The Fourth Star (3 page)

Midway through a monotonous patrol, he slipped away from his group and fired a volley of blanks from his M-16 into the air. The burst of fire sent his fellow cadets scrambling in all directions. Sergeants, who were leading the training, screamed at them to take cover in a dark thicket of bushes. Abizaid emerged from the darkness, flopping down next to his best friend Karl Eikenberry, and told him with a big grin that he had ambushed his own patrol.

When Abizaid arrived at West Point, his hope was to graduate and be sent to Vietnam. Four years later, it looked like the closest he would get was the silly “Recondo” training. The Army that he saw as his ticket to something bigger was now seen by most of his generation as either a last resort for people without options or a symbol of everything that was wrong with the United States. Nowhere was that more clear than at away football games, where Abizaid’s company was in charge of the color guard. Before marching onto the field for a game against Boston College he and his fellow cadets conducted drills on how to protect the flag in case fans from the opposing team tried to grab it. As they filed into the stadium prior to the game, the cadets clustered around the colors in a tight knot, pointing the bayonets on their unloaded rifles outward, just as they had practiced. No one tried to take their flag. Instead, the rowdy and intoxicated crowd greeted them with chants of
“Sieg heil.”

The telephone calls came late at night and never lasted more than a few seconds. On the line was an Army officer from Seattle University’s ROTC department informing Pete Chiarelli which of three secret locations to show up at the following morning for drill. The department had adopted the procedure after getting anonymous threats that cadets marching in their uniforms on the campus athletic field would be firebombed, and at the time it didn’t seem so far-fetched. Some days the downtown campus
was literally ablaze in antiwar protests. In January, a bomb went off outside the Liberal Arts Building, where Chiarelli took many of his classes. In March, someone set fire to Xavier Hall the same day Barry Goldwater was scheduled to give a campus speech. After the Cambodia invasion in April, more than a thousand protesters marched in downtown Seattle, the first of several large and at times violent protests that spring that drew students from Seattle University, the University of Washington, and other schools. The ROTC programs seemed a likely target of the city’s most radical protesters.

In the spring of 1970, Chiarelli was finishing his sophomore year, commuting to school every day from his parents’ house in the hilly Seattle neighborhood of Magnolia. He would arrive before dark in his uniform and march for an hour before changing into civilian clothes for class. He had friends who joined the protests, but that wasn’t for Pete. He supported the war and may have been the only student on campus who was disappointed when his draft number came in that year at 247, too high to have to worry about being sent to Vietnam. “I was just praying for a low number so I could justify to all my friends why I was still in,” he would say later. Some ROTC cadets quit the program when they received high numbers and they no longer had to worry about the draft, but Pete actually enjoyed ROTC, especially the grueling summer training when cadets reported to Fort Lewis, the big Army base near Seattle. When he wasn’t training that summer, Chiarelli drove down to Portland to see Beth Kirby, a Seattle University classmate he was dating.

He had wanted to enlist in the Army after graduating from high school in 1968 and go to Vietnam, but his father had vetoed the idea, insisting on college first. “If you’re going to go into the Army, that’s fine, but I want you to go in as an officer,” he told his son. The son of Italian immigrants, Pete Chiarelli (he and his only son shared the same first name) served in a tank battalion in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which fought its way across North Africa, Italy, and northern France, and finally into Germany. In 1945 he won a Silver Star for helping to remove a stuck tank under enemy fire. His ability to speak Italian and his heroism helped him secure a battlefield commission as an officer even though he never attended college. After the war, his life went the way of many citizen soldiers of that era: he got
married, went back to his old job at Serv-U-Meat, a commercial butcher downtown, and raised a family. He kept his framed Silver Star citation in a closet along with a picture of himself posing atop his tank, and rarely talked about his three years fighting across Europe. Anyone who really knew him realized that the war had been the adventure of his life. In his father’s later years, Pete bought him journals and tried unsuccessfully to get him to write about his experiences in Africa and Europe while he was watching Mariners games on television.

Still, the Army remained a big part of his father’s life. The elder Chiarelli and his wife, Theresa, played bingo on Wednesday night at Fort Lawton on Puget Sound, and they socialized at the officers’ club. An Army reservist, he spent two weeks every summer drilling at the Presidio Army base in San Francisco, sometimes packing the whole family into the car and turning it into a vacation. On one of their summer jaunts, they stopped at a ranch in northern California to visit with the parents of a soldier from his dad’s small tank crew. They had fought across Europe together. In the waning days of the war the young soldier was riding with his head sticking out of the turret and was shot in the head by a German riding past on a bicycle. The war was long over, but his dad wanted to say a few words to the parents about their son and how he had died. Pete’s hazy memories of the trip stuck with him for decades. His father’s rarely discussed wartime experiences seemed secret and exciting—especially when compared with his life as a butcher in Seattle. Rummaging in the garage one day as a teenager, he came across a yellowed clipping from the local newspaper about his dad winning the Silver Star during action in Germany. As he pored over the account, one paragraph brought him up short: his mother’s name was wrong. The yellowed newspaper said that his father had been “married to Dorothy Chiarelli.”

