The Fourth Star (9 page)

After one ambush, the Israelis and their allies emptied a Shiite village of its 2,000 residents at gunpoint. As Abizaid and his fellow observers watched from a nearby hill, the soldiers set fire to the town. UN observers couldn’t intervene to stop the destruction. Abizaid consoled himself with the thought that the forced evacuation might have degenerated into a massacre if he and his fellow observers hadn’t been there.

Since Abizaid was one of the few UN soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic, he was made the observer force’s director of operations, overseeing the outposts and patrols. He and the unit’s commander, an American lieutenant colonel, regularly loaded their jeep with cartons of cigarettes to bribe the locals, removed the American flags from their uniforms, and ventured out into the Lebanese countryside. It was a rugged area with deep wadis and small villages inhabited mostly by poor farmers. Shopkeepers and mosques peddled martyr videotapes and posters, lionizing local suicide bombers who had killed Israelis. “There was no shortage of willing martyrs,” Abizaid later wrote. “The martyrs who volunteered to undertake the attacks became instant celebrities, invariably leaving behind a videotape describing why they felt it necessary to sacrifice themselves. As one
might imagine, these videos were given prominent display on the various militia-controlled television stations.”

Town elders would scream at the UN officers that the Israelis and their Christian allies were killing civilians and preventing basic necessities from reaching their villages. The central government in Beirut was absent in southern Lebanon, and with the PLO also gone, Hezbollah and other Shiite militias filled the void, sweeping streets, fixing homes, and ferrying the elderly to medical appointments. With help from Tehran and Damascus, the militias learned how to meld violence, propaganda, and social aid programs to bring supporters to their side.

Five years earlier, Abizaid had watched as the Iranian revolution had energized his fellow students at the University of Jordan. In Lebanon, the Iranians were working through Hezbollah and other Shiite Muslim militias. Once an underground organization, Hezbollah leaders now spouted Iranian dogma and handed out Iranian funds to rebuild homes damaged by the Israelis and the South Lebanon Army. Tehran also provided powerful and sophisticated roadside bombs that terrorized Israeli convoys.

Hezbollah soon displaced Amal as the leader of the anti-Israeli resistance. “Moderates in Amal, unable to deliver on promises to force an Israeli withdrawal, lost ground to more radical Shia,” Abizaid recounted. In that way, occupation of the security zone “actually worked contrary to the long-term interests of Israel by weakening the forces of moderation in southern Lebanon to the benefit of the radicals dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state.”

Abizaid could sense a feeling of doom spread through the dwindling Christian community, too. He dined with Christian village elders, greeting the men with a traditional kiss on each cheek and choking down
kibbeh nayye
, a dish made of raw minced lamb. “We are fighting against Islamic extremism,” they told him, hoping that the young American officer could rally his country or the UN. There was little Abizaid could do. Stopping the suicide bombs was impossible for the Israeli soldiers, as it was for the UN. The only way to stop it was for Israel to withdraw, but that would only embolden the Shiite militants and their Iranian patrons. “There is going to be a lot more of this,” Abizaid announced to his fellow observers at
one point. “What’s preventing Iran from doing the same thing someplace else?”

Two years later Abizaid was serving at the U.S. base in Vicenza, Italy, when the telephone rang late one evening at his house. It was General Thurman, the vice chief of staff who remembered Abizaid from his time at the Pentagon several years earlier. “I’m going to take a trip to the Middle East and I want you to go with me,” he barked. It was typical Thurman. Known as the “Maxatollah” for his abrasive manner and monastic dedication to the Army, he expected his protégés to drop everything when he called. The general himself had never married, giving his life to the Army.

A few days later Abizaid met Thurman in Cairo. From there they traveled to Israel, where they met with the prime minister and toured the Golan Heights and the Lebanon border. The Israeli occupation, now in its sixth year, was grinding down its soldiers and sapping morale. As they stared out into the occupation zone, the Israelis insisted that they had to remain in southern Lebanon to protect their farms and cities from rocket attacks and terror attacks. Back at their hotel that evening, Thurman asked Abizaid for his view. To Abizaid the answer was obvious. The heavy-handed Israeli presence was radicalizing Shiites, strengthening Iran and Hezbollah. It wasn’t making anyone more secure. He told Thurman so.

Shortly after he returned, Thurman marched down one of the Pentagon’s corridors in search of a personnel officer. He didn’t even pause to say hello. “Where is Abizaid going on his next assignment?” the half-deaf, bespectacled Thurman shouted. “Who is Abizaid?” replied Colonel John Miller, who was unaccustomed to having four-star generals suddenly appear in his windowless Pentagon office bellowing questions about low-ranking officers. “Major John Abizaid,” Thurman snapped. “I need you to find out and let me know.”

Abizaid’s career was now being guided and nurtured at the Army’s highest levels.

