The Fourth Star (14 page)

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 reassign 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 assault 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 God, 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 assumed 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
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 assignments 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 assignment 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.

T
he 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 massive 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 assault 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.

Their objective was Zakho, a border town ringed by snowcapped mountains. Making camp with a contingent of Marines, they found an almost apocalyptic scene—abandoned houses, overturned cars, and boarded-up shops. As the sun set that first night, the Americans saw hundreds of flickering campfires in the surrounding peaks, where the townspeople had fled. Prior to the ground war, President George H. W. Bush had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Kurdish fighters, badly miscalculating the dictator’s weakness and the willingness of the United States to help them, had gone on the attack. To hold on to power, Hussein launched a brutal offensive against the Kurds. Now half a million refugees were huddled in the makeshift mountain camps, often without shelter or food. With winter bearing down and disease rampant, as many as a thousand Kurds were dying every day.

Once the scale of the calamity became clear, U.S. and European governments rushed in forces, including Abizaid’s battalion, to face down Hussein’s troops and coax the Kurds home. How to accomplish this was murky. Abizaid had little to guide him other than a few out-of-date maps and orders torn from a field notebook that read: “Mission: Conduct security operations in sector to protect displaced civilians. Be prepared to provide rapid reaction force to respond to requirements by headquarters.”

On one point his superiors had been adamant: worried about restarting a war they had just won, they barred Abizaid from using force unless his men were attacked. For the moment things were quiet. Iraqi units had moved a few dozen miles south and dug in. But it was a volatile situation, with the potential for shooting to erupt unexpectedly, especially early in the operation. Perhaps their biggest advantage was that the Iraqis didn’t know the Americans were barred from attacking unless threatened. “I know you understand the rules of engagement,” Abizaid told his young commanders, referring to the guidelines for firing their guns. “Your responsibility is to accomplish your mission and protect your force. I trust your judgment and I trust you.”

Abizaid’s years in the Middle East, his fluent Arabic, and his talent for improvisation made him a logical choice for this undefined mission. Most
of the other military men involved had barely heard of the Kurds’ long struggle to carve out their own independent homeland from parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. “We all took our cues from John,” recalled General John Shalikashvili, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who oversaw the operation from neighboring Turkey.

Abizaid’s experience in the Middle East gave him a view different from the one held by most of his peers, the colonels and majors who had just fought and won the Gulf War. They returned home certain that Iraq could not withstand the awesome might of the American military. Abizaid in many ways drew the opposite conclusion. His four-month mission exposed him to the barely suppressed hatreds of Iraq, a place where countrymen fought and killed each other with stunning viciousness. He emerged from the mission even more skeptical of the ability of his soldiers or any occupiers to impose their will on the country. A decade later, neoconservatives in the Bush administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, insisted that if Saddam Hussein were forced from power, democracy would quickly flower, just as it had in the Kurdish enclave. Abizaid never believed that. A foreign force like his could stop the worst of the killing and, with civilian government agencies and aid groups, carve out small enclaves of relative peace and prosperity. Sooner or later, though, an occupying army, even one with the purest of motives, would find itself hated and attacked.

Abizaid’s biggest worry was what would happen when the Kurds finally came down from the mountains. If the refugees pushed south to their homes, the Iraqi troops might resume their massacre. If the Iraqis retreated, Abizaid feared, the Kurdish rebels would slaughter the stragglers. To prevent either scenario, he planned to use his soldiers as a buffer, positioning them between the returning Kurds and the Iraqi troops. His troops had to move much sooner than he expected. A few days after Abizaid’s battalion arrived, Kurdish guerrillas, known as Peshmerga, began racing down from the mountains in white Toyota pickup trucks, clearly intent on revenge. At 7:00 a.m., in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, he ordered his battalion to move. They headed south, not knowing what lay ahead.