The Fourth Star Part 3

The demonstrating Kurds carried banners that read "We Love You America" and "Your Job Is Halve Done." When it became clear the Americans were leaving for good, the hysterical crowd began to hit the soldiers with their signs. A mother carrying a young child threw herself into the razor wire strung across the border, slicing her hands and face; another woman bit the battalion sergeant major on the arm. On the Turkish side of the bridge the local commander scrambled his soldiers, who looked as if they were preparing to open fire.

A furious Abizaid, his uniform drenched in sweat, rushed to find Callahan, whose men had fixed bayonets and were trying to hold their ground. "Do not allow anyone to set foot on this bridge!" Abizaid yelled as he called the rest of the battalion back across the border to augment his force. Standing on the hood of a Humvee, he a.s.sured the crowd that the United States would continue to protect them with planes and helicopters based in Turkey. As the temperatures rose, the exhausted and angry Kurds, held back by bayonets and razor wire, slowly drifted away.

Abizaid doubted the tenuous peace his soldiers left behind in northern Iraq would hold. His troops were replaced by jet fighters that patrolled in the skies over northern Iraq, ready to strike if Saddam Hussein tried to attack again. Surprisingly, a relatively prosperous enclave emerged, aided by ample international aid. But, as with most conflicts in the Middle East, it wasn't clear how long the calm would last.

After Iraq, Abizaid spent a year at Stanford University as a military fellow, reflecting on his experiences and writing about the need to prepare for guerrilla conflicts and peacekeeping missions. He visited Somalia, where the Bush administration in its waning months had sent troops as part of a UN effort to secure a cease-fire between the country's warring militias and feed its starving population. General Colin Powell, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supported the intervention, with the proviso that the U.S. force would be ma.s.sive and would remain only a couple of months. By the time Abizaid got there, most of the U.S. soldiers had been replaced by poorly equipped UN troops from countries like Pakistan. President Clinton had taken over in the White House, and the mission had expanded from feeding starving Somalis to stabilizing the country's government and arresting troublesome warlords.

The warlords fought back. First they attacked the poorly armed Pakistanis and then the remaining Americans. Four U.S. soldiers were killed when their unarmored Humvee drove over a hidden bomb. On his visit, Abizaid met with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division who were trying to separate warring clans south of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. A few months after he departed, a team of Rangers and Delta Force commandos was sent to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. The mission triggered a b.l.o.o.d.y and unexpected battle in which untrained fighters, armed with only AK-47s and grenade launchers, downed two Black Hawk helicopters and killed eighteen U.S. troops. Americans reacted with outrage to the horrific television footage from the battle. "I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit p.r.i.c.ks," Clinton screamed at his aides as they watched images of howling Somalis dragging the body of a dead U.S. pilot through the streets.

Unable to justify a humanitarian mission that had suddenly turned into a war, the White House ordered a withdrawal, abandoning Mogadishu to its warring clans. Many military officers blamed Clinton for the disaster, insisting that it was a mistake to commit the U.S. military to such ill-defined and unwinnable missions. General Powell had retired from active service a few days before the Mogadishu disaster. "We can't make a country out of that place," he later recounted warning Clinton on his last day in uniform.

Abizaid didn't disagree with Powell. No one could reasonably expect the military to forge a country out of a collection of warring tribes. But he didn't think the Army could completely avoid future Somalias, either. The military's instinct-to go in big and get out fast-was not acceptable. Its focus on large-scale combat and quick wars after Vietnam had left it unprepared for a whole series of smaller, messier threats that only the military could handle. "We must recognize that peacekeeping is no job for amateurs," he wrote in Military Review Military Review, an Army journal, during his Stanford fellows.h.i.+p. "It is dangerous, stressful duty that requires highly disciplined, well educated soldiers who understand the nature of the peacekeeping beast. As we get ready to fight the next war, let us also keep thinking about how we might have to keep the peace in some far off corner of the world."

It was a plea to study the operations in northern Iraq and Somalia and not dismiss them as aberrations. Abizaid believed deeply that the military didn't get to choose the kinds of wars that it would fight, and that it was likely the Clinton administration or its successors would send U.S. troops on similar peacekeeping missions in the future, probably without fully thinking through what they were taking on. He was right, just as Petraeus had been a few years earlier when he had argued the same point in his Princeton dissertation. Less than a decade pa.s.sed before the U.S. Army found itself again battling lightly armed fighters who relied on stealth and hit-and-run attacks to nullify America's overwhelming might-this time in Iraq.

Fort Campbell, Kentucky September 1991 After two years as a general's aide in the Pentagon, Dave Petraeus was finally back in a combat unit. He was taking over one of the 101st Airborne Division's most storied units. His battalion was one of three that traced its lineage back to the 187th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had been activated during World War II to fight in the Pacific. The j.a.panese had dubbed the parachutists Rakkasans Rakkasans, a term meaning "falling-down umbrella men," and the name stuck, even after the battalion converted into a helicopter a.s.sault force. The Rakkasans later fought in Korea, Vietnam, and, only a few months before Petraeus took command, in Iraq, where the battalion moved hundreds of miles behind enemy lines as part of a ma.s.sive helicopter a.s.sault to cut off Republican Guard units fleeing Kuwait.

Most of the captains and majors now working for him had been to war; he hadn't. But he had been prepping for the day when he would take over command since arriving in Vicenza sixteen years earlier as a green second lieutenant, vacuuming up ideas and depositing them in a folder marked "First Day of Command." Now he began putting his ideas into practice. He wanted to foster a culture of compet.i.tiveness, he told his officers. Always an exercise fanatic, he inst.i.tuted a demanding physical fitness test with standards far tougher than the Army required of even its youngest soldiers. Petraeus goaded his men into taking it and then stood over them at the track counting off push-ups, sit-ups, and dips one by one. He dubbed the winners "Iron Rakkasans" and engraved their names on a plaque at the battalion headquarters. Everything was a compet.i.tion for Petraeus, and every compet.i.tion was a way to prove the superiority of his unit. Even a chili cook-off in the town outside Fort Campbell was treated like a major operation, with soldiers dispatched a day ahead of time to secure a s.p.a.ce near the judges' table and scout out the compet.i.tion. Some officers loved Petraeus's gung-ho spirit; others thought he was trying too hard. It was as if he believed you could become a great commander the same way he had become a West Point Star Man-by breaking the a.s.signment into all of its thousands of components and then studying them harder than anyone else for the big test. The reality was tougher. There was much more to command than knowing small-unit tactics or winning a chili cook-off. A good officer had to convince soldiers to follow him, sometimes to their deaths. A few, like Abizaid, were naturals. Petraeus wasn't. He had moved so quickly through his relatively few rotations with frontline combat units and spent so much time at the hip of senior generals that he hadn't learned how to seem natural in front of regular troops.

