The Fourth Star Part 1

The Fourth Star.

by David Cloud.

CHAPTER ONE.

Age of Anarchy.

Along the Cambodia-South Vietnam border June 29, 1970.

The helicopters descended onto the hilltop clearing, wave after wave, a vast armada of American power. Out of them tumbled soldiers with rifles and rucksacks, returning from the invasion of Cambodia. They were mud-caked and sodden after three days of monsoon rain, but many were grinning and snapping pictures with their buddies. A few flashed peace signs for the television cameras, happy to have survived this madcap ordeal. The United States and its South Vietnamese allies had crossed into Cambodia precisely two months earlier on President Richard Nixon's orders, setting off the biggest protests of the war at home. Nixon had promised that every soldier would be out by the end of June, and they would be. The last of the rear guard would be flown back into Vietnam by six that evening.

Major General George Casey, commander of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, stood at the edge of the landing zone. The White House wanted the operation dressed up as a major victory, so Casey, sad-eyed and handsome, was there to brief reporters ferried out from Saigon for the day, along with a group of congressmen on a fact-finding mission. The facts were these: In eight weeks of combing through the Cambodian jungle, U.S. and South Vietnamese troops had captured vast stores of munitions, rice, and other supplies in so-called enemy sanctuaries that had long been off-limits. They had fought several battles and reported killing or capturing more than 10,000 Communist troops. But the invasion and the secret bombing that preceded it had destabilized Cambodia and achieved little that would help gain victory in Vietnam. The operation marked the beginning of the slow American pullout from Southeast Asia, a last push before the Army, bloodied and tired after five years of combat, began going home for good. Casey didn't exaggerate the gains. The enemy, he knew, would recover and the war would go on. But, he told the reporters, the operation had bought some time for their South Vietnamese allies, who soon would have to stand on their own. "I've done two tours over here," he yelled over the roar of the helicopter rotors, and going into Cambodia "was an opportunity we thought we'd never have."

He was a good soldier doing his duty, as he had for decades. After Pearl Harbor, Casey had withdrawn from Harvard University and enrolled at West Point, receiving his commission too late to see action in World War II. In Korea, he commanded an infantry company, earning a battlefield promotion to captain at Heartbreak Ridge, along with a Silver Star, the Army's third-highest honor. He went on to work as a personal aide to General Lyman Lemnitzer, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then returned to Harvard as a military fellow from 1965 to 1966. He spent most of the remainder of the decade commanding troops in Vietnam and seemed sure to ascend to four stars. Already he was being talked about as a future chief of the Army, as his West Point cla.s.smates had foreseen in 1945 when they predicted, "He will be the Army's best."

A week after the withdrawal from Cambodia, Casey climbed into the copilot seat of his Huey helicopter at 1st Air Cav headquarters and took off, flying east. He was headed for the U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay to visit wounded soldiers. It was raining and visibility was so poor that his chief of staff, Colonel Edward "Shy" Meyer, had urged him to cancel the trip, but he wanted to see his men before they were transferred to hospitals in j.a.pan. The helicopter's path took it across Vietnam's mountainous central highlands. At about 10:00 a.m. his Huey flew into a dense cloud and disappeared. A second helicopter flying behind crisscrossed over the shrouded peaks, looking for any sign of the general's craft, but finally had to break off when its fuel began running low. The American military headquarters in Saigon ordered a ma.s.sive search. Not wanting to alert the Viet Cong that a high-ranking general was unaccounted for, it held off making a public announcement until a few days later.

On July 9, the New York Times New York Times put the story on the front page: "The United States Army disclosed today that Maj. Gen. George W. Casey, who directed the withdrawal of the last American ground troops from Cambodia on June 29, has been missing since Tuesday when he took off in his helicopter. An intensive search is under way, an Army spokesman said." put the story on the front page: "The United States Army disclosed today that Maj. Gen. George W. Casey, who directed the withdrawal of the last American ground troops from Cambodia on June 29, has been missing since Tuesday when he took off in his helicopter. An intensive search is under way, an Army spokesman said."

