The Fourth Star (8 page)

Galvin had plenty of advice for Petraeus, too. He urged him not to focus narrowly on his job as an infantry officer. Success was not only a matter of being in great shape or getting top marks on evaluation reports. Think beyond the foxhole, about history and strategy, about relations between the military and their civilian bosses in Washington, about the next war, he urged. It amused him that someone with as supple a mind as Petraeus had would never admit a mistake. He needed to loosen up a little, Galvin thought. Consider going to graduate school, where he would meet civilians with different experiences and ideas. “I used to say you can’t get too smart to be an infantryman,” he recalled.

Petraeus soon became Galvin’s alter ego, responsible for balancing his schedule, drafting his speeches, and issuing orders in his name. Their close relationship did not always go over well with the division senior staff, who thought the confident captain sometimes overstepped his bounds. Colonel Pete Taylor, the chief of staff, chewed out Petraeus several times for presuming to direct the division staff, which was his job. He found it especially annoying when Petraeus would walk into Galvin’s office and close the glass door behind him, shutting out the rest of the staff. “I made it very clear to Dave that if I caught him doing it again, I would have the post engineers come over and take the door off its hinges,” he said.

Being a general’s aide was a double-edged sword. It was an opportunity to latch on to a powerful mentor and get a glimpse into the inner workings of the Army. But it had its downsides. It could mark an officer as a bit too eager to please and at worst as a self-serving sycophant. Most of Petraeus’s peers had read or at least heard of
Once an Eagle
, Anton Myrer’s 1968 novel that follows the lives of two officers from World War I through the early years of the Cold War. The protagonist, Sam Damon, is a battletested hero who marries the French-speaking daughter of a general and puts his soldiers’ interests ahead of his career. A stoic warrior, he dies on a mission attempting to keep the United States out of war in Southeast Asia. His rival, Courtney Massengale, disdains the rank-and-file soldiers under his command and attaches himself to generals, eventually rising to four stars himself. The thick novel and its simple parable about duty and sacrifice resonated with generations of officers, including those at Fort Stewart in the early 1980s. Martin Rollinson, a captain in the 24th Infantry when Petraeus was there, remembered talking with other officers about whether Galvin’s aide was like the selfless Damon or the conniving Massengale. “Some people compared Petraeus to Massengale,” Rollinson recalled. “It wasn’t fair, but he was so good he made people feel inferior.”

There was a passage in the novel describing Massengale that captured the Army’s scorn for officers who rose by using their connections rather than by leading men in battle: “He will go far, she thought, watching the proud, ascetic discipline in his face, the strange amber eyes. He will become Chief of Staff, if events follow a logical course; or even if they don’t. Yet—her eyes rested for the briefest second on his ribbons—he had no combat decorations.”

Petraeus knew that real combat leaders were supposed to be out in the field getting dirty with soldiers, not working as a general’s aide. He hadn’t given up on his goal of joining the Rangers, and asked about a transfer to the Ranger battalion at Fort Stewart, which would have established his credentials as a warrior. Galvin frowned on the idea and suggested he consider graduate school instead. Soon the issue became moot. Petraeus had been chosen to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where the Army sends the top 50 percent of its officers for advanced training. Although the school is usually reserved for
majors, Petraeus was one of only a few officers selected to go early as a captain. He had to report in twelve months. When he asked the Rangers about joining the battalion for a short tour, he was told that it was impossible.

Shortly before Petraeus left Fort Stewart, Galvin’s division faced its first big test at the National Training Center, an area in the Mojave Desert that the Army had opened in the early 1980s to practice tank warfare on a vast scale. The Pentagon expected that a conflict in the Middle East, where the 24th Division was supposed to fight, would be nothing like Vietnam, a war that most officers were eager to forget. In the Middle East the likely adversary was the Soviet Union or one of its proxies. Generals assumed the battles there would be very similar to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt launched a surprise attack against Israeli positions in the Sinai, followed by Syrian assaults in the Golan Heights. Despite horrendous losses, Israel counterattacked, using its air force and American-designed tanks to knock out the Arabs’ air defense, then break through their ground formations and destroy them. This was the kind of war that Galvin’s division was preparing to fight.

