All In Page 14

  He seemed weary of war, no longer certain that taking the gloves off and fighting hard, as he’d advised Petraeus back in July, would be enough. “There’s gotta be some sort of game changer,” he said. “We’ll keep doing COIN, all day long, but it’s hard to see payoffs,” he lamented. “And we can continue to fight, but there’s . . . to use the Vietnam analogy, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. We’re all in, but I’m not sure the Afghans are all in. You can even see it in the senior Afghan leaders as they’re all getting their houses in Dubai and carting a whole bunch of our cash out of the country.”

  Having served as Petraeus’s aide as the 101st pushed from Kuwait into Baghdad and all the way up to Mosul in March 2003, he knew the general was perfectly capable of skepticism. He had been there in southern Iraq when Petraeus famously asked, after recognizing the challenges that lay ahead, “Tell me how this ends?” But he also knew that if there was anyone now who had a sense of how this war in Afghanistan would end, it was Petraeus. How would Petraeus counsel him now? Fivecoat knew there was no need. “Petraeus, in his relentlessly positive way, would say, you know, keep pushing it every day, trying to do as much as you can.”

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL David Petraeus’s special relationship with the 101st Airborne Division began in mid-1991 when he became commander of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, Brigadier General Jack Keane was the assistant division commander for operations and already seen as next in line to assume command of the 101st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles.”

  The Rakkasans’ 3rd Battalion had recently returned from the Gulf War in Iraq, where it had cut off a Republican Guard retreat to Kuwait as part of a massive air assault by the brigade of which it was part. But by all accounts, it was not quite a “high-performing unit” when Petraeus took over. Most of its soldiers had never encountered anyone quite like their intense, lean, physical-fitness-fanatic battalion commander. Inspiring his men to achieve “iron” fitness was Petraeus’s top priority, an appropriate one for an air-assault infantry battalion. In an effort to create a “culture of hardness,” Petraeus developed the “Iron Rakkasan” fitness competition and challenged his men to compete and beat his score. Nobody did during his two years of command, during which the battalion became officially known as the Iron Rakkasans.

  A month after he assumed command of the Rakkasans, Petraeus was in the field walking with a unit while observing a live-fire maneuver exercise when a soldier sprinting out of a bunker tripped and accidentally discharged his M16 rifle. The shot hit Petraeus in the chest and left a massive exit wound in his back. Brigadier General Keane was by his side watching the exercise when Petraeus went down. “He’s been shot—get the damn medic over here!” Keane shouted.

  Blood came oozing out of Petraeus’s back. Captain Fred Johnson, the company commander, shouted orders to halt the exercise and called medics to the scene. They ripped off Petraeus’s battledress blouse and went to work. Keane held Petraeus in his arms and watched the color draining from his face.

  “Dave, I want you to stay with us,” Keane told Petraeus. Petraeus gripped Keane’s hand in answer.

  In a matter of minutes, Petraeus was evacuated by a Black Hawk medevac aircraft to the post hospital, where a chest tube was inserted, and then flown on to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Tennessee, with Keane at his side. An experienced surgeon named Bill Frist—who would later become a Republican senator from Tennessee and Senate majority leader—sliced through Petraeus’s latissimus dorsi muscle to conduct thoracic surgery and cauterize an artery that had been nicked. Petraeus had nearly bled to death internally.

  Holly had just finished taking her children and one of her daughter’s friends to the movies near Fort Campbell. A friend contacted by medical officials broke the news to her after tracking her down. “Sit down, Holly,” she said. “The good news is that he will live. The bad news is that he has been shot. The fact is that we need to go to the hospital.” Holly said nothing.

  But Petraeus soon turned his recovery into a competition to see how fast he could return to command. Doctors on at least one occasion had to order him to cool it. He was back in record time. He gave the soldier who had accidentally shot him a chance to redeem himself—by attending Ranger School. Twenty-seven days after the accident, Petraeus was back in the field, with his rucksack over one shoulder while the other shoulder healed, for a massive deployment and air-assault exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Keane later reflected that it was Petraeus’s drive and spirit that captured Keane’s attention.