Casey's son, George junior, was sitting in the apartment that he and his new wife, Sheila, shared on Pennsylvania Avenue in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., near the Capitol when the phone rang. It was his mother. "Your father's helicopter crashed. He's missing," she told him. As they spoke George tried to sound optimistic, as painful as it was, but when he hung up and told Sheila the news, he was matter-of-fact. "Mom's hopeful," he said. "But you don't go down in one of those helicopters and survive."

He knew the Army. He had grown up with it and, even at age twenty-two, had its fatalism about death. Born in j.a.pan on an Army base, he spent his childhood years moving every two years with his parents from one installation to another, an experience that had turned him into a jokester who made friends easily and applied himself as little as possible. He was, in that respect, completely different from his father. The Caseys were Boston Irish, and George junior had more than a little Irish mirth about him. It was the younger George who supplied the entertainment at the family's formal Sunday dinners. The table was set with linen napkins, china, and silver candlesticks. George and his brother, Peter, were expected to wear coats and ties. The three Casey girls, Joan, Ann, and Winn, and their mother wore dresses. Their father quizzed his brood about current events, which in an Army house in the mid-1960s usually meant the war or the protests that were just beginning in college towns such as Berkley and Cambridge. When their father brought up Vietnam, George would usually make a joke and s.h.i.+ft the conversation. Once he came to dinner in a coat and tie but no s.h.i.+rt, causing his sisters to erupt in peals of laughter.

His younger sisters were far more emotional on the subject-proud of their father, but also angry that the war pulled him away. George's teenage sister Joan responded to one of her father's Vietnam queries by declaring: "I'd go to Canada before I'd go to Vietnam!" A few months later she wrote a high-school essay on growing up as an Army brat and how their itinerant life, moving every two years and crisscrossing Europe in a beat-up station wagon, had drawn the family closer. When her father read it, she recalled, he began to cry.

Outwardly George, the eldest of the five Casey children, seemed the least bothered by the war. In the spring of 1966 he had applied to go to the United States Military Academy at West Point, mostly to please his father, but his math grades had been too low to get in. He enrolled instead at Georgetown University, just a few miles from his parents' brick colonial in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from the Georgetown campus. He signed up for the Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps program, played football, and always seemed to have the remnants of a six-pack stashed in his dorm room. George and his friends-Irish kids from Boston, New York, and New Jersey-crashed parties, hung out at the Tombs, a popular Georgetown bar, and squeaked by in cla.s.s. At first they gave little thought to Vietnam. "We rooted for the Americans the way you'd root for the bobsled team at the Olympics," recalled Ray O'Hara, one of George's closest college friends.

George would always remember the Sunday afternoon in 1968 when he and O'Hara went downtown to check out the war protests by the White House. George threw on his Army jacket to ward off the chill. As he moved through the throngs of protesters he noticed that many in the crowd were wearing green field jackets identical to his. To them it was some sort of counterculture statement. Feeling uncomfortable, Casey took his coat off and tucked it under his arm. A few minutes later someone threw a garbage can at a police officer, and a melee erupted. George and his friend took off, unsure what they were doing at the protest in the first place.

The anger over the war was remaking the Georgetown campus. When George entered in 1966 male students still wore coats and ties to cla.s.s and more than 900 of his cla.s.smates were enrolled in the university's ROTC program. By the fall of 1969, the coats and ties were gone and only sixty stalwarts were left in ROTC, including George. None of his friends had stayed in the program. "It was something I did by myself," he recalled. As he walked across campus one day in uniform, a group of protesters handing out antiwar pamphlets started to shout at him. One of his closest friends circled back and flipped over a table, sending the antiwar propaganda flying.

During his senior year, George worked at a bar, attended cla.s.ses sporadically, and cruised around town on his motorcycle, which he had nicknamed Brutus. He scored mostly C's and D's, but figured his grades didn't matter. When he was done with college he'd almost certainly be off to Vietnam, where his father was already on his second tour. George promised Sheila, the tall, pretty girl from Immaculata College he had started dating his junior year, that he wasn't going to be a career soldier like his dad. After his required four-year hitch, he planned on attending law school.

In April 1970, his dad came home from Vietnam to see his family before taking command of the 1st Air Cav. His new a.s.signment meant a promotion. On April 30, he pinned on the second star of a major general at a promotion ceremony at the Pentagon. That evening, the Caseys hosted a party at their house to celebrate. The guests were mostly other middle-aged officers and their wives, but George stopped by with a few of his college buddies. They stayed in the kitchen at first, drinking beers and watching the older guests through the doorway to the living room. An oil painting of West Point's granite chapel hung on the wall.