But in the desert of California Galvin’s troops were regularly outmaneuvered by the more experienced Soviet-style opposition force, played by American soldiers. For two weeks, he and Petraeus crisscrossed the battlefield in their jeep, studying the 24th Division as it fought. The situation got so bad that Galvin ordered his chief of staff, who had stayed home at Fort Stewart, to fly out to the desert so that he could see firsthand the drubbing they were taking. After returning home, Galvin ordered large tracts of forest cleared to replicate the conditions in the desert. Day after day, soldiers were in the field conducting maneuvers. Over the next year, units from the 24th returned to the California desert four more times, with better results each time. The same lessons were being learned all across the Army. Everywhere units were training for the big battles between armored formations that the Pentagon had decided were the future of warfare. The buildup was fueled by massive Reagan administration defense spending, which was buying thousands of new tanks, personnel carriers, and helicopters.

But Petraeus’s career was taking a new direction. After his year at Command and General Staff College, he planned to attend graduate school
at Princeton University and then return to West Point as an instructor. As Galvin had urged, he was beginning to think deeply about his profession and the wars to come. For the first time since he joined the service, the conclusions Petraeus came to would put him at odds with the prevailing view of warfare in the Army. Other young officers were reaching the same point, only by less conventional paths.

As Major John Abizaid had predicted when he left Jordan, war had brought him back to the Middle East. He had taken a yearlong assignment as a member of the United Nations observer force in southern Lebanon, where Israel was bogged down in a bloody hit-and-run conflict that looked nothing like the big tank battles that Petraeus and Galvin were preparing for in the Mojave Desert.

He had been on the ground for a week when he saw the remains of his first suicide bomber. He and his partner, a Swedish officer, heard the boom and took off in their white jeep, zipping around dun-colored hills on serpentine roads until they reached the blast site, a smoking, black gash that cut through the middle of the road. Abizaid was surprised at how little of the bomber was left—a few shreds of clothing, a couple of body parts, and some blood. From the bits that remained, he guessed that the only casualty had been the bomber himself. He probably had been on his way to a nearby Israeli checkpoint when the explosives he was carrying detonated prematurely. Abizaid scribbled some notes and snapped a couple of photographs for his report on the incident, the first of dozens he would submit over the next year.

The Israelis had portrayed their incursion into Lebanon three years earlier as a limited action aimed at driving out Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters, who for years had attacked northern Israel with rockets and terror attacks. Once across the border, the Israeli army drove north to Beirut, surrounding and laying siege to the city. The assault crippled the PLO and led to the departure of its leadership to Tunisia. But instead of
withdrawing, the Israelis stayed. Like the United States two decades later in Iraq, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon were determined to install a friendly government as part of its grander ambition to remake the Middle East. Up to that point, Israel’s fight had been with the Palestinians. Once they became an occupying power, the Israelis found themselves battling a new enemy—Shiite Muslims, who had originally welcomed their offensive against the PLO but now turned hostile.

By mid-1985, when Abizaid arrived in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces had withdrawn from all but a narrow strip of territory along the southern border, which they had declared a security zone vital for protecting northern Israel. The zone itself was far from secure. Israel found itself attacked by fighters from numerous Shiite factions and the remnants of the PLO, all of which competed to be seen as most dedicated to forcing out the occupiers. It was a sectarian stew. Both Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group, and Amal, its more secular Shiite rival, turned to suicide car bombs, mines, booby traps, and ambushes against Israeli soldiers and the South Lebanon Army, an Israeli-backed militia composed largely of Christians.

