All In (16 page)

On the trip back to FOB Andar, the driver of Fivecoat's MRAP said at one point, “We've crossed the point of no return, sir.” That simply meant that if an accident requiring a medevac occurred, the convoy would continue on to Andar rather than head back to the district center. Everyone in the MRAP remained quiet. Once back at Andar, Fivecoat was told that one of the mine-clearing trucks from the South Carolina Guard had hit a mine, killing a soldier whose son happened to be in Fivecoat's battalion. The unit chaplain came into Fivecoat's office and explained that the mine-detection vehicle had flipped onto the guardsman, killing him instantly. It was after midnight, and Fivecoat was starting to focus on a raid planned for 5:00 that morning. A theater policy allowed any next of kin to escort the body of a relative back to the United States. The chaplain told Fivecoat that he was going to go and wake the soldier and get him on the next helicopter out, at 2:00
A.M.
, with his father's body. Fivecoat didn't flinch, thankful to have the chaplain attend to this tragic bit of daily business. Fivecoat had lost two soldiers so far, fewer than his compatriots in the south but still hard losses. War was tough, he said, without elaborating, but his eyes showed the burden behind the mask. Deaths represented a statistic in Washington but a face to him and his fellow commanders. The civilians killed a few days earlier in the Apache attack were still on his mind. Two children had died, and Fivecoat had gone into town to apologize to the grieving family and pay reparations. Fivecoat's voice cracked as he talked about the incident—he had a one-year-old of his own. But a moment later the stoic had returned.

He seemed weary of war, no longer certain that taking the gloves off and fighting hard, as he'd advised Petraeus back in July, would be enough. “There's gotta be some sort of game changer,” he said. “We'll keep doing COIN, all day long, but it's hard to see payoffs,” he lamented. “And we can continue to fight, but there's . . . to use the Vietnam analogy, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. We're all in, but I'm not sure the Afghans are all in. You can even see it in the senior Afghan leaders as they're all getting their houses in Dubai and carting a whole bunch of our cash out of the country.”

Having served as Petraeus's aide as the 101st pushed from Kuwait into Baghdad and all the way up to Mosul in March 2003, he knew the general was perfectly capable of skepticism. He had been there in southern Iraq when Petraeus famously asked, after recognizing the challenges that lay ahead, “Tell me how this ends?” But he also knew that if there was anyone now who had a sense of how this war in Afghanistan would end, it was Petraeus. How would Petraeus counsel him now? Fivecoat knew there was no need.
“Petraeus, in his relentlessly positive way, would say, you know, keep pushing it every day, trying to do as much as you can.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL
David Petraeus's special relationship with the 101st Airborne Division began in mid-1991 when he became commander of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, Brigadier General Jack Keane was the assistant division commander for operations and already seen as next in line to assume command of the 101st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles.”

The Rakkasans' 3rd Battalion had recently returned from the Gulf War in Iraq, where it had cut off a Republican Guard retreat to Kuwait as part of a massive air assault by the brigade of which it was part. But by all accounts, it was not quite a “high-performing unit” when Petraeus took over. Most of its soldiers had never encountered anyone quite like their intense, lean, physical-fitness-fanatic battalion commander. Inspiring his men to achieve “iron” fitness was Petraeus's top priority, an appropriate one for an air-assault infantry battalion. In an effort to create a “culture of hardness,” Petraeus developed the “Iron Rakkasan” fitness competition and challenged his men to compete and beat his score. Nobody did during his two years of command, during which the battalion became officially known as the Iron Rakkasans.

A month after he assumed command of the Rakkasans, Petraeus was in the field walking with a unit while observing a live-fire maneuver exercise when a soldier sprinting out of a bunker tripped and accidentally discharged his M16 rifle. The shot hit Petraeus in the chest and left a massive exit wound in his back. Brigadier General Keane was by his side watching the exercise when Petraeus went down. “He's been shot—get the damn medic over here!” Keane shouted.

Blood came oozing out of Petraeus's back. Captain Fred Johnson, the company commander, shouted orders to halt the exercise and called medics to the scene. They ripped off Petraeus's battledress blouse and went to work. Keane held Petraeus in his arms and watched the color draining from his face.

“Dave, I want you to stay with us,” Keane told Petraeus. Petraeus gripped Keane's hand in answer.

