The Fourth Star (11 page)

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 assigned 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 glasses 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 passed 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 assault 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
) 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 fortitude 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 hell did we lose that war?” recalled Krepinevich. He turned his dissertation into a book,
The Army and Vietnam
, that was published in 1986 to widespread praise in the
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.”

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 naiveté” 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 assault 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 basement of
Thayer Hall for the next two years on his own Vietnam dissertation, typing on a clunky desktop computer while also teaching classes to cadets. In the summer, between his first and second years at Sosh, he traveled to the Panama Canal 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 canal, 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 José Napoleón Duarte’s office with a loaded submachine gun tucked underneath his arm. A
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.

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, entitled “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 classic 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 pass through Sosh, he was more interested in rising through the Army than in provoking its top brass. 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.

L
ieutenant Ed Massar poked his helmet out of the turret as his M1 Abrams tank rumbled to the starting line and halted, its main gun raised to fire. Three more sixty-ton M1s drove up and took positions on his flanks as the soundtrack to
Top Gun
, Hollywood’s unabashed celebration of American military prowess, blared over loudspeakers. In a nearby observation area, Major Peter Chiarelli watched anxiously through binoculars as the four tanks of Delta Company’s 1st Platoon prepared to move out. Chiarelli had spent eleven months training for this moment, the last run on the last day of NATO’s prestigious tank gunnery competition. Unfortunately, nothing was going according to plan. Just a few minutes earlier, the electronic gun sight in one of the tanks had failed, forcing Chiarelli to rush one of the four-man crews into a replacement tank. Freak weather on a previous run had left the U.S. in third place. Now as he watched and waited, Chiarelli silently prayed nothing else went wrong.

Spread out below him was the gently sloping countryside of Range 301 at Grafenwöhr, a vast training area near the Czech border that once had
been used by the Nazis and now was a main training range for NATO. The competition had been under way for four days, and multiple teams from Britain, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, and West Germany had already motored through the range, blasting their main guns at the pop-up plywood targets as though it was a carnival shooting arcade. Chiarelli knew that 1st Platoon needed a flawless run to have any chance of beating the Germans, who days before had hit all thirty-two targets without a miss.