It was the same night that Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia in a speech from the Oval Office, and when the address began, everyone cl.u.s.tered around the tiny television set. Only ten days earlier, Nixon had announced he was pulling an additional 150,000 troops out of Vietnam, on top of the 100,000 already due to come home. Now standing before a gigantic map of Southeast Asia, he declared that he was widening the war to attack staging areas in Cambodia used by the North Vietnamese to funnel supplies into the south. It was an angry, deceptive speech that portrayed the United States as violating Cambodian neutrality with great reluctance and only in a supporting role to South Vietnamese troops already flowing across the border. He didn't mention the secret bombing campaign that had already been under way for months. The speech, however, was about more than just Vietnam and Cambodia; Nixon tried in his maudlin way to address the dark mood that had taken over the country.

"My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home," he began. "We see mindless attacks on all the great inst.i.tutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. If when the chips are down the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free inst.i.tutions throughout the world."

The president's words drew a cheer from the military men around the television set who believed they were finally striking back at the enemy's supply lines across the border in Cambodia. Nixon didn't say so, but everyone at the Casey house knew it was the 1st Air Cav, the Army division that George Casey Sr. would take command of when he returned to the war, that was spearheading the attack into the "Parrot's Beak," an area along the South Vietnam-Cambodia border only thirty-three miles from Saigon. Nixon's gambit might have pleased the military men, but George's college friends were disgusted. He was expanding the war that they all hated only weeks after announcing a drawdown of troops. George's friends began to argue with the elder Casey, insisting that Vietnam was lost and the invasion would only lead to more deaths. The Caseys' teenage daughter Winn, who was sitting at her father's feet as the argument grew louder and more emotional, ran to her room and slammed the door. After a few minutes, her father walked upstairs to check on her.

"How could those people talk to you like that?" she sobbed.

"Those boys stand to lose their lives if they go to Vietnam," he replied. "They are ent.i.tled to their opinions."

George had become expert at navigating the middle ground between his Georgetown friends and his family. He generally supported the war, but he wasn't the kind of person to get in arguments or begrudge his friends their opinions. Neither was his dad. One of the reasons the younger Casey had invited his friends to the promotion party was that he wanted them to meet a soldier who believed in the war yet did not consider opposition to it an act of treason. He also wanted his father, who had spent most of the last three years at war, to meet his friends.

In the days after the speech college campuses around the country exploded. ROTC buildings were attacked or burned. At Kent State University, a unit of Ohio National Guard soldiers opened fire on a crowd of students, killing four of them. At Georgetown, like most colleges, there were protests and violence, and the school responded by canceling final exams. Amid this tumult George's family said goodbye to his father, who was heading back to Vietnam. On a warm spring day George, his mother, and his father climbed into the family's Mustang convertible for the hour drive to the airport. In the car with the top down and the wind whipping their hair, George broke the news that he had asked Sheila to marry him. Mrs. Casey and George's two youngest sisters were going to move to the Philippines later that summer to be closer to his father. So they were planning on having the wedding in mid-June, before his family left for Asia.

George and his mother walked his dad to the gate at Baltimore-Was.h.i.+ngton International Airport, hugged him one last time, and then watched as he disappeared down the carpeted ramp to his plane. "You've done this so much that it must get easier," George said, turning to his mom. His mother, who had always remained stoic for her children when their father was heading out to war, for once didn't bother to disguise her anguish. "No," she replied. "It just gets harder."

A little more than two months after the elder Casey returned to Vietnam his family got the news that his helicopter was missing. On July 11, arriving for the lunch s.h.i.+ft at the Capitol Hill saloon where he was tending bar that summer, George noticed his father's picture on the front page of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. Was.h.i.+ngton Post. He didn't need to read the story. Although no one had called him to deliver the news, he knew what the article said. They had found the wreckage and his father was dead. He didn't need to read the story. Although no one had called him to deliver the news, he knew what the article said. They had found the wreckage and his father was dead.