In a matter of minutes, Petraeus was evacuated by a Black Hawk medevac aircraft to the post hospital, where a chest tube was inserted, and then flown on to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Tennessee, with Keane at his side. An experienced surgeon named Bill Frist—who would later become a Republican senator from Tennessee and Senate majority leader—sliced through Petraeus's latissimus dorsi muscle to conduct thoracic surgery and cauterize an artery that had been nicked.
Petraeus had nearly bled to death internally.

Holly had just finished taking her children and one of her daughter's friends to the movies near Fort Campbell. A friend contacted by medical officials broke the news to her after tracking her down. “Sit down, Holly,” she said. “The good news is that he will live. The bad news is that he has been shot. The fact is that we need to go to the hospital.” Holly said nothing.

But Petraeus soon turned his recovery into a competition to see how fast he could return to command. Doctors on at least one occasion had to order him to cool it. He was back in record time. He gave the soldier who had accidentally shot him a chance to redeem himself—by attending Ranger School. Twenty-seven days after the accident, Petraeus was back in the field, with his rucksack over one shoulder while the other shoulder healed, for a massive deployment and air-assault exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Keane later reflected that it was Petraeus's drive and spirit that captured Keane's attention.

Petraeus had followed General Vuono's example of the imperative of developing key themes and stressing them on every possible occasion. Petraeus's themes for the unit remained consistent over the years. First was physical fitness: An infantryman in an air-assault unit needed to view his body as the “ultimate weapon.” Next, he demanded discipline—military bearing and self-control. He required everyone to get “high and tight” haircuts, button the top button of their combat jackets in the field and camouflage their faces to a specific standard. It was all a part of his endeavor to shape the culture. Then he stressed, in order, small-unit training and live-fire exercises, Ranger training and air-assault operations. No one was more competitive. “Life is a competitive endeavor,” he would remind them.

Even the skeptics had to admit after a year that Petraeus had taken an average unit and made it the best in the division. He stressed training. He stressed winning. By the end of his tour, the Iron Rakkasan
battalion
had more Ranger School–qualified soldiers than any other
brigade
in the division. A memorandum from one of Petraeus's subordinates summed up the driven Petraeus. “Without a doubt, we are doing some of the most complex and exacting training on post . . . but, this training has come at a price . . . many in the battalion question . . . if the late hours and weekends away from home were really worth it.” Petraeus expected others to keep up the high standard he set for himself. The memorandum continued, “More than any commander I know of, you have taken a keen and proactive interest in the development of the battalion's officer corps. Even if some officers do not recognize how your emphasis on certain professional skills may apply to their careers, you must continue to stress them.” “The challenge,” Petraeus recalled, “was changing the culture without alienating those who really didn't embrace it fully.”

He was more than a taskmaster. He believed in mentoring, and being mentored. He believed strongly in earned redemption. When West Point called him and asked him whether he would be willing to rehabilitate a cadet who'd been kicked out of the academy for an honor violation, Petraeus agreed—and challenged the soldier to complete a series of the infantry's most demanding schools, including the Air Assault and Ranger courses, and the trooper succeeded, ultimately returning to West Point and graduating.

Keane became division commander just after the conclusion of Petraeus's two years in command of the Iron Rakkasans. The two had bonded after the shooting. Keane promptly made Petraeus the division's chief of operations, plans and training—the perfect preparation for his future command of the division itself. “He was hands down the best battalion commander I had observed,” Keane said. “He had confidence. His knowledge about the job and what needed to be done was superior to others'. He had a sense of himself and what he brought to the job. He had a vision of where he would take the battalion.”

UNLIKE FIVECOAT
and Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel J. B. Vowell, another 101st Airborne battalion commander, fought a mountain war. In the early-morning light on June 27—four days after Obama tapped Petraeus as his new commander in Afghanistan—units from Vowell's 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment staged a large-scale air-assault operation in the mountains above the village of Daridam, in mountainous Kunar Province, along the Pakistan border. They were part of the 101st's Bastogne Brigade. Twin-rotor Chinook helicopters dropped their ramps and deposited hundreds of soldiers across a series of overlook positions on the mountainside that enabled them to see movement in the valley below. They dug in with heavy machine guns, surrounded by sandbags, expecting to be attacked by Taliban fighters in the valley below.

