The Fourth Star (47 page)

T
he star-shaped fortress lay on an exposed spit of land at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The Army had occupied the massive brick battlements for hundreds of years, holding the ground even during the Civil War, when it formed an impregnable Union enclave in the midst of the Confederacy. But the long presence on the shores of the Chesapeake was coming to an end. The post, which had ceased being vital to the country’s defense almost a century earlier, was slated for closing in a year or so. In the Army, change sometimes came slowly.

On this day, as a frigid wind swept in off the water, another sort of closure was happening on the parade grounds. One of the last U.S. officers to have served in Vietnam was retiring from the Army. As a lieutenant in 1972, Scott Wallace had been an advisor to South Vietnamese troops in the Mekong Delta. He had risen in the following decades through the ranks, eventually commanding troops during the invasion of Iraq, and he’d run Fort Leavenworth prior to Petraeus’s arrival there. Now he was set to
receive a proper four-star send-off, with a marching band and a thumping seventeen-gun salute fired by howitzers pointed out to sea.

General George Casey, as the Army chief, had flown in from Washington to preside. It was the kind of occasion Casey loved, the songs and ceremony recalling his childhood on posts around the world. In his black beret and camouflage fatigues, Casey beamed as he walked to the podium in the middle of the wide lawn. Seeing other officers he had served with for decades, some now retired, reminded him how much the Army had become his extended family. In the crowd he saw retired Army chief Carl Vuono, who had rescued Casey’s career nearly twenty years earlier by getting him a job in the 1st Cav. It was a moment to look backward. Wallace’s retirement after thirty-nine years in uniform meant that the Army was finally severing one of its last direct links to the war in Vietnam.

That conflict, Casey noted as he addressed the crowd, “was a formative experience both for Scott and for our Army.” In its aftermath, the generals who ran the institution had asked, “Just how does this Army fight?” The answer they devised “took the Army out of the rice paddies of Vietnam and placed it on the western European battlefield against the Warsaw Pact.” Casey had lived through that turbulent transformation as a young officer in Mainz and in Vicenza. He had stood guard in the barracks over his own men, including the drug addicts and the discipline cases that populated the ranks in those days as the Army withdrew from Southeast Asia and shifted to an all-volunteer force. And he had been part of rebuilding its strength, which still sent a surge of pride through him.

As Casey said goodbye to the last of the Vietnam generation, the Army was beginning to come home from Iraq after five years, facing the same questions about the future as it had in that earlier war. It had once rejected the idea that Vietnam had something to teach. No one thought it would repeat the same mistake after Iraq. But what lessons would it take? Casey’s experiences had led him to some conclusions. One of the biggest lessons that he’d taken was that counterinsurgency warfare was far harder than he’d thought it could be. “As a division commander in Kosovo, I would have said that if I can do conventional war, I can do anything else,” he often
said as chief. “Now I know that isn’t true.” The Army absolutely couldn’t lose its ability to wage counterinsurgency wars, he said.

But he worried that young Army officers, who had been schooled in Iraq and Afghanistan, were losing the skills that they’d need in future conventional battles, the sort that he and his generation had spent several decades mastering at the National Training Center. To best prepare the Army, he settled on the split-the-difference approach that reflected the way he had worked through most problems while in command. It was carefully reasoned, meticulously researched, and unlikely to require the major institutional changes that some counterinsurgency advocates demanded. Casey wanted to locate the middle point somewhere between counterinsurgency and conventional combat that would allow the military to react in whichever direction it had to in the future.