George met the casket at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and escorted it to Was.h.i.+ngton. On July 23, 1970, his father was buried with full military honors. The day began with a funeral ma.s.s at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown. The elder Casey was one of the highest-ranking soldiers to die in Vietnam, and much of official Was.h.i.+ngton was there. George junior, wearing the gold bars of a second lieutenant on his shoulders, read a Bible verse before nearly a thousand mourners packed into the pews, among them senators, congressmen, generals, admirals, and a personal representative sent by Nixon. "Perhaps it is fitting, if this ill.u.s.trious commander had to die on the field of battle," said General Lemnitzer, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in the eulogy, "that his final mission was to visit the wounded and hospitalized soldiers of his division. Such was the man, General George Casey."

As the funeral party gathered at Fort Myer's Old Post Chapel, adjoining Arlington National Cemetery, a summer storm sent generals in their blue dress uniforms and white gloves scurrying for cover. The pallbearers were all generals, five of them former 1st Cavalry Division commanders. The procession moved through the stone gate into the cemetery, and George junior, his mother, and his four siblings walked behind the flag-draped casket. Ahead of them, a soldier led a black stallion, its saddle empty except for the cavalry boots inserted backward in the stirrups. At the grave site they huddled under a small canvas canopy as a military band played taps. As he stood saluting, Casey's raised elbow poked out from beneath the tent and water sluiced down his arm onto his pants leg and s.h.i.+ny black shoes. After the funeral the guests gathered at Quarters One, the brick mansion where General William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff, lived. The house was set on a sloping hill at the intersection of Grant and Was.h.i.+ngton avenues, with the cemetery off on the right and the marble monuments of Was.h.i.+ngton spread out in the distance. The graying general, a World War II hero who had commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam until the setbacks of 1968 had led to his rea.s.signment back to the States, circulated among the guests, making small talk. To Sheila, who had grown up outside New York City in a family with no connection to the military, this world of funerals and generals that she had entered by marrying George seemed alien and scary. She retreated to the house's sun porch, away from the bustle. A few days later the Caseys visited Westmoreland's sprawling Pentagon office, where the general presented George with his father's framed medals.

In the s.p.a.ce of just a month or so George had graduated from college, married Sheila, buried his father, and received his commission. His family dealt with the loss in different ways. After the funeral his sisters unpacked their belongings, which had already been loaded into s.h.i.+pping crates bound for the Philippines, and moved back into the Arlington home. Winn, who had been planning to go to college in Boston, stayed with her mother and commuted to nearby Mount Vernon College, a two-year girls' school. Later she recalled hearing her mother quietly sobbing in her bedroom at night. George's life seemed the least disrupted, outwardly anyway. He reported as planned for six months of training in Fort Benning, and then he and Sheila s.h.i.+pped off to Germany, where Casey had been a.s.signed to an airborne infantry brigade.

Sierra Nevada Range June 1969

After three days of battling a low-grade forest fire, John Abizaid's thin face was streaked with soot and dirt. His crew boss called him over. "We've got to get you to a phone right away," he said. "Your dad wants to talk with you about West Point." Abizaid wasn't sure what that meant. He had applied months earlier to the United States Military Academy but hadn't been accepted. He was planning to go to the University of Idaho on a Navy ROTC scholars.h.i.+p. When he finally reached the nearest pay phone, an hour away in Las Vegas, his father told him that there was a spot for him at West Point if he could get there in three days. Abizaid had always been a long shot. His high school, which had only twenty-four students in the senior cla.s.s, wasn't especially demanding and his SAT math scores were low. But the Vietnam War had sapped interest in the military academy at the exact moment that the Army decided it needed more cadets to fill the quotas for Vietnam. Abizaid hung up the phone and hopped on the first bus he could find headed in the direction of the small house that he shared with his widowed father and sister in the tiny California town of Coleville, six hours away.

The next morning he and his high school princ.i.p.al, who had agreed to accompany him across the country, boarded a plane in Reno bound for New York City. It was the first time in as long as anyone could remember that someone from Coleville was going to West Point, and the first time Abizaid had been east of Montana.

