The Fourth Star (6 page)

John’s classes didn’t commence until the second week in October, ten days later than scheduled. There was no explanation. It was just the way things worked. When Abizaid scheduled meetings with professors, they often showed up late or not at all. Keeping up with lectures conducted in Arabic was a trial, especially until he adjusted to the local dialect. “It is quite a surprise for the Arabs to see an American taking a course with them
in Arabic and they will always marvel at my ability to understand what is going on in class,” he said at the time. “If they were ever able to look beneath my confident expression of understanding they would see the stark terror of a student who understands much less than they think he does.”

Many mornings after John left for the university, neighborhood women arrived at the apartment, offering to help Kathy with washing and cooking. They peppered her with questions: Why wasn’t her mother here? How could she allow her four-year-old daughter to freeze in only a sweater? Why weren’t her sisters married? “Don’t worry. God will bless you with a son,” they reassured her after their second daughter was born. Soon Kathy was communicating in rudimentary Arabic and teaching them English in return. “There were times when both Kathy and I would curse as our doorbell rang, yet open the door with a huge smile,” Abizaid recounted in an early report to his scholarship sponsors. “Thankfully this period has now passed. We are now members of the neighborhood and very comfortable.”

Even a newcomer to the Middle East, such as Abizaid, could see that the region was undergoing tumultuous change. In January 1979, as he was getting ready to begin his second semester, the shah of Iran, America’s strongest ally in the area, was driven from power. The return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran a month later marked the first successful takeover of a major Middle Eastern country by Islamists. Khomeini’s ascendance unleashed a wave of political unrest across the region. In Jordan, which was ruled by King Hussein, a non-Palestinian monarch from the Hashemite tribe, the Iranian revolution revived the Palestinian nationalism long repressed by the regime’s security services. Abizaid was studying in the history department one day when he looked out the window and saw demonstrators marching toward the five-story building and chanting Khomeini’s name. A Jordanian friend urged him to leave, worried about what might happen if the mob found an American on campus. As Abizaid raced down the back stairs he could hear the demonstrators growing louder and angrier as they denounced the king. Another group of students, outraged at the insult, was massing to avenge his honor. Emerging from the back door, he threaded his way through the angry throng and sprinted
home to find Kathy peering over the concrete wall surrounding their apartment. As Abizaid came through the front gate, a convoy of riot police in armored vehicles sped by in the direction of the university. A few minutes later they heard automatic weapons fire. The police were firing over the demonstrators’ heads to break up the melee.

“Order was restored, certain activists disappeared from campus, and we completed the year in calm,” Abizaid wrote, describing the episode in a letter to the American administrator of his scholarship program. “In all truthfulness experiences such as this are worth as much as classroom study.”

He found his fellow students more assertive and angry, emboldened by Khomeini’s rise. When sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Tehran that November, many students skipped classes to celebrate. Almost overnight women began donning head scarves and the campus took on a more Islamic identity. Abizaid saw the signs of religious radicalization as ominous for the United States. “It was inevitable that something big was coming our way in the Middle East. You could just sense it,” he recalled years later.

After registering for a course on Islamic history, he spent hours poring over the required reading—verses from the Koran, which many other students already knew by heart. By the end of the semester he had eked out a passing grade and gained deeper insight into the power of the new Islamist movement. “I cannot say that I mastered the finer points of Islamic law nor understand the historical background of certain Islamic practices today. I can only say that I now understand that Islam is much more than a religion. It is a way of life that guides Muslims in every aspect of their lives,” he wrote in December 1979.

When school wasn’t in session, Abizaid traveled, studying the region and its many conflicts. He and a fellow officer drove out into the Yemeni desert to watch the hit-and-run battles between the U.S.-supported North and the Soviet-backed South during that country’s civil war. In Sudan, the U.S. embassy enlisted him to negotiate the return of one of its vehicles, which had been claimed by a warlord after it broke down and was abandoned on the side of the road. In the winter of 1980 he traveled with a
team of U.S. diplomats and officers to a dirt airstrip at the base of a soaring desert escarpment near the Oman-Yemen border. There he met a British lieutenant in command of a motley group of Pakistani soldiers and local tribesmen, clad in colorful garb, who were attempting to put down an uprising against the sultan of Oman. As he wandered through the dirty camp, he was amazed that a few dozen British officers oversaw the wide-ranging effort—fighting insurgents, overseeing aid projects, and advising the sultan’s government. Abizaid envied the small detachment of British soldiers, who actually seemed to be achieving something, as tiny as their effort was. “It was one of these rare instances in the twentieth century where an insurgency is quelled,” he recalled.