He found reassurance by examining Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. At first glance the Hezbollah forces didn’t look too different from the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They operated in small cells and lived among the Lebanese people. But the Hezbollah fighters were far better armed and trained than the enemies the United States had fought. Over thirty-four days, the insurgents pounded the Israelis with sophisticated antitank guided weapons and cruise missiles. After the battle, senior Israeli commanders blamed their losses on their long tours in the West Bank and Gaza. The years of occupation duty, they argued, had caused their soldiers’ conventional skills to atrophy and left them vulnerable to the disciplined and well-armed Hezbollah fighters. By 2009, the Pentagon had coined a new term to describe the Lebanon battle and others like it. They were “hybrid wars” that combined aspects of a conventional fight, counterinsurgency, and peacekeeping. Much as it had been for the last four decades, the Army was embroiled in a debate about what the next war was going to look like and what kind of military the United States would need to fight it. The truth was that there was no consensus, other than that the Army should not turn its back on Iraq.

John Abizaid’s long experience in the Arab world gave him a different view than most about the changes the military needed to make. He’d retired from the Army and moved home to the Sierra Nevada, an hour’s drive from Coleville, where he and Kathy had grown up. They loved the
soaring, snowcapped peaks that surrounded their home. Abizaid also loved the fact that he was far from Washington, D.C., a place where he’d never felt entirely comfortable. He jokingly said he was living in “ungoverned space,” a term the Pentagon applied to terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan and Somalia.

Even in retirement, the Middle East and its problems still dominated his thoughts. He’d watched the conflicts between moderates and extremists, Shiites and Sunnis, Israelis and Palestinians unfold since his days at the University of Jordan in the late 1970s. It had taught him to take the long view of events in the region and to appreciate the limits of military power on its own to make lasting changes.

After his retirement, he tried to explain his ideas at universities, foreign policy think tanks, military bases, and even at the monthly Rotary Club luncheon in Gardnerville, a town about thirty miles from Coleville. The source of the instability in the Middle East, as Abizaid saw it, was the conflict between moderates and extremists within Islam. The United States couldn’t decide this struggle. “I came to the conclusion a long time ago that you can’t control the Middle East,” he often said. But America could help its more moderate allies prevail. His solution amounted to an anti-Powell Doctrine for the Arab world. Rather than relying on military force to remake the Middle East, he wanted to send small teams of soldiers and civilians to work with allies to reform their economies and build competent local armies and police. “Throughout the region we need to quit being the primary military force and over time do less as we increase the capacity more and more of indigenous forces,” he said.

If there was a model, it was one he had seen on his travels years earlier when he had come across a tiny band of British soldiers in the wilds of Oman, training and fighting with the Sultan’s army. Britain had shed its empire and most of its global commitments, but it still pursued its interests where and how it could, with a clear-eyed sense of limits built up over centuries. The United States had far more resources and more places where it needed to be present, but it could learn from Britain’s example, he thought.

The problem was finding soldiers who could put his ideas into practice. They had to be soldiers like John Abizaid. In his retirement he sat on
the board that chose officers for the Olmsted Scholarship, the program that had first sent him to the Middle East. The program could produce officers who were culturally aware and comfortable in foreign lands, the qualities he thought were needed. The problem was that there weren’t nearly enough of them. During the Cold War the Defense Department had trained tens of thousands of Sovietologists and nuclear strategists. The Olmsted program paid for only twenty-seven officers each year to study overseas. “Why not have 270 or 2,700?” Abizaid wondered.

His approach offered a plausible source for a segment of the military, but it was no panacea for the entire Army, a force of over a million active and reserve soldiers, few of whom had Abizaid’s curiosity about historical and cultural forces shaping the places where they might be called on to fight. Abizaid recognized this.

But his unhappy experience in Iraq was a poignant example of a fact Abizaid had long warned about: generals didn’t get to pick the wars they were asked to win. There was no guarantee that a future White House wouldn’t send the Army into another misbegotten conflict or that a crisis wouldn’t emerge requiring a large conventional ground force. The Army had to be ready for a whole range of contingencies—as Iraq had shown.

