper and present it at the conference.

When Taylor arrived at West Point in the 1970s there were no courses on Vietnam. At the Army's Command and General Staff College, counterinsurgency and guerrilla war were almost entirely absent from the curriculum. To Taylor it seemed as if the Army was trying to blot out the memory of the painful war, and he made it a personal crusade to force it to confront its failures. Taylor wore thick horn-rimmed gla.s.ses that gave him a professorial air and was so skinny he looked almost frail, but when he started talking about Vietnam his face reddened and his voice thundered. He had spent a long year leading patrols through rice paddies and small hamlets in the Mekong Delta, but those forays had accomplished little. Even when his unit could find the enemy, which wasn't often, they returned to their base at night, turning the villages they had just fought and bled for back over to the Viet Cong. "Anything you could do wrong, we did it," he often shouted. Taylor's anger spread like a virus through the restless minds in Sosh. "Bill would go into a rant and absolutely make your brain itch," said Asa Clark, another Vietnam vet who arrived at Sosh in the late 1970s. By the time he and Petraeus teamed up on their Vietnam paper, Taylor had left the Army and was working at a policy think tank in Washington.

The conference, held in early summer in a large auditorium on the West Point campus, attracted a diverse crowd of military officers, academics, and Pentagon officials. Though Petraeus had done most of the actual writing, the better-known Taylor gave the public presentation on the paper, which argued somewhat prosaically that Vietnam had made the U.S. military and its political leadership reluctant to use force. Afterward, Petraeus settled into a folding chair in the back of the auditorium for the conference's main attraction. Major Andy Krepinevich, a Sosh professor with a doctorate from Harvard, had written a sweeping history of Vietnam that painstakingly catalogued the mistakes of the war and punctured the Army's conventional wisdom on why it had lost. Writing during his three years at Sosh, Krepinevich was able to feed off the frustration that had taken root in the department. His work came to be pa.s.sed around like a seditious tract, the sort of unauthorized thinking that resonated with some and exasperated others, not least because of his Harvard pedigree and lack of Vietnam service.

After the war, the Army had blamed its defeat on a fickle American public and meddling political leaders who prohibited the military from launching a conventional a.s.sault on North Vietnam and its military. Attacks in the north had largely been confined to bombing, and even those had been continually modulated in hopes of drawing the Communist leaders into a negotiated settlement. In the South the Army chased after Viet Cong guerrillas who senior officers later insisted were merely a distraction. This argument, advanced by Army War College professor Harry Summers and others, appealed to a demoralized force that was looking for an excuse to forget Vietnam, abandon guerrilla warfare, and focus on fighting familiar types of wars. Krepinevich, by contrast, insisted that the Army had lost in Vietnam not because of meddling civilians but because of its own incompetence. Its search-and-destroy tactics had alienated the very people it was supposed to be protecting. "The Army ended up trying to fight the kind of conventional war that it was trained, organized and prepared (and that it wanted wanted) to fight instead of the counterinsurgency war that it was sent to fight," he argued. To make matters worse, the 1980s Army was compounding its error by focusing almost exclusively on conventional combat, giving little thought to how it might fight future guerrilla wars, which seemed "the most likely area of future conflict for the Army," he concluded.

Other officers with less fort.i.tude than Krepinevich might have toned down their dissertation or quietly let it slip into academic obscurity, but he had ambitions to hold a mirror up to the Army's flaws. Petraeus, listening in the audience as he outlined his arguments, was impressed. After Krepinevich finished his remarks, he introduced himself and asked if he could get a copy of the dissertation.

The two officers long had been on parallel intellectual paths. Krepinevich graduated three years before Petraeus at West Point and had gone into the artillery branch, where he was plucked from the regular Army by Olvey and sent to Harvard. There he decided on an impulse to conduct his doctoral research on Vietnam. "I always wondered, how in the h.e.l.l did we lose that war?" recalled Krepinevich. He turned his dissertation into a book, The Army and Vietnam The Army and Vietnam, that was published in 1986 to widespread praise in the New York Times New York Times and other mainstream publications. "From the Army perspective, the account is certainly accurate, and devastating," wrote William Colby, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (though he chided Krepinevich for giving short shrift to the CIA's counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, which he had directed). It also drew praise from Sosh's longtime Asia expert, George Osborn, who wrote in the book's foreword that Krepinevich's dogged work had revealed the "doctrinal rigidity at all levels of the U.S. Army." and other mainstream publications. "From the Army perspective, the account is certainly accurate, and devastating," wrote William Colby, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (though he chided Krepinevich for giving short shrift to the CIA's counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, which he had directed). It also drew praise from Sosh's longtime Asia expert, George Osborn, who wrote in the book's foreword that Krepinevich's dogged work had revealed the "doctrinal rigidity at all levels of the U.S. Army."