He used Boy Scout language like "gosh" and "golly." He frowned on officers who chewed tobacco. He mangled words that every infantryman was supposed to know-even "hooah," the all-purpose Army reply. Every soldier learned in basic training that it was uttered in a throaty roar, meant to signal you were up for anything. Petraeus's "hooah" sounded flat and unconvincing, causing his officers to cringe inside. Several put together a list of soldier slang terms and gave it to their new boss so that he would come off better when addressing his troops. He accepted it good-naturedly. On the wall of his new office he hung his prized photo of Marcel Bigeard, the French paratrooper and guerrilla war expert, right above the framed French paratrooper certificate he had earned in 1976. Petraeus liked to quiz visitors on the ident.i.ty of the foreign-looking officer in the photo; no one at Fort Campbell had ever heard of Bigeard. Choosing a French general as a role model marked him as unusual in the American Army. It made it seem like he had developed his ideas about how to be a soldier from history books and going to seminars-or, worse yet, in the salons of Paris. His men started calling their Ph.D.-degreed commander "Doc," which summed up his intellect and their misgivings about his street smarts.

Shortly after arriving, he and six of his officers found themselves camping out near a runway at a small air base in rural Tennessee. The soldiers and their new commander talked into the evening about their lives, families, and careers. Eventually the question went around the circle: Which of them had spent a night in jail? Everyone had except Petraeus. That summed up their new commander: physically tough and smart but lacking in real-world experience.

Fred Johnson, one of his company commanders, noticed that Petraeus didn't wear a "high and tight," a military haircut that was closely shaven on the sides and back. Many infantrymen at Fort Campbell believed the shorter-than-regulation trim made them look like warriors, ready to deploy at a moment's notice. It set them apart from the rest of the peacetime Army. When Johnson raised the subject, Petraeus explained that Holly didn't like his hair that short. Some of the men, Johnson replied, had commented on it. It wasn't true-n.o.body had mentioned it-but he wanted Petraeus to succeed, and in a unit full of combat veterans, the commander couldn't afford to appear less than warriorlike. The next day, he recalled, Petraeus walked into the battalion headquarters sporting a high and tight and promptly issued a new directive: from then on, the standard haircut for Iron Rakkasans was a high and tight.

The 1990s were known as the era of the "zero-defect Army," a time when a single mistake by an officer-or even his troops-could doom his chances for advancement. With the end of the Cold War, the Army was shrinking, and a below-average fitness report was usually enough to convince a promotion board to pa.s.s over an otherwise exemplary soldier. Petraeus exemplified this mania for detail, though his goal was not to weed out the unfit but to bind his soldiers together. Shortly after arriving, he published a booklet that laid out page after page of detailed instructions about how the battalion should look, act, and think. There were instructions on everything imaginable, and some that defied easy explanation. Every Rakkasan was required to fasten the top b.u.t.ton of his combat fatigues, the one right under the chin, ostensibly so uncamouflaged necks wouldn't show. Some U.S. soldiers in the 101st thought all that Petraeus's "battle b.u.t.ton" did was make them look stupid. Actually, that was his intention. "It made others joke about us, which pulled us together," Petraeus later explained. He had borrowed the idea from The Centurions The Centurions, the novel he had first read in 1976 that was loosely based on Marcel Bigeard's experiences fighting insurgents in Vietnam and Algeria. The hero of the book and his paratroopers wear distinctive floppy hats known as "lizard caps" that are mocked by other French troops but bind the unit together.

He also had elaborate rules for attaching equipment to the load-bearing web belts, known as LBEs, worn by every soldier in the field. During inspections, he made a point of examining the belts to make sure his troops had tied the knots just right and that they had burned off the ends of the parachute cord to prevent fraying. His own LBE was outfitted flawlessly. It had taken him hours to get it just right.

His other priority after taking command was training-often with live ammunition. One Sat.u.r.day morning a month after a.s.suming command, Petraeus and the a.s.sistant commander of the 101st, Brigadier General Jack Keane, were watching a company of soldiers practice clearing a bunker. Ahead of them, Specialist Terrence Jones tossed a training grenade through the doorway, flattened himself against a wall, and waited for the dull thud. Then he began running to rejoin his squad. Jones could hear the popping of automatic weapons and the whiz of real bullets as he lumbered over twenty yards of open ground. Reaching his squad's position, he threw himself down on the ground, using the b.u.t.t of his SAW machine gun to break his fall. As he landed, his finger inadvertently squeezed the trigger. Thirty yards away, Petraeus grunted in pain and dropped to his knees. The bullet from Jones's weapon had hit him in the chest, right over the A A in his uniform name tag. in his uniform name tag.

He wasn't sure what had happened. The pain was in his back, and his first thought was that he had been struck from behind by a grenade. He tried to steady himself, but then his head started to swirl and pain enveloped his torso. He felt like he was staring down a long tunnel. Keane, who had been standing nearby, eased him down to the ground and opened his camouflage uniform. "Dave, you've been shot. You know what we're going to do here. We're going to stop the bleeding," he said in his booming voice. From the front, the wound didn't look so bad. Blood was trickling from a small hole over his right nipple. But Petraeus couldn't see the exit wound, where the bullet had come out. A four-inch chunk of his back was torn away and oozing blood. Smoke was still wafting out of the hole. Keane bellowed for a medevac helicopter and then turned back to Petraeus. Two Army medics rushed up and began cutting open his fatigues. Petraeus in his fog worried about all the work he had put in getting his knots correct. "Don't cut my LBE," he muttered. "I just got it to standard." They ignored him, swiftly cutting off his web gear and pressing gauze bandages on the wounds. "Dave, I want you to stay with us," Keane said. "Yes, sir," Petraeus replied.

As the minutes pa.s.sed, Keane kept up a steady chatter, all but commanding him not to slip into unconsciousness. Petraeus was speaking less and less. Soon he started going blank, his eyes wide but unresponsive. His face was turning ashen. He vomited greenish fluid and a chunk of something. Finally the thump-thump thump-thump of an arriving helicopter was heard in the distance. Keane announced he was going with Petraeus to the base hospital. "We all know what happened here. A soldier accidentally shot his commanding officer. Pull that unit together and get them back on the range," he bellowed. The Army Black Hawk set down twenty yards away, and Petraeus was rushed aboard on a stretcher with Keane at his side. of an arriving helicopter was heard in the distance. Keane announced he was going with Petraeus to the base hospital. "We all know what happened here. A soldier accidentally shot his commanding officer. Pull that unit together and get them back on the range," he bellowed. The Army Black Hawk set down twenty yards away, and Petraeus was rushed aboard on a stretcher with Keane at his side.