B
eth Chiarelli was just about to tee off under the lush pines lining the first hole at the Fort Lewis golf course when she was beckoned back to the clubhouse for a telephone call. Her husband, Pete, had tracked her down with the news she had been waiting to hear. “Honey, I just turned in the papers. We’re out,” he said. The young couple had been talking about getting out of the Army for a couple of years, and now that he had submitted his official papers Beth felt relieved. With a newborn infant and another baby planned, it irked her that Pete was always away on training exercises, sometimes for weeks at a time, and that he could never spend summers along the Oregon coast, as her family had done for years. Unlike Pete, Beth had no special ties to the military, and she had never planned on becoming a military spouse. She constantly mangled the acronym-laden military-speak tossed around by everyone on Army bases, including the other wives. Pete teasingly referred to her as the “demilitarized zone.”

Beth had not issued ultimatums. She knew Pete loved the military. It had been part of his life since his childhood in Seattle, when his parents
had played bingo at the Fort Lewis officers’ club, a short drive from their house in the hilly neighborhood of Magnolia. But she had made it clear to him that she yearned for a more settled life, and Pete had come around to her way of thinking. With his four-year ROTC commitment nearly up, he talked more and more about attending graduate school and already had a job offer from a steel company in Portland, where Beth’s dad was an executive. Now it was done. His resignation papers were filed. In thirty days their life after the Army would begin. Her biggest concern as she walked back to the 332-yard first hole was whether they could afford to buy Pete a few suits now that he was a civilian.

An hour later, at the seventh hole, Beth was summoned to the telephone for another call from her husband, and this time he sounded a little sheepish. After learning that Chiarelli planned to get out, Major Ron Adams, the executive officer in his unit, had made a few hurried calls and an hour later had come back with a counteroffer, Pete told her. If he would withdraw his retirement, the Army would send him to graduate school, all expenses paid, and then to West Point to teach cadets as an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences. “It’s going to be fully funded and I’ll get paid the whole time. What do you think?” he asked. It was so sudden that Beth didn’t know what to think, except that her hopes for a simpler life in her hometown and summers along the coast were slipping away. That evening, Pete invited Adams over for Chinese takeout, and they talked over the Army offer. Pete could go to school full-time at the University of Washington while Beth got her wish to stay home with their growing family, they told her. At least they could stay in the Northwest near her family for two years. If they still wanted out of the Army later, he would have the advantage of experience teaching at the United States Military Academy. Finally it was agreed: he would stay in.

As a ROTC graduate, Chiarelli knew little about West Point and next to nothing about the Department of Social Sciences, where he would be teaching after completing graduate school. He had no idea he was entering an elite and somewhat secretive tribe. The Army, lumbering and homogeneous to outsiders, was actually a collection of these tribes. The largest are built around weapons systems. Officers in the armor branch spent their careers thinking about tank warfare. Artillery officers swore allegiance to
their fearsome cannons, which they referred to as the “King of Battle.” Then there were the Special Forces, which trained foreign armies and the special ops units that ran missions so secret they could not even be discussed.

When he was assigned to the Department of Social Sciences, Chiarelli was moving into one of the few tribes not built around some aspect of warfare, one so exclusive that many officers didn’t even know it existed. For decades “Sosh,” as it was known inside West Point’s granite walls, recruited some of the best minds in the officer corps to join its rotating faculty of several dozen instructors. These young captains and majors taught economics, government, and international relations to cadets, and also formed a wellspring of unconventional thinking in a service not known for openness to new ideas. Sosh instructors were literally the longhairs—the guys whose haircuts tended to be a little less military and who called each other by first names. They saw themselves as intellectuals, or as close as you could get in a service with a deep anti-intellectual bent. It was the Army’s bias for action over argument and debate that made Sosh a dangerous place for officers. Stay too long in Sosh or appear to enjoy your time there too much and you ran the risk of being branded an elitist or an egghead, in either case not the right type to lead men in combat. For that reason, those inside the fraternity didn’t talk much to outsiders about the department, but to the initiated it was a special place.

For most of Sosh’s history, it had drawn two types of soldiers—generals-in-waiting and dissidents. In the first category were officers who came to Sosh in the midst of stellar careers, for whom a few years in the department was another box to be checked on their way up the chain of command. In 2009, one-quarter of the Army’s four-star generals had taught in the Sosh department. In the second group were the officers who were too outspoken or just too different to ascend to the top of an organization that rewarded teamwork and fitting in above all. They wanted to puncture the Army’s conventional wisdom, its priorities, and its myths. Frequently they pushed their more career-oriented counterparts in the department to sharpen their ideas and take more daring positions.

Chiarelli’s four years at Sosh were the defining time of his early career,
turning him into an officer who decades later, when he made general, was willing to question almost everything about the way his Army was fighting in Iraq. A year after Chiarelli departed, David Petraeus arrived and had a similar experience.

When Pete and Beth Chiarelli arrived at West Point, it dawned on them almost immediately that they were joining a high-powered crowd. The department head, Colonel Lee Donne Olvey, stressed to every incoming instructor that they were the best minds the Army had to offer, and they were expected to show it during their three years there. Sosh had a mystique that Olvey was determined to preserve. “We followed a policy of unabashed elitism,” he recalled.