The Fourth Star Page 3

  By then he had abandoned his plans for medical school. He had done well enough to become a Star Man, finishing forty-third in his class, 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 class filed into South Auditorium. Each cadet stood and announced which branch of the service he was entering. Those at the top of the class 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 class motto, one of the suggestions had been “No More War ’74,” but the class settled on the more patriotic “Pride of the Corps ’74.”) When Petraeus’s turn came, forty-three of his classmates 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 finishing 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 shift 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 space 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, assigning them to shifts in the base thrift store. “I hope you can look back on your time here as your best assignment in the army,” the woman told George and Sheila one evening at a mandatory cocktail 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 godfather 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 assured 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, finishing as the top cadet in his West Point class. 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 class at Ranger School, a grueling eight-week hell 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 passed 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 competitiveness 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 damn 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 finishing first in his class. 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 assistant logistics officer in a mechanized infantry battalion, about as unglamorous an assignment 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 passengers escaped unscathed. In Washington, 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 assembling revealed how the Army saw the problem. Delta Force was to be a small, top-secret team that would rely on speed and stealth instead of mass and firepower. The unstated assumption was that terrorism did not pose a fundamental danger to the country. It could be handled by a small band of commandos who trained relentlessly in the special techniques of rescuing hostages and killing terrorists.

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

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

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

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

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

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