The acclaim from outsiders made the Army even more defensive. In what amounted to the official response, retired General Bruce Palmer, a commander in Vietnam who had penned his own lengthy history of the conflict, wrote a review for the Army War College's journal blasting the book for its "crippling naivete" and an overall "lack of historical breadth and objectivity." Taking a job at the Pentagon after leaving Sosh, Krepinevich received a call one day from the West Point superintendent's office asking if he was the officer who wrote "that book about Vietnam." After Krepinevich confirmed that he was, the caller hung up without explanation. Only later did he learn from a friend on the faculty that the superintendent had banned him from speaking on campus. Most important forums where he might have spread his message within the Army ignored him. He retired a few years later as a lieutenant colonel, his book all but forgotten until the Army found itself fighting another intractable insurgency in Iraq.

Petraeus later referred to Krepinevich's treatment as "unsettling" and "enough to make any internal critic think twice" about challenging Army orthodoxy too openly. But in a less confrontational way, that was exactly what Petraeus himself was doing. He had been thinking about Vietnam since the 1970s, when his ten-day sojourn to France piqued his interest in Bigeard and the French experience in Indochina. He also talked for hours about the conflict with his father-in-law, General William Knowlton, who as a young officer attached to Westmoreland's staff in Saigon had helped run a rural development program aimed at winning over Vietnamese peasants. Later, at Fort Leavenworth, Petraeus and five other students had studied the largest helicopter a.s.sault of the war, Operation Junction City, in 1967. They concluded that such search-and-destroy missions were ineffective against the Viet Cong, who simply melted away rather than fight. "Large unit tactics do not appear to have been appropriate for what was primarily a political war and an insurgency," they wrote.

Once he reached West Point, Petraeus labored in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Thayer Hall for the next two years on his own Vietnam dissertation, typing on a clunky desktop computer while also teaching cla.s.ses to cadets. In the summer, between his first and second years at Sosh, he traveled to the Panama Ca.n.a.l Zone, the headquarters of the United States Southern Command, where Jack Galvin, his mentor from the 24th, was now in command. With leftist guerrillas fighting the U.S.-backed right-wing government in El Salvador, Galvin was overseeing the military's first counterinsurgency operation since Vietnam. The two wars were nothing alike, though. Congress, eager to stave off another overseas commitment, had with the quiet support of the Pentagon put strict limits on the effort. A few dozen American Special Forces soldiers were involved in training the Salvadoran military, trying to rein in death squads, and extending the government's control to areas cleared of guerrillas. The Americans were barred from combat.

Petraeus attached himself to Galvin for the next six weeks, living again, if only temporarily, the glamorous life of an American officer abroad. They celebrated on the Fourth of July at Galvin's porticoed residence overlooking the ca.n.a.l, drinking champagne sent over by Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. They made trips to Peru, Colombia, and El Salvador, all of which were fighting insurgencies of varying intensity. It was a heady experience. In a stopover in the Salvadoran capital, Petraeus strode into President Jose Napoleon Duarte's office with a loaded submachine gun tucked underneath his arm. A Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal reporter who ran into the exuberant young major that summer quoted him on the newspaper's front page as saying counterinsurgency was becoming a "growth industry." Yet Petraeus was also struck by how oblivious most of his own Army was to what was happening in El Salvador. Here was a small war the Army was actually involved in, he recalled thinking, but outside of Galvin's staff virtually all of the Army's energy and thought were focused elsewhere. reporter who ran into the exuberant young major that summer quoted him on the newspaper's front page as saying counterinsurgency was becoming a "growth industry." Yet Petraeus was also struck by how oblivious most of his own Army was to what was happening in El Salvador. Here was a small war the Army was actually involved in, he recalled thinking, but outside of Galvin's staff virtually all of the Army's energy and thought were focused elsewhere.

Galvin, in his usual provocative way, wanted to spread the word about what was happening in his vast domain. He told Petraeus to ghostwrite an essay using a speech that Galvin had delivered in London on counterinsurgency and to get it published in a military journal. The article, ent.i.tled "Uncomfortable Wars," sounded many of the same warnings as Krepinevich had: "There are many indicators that we are moving into a world in which subversive activities, civil disturbances, guerilla warfare, and low-level violence will grow and multiply," it argued.

After returning to West Point, Petraeus finished his dissertation, writing a prescient final chapter that criticized the Pentagon view that the U.S. military should only be committed to wars in which it could use overwhelming force to achieve clear objectives. This preference for short, firepower-intensive battles would soon be dubbed the Powell Doctrine, named for its most prominent adherent, General Colin Powell. Such an all-or-nothing approach to war was "unrealistic," chided Petraeus, who had never been in combat. The Army might prefer only rapid, conventional wars with broad popular support. But sooner or later it would be sent by the country's political leaders into a protracted conflict in which its foes would try to blend in with the populace, as the Viet Cong had done. In this environment, he argued, the United States would have to limit its use of firepower and try to win over the population through political and economic measures. In short, the Army would have to apply the sort of cla.s.sic counterinsurgency strategy that its generals were explicitly rejecting. He concluded by calling for the United States to rebuild its counterinsurgency forces and expertise.

