The Fourth Star Read online

  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 scholarship. 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 class, 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 principal, 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-class 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 ships 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 Japanese troops. He was impressed by the camaraderie and the sense of purpose in the military; before the men went ashore 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 class 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 shipping 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 classmates 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 class. 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 documents for a research paper. Abizaid’s final work relied heavily on arcane diplomatic cables from German ambassadors 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 clustered 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.”

  Seattle, Washington

  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 classes. 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 Washington, and other schools. The ROTC programs seemed a likely target of the city’s most radical protesters.

  In the spring of 1970, Chiarelli was finishing his sophomore year, commuting to school every day from hi
s 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 class. 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 classmate 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 scholarship, but Pete thought he wanted to become a lawyer. He applied to law school at the University of Washington but was rejected. Never good at standardized tests, Chiarelli scored poorly on the admission exam, despite three attempts. Crestfallen, he shifted 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 championship 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 scholarship 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 classes 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 brass uniform buttons and belt buckles that would keep their shine indefinitely—sparing you a few minutes of late-night polishing and maybe the unwanted attention from some upperclassman bracing you for not having gleaming buttons.

  He did well during his plebe year but not spectacularly, earning a class rank of 161st out of more than 800 classmates. “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 class rank into the sixties. He gravitated toward others like him—hypercompetitive guys who enjoyed pushing each other to do better. At West Point, where cadets were ranked, graded, and assessed 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 scholarship. 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 entitled to wear a small star on his collar for finishing in the top 5 percent of his class. Though room assignments 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 scholarship, 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 classmates 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, leadership, and even in his social life. This attitude 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 Saturday 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 Dickinson College, Holly was fluent in French and finishing her honors dissertation on the novelist François 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.