Petraeus went directly into the operating room at the Fort Campbell hospital. When the chief surgeon emerged he marveled at Petraeus's toughness, telling Keane that he had shoved a tube into the bullet hole in Petraeus's chest to prevent infection-a procedure done without anesthetic that normally causes patients to cry out from the intense pain. Petraeus had only grunted. The bleeding was under control, but he needed more surgery as soon as possible by a specialist, the doctor said, suggesting Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. Since it was a weekend, Keane called ahead and insisted on the best surgeon on the staff to do the operation.

When the helicopter landed at Vanderbilt, tubes were protruding from Petraeus's chest, draining blood so he wouldn't suffocate. The hospital's emergency staff was waiting, along with a tallish doctor dressed like he had come from the golf course. After Keane's call, the Vanderbilt staff hunted down the hospital's chief of thoracic surgery, Dr. Bill Frist, a future senator from Tennessee. Frist did an initial examination and returned to speak to Keane, shocked at the grapefruit-sized exit wound. Used to treating hunting injuries, he had never encountered the trauma that the high-velocity rounds used by the military could cause. Rather than wait for Petraeus to stabilize, he was going directly into surgery. "Obviously, you know we have a very serious injury here," Frist told Keane.

The surgery took nearly six hours. The bullet had severed an artery and damaged his right lung, part of which had to be removed. When it was over, Petraeus was resting, still sedated, in a recovery room. He was on a respirator as a precaution, but the worst danger had pa.s.sed. Frist told Keane and Holly, who had arrived by then from Fort Campbell, that the prognosis was good but recovery would take at least ten weeks. That was too long for Petraeus. His battalion's first big field test was approaching, and Petraeus didn't want to miss it, even with a gaping scar on his torso. A few days after his operation, he requested a transfer back to the Fort Campbell hospital.

Soon he began pestering his doctors and nurses. He was feeling fine and should be released, he said. His demands eventually became so bothersome that the hospital commander, Colonel Steve Xenakis, came to Petraeus's room to order him to quiet down. "Everybody recovers and heals differently," Petraeus told him. "I'm ready to go home." With Xenakis's help, he removed the intravenous tubes from his arm, got down on the floor, and started doing push-ups in his flimsy hospital gown. Running out of strength at fifty, Petraeus stood up. "Well?" he said. Xenakis said he could leave in a few days, but made him promise not to rush back to work or resume exercising anytime soon.

He broke his promise. Petraeus worried that losing part of his lung would leave him unable to match the blistering running pace he had turned in before the shooting. Being one of the fittest soldiers in the Army was part of the superhuman persona that Petraeus had strived for since he was at West Point. His stamina was part of what, many years later, he would call the "Petraeus brand," the carefully crafted ident.i.ty that protected him, in his own mind anyway, from those officers who wanted to lump him with other brainy officers who were unable to handle the physical rigors of leading men in combat. A few days after he came home, Petraeus went to the Fort Campbell gym, planning for an easy workout. He started off on an exercise bike, pedaling gently. Feeling okay, he moved on to light jogging around the track. When that brought only mild discomfort, he decided to time himself in a 440-yard sprint. He dashed two times around the track and was reasonably pleased with his time, given the rolls of tape wrapped around his torso. Although he didn't realize it, the exertion had caused his lung to bleed again. His doctors warned him that if he did it again, he might need emergency surgery. "They read him the riot act, and he backed off for a while," Holly Petraeus recalled. But not for long. In less than a month, he was back with his battalion when it went to the field for their first big training exercise. His only concession to medical necessity was carrying a lighter-than-usual rucksack to avoid aggravating his incision.

Over the years, he shaped the shooting into a tale of toughness and resilience. He retold it often, joking that he had arranged to get himself shot to erase the stigma of missing the Gulf War. Admirers and journalists cited his escape from death as evidence he was destined for great achievement. Rather than degrading the Petraeus brand, the accident ended up adding to its aura.

Petraeus's plan after completing his battalion command at Fort Campbell was to spend the 199495 academic year on a fellows.h.i.+p at Georgetown University. There were clear giveaways that he had no intention of spending the year in quiet academic retreat. His choice of Georgetown meant that Petraeus was in Was.h.i.+ngton, where the action was. His research topic was the crisis in Haiti, which was still unfolding. The Clinton administration had spent more than a year readying a plan to restore to power Haiti's democratically elected president, who had been toppled by a military junta. With memories of Somalia still fresh, the White House readily acceded to the Pentagon's insistence that it deploy a ma.s.sive force to the country and severely limit the overall goals for the operation. President Clinton promised there would be no long-term U.S. occupation or attempt to remake Haiti's shattered economy or government. The 20,000 American troops were supposed to move in, restore security, and after a few months turn the operation over to a United Nations force.

Several months after arriving at Georgetown, Petraeus used his Sosh connections to secure an interview with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was deeply involved in the U.S. effort to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Impressed by Petraeus's questions, Talbott invited him to an upcoming White House meeting on Haiti for a glimpse into the workings of the government at the highest level. Wearing his best suit, Petraeus walked into the White House Situation Room, the wood-paneled nerve center in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the West Wing, and took a seat along the wall. "Who are you?" Sandy Berger, Clinton's deputy national security advisor, barked at him, noticing an unfamiliar face. Petraeus uneasily explained he was there at Talbott's invitation. Off the hook, he listened quietly as senior officials from the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and Justice Department debated the pros and cons of a plan for a new Haitian police force.

Several weeks later, Petraeus ran into Colonel Bob Killebrew, a fellow alumnus of Vuono's staff, in the Pentagon. Killebrew was a.s.sembling the headquarters for the 6,000-soldier UN peacekeeping force that was taking over from the United States in Haiti. It included 2,500 American troops along with soldiers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and seventeen other countries. He needed a handful of U.S. officers to oversee the effort and asked Petraeus if he was interested. Absolutely, he replied. He just needed to get out of his Georgetown fellows.h.i.+p.

Killebrew was pleased. Top-notch officers weren't exactly crawling over each other to go to Haiti and work for the UN. Petraeus, however, had long been interested in peacekeeping. He also knew that the only deficiency in his otherwise golden resume was a lack of field experience. He needed his ticket punched in a war zone, or as close to one as he could get. He flew into Port-au-Prince in February of 1995, a few weeks ahead of the U.S. handover to the United Nations. The Americans had achieved their modest goals: Aristide was in office, violence had been reduced, and the tide of refugees heading for Florida on rickety boats had stopped. There had been only one U.S. combat death-a Special Forces sergeant shot and killed at a checkpoint.