His father was a mechanic whose family had immigrated to the United States from Lebanon in the 1870s. John's mother died of cancer when he was eleven. Shortly after her death, the elder Abizaid, who suffered from often crippling bouts of emphysema, moved the family from the lower-middle-cla.s.s neighborhood of Redwood City, near San Francisco, to Coleville, a town of cinder-block buildings at the base of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. The doctors thought the dry air would be good for his health. Some days his coughing fits became so severe he seemed in danger of suffocating. At age sixteen, John rushed him to the hospital in Reno, a two-hour drive over the mountains, where the doctors drained fluid from his lungs and told him to prepare for the worst. His father survived, but his condition was a constant worry.

The highlight of the elder Abizaid's life had been World War II, when he served as a machinist on Navy s.h.i.+ps chasing German subs in the Caribbean and patrolling the South Pacific. Abizaid loved his father's stories about surviving a hurricane while on submarine escort duty and searching small Pacific islands for j.a.panese troops. He was impressed by the camaraderie and the sense of purpose in the military; before the men went ash.o.r.e in small reconnaissance parties they made a pact to fight to the death. Among his fellow students at Coleville High, whose fathers worked as alfalfa farmers and sheep ranchers, Abizaid stood out for the scale of his ambitions. In geography cla.s.s he drew imaginary countries and labeled them "Abizaidland." He quarterbacked the high school's eight-man football team, earned good grades, served as student council president, and began dating his future wife, Kathy, the dark-haired daughter of the local district attorney. Everyone knew he wanted to be a soldier, even if that meant s.h.i.+pping off to Vietnam. Whenever he got the chance he would talk to soldiers from the area home on leave. One fall evening during his senior year he spotted a sergeant with a 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles combat patch on his uniform in the stands at one of his football games. After the game, Abizaid's father thanked the sergeant for his service, and then Abizaid quizzed him: Where had he fought in Vietnam? What was it like? Why had he joined the Army? By the late 1960s Abizaid's father had become deeply disillusioned with the war, arguing heatedly to his American Legion friends that sparing the tiny nation from Communist rule wasn't worth the cost. His eldest son disagreed. But it wasn't Vietnam that drew him to the military; it was the opportunity to get out of Coleville.

Abizaid's Coleville education had left him woefully behind most of his West Point cla.s.smates in math and science. He finished his first year ranked 228th out of 1,206 cadets but each year managed to raise his standing, and by his last year he was third in his cla.s.s. West Point opened new worlds for him. His favorite professor at the school was a twenty-six-year-old Army captain named Michael Krause who had earned a doctorate in history from Georgetown University and served a year as a combat advisor in Vietnam. Krause spoke fluent French and German, quoted Franz Kafka, and had the German diplomatic records of World War I in his personal library. When he learned that Abizaid had taken correspondence courses in German throughout high school, he set him to work combing through the doc.u.ments for a research paper. Abizaid's final work relied heavily on arcane diplomatic cables from German amba.s.sadors to Berlin and concluded that the Allies had missed opportunities in Bosnia to curb German aggression prior to World War I. Krause remembered it as the best undergraduate work he saw at West Point.

Compared with the other straight-backed cadets, Abizaid was short and even a bit slump-shouldered. But he had an easygoing swagger and didn't take West Point or the Army too seriously. After their first year the cadets were sent out on night patrols in the forest near campus to hunt for a guerrilla force played by Army sergeants. The exercises had been developed by General Westmoreland in the mid-1960s when he was superintendent and the Vietnam War was just beginning to ensnare the Army. Westmoreland had grandly dubbed the exercise "Recondo," a hybrid of reconnaissance and commando. The training, however, didn't live up to its inflated moniker. To the twenty-year-old Abizaid it seemed like little more than blundering around in the forest at night, something he had done regularly back home.

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 cl.u.s.tered 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." "Sieg heil."

Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton

1970.

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 cla.s.ses. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, and other schools. The ROTC programs seemed a likely target of the city's most radical protesters.

In the spring of 1970, Chiarelli was finis.h.i.+ng his soph.o.m.ore 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 cla.s.s. 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 cla.s.smate 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 scholars.h.i.+p, but Pete thought he wanted to become a lawyer. He applied to law school at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton but was rejected. Never good at standardized tests, Chiarelli scored poorly on the admission exam, despite three attempts. Crestfallen, he s.h.i.+fted 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.

Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York

1970.