The United States proved clumsier in its attempt to intervene in the region. Although Abizaid didn’t realize it at the time, he and his fellow officers were in Oman that winter scouting for airfields to use in a secret mission to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. Abizaid was brought along as a translator. The operation was conducted later that spring by Delta Force—the counterterrorism unit that Casey had tried out for a year earlier—and ended in disaster when a U.S. military helicopter crashed into an Air Force C-130, killing eight commandos. The debacle made a deep impression on the U.S. Army, which was still recovering from Vietnam. Instead of surgical strikes by clandestine commandos, Pentagon generals would insist that the key to success in future operations was to overwhelm the enemy with troops and firepower.

Toward the end of his stay Abizaid decided to run the entire length of Jordan, a 270-mile journey that took him from the Iraqi border in the north to Aqaba, the port city that had been captured by Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab allies during World War I. Abizaid was trying to soak up as much of the country as he could before he left. As he jogged through the desert he was joined by Jordanian army officers, including one lieutenant who smoked cigarettes as he plodded alongside him in the searing heat. The Arabs reproached him for guzzling water, saying no Bedouin would need to drink so much. Stopping at desert encampments at night, he was served bread and tea—and called “Abu Zaid” by the nomads.

His family had grown to feel at home in the country as well. Kathy bargained with local food vendors for bruised tomatoes and taught herself
how to serve Arabic coffee to their Bedouin guests, filling their shot-glass-sized cups again and again until they shook them, the signal that they were finished. She gamely put up with even the most intrusive guests. Abu Latif, a Bedouin sheikh who had played host to the Abizaids several times in the Byzantine ruin on the outskirts of Amman where his tribe lived, arrived one rainy evening in his flowing robe, accompanied by a dozen family members. “We’ve come to bathe,” he announced in Arabic. For the next several hours they rotated through the Abizaids’ bathroom, washing and raiding the medicine cabinet.

Few Army wives would ever throw themselves into a foreign culture the way Kathy did, Abizaid thought. He delighted in watching his four-year-old daughter Sherry laugh and shout with her Jordanian playmates in self-taught Arabic. And he reveled in the disorder of everyday life in Jordan: the ten o’clock news that some nights didn’t start until after 10:30; the total disregard for traffic laws. “I can’t think of a time when we’ve been happier or closer as a family,” he wrote in a letter to the Olmsted Foundation. On their last night in Amman, the Abizaids hosted a small goodbye dinner, inviting their neighbor Asma Ali and several close Jordanian friends and their children. Kathy later described the gathering in a letter: “As the evening wore on, I could see that they were delaying their departure. I was sitting and watching all of our children playing and turned to ask Asma something. She was playing with the baby and crying. I found that I was crying too. In a country where families live in the same village for centuries the departure, perhaps permanent, of a friend is so much of a loss. We both felt that then.”

Abizaid’s two-year sojourn had caused him to fall behind his fellow West Point classmates. In his first two Army assignments with the 82nd Airborne Division and the Rangers he’d received glowing reviews. “One of the most intelligent officers I have ever known,” an early battalion commander wrote in his personnel file. “Destined to become one of the truly great leaders of the U.S. military,” another boss said. Now the Pentagon officer charged with placing him in his next assignment warned him in letters typed on Department of the Army stationery that he needed to get back to leading troops “as soon as possible.” He briefly considered switching from infantry officer to foreign area officer so that he could remain in the
Middle East, which he and Kathy had grown to love. “Arabist or infantryman?” he asked in one letter home. The more he thought about it, the clearer the answer became. Ever since hearing his father’s stories from World War II as a teenager, Abizaid had longed to lead soldiers. He chose infantryman, confident that growing unrest in the Islamic world would draw him back one day.