Still, Haiti was a mess. The government ruled in name only. A hastily recruited police force was incapable of even basic law enforcement. Vigilante killings and political reprisals were common. There were more than a hundred murders throughout the tiny country the month the UN arrived, including forty-five cla.s.sified as a.s.sa.s.sinations. These were now problems for the UN, which at first was a tiny operation. "There were just a handful of us, literally less than the fingers on one hand, pulling this thing together in Haiti," Petraeus recalled.

With little help, Petraeus churned out detailed plans and orders covering every conceivable facet of the upcoming operations. There was Operational Plan 95-1, a comprehensive blueprint for the UN military mission, followed by a 159-page manual of standard operating procedures that covered topics as broad as "the practice of peacekeeping" and as basic as "two-way radio communications." In early March, with the 170-man headquarters staff finally nearing full strength, he ran a weeklong officer training course at the makes.h.i.+ft UN headquarters, an abandoned industrial park that had been converted into a sandbagged fortress. The wide variations in training and experience made it important to build cohesion in the motley force. He arranged for detailed briefings on when UN soldiers could fire their weapons, the basics of peacekeeping, working with humanitarian groups, and Haiti's unusual history and Creole culture. The training ended with a two-day war game, meant to prepare the headquarters staff for a Black Hawk Downlike crisis.

In Haiti Petraeus was exposed in depth to the problems of reconstructing a society whose government and economy had all but ceased to function. There was no insurgency of the sort he'd face later in Iraq, but many of the problems were similar. In both places, the U.S. military's plan a.s.sumed that civilians from the UN or other ent.i.ties could quickly restore a working government, electricity, and other essential services. It was a wildly optimistic a.s.sumption.

So Petraeus improvised. He worked closely with aid workers and humanitarian groups, scheduling helicopter flights to move them around the country and providing Army engineers to help with quick construction projects. He brought in noncommissioned officers to train the new Haitian police force. He coordinated raids to arrest the fugitive leaders of the paramilitary groups who had gone underground. The UN had not reserved any money for the military to do its own projects, opting to funnel reconstruction through civilian groups. But Petraeus and his boss, Major General Joe Kinzer, sidestepped the restrictions, spending U.S. funds to repave roads and build police stations when it became clear the normal UN process would take months. They gave a French-speaking U.S. lieutenant colonel the job of getting the lights back on in Port-au-Prince. Without any money, the staff officer went door-to-door to emba.s.sies asking for contributions and managed to raise $250,000, which was spent on generators. UN officers remember Petraeus constantly on the phone late at night with Was.h.i.+ngton, briefing officials at the White House or lobbying the Pentagon's Joint Staff for more cash.

He believed that he was creating a blueprint for a new kind of military operation, and he wanted his peers to know it. Shortly after returning home, Petraeus and Killebrew penned a military journal article that was triumphantly t.i.tled "Winning the Peace." They argued that "in detail of planning and degree of coordination the effort to stand Haiti back up after taking it down broke new ground... An environment conducive to political, social and economic development has been created in Haiti." It was exuberant overstatement. His three-month tour was not enough time to make any lasting improvements, and when the last U.S. troops left the island a year after Petraeus, conditions rapidly deteriorated.

The military wasn't quite sure what to make of the new operations it faced in places such as northern Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti. As the 1990s progressed, it began referring to them as "peace operations," and later, when that came to seem too narrow, as "military operations other than war," or MOOTW (p.r.o.nounced "mootwah"). These clunky terms reflected confused thinking. Every conceivable military operation other than conventional Gulf Warstyle battles was crammed under this ever-broadening rubric. The list included combating terrorism, providing humanitarian a.s.sistance, protecting s.h.i.+pping lanes, interdicting narcotics, enforcing arms control agreements, and ten other unrelated missions. Also buried on the list was helping foreign governments fight insurgencies, a task the United States would eventually take on in Iraq.

Though these jobs required new skills, the Army and the Marines did very little to prepare for them. Too much time spent on peacekeeping would dull the Army's combat edge, generals reasoned. The conventionally trained military could always adjust on the fly. It was an idea Abizaid and Petraeus explicitly rejected. As Abizaid had noted in his military journal article, published when Petraeus was in Haiti, the Army still lacked the training, equipment, and specialized personnel for these demanding new missions. "Doctrinal voids exist at every level," Abizaid warned. "We should avoid the notion that combat-ready troops are ready for peacekeeping."

In Haiti, Petraeus had picked up lessons that would prove valuable a decade later in Iraq. Near the end of his three-month rotation, he pinned on the silver eagles of a full colonel at a small headquarters ceremony. On June 9, he flew home, heading for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and his next plum a.s.signment. He was taking command of the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Brigade-John Abizaid's brigade.

On the morning of the change-of-command ceremony, Abizaid walked into his office and noticed Petraeus's possessions stacked on his gray desk and peeling linoleum floor. There's a rigid protocol surrounding changes of command, and one of the rules is that the old commander is ent.i.tled to keep his office until the swallow-tailed unit streamer changes hands at the official parade ground ceremony. Overcome by eagerness and an ambition that was always propelling him forward, Petraeus had broken it. When Abizaid saw Petraeus's boxes piled in his office, he was annoyed. "Who does this guy think he is?" he barked to his executive officer.

"On that day I think the two of them really didn't like each other," the executive officer recalled. The two men had radically different command styles. Within hours of taking over, Petraeus had already pulled a young soldier out of formation and made him produce his dog tags. "The old commander would have never done that," Frank Helmick, a battalion commander in the unit, thought. Abizaid trusted his sergeants to check such details. He was loose, funny, and even a bit sarcastic. Soldiers who wandered into his office were always struck that his desk and file cabinets were virtually empty. He seemed to run the entire 3,000-soldier brigade out of the notebook stuffed in his cargo pants. Petraeus, meanwhile, maintained binders full of rules and regulations. There was even a rule for labeling the binders, complained his officers, who were accustomed to Abizaid's more laid-back approach.

Despite those outward differences, the two men shared a remarkably similar view of their Army's future. The U.S. military's ma.s.sive technological and firepower edge made it unlikely that anyone would challenge it to a tank-on-tank fight. Instead, they believed, civilian political leaders were far more likely to send soldiers to deal with murky ethnic conflicts, humanitarian crises, and internal civil wars. Only the U.S. Army could get manpower and supplies to such backwaters. Only the military was capable of interceding between these warring parties. To perform these missions well, the Army had to change, they insisted. Theirs was a view that was decidedly out of step with most mainstream military thinking at the time.

