The Fourth Star (13 page)

Two weeks later Chiarelli, still grieving, was back in Germany for the start of the CAT competition. 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 competition 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 competition. 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 Massar’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. Massar’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 pass 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
theme song was playing at top volume over the loudspeaker until a gruff voice rang out from grandstand, “Turn that goddamn 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. Massar’s men had taken an average of a full second less than every other competitor 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 goddamn thing,” Chiarelli fired back.

“You took a hell 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 competition that the United States had won around the same time. “These competitions 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 massive M1s through the front gate, pulling up in formation to cheers from the soldiers and families who had assembled to welcome them home. The division band played the theme to the movie
Patton
as generals made speeches and handed out medals to every member of the platoon. Originally, the Army brass had wanted to decorate only Massar’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 competition, 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 competition, 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 Grafenwöhr in Germany and in the Mojave Desert of California actually came to pass. 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 passed 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 assign 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 Saturdays 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 Canal 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 competition in Germany, Casey’s 700-soldier battalion got its shot in the California desert. His commander at the time was Colonel Wesley Clark, a hypercompetitive 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 antitank missile weapons in the fight. Mounted atop 1960s-era armored vehicles, the launchers typically were trapped behind faster-moving tanks. Casey snuck his antitank 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 antitank
missiles,” Casey had written on one such photo, which in 2008 hung in the Pentagon office of one of his former lieutenants.