The Fourth Star (5 page)

Delta Force was the Army’s attempt to come to grips with the new threat of international terrorism. In the Middle East and other volatile regions, political extremists were increasingly exploiting the shock value of televised terror. Airliner hijackings and bombings in the airports and nightclubs of Europe were happening with frightening regularity. How this threat would expand in coming decades was hard to discern, but the unit that Beckwith was assembling revealed how the Army saw the problem. Delta Force was to be a small, top-secret team that would rely on speed and stealth instead of mass and firepower. The unstated assumption was that terrorism did not pose a fundamental danger to the country. It could be handled by a small band of commandos who trained relentlessly in the special techniques of rescuing hostages and killing terrorists.

Casey reported to Fort Bragg in North Carolina in late November, one of just over a hundred soldiers invited to compete for a handful of slots in the new unit. They had been told to assemble at the base stockade, which had been cleared of prisoners and turned into a makeshift headquarters and barracks. For the first few days they slept in the empty prison cells, a fitting indicator of how they would be treated during the two-week selection process. As he looked around, Casey realized that he knew almost none of the other candidates. This was a Special Forces show, and Casey sensed that the SF officers were cutting each other slack.

Beckwith had spent a year as an exchange officer training in the jungles of Malaya with the Special Air Service, Britain’s elite commando unit.
Later he commanded an elite reconnaissance unit in Vietnam that spent weeks tracking enemy guerrillas in the remotest parts of the jungle. He inflicted the same hunger, fear, and confusion that he’d felt training with the British commandos and in Vietnam on the men vying for a spot in his new unit. Beckwith began the ordeal with characteristic stealth. Most of the first week was spent on basic conditioning drills and psychiatric testing. Then the instructors announced they were starting the “stress phase.” Casey was told to pack a rucksack weighing at least forty pounds and climb onto a truck with a dozen others and drive deep into Uwharrie Mountains National Forest, in rural North Carolina. Once there, he was handed a map and an AK-47 rifle and told to wait at the edge of a nearby clearing for instructions on what to do next. An instructor gave Casey an eight-digit coordinate and told him to hike there as quickly as he could. “Do not use any roads or trails,” the instructor told him. “You are being judged against an unannounced time standard.”

Some days Casey and the other soldiers started before dawn and went until sundown, hitting a half-dozen rendezvous points on the map. Another instructor, bearing new map coordinates, met them at each stop. “Show me where you are and show me where you are going,” the instructor directed. Then he would tell them to hike as fast as they could. One day, exhausted and confused by a fold in the map, Casey accidentally started running along the wrong creek. When the brush on either side of the creek became too thick to navigate, he began marching through the water. After about thirty minutes he stumbled onto a nearby road and flagged down a farmer passing by in a pickup truck. His uniform was soaked, his face was scratched and bleeding, and the butt of his AK-47 rifle had broken when he fell. As Casey asked for directions, the farmer stared at him in disbelief. “Boy, you is really lost,” he said. A few hours later the instructors saw Casey running in the woods and drove him back to the camp. Each day in the forest he was told to add a few more rocks to his rucksack. Each day a few more soldiers quit or were sent home.

On the last day of the tryouts the pack weighed fifty-five pounds. He and his fellow troops woke at 3:30 a.m. for a forty-mile hike through the wilderness. A few miles into the march Casey’s feet began to throb and swell. To prevent blisters he had been slathering tincture of benzoin, a
toughening agent, on his feet. Now he was pretty sure the medicine was causing an allergic reaction. For twelve hours he walked, stopping only to cut the back of his boot off in an effort to relieve the pressure on his Achilles tendon. As he grew more fatigued he began screaming at himself not to give up: “You pussy! You pussy! Keep going, goddamn it, you pussy!”

When he finished the hike his feet looked like raw hamburger. Back in the stockade and thoroughly exhausted, he phoned Sheila to let her know he had made it. Fewer than 20 of the 100 men who tried out survived the ten-day course. Soldiers in Delta would be gone for weeks or even months on secretive, dangerous missions. “Join Delta and we’ll guarantee you a medal, a body bag, or both,” Beckwith told the recruits. Casey had promised his wife when he left for the tryouts that he was doing it just to test himself; he wouldn’t join up. After he was chosen he started wavering. Sheila bluntly told her husband that she couldn’t live with the uncertainty. The first Army ceremony she had ever attended was her father-in-law’s funeral, and the image from that day of Casey’s grieving mother, a forty-two-year-old widow with five children standing in the pouring rain, had never left her. Now that she and George had two young boys, it was even harder to shake. “It is one thing getting hit by a bus crossing the street,” she blurted out to him over the phone. “It is another thing to get hit while standing in the middle of the road.” Casey badly wanted to accept the spot in Delta, but not at the expense of his marriage. He hung up the phone and informed the Delta officers that he was bowing out. He returned to Fort Carson to the sleepy unit that was at the bottom of virtually all of the Army’s war plans. Beckwith, not one to hand out compliments to those who declined tough assignments, pulled Casey aside before he departed to offer some words of reassurance. “You are going a long way in this man’s Army,” he told him.

The Army had a long way to go. It was still trying to pull itself out of its post-Vietnam nadir. The bedlam Casey had seen in Germany had been replaced by a mania for discipline that was nearly as crippling. Sometimes he’d grab a seat at the back of the theater at Fort Carson and watch the generals grill the lieutenant colonels on how many rules infractions each
unit had accumulated that month. Commanders reeled off the statistics, detailing every AWOL, insubordination, and drug infraction. Meanwhile, the Army was burying the memory of Vietnam as much as possible. It removed virtually all of its war college classes on counterinsurgency warfare from the curriculum. Field exercises modeled after Vietnam were jettisoned as well. Instead it focused on preparing to fight an enemy it knew—the Soviet Union.