Dugi Dio, Bosnia October 10, 1996 It was late afternoon and already growing dark when Brigadier General George Casey and a force of twenty soldiers drove into the tiny mountain village of Dugi Dio. Normally, one-star generals don't lead patrols. Casey, the a.s.sistant commander of the U.S. peacekeeping force in northwest Bosnia, was there because of elderly peasants who had trudged through the mud with their belongings in bundles and on oxcarts, heading home.

The refugees were Muslims who had once lived in Dugi Dio and in nearby Jusici. They had been driven out years before in one of the first Serbian offensives of the war. Now that the fighting was over and the U.S.-led peacekeeping force had arrived, they were going back to their destroyed houses, which currently happened to be in Serb territory. Accompanying the elderly villagers were young, hard-looking men armed with guns to defend them from their former Serb neighbors who were now their enemies.

Their arrival sparked a tense standoff, with Serb police threatening to arrest the Muslim returnees. The refugees, in turn, vowed to defend themselves, by force if necessary. Casey and several UN officials had spent three weeks negotiating an agreement that allowed the returnees to remain, provided they met two conditions: they had to prove their claims to own property, and they had to promise to get rid of all weapons.

The U.S. Army had crossed the Sava River into Bosnia a year earlier to enforce a peace agreement that ended more than three years of horrific killing among Bosnia's Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The force was gigantic, with 20,000 U.S. troops and 40,000 more soldiers from European countries, including Russia. The U.S. military was supposed to stay for only one year (a deadline that was repeatedly extended) and its mission was tightly constrained to exclude anything that smacked of nation building or put soldiers at risk. "The U.S. and NATO are not not going to Bosnia to fight a war. They are going to Bosnia to fight a war. They are not not going to Bosnia to rebuild the nation, resettle refugees, and oversee elections," Defense Secretary William Perry told reporters. "The tasks of our soldiers are clear and limited ... They will enforce the cessation of hostilities." going to Bosnia to rebuild the nation, resettle refugees, and oversee elections," Defense Secretary William Perry told reporters. "The tasks of our soldiers are clear and limited ... They will enforce the cessation of hostilities."

In theory the job of forging Bosnia into a functioning, multiethnic state was supposed to be handled by the UN-led civilian administration and the Bosnians themselves. As in Haiti, the civilians were quickly overwhelmed, and there was pressure on the military to expand its role-to fill the ma.s.sive civilian gaps, to arrest war criminals, and to protect refugees who wanted to return home. When officers such as George Casey did try to undertake these tasks, they found out how difficult they could be. Casey had spent four years after the Gulf War with the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, overseeing the division staff and then commanding a 4,000-soldier brigade from 1993 to 1995. He readied his troops to deploy to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait in case Saddam Hussein decided to try to reinvade, and fought big mock-tank battles at the National Training Center against the same Soviet-style enemy that U.S. forces had battled for much of the Cold War. It was demanding work that required smarts and an obsessive attention to detail. Casey had performed well.

Little in his career, however, had prepared him to mediate ethnic civil wars or rebuild broken societies, like Bosnia. In the gathering darkness Casey waited as the last of the Muslim returnees' homes were searched to make sure that they had abided by their promise to get rid of all of their weapons. Standing alongside Casey were several Serb officials and the town's former deputy mayor, a Muslim who had come back with the other returnees. The Muslims warily eyed the Serbian observers. Their presence was a bit like "having Darth Vader in your house," Casey recalled. An hour pa.s.sed. Nothing was uncovered in any of the nearly three dozen houses searched, until only the residence where Casey was waiting remained. He began to think he had pulled it off, the peaceful return of refugees to their communities, a small but unmistakable success on his first foray into real peacemaking. Then a Serb policeman found two AK-47s, two hand grenades, and a bag full of ammunition in the very last house-the one where Casey was standing. The weapons belonged to the Muslim deputy mayor. Casey was staggered. The agreement that he'd spent weeks negotiating between the Muslims and Serbs was off. "I'm looking at this guy going, 'What the f.u.c.k were you thinking?'" he recalled.

A standoff ensued. When the Serb police tried to arrest the deputy mayor, dozens of Muslim women lay down outside the house, blocking their departure. Trapped in a surrounded Muslim home as night fell, the Serb police were growing noticeably nervous. Fearing the situation could escalate into violence, Casey took custody of the deputy mayor and left the village. Crestfallen, he returned to the U.S. camp and told Lieutenant General Bill Nash, the cigar-chomping commander of the multinational force, about the collapsed deal.

"George, never forget it's their country," Nash told him. It was Nash's way of saying that even a force as powerful as the U.S. Army couldn't resolve centuries-old sectarian and ethnic hatreds and shouldn't try. U.S. troops could separate the Serbs and Muslims and provide basic security, but they should leave the lengthy job of building a functioning country to the civilian experts or the Bosnians themselves. No one could force these people to get along, certainly not the U.S. military. It was a lesson Casey never forgot, and one the entire Army would take with it to Iraq.

A few months later General John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, came through Bosnia. He noticed that Nash was talking at length with John Abizaid, who was Shalikashvili's executive officer, about the situation on the ground. Before Shalikashvili left to return to the Pentagon, he pulled Nash aside.

"You want Abizaid?" he asked. Nash had worked with Abizaid several years earlier and knew his reputation as one of the Army's brightest minds. He immediately said yes. When Abizaid arrived a month later, Nash gave him Casey's job overseeing daily military operations. A crestfallen Casey was s.h.i.+fted to a less prestigious position as the a.s.sistant division commander overseeing logistics and supply issues.

Many officers in Casey's position would have felt threatened by the high-flying Abizaid, who at the time was the youngest general in the Army. Casey chose to embrace the newcomer, who exuded the confidence and street smarts that he lacked. Prior to Bosnia, Casey had long believed that the best Army officers focused on tough field training, taking care of their soldiers and maintaining their equipment. This muddy-boots mentality had helped the service recover from its nadir after Vietnam and had proved its value in the Gulf War. Abizaid was a different kind of officer who sought answers to problems that most officers didn't see. Instead of focusing downward on his troops, he thought about how forces such as radical Islam were transforming the Middle East and could create new problems for the United States. He was comfortable working with foreign militaries. Where Casey had struggled to win the trust of the Russian officers in Bosnia, Abizaid seemed instinctively to know how to make former Soviet officers, who bristled at their second-tier status, feel valued.