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 champions.h.i.+p 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.ses 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 bra.s.s uniform b.u.t.tons and belt buckles that would keep their s.h.i.+ne indefinitely-sparing you a few minutes of late-night polis.h.i.+ng and maybe the unwanted attention from some uppercla.s.sman bracing you for not having gleaming b.u.t.tons.

He did well during his plebe year but not spectacularly, earning a cla.s.s rank of 161st out of more than 800 cla.s.smates. "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 cla.s.s rank into the sixties. He gravitated toward others like him-hypercompet.i.tive guys who enjoyed pus.h.i.+ng each other to do better. At West Point, where cadets were ranked, graded, and a.s.sessed 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 scholars.h.i.+p. 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 ent.i.tled to wear a small star on his collar for finis.h.i.+ng in the top 5 percent of his cla.s.s. Though room a.s.signments 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 scholars.h.i.+p, 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.

As firsties (as seniors are called at West Point), cadets pick cla.s.smates to write a few words summing up their four years at West Point for the yearbook. Petraeus asked Chris White to compose his. "Peaches came to the Mil Acad with high ambitions," White wrote, using the nickname Petraeus had acquired as a kid and brought with him to West Point. "Unlike most he accomplished his goals. Dave was always 'going for it' in sports, academics, leaders.h.i.+p, and even in his social life. This att.i.tude will surely lead to success in the future, Army or otherwise." The reference to his social life was as an inside joke. Petraeus was dating Holly Knowlton, the daughter of the West Point superintendent, Lieutenant General William Knowlton. They had met on a blind date, attending a Sat.u.r.day football game. She was pretty and smart and in her own way just as driven as Dave. "This is the girl you are going to marry," John Edgecomb, a fellow cadet, recalled telling Petraeus. A senior at d.i.c.kinson College, Holly was fluent in French and finis.h.i.+ng her honors dissertation on the novelist Francois Mauriac. It was a whirlwind romance. By second semester, Dave and Holly were often seen on the campus tennis courts or driving around town in the superintendent's car.

By then he had abandoned his plans for medical school. He had done well enough to become a Star Man, finis.h.i.+ng forty-third in his cla.s.s, and was intent on becoming an infantryman. In his usual way he had picked the most demanding path. In May 1974, a few days before graduation, he and the rest of his cla.s.s filed into South Auditorium. Each cadet stood and announced which branch of the service he was entering. Those at the top of the cla.s.s had their pick, and called out "engineers" or "artillery" or "aviation" or "armor." Since Vietnam, the popularity of the infantry, the branch that did the most fighting and dying in Southeast Asia, had plummeted, and even with the Army gone from Vietnam it had not recovered. (For a cla.s.s motto, one of the suggestions had been "No More War '74," but the cla.s.s settled on the more patriotic "Pride of the Corps '74.") When Petraeus's turn came, forty-three of his cla.s.smates already had declared their branch selections. Only one had chosen the infantry. Petraeus became the second, and when he announced his choice an admiring cheer went up from the ranks. To young men who had been told since they entered Thayer Gate four years earlier that their job was to prepare to lead men in combat, anyone who went into the infantry voluntarily was worthy of special recognition. A few weeks later Petraeus received his commission as a second lieutenant and married Holly in the West Point Chapel. At the reception afterward, the young couple and their guests cruised up the Hudson River on the superintendent's yacht, basking in the early-summer twilight.

Mainz, West Germany

1971.

Lieutenant George Casey arrived at his first Army post carrying his father's dress blue uniform in his bags, along with the flag that had covered the casket. He was in that respect not that different from the entire Army, which was coming home from Vietnam broken and defeated. His new home, a U.S. base on the west bank of the Rhine River, was populated mostly by green officers like himself or soldiers recently back from the war, short-timers finis.h.i.+ng the last six months of their enlistments. Sergeants and other noncommissioned officers, critical to maintaining order among the troops, were retiring in droves, exhausted by the repeated deployments. Casey's first platoon was supposed to have thirty-five soldiers. Instead it had nine, and he soon discovered four of them had heroin problems.