C
olonel James Shelton had never seen anything like it. The letter from a captain named David Petraeus went on for two pages, ticking off all the honors and achievements he had accumulated in his short career—Star Man at West Point, promoted early to captain, master parachutist badge, top of his class at Ranger School, exemplary fitness reports. Shelton and Petraeus had met each other exactly once. A few years earlier they had shared a tent one night during a NATO exercise in eastern Turkey. Petraeus had cracked up when Shelton pulled a bottle of scotch from a spare boot in his rucksack, and the two soldiers had shared a drink. Now it was Shelton’s turn to chuckle. This brash captain was lobbying for command of a rifle company in his brigade. He passed the letter around his headquarters, and everyone got a kick out of it. “What do you want to do with Superman here?” the brigade’s personnel officer asked. “Let’s give him a shot,” Shelton replied. He had only taken over command a few months earlier and already had bawled out several shoddy junior officers. If Petraeus was half as good as he claimed, he would be an improvement.

Petraeus and his wife, Holly, pulled into Fort Stewart in their yellow Corvette a few weeks later, newly assigned to Shelton’s brigade in the 24th Infantry Division. Everything moved at a languid pace in rural Georgia, they found. Holly could speak French fluently, but she had a harder time with southern drawls. When, shortly after arriving, she heard a radio commercial referring to “Vince’s Dawgs,” she had no idea it was a reference to the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team and its coach, Vince Dooley. The 24th Division headquarters was in a creaky white clapboard building built in the early months of World War II. Beyond the main post lay the vast training grounds, nearly 300,000 acres of dense scrub pine and swamp. But training wasn’t much of a priority. The commanding general spent long hours on his boat, which he kept moored near Savannah, twenty-five miles away. Days at a time would go by without him saying a word to his staff. “You’re in command,” he told his deputy. “Just tell me if something goes wrong.” A lot was going wrong. The year Petraeus arrived, the 24th was rated “not combat ready” in the Army’s internal unit assessments.

He and Holly had spent the previous four years at the U.S. base in Vicenza in a parachute infantry brigade. They had loved life in Italy, or he had anyway. The only work Holly could find as the wife of an officer was tutoring soldiers seeking their high school GEDs. Petraeus, however, spent weeks at a time traveling around Europe on joint exercises with parachute units from other NATO countries. In 1976, he and a couple of dozen soldiers from his unit went to France to train with its paratroopers. After ten days, they ended up in the Pyrenees Mountains, executing a tricky drop onto a hilltop. From there the Americans and their hosts marched several miles to a rustic château, where they were served a memorable meal by black-coated waiters. A picture snapped that evening by one of his men shows a youthful Petraeus standing outside the farmhouse in his paratrooper beret, looking deeply happy.

On the trip Petraeus noticed a larger-than-life portrait of a French officer displayed in the regimental mess and asked about it. The painting was of Marcel Bigeard, his hosts told him, a revered French general. He had fought in Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, was taken prisoner during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and later forged the counterinsurgency tactics that
French units used in their war in Algeria. After returning to Vicenza, an intrigued Petraeus began reading about Bigeard, poring over a copy of
Hell in a Very Small Place
, Bernard Fall’s classic account of the French war in Indochina, and a translation of the
The Centurions
, Jean Lartéguy’s novel whose hero, Raspeguy, was loosely modeled on Bigeard.

Petraeus became a fervent admirer of the combat-hardened paratrooper who had helped revive the French spirit after its crushing defeat in Vietnam, a decade before the United States sent troops there.
The Centurions
quickly became one of his favorite books. The novel recounts how Raspeguy and his tight-knit band of men returned from the war to an indifferent France and re-formed their unit to fight in Algeria, this time more effectively battling Arab guerrillas on their own ground. One of Petraeus’s prized possessions was an autographed picture of Bigeard, given to him as a Christmas present in 1976 by Holly’s father, General Knowlton, who had left West Point for an assignment at NATO. Petraeus would hang the picture on his office wall for decades afterward. He would read and reread sections of
The Centurions
, too. Thirty years later, Petraeus would pull a copy of the novel off his bookshelf at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and lecture a visitor on what it taught about small-unit infantry tactics.