Working together in Bosnia turned Casey and Abizaid into close friends. Both were outwardly easygoing and unflappable. Over the next decade, their careers would move in parallel. Casey, in particular, seemed to study his younger friend's progress through the Army and emulate it. He would follow Abizaid in a series of increasingly important jobs at the Pentagon over the next five years.

Casteau, Belgium June 11, 1999 After seventy-eight days of bombing, the Kosovo war was over and Brigadier General Pete Chiarelli thought he could finally relax a little. Chiarelli was working for General Wes Clark, the NATO commander running the war. Clark typically arrived at his headquarters around 7:00 a.m., so Chiarelli made it a point to get into the office by five-thirty. That way he'd have an hour to sort through the overnight traffic and pull out key pieces of intelligence that Clark needed to see first thing in the morning. Usually he didn't make it home until 11:00 p.m. It was like that seven days a week.

The Clinton administration started the war in an attempt to thwart Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's ruthless a.s.sault on ethnic Albanians living in the Serb province of Kosovo. The thinking was that Milosevic would buckle in a few days, but he had held on far longer than expected. Finally he'd agreed to withdraw his troops from the tiny province and allow in a peacekeeping force. That morning, Chiarelli updated Clark on the timetable for sending in the troops and then returned to his desk just outside the NATO commander's door.

Then the telephone rang. On the other end was an Army major with an urgent report: hundreds of Russian troops stationed in Bosnia were heading for Kosovo, several hours' drive away. The Russians, who had ties to the Serbs, had been insisting for weeks that they wanted to control their own sector of the province. The Clinton administration and Clark were deeply opposed to it. Chiarelli rushed back into Clark's book-lined office. "Sir, the Russians are moving forces," he warned. The two officers dashed out of the office to a videoconference on the crisis.

George Casey, who had left Bosnia for a high-profile job as the deputy director for political military affairs on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, was also at the center of the action. He'd spent weeks shuttling back and forth between Was.h.i.+ngton and Moscow with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott negotiating the terms of the Russians' partic.i.p.ation in the Kosovo peacekeeping force. Landing the important job had been especially satisfying. A decade earlier when Casey had tried to find a slot in the office he was now running, he had been summarily dismissed. "No, no, no. He's never been in the Pentagon. We can't use him," he'd heard someone yelling in the background when he called to ask about the job. But his Bosnia tour had given him on-the-ground experience in the region that many senior officers lacked.

Around 6:00 p.m. Clark was still trying to get a fix on what the Russians were doing when he broke away to take a call from Casey, who was in Moscow a day earlier. The head of the Russian military had threatened to seize a sector in Kosovo as soon as NATO troops deployed. The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, was taking a softer line. Casey told Clark that he didn't think the Russians could move that quickly.

Clark disagreed. In fact, reports from the ground in Bosnia suggested that several hundred Russians were already moving. Across the border in Kosovo, Serbs who had learned of the deployment were getting set to welcome them. The key decisions were being made not in Moscow but rather on the ground in Bosnia and Kosovo. For both Casey and Chiarelli, the aftermath of the Kosovo war was an introduction to political and military crisis solving at the highest levels, and their involvement pushed them ahead of many of their Army peers in the endless compet.i.tion for the next job.

Casey spent the next several weeks shuttling from the Pentagon to the Kremlin and Macedonia as part of a team hammering out the broad outlines of a deal that would place the Russian peacekeepers under NATO control but also salvage some measure of Russian pride. Chiarelli also found himself busier in the weeks after the end of the conflict than he had been during the bombing campaign. More tense issues would arise, including the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the disarming of Kosovar Muslims on whose behalf the war had been fought.

Chiarelli owed his career to Clark. A few years earlier he had been finis.h.i.+ng a year at the National War College in Was.h.i.+ngton and had no job lined up. He sat in his bas.e.m.e.nt in suburban Virginia and typed out letters on his Commodore 64 home computer to every division commander in the Army, asking for a job as an operations officer, or G3 in Army parlance. Landing such a position was essential if he was ever going to be promoted again. "This may not be the normal way of doing business," he wrote. "However, I would like your help as I look for a division G3 job." Only Clark, who was the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, invited him for an interview. Although they had never met, Clark had been an instructor in the West Point Social Sciences Department in the early 1970s after returning from Vietnam. He hired him after a twenty-minute interview. Chiarelli never knew why. The best theory he could come up with was that the Sosh connections had saved him again. When Clark was named NATO commander he hired Chiarelli as his executive officer, essentially his senior aide.

Chiarelli learned a lot from Clark. Clark was an activist general who was comfortable using military power to prevent humanitarian disasters and stabilize failing states. As NATO commander he quietly encouraged U.S. troops in Bosnia to arrest mafia-like criminals and strengthen the country's moderate political opposition, knowing such moves would draw the ire of his more conservative Pentagon bosses who were opposed to anything that smacked of nation building. "You have to push the envelope," he told his soldiers. "If you put this strategy down [on paper] and circulate it, it's dead."

Chiarelli also learned a good deal about how not not to handle himself from Clark, a brusque, highly intelligent man who had made lots of enemies during his long Army career. He never cared how hard he drove his subordinates. He wasn't deferential to his superiors, and his unrivaled ambition left him with few allies in the Army or the Pentagon. Six weeks after the Kosovo war ended, Clark got a call from Joint Chiefs chairman General Hugh Shelton, who told him that he would be replaced the following April as NATO commander. Clark, who was in Lithuania at the time, couldn't believe what he was hearing. Normally it was a three-year job, often extended to four. He had just finished his second year and had fought and won the first war in NATO's fifty-year history. "I stood there stunned. Was I being relieved of duty?" he wrote in his memoirs. to handle himself from Clark, a brusque, highly intelligent man who had made lots of enemies during his long Army career. He never cared how hard he drove his subordinates. He wasn't deferential to his superiors, and his unrivaled ambition left him with few allies in the Army or the Pentagon. Six weeks after the Kosovo war ended, Clark got a call from Joint Chiefs chairman General Hugh Shelton, who told him that he would be replaced the following April as NATO commander. Clark, who was in Lithuania at the time, couldn't believe what he was hearing. Normally it was a three-year job, often extended to four. He had just finished his second year and had fought and won the first war in NATO's fifty-year history. "I stood there stunned. Was I being relieved of duty?" he wrote in his memoirs.