On March 10, 1985, a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into an Israeli convoy at a border crossing, near the Israeli town of Metulla. Twelve Israelis were killed and fourteen wounded. The Israelis responded with the “Iron Fist” policy that included artillery barrages on Muslim villages and reprisal raids that rounded up hundreds of Shiites at a time. Still the attacks continued. Dispirited Israeli troops castigated Abizaid and his fellow UN observers as the “United Nothing,” because they did nothing to stop the increasingly powerful and frightening bombs.

By this point in his career Abizaid had experienced combat firsthand. After returning from Jordan he had spent a year at Harvard, where he earned a degree in Middle Eastern studies, and then taken command of a 120-soldier Ranger company at Fort Stewart. In 1983 he and his men parachuted onto the Caribbean island of Grenada, as part of an invasion to restore the island’s pro-Western government to power following a coup. They had only been on the ground a short time when a bullet from a Cuban machine-gun position sliced through the neck of one of Abizaid’s soldiers, killing him. With enemy fire snapping over his head, Abizaid ordered a
sergeant to hot-wire a bulldozer that had been abandoned nearby and charge at the Cubans with the blade raised as he and his fellow Rangers advanced behind it. Abizaid and his troops soon overwhelmed the Communist troops. The bulldozer assault, which was re-created in the Clint Eastwood movie
Heartbreak Ridge
, later made Abizaid a celebrity within the Army—one of the few genuine combat heroes to emerge in the decade following Vietnam. But real combat was nothing like the Hollywood adaptation. A few hours after the airport skirmish, another four soldiers from Abizaid’s company were gunned down after straying into an ambush.

After Grenada, he spent a year in the Pentagon assigned to a twelve-person study team that worked for General Max Thurman, the Army’s iconoclastic vice chief of staff. Although the mainstream Army was heavily focused on preparing to fight the Soviets, Thurman believed that the United States was far more likely to be drawn into a war in the developing world. If he was right, the service needed a cadre of leaders who not only knew combat but also had a deep understanding of the Third World backwaters where they might be asked to fight—the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Abizaid became his model officer. Speaking to newly promoted majors at Fort Leavenworth, Thurman told his audience that if they wanted to become generals, they should imitate Abizaid’s career. It wasn’t enough to learn tactics and leadership. They needed to know languages and foreign cultures, to spend time abroad away from the day-to-day Army, as Abizaid had done. Eager to tap Abizaid’s knowledge of the Middle East, Thurman assigned him to a group examining the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. The study focused on the technology and tactics the Israelis had used during their lightning push to Beirut, but it ignored the bloody and largely unsuccessful occupation of the country. The oversight wasn’t surprising; ever since Vietnam, the Army had decided it could simply choose not to fight messy guerrilla wars. It instead planned on using overwhelming firepower and superior technology to defeat foes in short, sharp battles. The study was completed just before Abizaid headed out for Lebanon, where an entirely different kind of war was being waged.

He and the four dozen or so other United Nations observers—Argentines, Canadians, Swedes, and fellow Americans—lived and patrolled unarmed out of a main base in the small city of Naqoura and from a half-dozen
smaller cinder-block outposts perched along winding roads and barren hills.

Though the UN was officially neutral, Abizaid’s time in the country summoned up a stew of conflicting emotions. More than once, he found himself watching from a distance as Shiite fighters set up launchers to fire Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, where his wife and children were living. He was appalled by the brutality of the Israelis’ allies, often hearing screams of tortured prisoners emanating from an old French fort used by the South Lebanon Army as an interrogation center. But he also came to understand the debilitating effect a long and unsuccessful occupation has on an army, even one as disciplined as the Israel Defense Forces. “War in southern Lebanon is difficult to imagine by common standards of reference,” he wrote in a report after completing his tour. “It was neither guerrilla war of the Vietnam style nor was it the urban battle of Beirut. It was low-intensity conflict where UN sources routinely recorded over 100 violent incidents per month, ranging from ambushes to kidnappings to suicide car bombs.”