Unlike Krepinevich, Petraeus never published his dissertation's controversial conclusions. Like many high achievers who pa.s.s through Sosh, he was more interested in rising through the Army than in provoking its top bra.s.s. Nor did he remain the normal three years in the department. In the spring of his second year, he left to go work as a speechwriter and advisor to Galvin, who had been appointed supreme allied commander of NATO in Europe. Petraeus's last-minute departure rankled some of his colleagues who wondered why he got to play by different rules. The truth was that even in a department that practiced unabashed elitism, he stood out as special.

To fill his teaching slot, Olvey had to pull another officer out of graduate school early. The unlucky officer was a captain named William Sutey, who arrived from Syracuse University as Petraeus was leaving. At a reception for incoming Sosh faculty members that summer, Petraeus introduced himself to Sutey and asked where he had gone to school and what he had studied. "You are going to finish your Ph.D., right?" he inquired.

Sutey explained that he had not been able to finish the required courses. He didn't mention that it was Petraeus's exit that had interrupted his studies (or that he already had a second master's degree, earned before he joined the Army). A wan smile came across Petraeus's face. Here was somebody who didn't measure up, who lacked drive or intellect-or at least that was how Sutey interpreted the bland look. In a few seconds their conversation ended awkwardly. Petraeus spun on his heel and walked away.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Trophy Grafenwohr, West Germany June 1987 Lieutenant Ed Ma.s.sar 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 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 compet.i.tion. 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 Grafenwohr, a vast training area near the Czech border that once had been used by the n.a.z.is and now was a main training range for NATO. The compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tion, an embarra.s.sing 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 Wall Street Journal story about the 1985 compet.i.tion, where the United States had eked out second place. This year no effort had been spared to bring home the trophy. Ma.s.sar and his men were in an improved M1, rushed to Europe for the compet.i.tion. 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 a.s.sembly 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 Grafenwohr, 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. story about the 1985 compet.i.tion, where the United States had eked out second place. This year no effort had been spared to bring home the trophy. Ma.s.sar and his men were in an improved M1, rushed to Europe for the compet.i.tion. 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 a.s.sembly 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 Grafenwohr, 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 Ma.s.sar'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 a.s.signed 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 st.i.tches 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 a.s.signments 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 bypa.s.s 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 a.s.surances 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 a.s.signment 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 bra.s.s 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 a.s.signment 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 c.o.c.ktails. 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 a.s.signment, Chiarelli thought. Once his father had stood in the turret of his Sherman tank as it motored into the n.a.z.i 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 Grafenwohr 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 a.s.sured 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 compet.i.tion rules, each tank team training for the compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tion 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 Grafenwohr 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 h.e.l.l 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 compet.i.tion, Delta Company's tanks were consistently hitting only twenty-six of thirty-two targets, which was not enough to win the trophy, if past compet.i.tions 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 compet.i.tion. 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 compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tion. 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 Ma.s.sar'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. Ma.s.sar'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 pa.s.s 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 Top Gun theme song was playing at top volume over the loudspeaker until a gruff voice rang out from grandstand, "Turn that G.o.dd.a.m.n 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. theme song was playing at top volume over the loudspeaker until a gruff voice rang out from grandstand, "Turn that G.o.dd.a.m.n 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. Ma.s.sar's men had taken an average of a full second less than every other compet.i.tor 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n thing," Chiarelli fired back.

"You took a h.e.l.l 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 compet.i.tion that the United States had won around the same time. "These compet.i.tions 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 ma.s.sive M1s through the front gate, pulling up in formation to cheers from the soldiers and families who had a.s.sembled to welcome them home. The division band played the theme to the movie Patton Patton as generals made speeches and handed out medals to every member of the platoon. Originally, the Army bra.s.s had wanted to decorate only Ma.s.sar'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. as generals made speeches and handed out medals to every member of the platoon. Originally, the Army bra.s.s had wanted to decorate only Ma.s.sar'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 compet.i.tion, 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 compet.i.tion, 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 Grafenwohr in Germany and in the Mojave Desert of California actually came to pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sign 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 compet.i.tion in Germany, Casey's 700-soldier battalion got its shot in the California desert. His commander at the time was Colonel Wesley Clark, a hypercompet.i.tive 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 ant.i.tank missile weapons in the fight. Mounted atop 1960s-era armored vehicles, the launchers typically were trapped behind faster-moving tanks. Casey snuck his ant.i.tank 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 ant.i.tank 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 rea.s.sign 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 a.s.sault 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sumed 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 Washington Post before heading over to the Pentagon gym. 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 a.s.signments 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 a.s.signment 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.

CHAPTER SIX.

No Job for Amateurs 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, 1999Vicenza, 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 ma.s.sive 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 a.s.sault 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.