The sixteen-year-old Chiarelli bounded back into the house to confront his father: “Dad, this is not Mom! Who is this?” The elder Chiarelli revealed that he had been married to another woman before the war. When he came back to the United States his twin brother broke the news to him that Dorothy was living with another man in Seattle. Pete’s mother, Theresa, who was Canadian by birth, had also had her own wartime heart-break.
She had been engaged to a Canadian Air Force pilot who was shot down over northern France in 1944.

By the time Pete Chiarelli graduated from Seattle University in 1972, few young officers were going to Vietnam. The Army was coming home, and American involvement would soon be over. Although he was a mediocre student, Chiarelli had impressed the officers in charge of the ROTC program, winning an award as the Distinguished Military Graduate of the program that year. With Vietnam winding down, his interest in the Army had lessened. He owed the Army four years in return for his ROTC scholarship, but Pete thought he wanted to become a lawyer. He applied to law school at the University of Washington but was rejected. Never good at standardized tests, Chiarelli scored poorly on the admission exam, despite three attempts. Crestfallen, he shifted course. He and Beth married in August and the next month they loaded his Chevy Camaro and headed to the Army’s armor school at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Chiarelli spent the next three months learning to be a tank commander, just as his father had been.

As a kid Dave Petraeus used to sneak onto the West Point campus with his friends during the summer and play on the lush athletic fields until someone came along and ordered them off. In winter, he and his friends went skiing on the West Point slopes. His hometown, six miles away, was full of West Point professors and Army families. Reamer Argot, the son of an officer who lived near the Petraeuses’ modest Cape Cod home, remembered Dave as the “alpha dog,” the kid who led the pack of neighborhood boys and was usually up for anything. Several of his teachers at Cornwall High School were retired West Point instructors and now formed an informal recruiting network, steering local teenagers with the stuff to handle the rigors of cadet life to West Point. They urged Petraeus, a star on the school’s championship soccer team and a top-notch student, to seek an appointment.

A wiry 150 pounds, Petraeus barely looked old enough to be out of junior high school. His family had no ties to the Army. His father, Sixtus Petraeus, a Dutch seaman until World War II, when he emigrated to the United States, worked for the local power company. His mother, who had attended Oberlin College, was uncertain about sending her only son into the Army with the Vietnam War still under way. But when West Point became one of the few colleges to recruit him to play soccer, Petraeus decided to give it a try. The full scholarship was attractive to a family of limited means, and if he didn’t like it, he could always transfer before his junior year without owing the Army anything. He made the drive with his parents to the academy in late June and said goodbye, plunging into the chaos of Beast Barracks, the eight-week hazing ordeal plebes are subjected to before classes even start. Dave didn’t have much trouble. He was meticulous and serious, the kind of cadet who knew a lot of the tricks for making life slightly more bearable, like where to send away for anodized brass uniform buttons and belt buckles that would keep their shine indefinitely—sparing you a few minutes of late-night polishing and maybe the unwanted attention from some upperclassman bracing you for not having gleaming buttons.

He did well during his plebe year but not spectacularly, earning a class rank of 161st out of more than 800 classmates. “I thought, ‘Okay, he’s like me, an A or B student,’” recalled Dave Buto, one of his plebe-year roommates. “But his second year he took off.” Petraeus raised his class rank into the sixties. He gravitated toward others like him—hypercompetitive guys who enjoyed pushing each other to do better. At West Point, where cadets were ranked, graded, and assessed every day of their four years, he was in his element. The first time he went for a run around campus with his roommate, Chris White, they started out at a moderate jog, but the pace kept increasing, until after about five miles both of them were running flat out, neither wanting to admit he could not keep up. They finally pulled up outside the dormitory, panting and exhausted. “You’re insane. I’m never running with you again,” White said, more than a little serious. “I wanted to slow down, but you kept speeding up,” Petraeus answered, grinning.

Petraeus wanted to go even faster. White told him that the Army paid to send the eight top graduates of the military academy every year to medical
school on scholarship. His roommate was going for it, so Petraeus decided he would, too. Not because he had decided he wanted to be a doctor, but because aiming for the top appealed to him. It was even more exclusive than being a “Star Man,” a cadet who was entitled to wear a small star on his collar for finishing in the top 5 percent of his class. Though room assignments rotated every three months, Petraeus and White received permission to be roommates several times during their second and third years. Almost every night they requested “late lights,” permission to stay up an hour past the ten o’ clock curfew, so they could study an hour longer before racking out. Petraeus made every second count. He persuaded his roommate to stop taking showers before bed, arguing it was more efficient to get up a few minutes early than to waste precious study time at night. When he got tired, Petraeus walked in circles in his dorm room to prevent himself from falling asleep.

He made a perfunctory call that spring to another nearby college to see if they were interested in offering him an athletic scholarship, but by then he had pretty much decided to stay on at West Point. As time went on, other cadets noticed that Petraeus became more and more serious about all aspects of cadet life—academics, military training, and the little details that separated the guys who were intent on excelling from those who resented the academy’s tyrannies and just wanted to make it through.