A few months after he arrived, a gang of soldiers tore through the enlisted barracks beating their fellow soldiers with heavy chains, sending several to the hospital. Later a senior sergeant was shot by one of his own men in front of the post exchange. The base commander responded by ordering the lieutenants to guard their own men. Casey sat in the barracks from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. two times each week with a loaded .45-caliber pistol on his lap until his soldiers returned from a night of drinking, drugs, and brawling in Mainz. When his s.h.i.+ft was over he headed to the small apartment he shared with Sheila, grabbed a snack and a quick nap, and then head back to the base for 5:30 a.m. calisthenics.

Officers around him were regularly relieved of their command. In the s.p.a.ce of a year, Casey's battalion commander and three of the four company commanders in his unit were fired for incompetence or abusing their troops. The other battalions were just as bad, if not worse: "The price of Vietnam has been a terrible one. In terms of casualties, in terms of national treasure of both men and dollars that have been spent," said General Michael Davison, the commander of the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany. "We had to wreck the Seventh Army in order to keep Vietnam going."

Sheila hated military life in Germany. Her husband was constantly gone, either babysitting his troubled troops in the barracks or drilling with them in the field. Just as irritating was the 1950s-like formality. The base commander's wife bossed her and the other spouses around as if she were a colonel herself, a.s.signing them to s.h.i.+fts in the base thrift store. "I hope you can look back on your time here as your best a.s.signment in the army," the woman told George and Sheila one evening at a mandatory c.o.c.ktail party.

"If that is true, we are out of here now," she whispered to her husband.

Amid the chaos, Casey excelled. His platoon was rated the best of more than seventy in his division in field tests where troops conducted mock attacks and fended off ambushes. His soldiers loved him. He was quiet, confident, and steady. Because he had grown up in the Army, he knew instinctively how to relate to troops. His platoon sergeant, Ed Charo, had returned from a tour in Vietnam angry and frustrated. "Vietnam ruined me because of what I saw wrong there. There was no loyalty. The officers were all in it for themselves and didn't care about their men," he recalled. "They treated their NCOs like dirt." Charo concluded that Casey was different. He questioned his platoon sergeant relentlessly about what he'd learned in combat and even invited him over for Sunday dinner with Sheila and their infant son. He urged Charo, a demanding taskmaster, to lighten up on the troops. The end of the draft meant that the Army was converting to an all-volunteer force, and many of the recruits who joined in those years did so because they couldn't get other jobs. Most had little interest in staying in the military.

"He was the first officer who treated me with respect and took me into his home," Charo recalled. "I asked him to be my daughter's G.o.dfather and he agreed to do it. What officer would do that for an enlisted man?"

In 1973, Casey and a handful of other high-performing officers in Germany were chosen to lead a newly formed airborne battalion in Italy. Although he hoped Sheila might like their new post better, he a.s.sured her that he wasn't interested in making the Army a long-term career. Sheila, however, could tell that he loved being a soldier and had no plans to leave the service. At boozy formal dinners, Casey was usually at the center of the hijinks. He'd push aside the dinner tables and organize raucous indoor rugby games with his peers. At one such game he was running through the dining hall with the rugby ball when a fellow officer tackled him and the two men went flying through a first-story window. Casey, cut and bruised, returned to the fray.

He rarely talked about his father and bristled when fellow officers referred to him as "General Casey's son." When a friend introduced him that way once, he snapped, "Don't ever call me that again." In 1973, Lieutenant Joseph Tallman, whose father, also a general, had been killed in Vietnam only a few months earlier, joined the battalion. Unlike Casey, Tallman had been a superstar in college, finis.h.i.+ng as the top cadet in his West Point cla.s.s. But he struggled in the real Army, disgusted with the low standards, second-rate equipment, and poorly motivated troops. Casey figured he might be able to help the young lieutenant deal with his loss.

The two soon realized that they had little in common. To Tallman everything about Army life seemed to drive home the injustice of his father's death a year earlier. Casey was just the opposite. For him the military had become a comfortable refuge from his family's tragedy. One evening after dinner at Casey's apartment, Tallman recalled watching Casey set his young son atop the refrigerator in the kitchen. The toddler, at his father's prodding, yelled, "Airborne!" and then launched himself like a paratrooper into his father's outstretched arms. "It was like George had shut the door on his father's death and it was gone," Tallman recalled. "He didn't dwell on it at all."