Even at that type of warfare, the Army wasn’t very good. At the National Training Center, a 1,000-square-mile training ground in the Mojave Desert, tanks and artillery cannons faced off in laser-tag battles against a mock enemy meant to resemble the Soviet army. After each fight, the soldiers who ran the training center critiqued the visiting units. In his first test, Casey quickly realized that he and his raw troops had no idea what they were doing. Casey, riding with the senior intelligence officer from his unit, got hopelessly lost. The two officers tried calling for help, but their antiquated radios didn’t work. After the fight, his brigade commander called the officers together and chewed them out. “You all are a bunch of dumb asses,” he screamed. “That was the sorriest excuse for an attack I have ever seen.” Casey agreed. “We don’t know what the hell we are doing, and this has got to change,” he told himself.

W
ell, we have finally made it to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” John Abizaid declared in a letter home on September 15, 1978. Just writing those words was exciting. At last, he and his family were where he had longed to be—in the Middle East with two years ahead of them to explore. Abizaid, whose great-grandfather was Lebanese, had been fascinated by the region since he was a cadet at West Point, but it had been a difficult journey to get there—a year in the 82nd Airborne Division, three years in the Rangers, and six months studying Arabic with his wife, Kathy, at the Defense Language Institute. The Army had to be convinced that sending one of its brightest young officers to the Middle East was worthwhile. He had won an Olmsted scholarship, which paid for a handful of officers each year to study abroad, but the seven other winners that year had all gone off to Europe—to the University of Geneva, the University of Grenoble, the University of Heidelberg, and other venerable institutions. The poster child for the program was Robert “Bud” McFarlane, a Marine artillery officer in Vietnam who had studied Cold War strategy in
Geneva and who would go on to become Reagan’s national security advisor. That wasn’t the path Abizaid had chosen. The last time an Olmsted Scholar had proposed going to the Middle East, it was to Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Abizaid was the first to go to an Arab country.

He had ditched his initial plan to study in Egypt when the university he contacted failed to respond to his letters seeking admission. His backup was Jordan, the impoverished kingdom in the heart of the Middle East, surrounded by wealthier and more powerful neighbors. Even with his scholarship in hand, getting there hadn’t been easy. The University of Jordan had accepted him, which was better treatment than he received in Egypt, but the school seemed at best indifferent to having an American officer join its student body. The U.S. embassy discouraged him, warning about his safety and telling him it would offer him no special assistance. Kathy was pregnant with their second child and had never traveled outside of the United States. She was wary about moving to a part of the world that made news mostly for terrorist hijackings and brushfire wars. Her parents back in Coleville panicked when they learned their pregnant daughter was moving to the Middle East. “Wouldn’t Germany be easier?” she wondered. It had taken a while, but Abizaid had convinced her that this could be the adventure of their lives.

The Jordanian capital, perched in the hills above the desert, was a backwater, with none of the opulent skyscrapers and elegant hotels that were beginning to appear in Baghdad, Cairo, and the oil-rich ministates of the Persian Gulf. The city had absorbed thousands of Palestinian refugees, who had come in waves across the Jordan River after the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967. Dilapidated slums spread out into the distance. On a clear day, the city of Jerusalem could be seen to the west. Arriving in Amman ten days ahead of Kathy and their young daughter, Abizaid rented a dank basement apartment and registered for classes at the university, a short walk away. He quickly felt at ease. It took Kathy longer. When she stepped off the plane in Amman’s tiny airport, the heat and the long journey from San Francisco to New York to Greece and now Jordan had left her feeling woozy. As she collected her bags in an atmosphere she would later recall as “absolute chaos,” an unknown Jordanian man approached
her. “I take baby now,” he said, grabbing the toddler and rushing off. Kathy screamed and went running after him until the unknown man passed the child over the customs barrier to John, who was waiting with his daughter’s favorite blanket.

When she saw their apartment, which John had dubbed the “Führer bunker,” she cringed. They didn’t have the money to live in a westernized enclave like most of the embassy staff and other American expatriates, but Kathy had been hoping for something slightly more comfortable. The basement apartment had concrete floors, no windows, and little furniture beyond two beds and an old couch. The arrival of an American family in the neighborhood created a minor sensation. Night after night neighbors appeared at their door, bearing food and offering welcomes. Kathy discovered that her months of Arabic-language training were almost useless. She could make out only bits of what her guests, who spoke an unfamiliar Jordanian dialect, were saying. She and John learned they were expected to ply them with tea, sludgelike Bedouin coffee, and frequently dinner as they discussed family, politics, and life in the United States for hours. A few weeks into their stay their American-made washing machine overflowed, flooding the apartment. Kathy was trying to contain the water when her landlady appeared for her daily visit. She pushed past her disheveled, pregnant, and obviously angry tenant, asked how everyone was doing, and began mopping up without apparent concern. “Fifteen minutes later we were sitting sipping tea as she advised me on the proper way to cook rice,” Kathy wrote in a letter several weeks later. “My feelings were difficult to describe. I was irritated at the house she had rented us and her unceasing advice, but glad to have the company.” This was the “Arab way of dealing with life’s daily annoyances,” she concluded. “One does what one can, and then turns to more important things like tea and company.”