All In (11 page)

“The first time I met him, I knew he was different and unique,” said Nightingale, who later would help develop what evolved into the Joint Special Operations Command. He would also play a key role in planning the ill-fated Iran Hostage Rescue Mission that ended when aircraft failed in the desert en route to Tehran in April 1980. “I said in an evaluation report that this man has the potential to be the chief of staff of the Army. The colonel running our higher headquarters said, ‘You can't say this.' But I said, ‘It's true,'” Nightingale recalled. “He already was a cut above everybody else.” His skills were such that, even as a young lieutenant, he ran certain aspects of the unit during the tenure of a very hands-off battalion commander. Nightingale liked to think that he taught Petraeus to never take no for an answer—and to understand that there's an exception to every rule.

The 509th presented Petraeus with ample opportunity to train with NATO forces, and he did so in Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Turkey. On a training mission in France to compete for French Jump Wings, he learned about Marcel Bigeard, a legendary French general and paratrooper who had been captured during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, in Vietnam. Upon Bigeard's release, he went back to France, regrouped with his men and, employing the lessons they had learned fighting the Viet Minh, attempted to pacify the Casbah in Algeria. Bigeard was the inspiration for Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Raspeguy in Jean Larteguy's 1963 novel
The Centurions.
Petraeus read the book as a captain and admired what it had to say about leadership and the cohesion of successful fighting units. Petraeus later wrote to Bigeard, beginning a correspondence that would continue intermittently until Bigeard's death in the summer of 2010, three weeks after Petraeus took command in Afghanistan. By then Bigeard had acknowledged Petraeus's accomplishment in Iraq and addressed him as a peer.

After his tour in Italy, Petraeus attended the Armor Officer Advanced Course, following which he was assigned to the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) at Fort Stewart, Georgia. He and McChrystal served briefly together there as captains. Both had their eye on assignments with the elite 1st Ranger Battalion, a unit formed in the mid-1970s as part of a chief of staff of the Army initiative implemented by Nightingale and others to build a unit of exceptionally high standards and training readiness. Petraeus so distinguished himself in the 24th as a company commander that he was selected to serve as the aide-de-camp to the incoming division commander, then–Major General Jack Galvin, who would become his most important mentor.

Galvin was an intellectual force in the American military who, like Knowlton, came from Massachusetts and was an archetypal soldier-scholar. Commissioned in the infantry from West Point in 1954, Galvin came of age in Vietnam and was among a key group of officers who helped rebuild the Army in the 1980s. When Galvin arrived at Fort Stewart and assumed command of the 24th Infantry Division, he found that Petraeus had managed to anticipate all of the first tasks Galvin would need done—and accomplished them in advance. Petraeus's chagrin over giving up a battalion operations job in the division, however, was not completely muted.

Sensing this, Galvin assured Petraeus that the insights he would gain would contribute to his personal development like no other assignment. Galvin took Petraeus on trips throughout the United States as he oversaw division training—to include maneuver exercises at Eglin Air Force Base, in Florida and Fort Bliss, Texas, as well as a major international exercise called “Bright Star” in Egypt, which was designed as preparation for a potential ground war should the Soviets invade Iran. In all, Galvin and Petraeus had thirty-five trips together in twelve months. “Help me expand my impact,” Galvin instructed Petraeus, expecting the young officer to be not just his eyes and ears but a surrogate voice as well. In turn, Petraeus inspired Galvin, according to Galvin's unpublished memoirs and their exchange of letters. Galvin considered him an intellectual “sounding board” with “sharp and often original perspectives.” Galvin's associates thought Petraeus was a “bit of a tonic” and source of energy for the senior officer. Petraeus took notes as Galvin schooled the division's senior officers in the importance of military history, the concept of “chain training,” the conduct of heavy/light force operations and soldier-scholar skills. They even discussed the history of aides-de-camp, which Galvin, slightly tongue in cheek, said he thought was “glorious.”