In 1974, Casey finished first in his cla.s.s at Ranger School, a grueling eight-week h.e.l.l of mock attacks and all-night marches on minimal rations in the forests, mountains, and swamps of Georgia and Florida. Many young officers go through the ordeal shortly after getting their commissions, claiming the coveted black and gold Ranger patch to prove their toughness. Casey initially had pa.s.sed on it, figuring that since he wasn't going to make a career of the Army, there was no point in putting himself through the agony. But there was a culture of compet.i.tiveness in the Army, and even an easygoing guy like Casey could not escape it. So there he was, one of the older guys at the course and sore all over, but he had proven something to himself. When he put his mind to it, he was a d.a.m.n good soldier.

One day near the end the course he was on the phone with his mom when she mentioned that there was a new second lieutenant named Dave Petraeus getting ready to start Ranger School. Go by his quarters and introduce yourself, she asked. She had been talking to his mother-in-law, Peggy Knowlton, who had mentioned that her daughter Holly had just married this young West Point graduate. After the course, he was headed off to the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion in Italy, the same unit George had just left. As a favor to her, Casey tracked him down and they chatted for a few minutes about Vicenza and the Ranger course. Like Casey, Petraeus was on his way to finis.h.i.+ng first in his cla.s.s. Casey handed Petraeus a few 509th patches for his uniform and wished him luck.

Their careers would intersect repeatedly over the next thirty years, but they could not have been more different. Petraeus was always the striver who saw the Army as a summit to be conquered and the stars of a general as the ultimate prize. His fellow officers often saw him as distant and calculating. Casey was content to be a good solid officer. After Ranger School he headed off to Colorado to be an a.s.sistant logistics officer in a mechanized infantry battalion, about as unglamorous an a.s.signment as you could find.

Fort Carson, Colorado 1977.

Casey was out in the field training his company in a mountainous section of Fort Carson in Colorado when his first sergeant said he had an urgent call. Casey took the call in a nearby shack. "You've been selected for a mission with the highest national priority," said the voice at the other end of the line. "I need to know if you want to do it."

"What is it?" Casey asked.

"I can't tell you over the phone," the voice said.

A buddy of Casey's had recently been selected to try out for the new counterterrorist unit, dubbed Delta Force, and he quickly figured out that he was getting a shot as well. Before he agreed to go he said he had to talk with his wife about it. "I need to know by one this afternoon," the voice replied. He phoned Sheila and described the curious call. He couldn't say what he was getting into, mainly because he didn't know for sure himself, but it was unmistakably something new and different. "I need to go do this," he told her. She could tell there was little use in trying to talk him out of going.

The chance to join Delta had not come as much out of the blue as it appeared. A few weeks earlier Lufthansa flight 181, bound for Frankfurt and full of German tourists heading home from Majorca, had been hijacked by four Palestinian terrorists. Four days later, after the plane landed at Mogadishu, Somalia, and the hijackers tossed the pilot's lifeless body onto the tarmac, a German counterterrorism unit, called Grenzschutzgruppe 9, stormed the aircraft. The operation was a miraculous success. Three hijackers were killed and the fourth was captured. Except for a few minor injuries, all eighty-six pa.s.sengers escaped unscathed. In Was.h.i.+ngton, President Jimmy Carter sent a note to the Pentagon asking if it had a counterterrorist force like the Germans had. At the time an Army colonel named Charlie Beckwith was attempting to start up just such a unit, but he had been getting a lukewarm response from the Pentagon bureaucracy. President Carter's note kicked the effort into high gear. Beckwith told the Army chief of staff that his top priority was finding the right soldiers. That led him to Casey, who had impressed his superiors with his toughness.

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 a.s.sembling 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 ma.s.s and firepower. The unstated a.s.sumption 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 a.s.semble at the base stockade, which had been cleared of prisoners and turned into a makes.h.i.+ft 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 pa.s.sing by in a pickup truck. His uniform was soaked, his face was scratched and bleeding, and the b.u.t.t 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 p.u.s.s.y! You p.u.s.s.y! Keep going, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, you p.u.s.s.y!"

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 a.s.signments, pulled Casey aside before he departed to offer some words of rea.s.surance. "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 acc.u.mulated 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.ses," he screamed. "That was the sorriest excuse for an attack I have ever seen." Casey agreed. "We don't know what the h.e.l.l we are doing, and this has got to change," he told himself.