It was 3:00 a.m. back in Belgium when Chiarelli was awoken at home by a call from his apoplectic boss. They were firing him, Clark said. Not only that, Clark railed, but within minutes of hanging up with Shelton he had gotten a call from a Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter who already knew he had been dismissed. The Pentagon had leaked the news to make it impossible for him to lobby the White House to reverse it. "He was definitely upset, and rightfully so," Chiarelli recalled. "This guy had just won a war and here he was being shown the door." reporter who already knew he had been dismissed. The Pentagon had leaked the news to make it impossible for him to lobby the White House to reverse it. "He was definitely upset, and rightfully so," Chiarelli recalled. "This guy had just won a war and here he was being shown the door."

In Kosovo, Clark's Pentagon bosses resented his demands for more forces, especially a request for two dozen Apache helicopters. Clark wanted to use the low-flying helicopters to destroy Serbian military forces at close range, but Defense Secretary William Cohen was deeply opposed to the plan. The helicopters were too vulnerable to ground fire and might lead to U.S. casualties. In a war fought primarily for humanitarian reasons, he believed, there was no compelling reason to put U.S. troops' lives at risk. Cohen also suspected that Clark was using his back-channel contacts with the White House and State Department to reverse Pentagon decisions that he opposed.

Although Clark had the backing of the White House and the State Department on many of his initiatives in Kosovo, he had alienated his most important boss: the defense secretary. His high-profile dismissal wasn't soon forgotten in the Army. "The lesson I took from it is that your chain of command is your chain of command and that you are obligated to do your best to work within it to the extent that you can," recalled Abizaid.

In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in the Pentagon deeply opposed to using the military for nation-building ventures. Within weeks of taking office he asked the Joint Staff to draw up plans for pulling American troops out of the Balkans, insisting that such missions should be handled by the same civilian agencies that had repeatedly proven themselves incapable in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Rumsfeld also was convinced that activist commanders, such as Clark, had been given too much lat.i.tude by the Clinton administration to use military power to help stabilize weak or failing states. He wanted to rein in the generals.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Sheikh of Sheikhs Out of the French army's soul-destroying trial by fire in Algeria there has so far emerged one superlatively good combat commander, a 42-year-old ex-bank clerk from Toul named Marcel Bigeard. So notable is Colonel Bigeard's tactical genius and so successful his Spartan training methods that for three years, whenever French troops scored one of their rare clearcut victories over the Algerian rebels, French newspaper readers automatically looked for the name of his 3rd Colonial Paratroop Regiment.-Time MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1958 MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1958Camp Asaliyah, Qatar March 26, 2003 On the sixth day of the invasion of Iraq, Lieutenant General John Abizaid sat in for General Tommy Franks, the top commander in the Middle East, at the daily war update conducted by video with the top bra.s.s back at the Pentagon. It was midmorning in Was.h.i.+ngton. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, greeted Abizaid, who appeared on-screen wearing desert fatigues. A handful of officers from Kuwait also were on the call. They wore bulky chemical protection suits, minus only the airtight headgear. Three Iraqi missiles had fallen nearby less than an hour earlier, and one of the colonels in Kuwait noted that he might have to break away if they got word a chemical attack was under way.

The Was.h.i.+ngton team nodded, but their relaxed mood was palpably different from the atmosphere of gathering dangers facing the Army in the field. A sandstorm blowing from the south had grounded helicopters and slowed the advance on Baghdad to a crawl. Attacks by Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen, the fanatical fighters in civilian clothes who prefigured the coming insurgency, were escalating, especially on military supply lines that snaked to the Kuwaiti border. Some units were down to only a few days of fuel and ammunition.

Three months earlier, when General Franks had suggested that he might need a deputy to help manage the war, Abizaid had jumped at the chance. He was working for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, far from the action. When he told Kathy, she knew it wasn't even worth trying to talk him out of it. Now here he was on an unmarked base in Qatar, a small Persian Gulf kingdom where Central Command kept its forward headquarters-still not exactly the front lines. His windowless office sat inside a big sand-colored tent. Like a Russian nesting doll, the tent was further encased by an even larger prefabricated metal building. Outside, the desert temperatures often soared past 110 degrees. Inside, the air-conditioning blew so cold that soldiers often found they had to wrap themselves in fleece jackets. On computer screens in his office, Abizaid could track minute-by-minute movements of ground units and aircraft throughout the Middle East. He spoke daily with senior Pentagon leaders on video teleconferences. Hundreds of officers scrambled around the headquarters cranking out Power-Point slides by the thousands. It was a strange way to fight a war.

But it wasn't really the war that troubled Abizaid. He had no doubt that U.S. troops would drive Saddam from power. What concerned him was what would come after the dictator fell. Dave Petraeus, who was leading the 101st Airborne Division through a brutal sandstorm as it drove toward Baghdad, had the same worry. Rumsfeld and Franks's war plan a.s.sumed that a lightning a.s.sault would quickly topple Saddam's regime. Once the dictator was gone, they expected, Iraqis and the relatively small team of civilians and retired generals that the Pentagon had a.s.sembled would handle delivery of humanitarian aid and any other problems that arose until a new government could be established.

Both Abizaid and Petraeus had heard such promises about civilians taking over the postwar reconstruction from the military in the 1990s. And both expected that, just as in the nineties, the military would have to fill the void when the civilian teams were overwhelmed by the chaos that followed combat. The 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrated the danger that could emerge from chaotic, ungoverned places, like Afghanistan. But the Bush administration wanted no part of nation building there or anyplace else. They hadn't absorbed the lessons of the 1990s about the military's unavoidable postconflict role. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, a small force made up of U.S. special operations troops invaded Afghanistan and, with precision bombing and local allies, quickly toppled the Taliban. The Bush administration left about 10,000 troops to hunt down the remnants of Al Qaeda. Then it turned its focus to Iraq, and to toppling Saddam and transforming Iraq into a model democracy for the Middle East. Ordered to prepare for an invasion of Iraq, the military was quite happy not to be saddled with rebuilding Afghanistan. The same att.i.tude pervaded the early stages of the Iraq war, to Abizaid's and Petraeus's frustration. As the U.S. force pushed north, they were among the few who worried about what would happen after Baghdad fell.

Abizaid's and Petraeus's views on Iraq differed in other key respects, however. Petraeus had high hopes for the postinvasion period. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if this place turns out to be something?" he said to a reporter a few weeks into the war. "There's no reason why it couldn't be. They have lots of money, unless some petty despot takes over." Abizaid had a darker view. He knew how deep the ethnic and sectarian hatreds ran in the country and how quickly they could explode. He also recalled his time in Lebanon, when the Israelis had attempted to occupy an Arab land. Prior to the invasion, he had e-mailed his staff an academic study on the occupation. He hoped his troops would take two lessons from Israel's failure: occupation duty is hard even for the best-trained military, and the longer you stay the harder it gets.