Galvin also schooled Petraeus on a concept he called “the big M,” which stood for individual mystique or mythology. “‘When the going gets hard, we need a leader to pull us together,'” he remembered telling Petraeus. “‘Through your mythology, people create you. Set the example. It doesn't have to be flamboyant, like Patton and his pistols always seen driving to the front. Ridgway and his grenades. Grant with his cigar. They want you to be bigger than you are, so they magnify you. They laud you to everyone. Live up to it all with the highest standards of integrity. You become part of a legend.'”

Galvin gave Petraeus a signed print of Remington's
Stampede
as a farewell gift to symbolize the chaos surrounding the transformation of the under-strength 24th Infantry Division into a trained and ready mechanized infantry unit that became part of the nation's new Rapid Deployment Force. The print—and its symbolism—would accompany Petraeus throughout his career.

Galvin was also instrumental in convincing Petraeus to go to graduate school, which took Petraeus, his wife and their first baby, Anne, to Princeton in the fall of 1984, where he began work on a master's degree—and ultimately a Ph.D.—at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. There, Petraeus sought out the tutelage and mentorship of Professor Richard Ullman, known for his common sense and realistic liberalism in foreign policy. He would push Petraeus intellectually. During work on his doctoral dissertation, which he completed in 1987, Petraeus taught at West Point's Social Sciences department. His son, Stephen, was born during this academic hiatus, just miles from his father's birthplace, and four years after the birth of the Petraeuses' daughter, Anne, who was born during the general's year at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

Petraeus's growing interest in Vietnam—the subject of his doctoral research—and counterinsurgency were evident in a letter he wrote to Galvin in August 1985 from West Point. “I think the next big debate will be about counterinsurgency operations—whether the U.S. should get involved in them, and if so, how,” he wrote. “One of the sub-debates will undoubtedly be over whether the Army is capable of developing forces suited for counterinsurgency operations.”

The following summer, Galvin invited him to spend time with him at the Southern Command headquarters, in Panama, which Galvin led as a newly promoted four-star general. Petraeus was thrilled and offered some research prospects—to compare and contrast the differences between the intervention in Vietnam and the U.S. military's activities in Central America, or perhaps a look at the efforts of military and civilian officials to coordinate their activities. “These efforts,” Petraeus observed, “seem a good example of political-military integration, something that, as you know, many in the military would rather avoid, preferring instead to worry only about ‘purely military matters' and wanting to be left alone in pursuing them. Those instincts are, of course, contrary to what must be done in fighting low intensity conflict. Civil-military integration efforts also seem to be an example of success in spite of the system, rather than because of it.”

The theater for which Galvin's Southern Command was responsible encompassed Central and South America, and it was defined by multiple Communist insurgencies, which Petraeus found fascinating. He traveled with Galvin throughout Panama and to Honduras and El Salvador, where U.S. trainers were helping the Salvadoran army defeat Communist guerrillas. Although brief, the time was formative for Petraeus, who had known only garrison and field training to that point. “This has been a tremendous experience,” Petraeus wrote to a colleague from Princeton in July 1986. “When I showed up at the house [of the Mil Group Commander in El Salvador]—his wife greeted me, ushered me to the guest wing . . . and handed me a loaded MP-5 submachine gun to keep me company. . . . I [later] asked a Salvadoran soldier if he'd seen much combat. ‘Not much,' he said, matter-of-factly; ‘I've only been in about 85 firefights.'”

At the end of the summer, Galvin sent a note to the head of the Social Sciences department, thanking him for releasing his favorite protégé: “Dave did not try to wear my stars while here, but rather helped me to wear them more effectively. I told him to help and expand my impact and he did that—without ruffling feathers. In fact, his enthusiasm, dedication, and pleasant personality proved infectious to others in the command group.”