While Abizaid was talking about changes that would take decades, soldiers in Iraq had been forced to adapt as best they could. And though it had taken too long, they had done so. The best officers had worked tirelessly to understand the politics and culture of their areas. They brokered local cease-fires between warring Sunnis and Shiites, bought off sheikhs with reconstruction projects, and even rebuilt religious shrines if that was what it took to achieve even a tentative peace. The most curious among them pored over works of history and counterinsurgency theory from Vietnam and Algeria. The learning process had often been slow and costly. Many still lacked the kind of deep cultural understanding that Abizaid wanted. But, spurred on by dissidents in its ranks and painful battlefield failures, the Army had become a very competent counterinsurgency force.

It was Petraeus who both drove this change and benefited from it. A few days before he gave up command in Iraq several hundred soldiers gathered in Al Faw Palace for a party to say goodbye. The lights dimmed in the palace banquet hall and a highlight video, set to thumping rock music,
began to play on a movie-theater-sized screen. Images of exhausted soldiers and wailing, grief-stricken Iraqis gave way to a clip of Petraeus testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The situation in Iraq is dire. The stakes are high. There are no easy choices, and the way ahead will be hard,” he said in a flat monotone. “But hard is not hopeless.” The music quickened. Soon the soldiers on the big screen were collaring insurgents, handing out school supplies, and cutting ribbons on new police stations and sewage-treatment plants.

When the lights came back on Petraeus stood atop a plywood riser. Although he would never admit it to Holly, he was sad to leave Iraq. His life there had settled into a comfortable rhythm. The daily battle update, the regular trips to visit his field commanders, and the weekly meetings with Maliki all had afforded him a feeling of control over the war that had dominated six years of his life. His new job as the top commander in the Middle East would give him a continuing role in Iraq. But it was clear that most of his attention was going to be consumed by the growing violence and instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In truth, the U.S. military’s influence in Iraq was on the wane. Iraqi-led victories over Sadr’s militia in Baghdad and Basra in the spring of 2007 had given Maliki, who only months earlier had been fighting for his political survival, a new swagger. Iraq was returning to real self-government, though where it would lead was uncertain.

The soldiers who gathered for Petraeus’s farewell weren’t really there to celebrate the gains in Iraq. They’d come to thank the general for what he’d done for them. In his nineteen months in command he’d imbued his troops—many of whom had begun to doubt whether victory was even possible—with a new resolve. He’d made the Army feel smart again, and convinced his brigades and battalions that they could prevail.

As custom dictated, his soldiers had brought gifts for their departing commander. The noncommissioned officers in the palace arranged with the Pentagon to have him named the Army’s first honorary command sergeant major. It was an accolade freighted with irony. Petraeus’s tendency toward micromanagement early in his career had often made him the scourge of his sergeants. Now they wanted to welcome him into their fraternity. Next Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, Petraeus’s deputy in Iraq, presented him with a replica of the “Iron Mike” statue that stands across
the street from the Fort Bragg officers’ club. The statue depicts a World War II-era paratrooper who has just alighted in enemy territory. His foot rests on a pile of rubble. He is fingering the trigger of his weapon. His helmet is unbuckled and slightly askew. For decades the type of fighting man the statue represented was the Army ideal, one that Petraeus had always aspired to. He turned the statue in his hands. “I have never received one of these, but it means an awful lot,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.

The embrace of his own army was important to Petraeus, but so was the regard of his hero Marcel Bigeard. They had kept up an occasional correspondence over the years. Now that the legendary French paratrooper was over ninety, the letters from France came less frequently and were written by an assistant. But Bigeard’s sentiments were unmistakable. He had followed Petraeus’s exploits in Iraq and now treated the younger American officer as an equal. One letter arrived on the anniversary of Dien Bien Phu, the French defeat in Indochina where Bigeard had been taken captive. He had come home to France years later determined to rebuild the spirit of the French paratroopers. He had not forgotten those days. “The last will of General Bigeard is to have his ashes spread over the Dien Bien Phu area,” the letter said. It closed with these words to Petraeus: “I wish you all the best for your mission. I know how difficult it is… Airborne, all the way.”