These were the sorts of issues that Abizaid wanted to raise with Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials during the video teleconference. The March 26 briefing began with the weather-a sandstorm blanketing much of the region had slowed the push north-and a discussion of that day's fighting. With the ground troops stalled, Air Force jets were doing most of the fighting that day, pounding Republican Guard units on the outskirts of Baghdad. After fifteen minutes, Rumsfeld departed, signing off with a wave. "We are glad you are so focused," he breezily announced to Abizaid, and turned the discussion over to his close aide Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, who suggested they talk about the postwar period.

As the discussion meandered along, Abizaid became more and more irritated. He had been warning for months that stabilizing the country after an invasion was going to be perilously hard. "The response I got was that you don't know what you are talking about," he recalled. Now, with the fall of Baghdad only days away, they were stuck debating about minor issues. Abizaid punched the white b.u.t.ton on his console and a red border formed around his screen image in the Pentagon, Qatar, and Kuwait, indicating that he had the microphone. He suggested that the group spend a few minutes talking about how to handle members of Saddam's government.

"Senior-level Baathists with money will flee the country. They will become a problem for Interpol," he predicted. "Senior Baathists without money will be killed or will turn themselves in to us and try to trade information for clemency. Then there are the middle and lower tiers that run the country. We want them to come back to their jobs and work with us." It was these party members, the roughly 30,000 to 50,000 bureaucrats, teachers, police officers, and engineers, who did the day-to-day business of the government. Many had joined the Baath Party because Saddam Hussein's Iraq had offered no alternative. Even if their loyalties were suspect, they needed to be kept in their jobs to prevent a total breakdown in authority, he argued.

From Was.h.i.+ngton, Feith cut Abizaid off. "The policy of the United States government is de-Baathification," he said. As he spoke, Feith drew out the syllables in a way that seemed intended to shut off further discussion. Abizaid had grown to despise the word, which he thought echoed de-n.a.z.ification de-n.a.z.ification and only served to feed a fantasy that had taken hold at the highest levels of the Pentagon that the Iraq war was going to proceed like the liberation of France and Germany at the end of World War II. Occupying a Muslim country with its almost impenetrable tribal and ethnic politics and whose minority groups had a long history of killing each other was nothing like running Germany after World War II. and only served to feed a fantasy that had taken hold at the highest levels of the Pentagon that the Iraq war was going to proceed like the liberation of France and Germany at the end of World War II. Occupying a Muslim country with its almost impenetrable tribal and ethnic politics and whose minority groups had a long history of killing each other was nothing like running Germany after World War II.

Abizaid pressed the white b.u.t.ton, claiming the microphone. "You shouldn't even use the term de-Baathification," de-Baathification," he told Feith. His voice had grown clipped and angry. "This is not n.a.z.i Germany and what's needed is not de-n.a.z.ification. You have to hold this place together and if you don't keep the government together in some form, it won't hold." he told Feith. His voice had grown clipped and angry. "This is not n.a.z.i Germany and what's needed is not de-n.a.z.ification. You have to hold this place together and if you don't keep the government together in some form, it won't hold."

Feith fired back, emphasizing that the decision came from the civilian officials who gave the military its orders. "Let me repeat to you what the policy of the U.S. government is: de-Baathification."

Outside Najaf, Iraq March 26, 2003 Major General David Petraeus couldn't afford to think about what was going to happen after Saddam fell. For the first time in his thirty-year career he was leading troops in combat. After crossing the Kuwait border and moving north hundreds of miles in only a few days, the leading edge of Petraeus's 101st Airborne Division was hunkered down outside Najaf, a city of more than 500,000 people about 160 miles south of Baghdad. Because of the whipping sandstorm, mud and sand coated Petraeus's face and reddened his blue eyes as he considered the division's next move. His orders called for stopping the Fedayeen fighters in white pickups who were mounting suicidal a.s.saults on U.S. tanks and supply trucks. Intelligence reports estimated that there could be more than 1,000 fighters inside Najaf. Petraeus told Colonel Ben Hodges, whose brigade was awaiting orders to attack, that there was no reason to rush headlong into a potential ambush. "We're in a long war here. I want to keep our guys from getting killed in large numbers," he said.

Tanks might be able to charge into a city, but a light infantry unit like the 101st was far more vulnerable. At the moment Petraeus's division was strung out all the way to the Kuwaiti border. Supplies were running short. His helicopters were grounded. All were reasons to postpone the a.s.sault into Najaf until his division had time to consolidate its position. He told Hodges to dig in and defend the highway that skirted Najaf, which the Army needed to move supplies north. It was Petraeus's first combat experience, but he wasn't going to charge into the city when his orders were to move north fast.

It had been more than a decade since Petraeus had been shot in the chest in the Fort Campbell training accident. In 1999, he had broken his pelvis while skydiving during his free time near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Although the painful accident required months of therapy, he liked to tell colleagues that it made him faster. He had his scores on the Army's physical fitness test to prove it. The fifty-year-old general, at five foot nine and 150 pounds, was still in better shape than the vast majority of his much younger soldiers. Few could match his toughness or his drive.

Still, he had his doubters. The long stretches Petraeus had spent at the elbow of senior generals had caused him to miss all of the nation's previous wars, big and small, over his thirty-year career-Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Some of his subordinates thought his lack of combat experience had made him too cautious. They wanted to charge into Najaf.

Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, one of his two a.s.sistant division commanders, held an impromptu meeting in the command post with two other senior officers: Brigadier General E. J. Sinclair and Colonel Thomas Schoenbeck. Freakley, a Gulf War veteran, dominated the gathering, leaning in close as he spoke. The best way to protect the highway was to attack into the city, he maintained. If Fedayeen troops were fighting for their lives, they wouldn't be able to attack convoys. The other U.S. units involved in the invasion were already driving toward Baghdad. If the 101st didn't move fast, it would get left behind, he worried. The officers agreed to present a united front. Of the three, Colonel Schoenbeck, an easygoing officer who years before had played wide receiver for the University of Florida, was closest to Petraeus. "Tom, you need to convince the boss it is going to be okay," Freakley told him. "First Brigade can take this fight by itself." Schoenbeck promised to deliver the message.

In the days that followed, two brigades from the 101st edged toward Najaf. When the enemy fighters showed themselves in the city, the Americans. .h.i.t them with rockets, artillery, and machine guns. It wasn't the headlong rush that Freakley wanted but a slow, deliberate attack. "We were all trying to understand, 'Who is it that's fight