Vowell's battalion was nicknamed “No Slack,” having been deployed for seven straight years during the Vietnam War, the longest of any battalion. Vowell, 41, was an Army brat whose father had been awarded a Silver Star as a company commander in Vietnam, went to college at the University of Alabama, fully intending to become a doctor. But he took a military science class, fell in with ROTC, and realized during an all-night training exercise that leading men in combat was his calling. He typified the experience level common in the Army after nearly a decade of war following the September 11 terror attacks. He had already served in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and in Iraq from 2006 to 2007 during the surge, when he briefed Petraeus at the start of the campaign. He had never forgotten how Petraeus, at the start of the Iraq surge, told his battalion staff that they were there to secure the people and win, not just transition to Iraqi forces and race for the exits.

Schooled in Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine, Vowell knew that this large-scale air assault, code-named Operation Strong Eagle I, was unorthodox. Counterinsurgency was all about small footprints, not large offensive operations—though some of the latter were needed, as in Kandahar and Helmand. But Vowell had come to realize that the Taliban were a far more formidable force in Kunar Province than anyone had expected. Indeed, Vowell had lost eight soldiers during his first month in Afghanistan in a series of savage attacks and ambushes. The only way he could help build an effective provincial government in Kunar was to clear this valley of what he estimated to be three hundred Taliban fighters. He had told his men to dig in with heavy weaponry because he expected a ferocious assault. He didn't have to wait long.

Within hours after the battalion's troopers assumed their positions, the Taliban opened up with a withering barrage. Vowell's scout platoon leader, Captain Kevin Mott, was shot in the head at his position along the southern mountain. The impact threw him down the mountainside. His platoon fought off a determined series of enemy attacks intended to capture him. Barely conscious, Mott had managed to crawl to a rock outcropping and hunker down. Air Force pararescue jumpers were ultimately able to get him out. They also grabbed Mott's radio operator, who had been hit in the body armor that protected his chest. Both were to make full recoveries. The next thirteen hours would be filled with frantic calls for medevacs, artillery, mortars, close air support and resupply.

Vowell had intended to oversee setting the conditions for the battle from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, directing Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, reconnaissance drones and radio-jamming technology. He was planning to land once his soldiers started their push down into the valley. But as the Taliban unleashed simultaneous attacks on his positions, Vowell realized the mountainous terrain was making it impossible for his units to talk to one another. He decided to stay aloft in the Black Hawk in order to maintain full communications. He would return to Asadabad and refuel every two hours for the battle's duration. He desperately wanted to be down on the ground, in the fight. But he knew that if he landed, he would lose control of the bigger picture. His men spent the rest of the day fighting down the mountain and seizing the town. They killed more than 150 insurgents. Vowell lost two sergeants and watched as numerous soldiers were wounded in a battle that raged for hours at maximum intensity in 120-degree heat. It was the No Slack battalion's largest fight since Vietnam: Seven hundred U.S. and Afghan soldiers had assaulted nearly three hundred entrenched Taliban fighters—and won. “Finally, someone has done something good!” Fazlullah Wahidi, the district governor, told Vowell after the smoke had cleared. Nothing like this had happened in Kunar in decades. The Soviets tried but had dozens annihilated in the same valley Vowell's men had just claimed.

Strong Eagle I was the battalion's turning point after losing so many soldiers during its first month. With it, they had regained the initiative and driven the enemy from a key stronghold. Now that they had the momentum, Vowell became convinced that his men should go farther into the Ghaki Valley to the town of Chinar and hunt down remaining insurgents. He convinced Major General Campbell and his brigade commander, Colonel Andrew Poppas, to support Operation Strong Eagle II. The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) was well trained and equipped for just this type of full-scale air assault.
The division had six dozen Apache gunships and squadrons of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters that could fly four thousand soldiers more than one hundred miles in six hours. But when the operation launched in the dead of night, the No Slack soldiers encountered nothing but silence. There were no insurgents left to attack them. In talking to locals after the sun rose, Vowell was told over and over that the enemy was gone from the area. He realized he now had a chance to begin successful counterinsurgency operations with villagers, even start reconciliation efforts. Over the coming weeks, twenty insurgent fighters presented themselves to Governor Wahidi and said they were done fighting.