The Fourth Star (2 page)

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 entitled 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-Washington 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 shift at the Capitol Hill saloon where he was tending bar that summer, George noticed his father’s picture on the front page of the
Washington 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.

George met the casket at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and
escorted it to Washington. On July 23, 1970, his father was buried with full military honors. The day began with a funeral mass at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown. The elder Casey was one of the highest-ranking soldiers to die in Vietnam, and much of official Washington 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 illustrious 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 shiny 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 Washington avenues, with the cemetery off on the right and the marble monuments of Washington 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 reassignment 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 space 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 shipping 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 shipped off to Germany, where Casey had been assigned to an airborne infantry brigade.

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.