Petraeus sent a note to Galvin from West Point upon his return in July 1986. “To really make an impact on Army thinking about small wars,” Petraeus reflected, “you need to institutionalize your ideas. That requires, of course, that you get your ideas/concepts into doctrinal manuals.” Petraeus proposed that Galvin encourage his staff to produce a new version of a field circular on low-intensity conflict. He thought it could evolve into a replacement for a “rather poor” field manual on the subject drafted in the early eighties. A quality field manual on this type of warfare, he said, presciently, “could be very valuable in coming years.”

Petraeus continued to immerse himself in the study of Vietnam and low-intensity conflict, reflecting in the same letter to Galvin on a particular book that had captured his interests, Andrew Krepinevich's
The
Army and Vietnam
. In it, Krepinevich argued that the Army had not gotten its campaign strategy right, that it had focused too much on the “big war”—large units conducting search-and-destroy operations—when it should have put more emphasis on the “smaller war”: small elements living with and securing the people and helping develop host-nation capacity to secure and govern themselves.
Petraeus thought Krepinevich's book was “the best there is” and later used it to inform the
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
. “Maybe we should marry Andy's book and Harry Summers'
On Strategy
(which, as you know, criticizes our preoccupation with the insurgency),” he wrote to Galvin. “The two together might have provided a solution—though I occasionally wonder if there was anything we could have done to ‘win' in Vietnam given the obvious domestic unwillingness to stay for the long haul and given the absence of a ‘Vietnamese Duarte,'” Petraeus concluded, referring to José Napoleón Duarte, the Salvadoran leader with whom the American military successfully worked to demobilize and reintegrate the guerrillas there.

Petraeus completed his Princeton Ph.D. thesis,
The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of American Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era,
in 1987. He concluded that, contrary to stereotypes, military officials in the wake of Vietnam had not been as hawkish as their civilian counterparts. He based this on an examination of historical case studies between Korea and Vietnam, a discussion of the Vietnam legacy and finally a review of the post-Vietnam military interventions—eleven in all—through the mid-eighties.

He found that from 1973 to 1986, military decision makers tended toward a more cautious approach than the president's most hawkish principal civilian advisers in their advice on whether to commit troops. In his research, he highlighted the conclusions of Samuel Huntington, who, in
The Soldier and the State,
his seminal work on the history of the military profession and civil-military relations up to World War II and then from 1940 through the mid-1950s, found that military officials had been cautious professionals. As for the future, he offered three conclusions. First, small wars were more likely on the threat horizon than nuclear or other large-scale ground wars. Second, the military needed to be prepared, even if it was unlikely that decision makers would advise intervention. And third, that it was wiser, when possible, to use small teams of advisers than massive troop deployments to assist countries engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign, a conclusion he drew from his experience in Latin America.

But in assessing the failure in Vietnam, rather than pinning the blame on civilian leaders or reporters (as was in vogue among those in uniform at the time), he concluded, like Krepinevich, that the Army had fought the war in the wrong way. Instead of strategies like search-and-destroy, Army commanders would have been much better off with tactics that fell under the heading of counterinsurgency.

When his studies at Princeton and his teaching at West Point came to an end, Major Petraeus again joined his mentor General Galvin, who was to become the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), in Belgium. There were nearly 250,000 U.S. forces in Europe at that time, the vast majority of them stationed in West Germany. It was key terrain for, and the focus of, the U.S. military. Petraeus agreed to serve as Galvin's military assistant under two conditions: first, that he could travel with Galvin and hear his boss deliver the speeches that Petraeus had drafted, and second, that he could be assigned to a tactical unit in Europe after a year as a speechwriter. He'd been away from troopers for five years and was anxious to return to the field.

In the meantime, he took lessons in NATO leadership. “The boss continues to amaze me even now,” Petraeus wrote to his mentor from the 509th, Nightingale, in January 1988. “As long as I've known him, [Galvin] has always, within a few months of taking command, initiated some project that proved to be truly visionary in terms of how important it later became. Here . . . it's the NATO posture related to the intermediate nuclear forces agreement.”