  Petraeus had followed General Vuono’s example of the imperative of developing key themes and stressing them on every possible occasion. Petraeus’s themes for the unit remained consistent over the years. First was physical fitness: An infantryman in an air-assault unit needed to view his body as the “ultimate weapon.” Next, he demanded discipline—military bearing and self-control. He required everyone to get “high and tight” haircuts, button the top button of their combat jackets in the field and camouflage their faces to a specific standard. It was all a part of his endeavor to shape the culture. Then he stressed, in order, small-unit training and live-fire exercises, Ranger training and air-assault operations. No one was more competitive. “Life is a competitive endeavor,” he would remind them.

  Even the skeptics had to admit after a year that Petraeus had taken an average unit and made it the best in the division. He stressed training. He stressed winning. By the end of his tour, the Iron Rakkasan battalion had more Ranger School–qualified soldiers than any other brigade in the division. A memorandum from one of Petraeus’s subordinates summed up the driven Petraeus. “Without a doubt, we are doing some of the most complex and exacting training on post . . . but, this training has come at a price . . . many in the battalion question . . . if the late hours and weekends away from home were really worth it.” Petraeus expected others to keep up the high standard he set for himself. The memorandum continued, “More than any commander I know of, you have taken a keen and proactive interest in the development of the battalion’s officer corps. Even if some officers do not recognize how your emphasis on certain professional skills may apply to their careers, you must continue to stress them.” “The challenge,” Petraeus recalled, “was changing the culture without alienating those who really didn’t embrace it fully.”

  He was more than a taskmaster. He believed in mentoring, and being mentored. He believed strongly in earned redemption. When West Point called him and asked him whether he would be willing to rehabilitate a cadet who’d been kicked out of the academy for an honor violation, Petraeus agreed—and challenged the soldier to complete a series of the infantry’s most demanding schools, including the Air Assault and Ranger courses, and the trooper succeeded, ultimately returning to West Point and graduating.

  Keane became division commander just after the conclusion of Petraeus’s two years in command of the Iron Rakkasans. The two had bonded after the shooting. Keane promptly made Petraeus the division’s chief of operations, plans and training—the perfect preparation for his future command of the division itself. “He was hands down the best battalion commander I had observed,” Keane said. “He had confidence. His knowledge about the job and what needed to be done was superior to others’. He had a sense of himself and what he brought to the job. He had a vision of where he would take the battalion.”

  UNLIKE FIVECOAT and Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel J. B. Vowell, another 101st Airborne battalion commander, fought a mountain war. In the early-morning light on June 27—four days after Obama tapped Petraeus as his new commander in Afghanistan—units from Vowell’s 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment staged a large-scale air-assault operation in the mountains above the village of Daridam, in mountainous Kunar Province, along the Pakistan border. They were part of the 101st’s Bastogne Brigade. Twin-rotor Chinook helicopters dropped their ramps and deposited hundreds of soldiers across a series of overlook positions on the mountainside th
at enabled them to see movement in the valley below. They dug in with heavy machine guns, surrounded by sandbags, expecting to be attacked by Taliban fighters in the valley below.

  Vowell’s battalion was nicknamed “No Slack,” having been deployed for seven straight years during the Vietnam War, the longest of any battalion. Vowell, 41, was an Army brat whose father had been awarded a Silver Star as a company commander in Vietnam, went to college at the University of Alabama, fully intending to become a doctor. But he took a military science class, fell in with ROTC, and realized during an all-night training exercise that leading men in combat was his calling. He typified the experience level common in the Army after nearly a decade of war following the September 11 terror attacks. He had already served in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and in Iraq from 2006 to 2007 during the surge, when he briefed Petraeus at the start of the campaign. He had never forgotten how Petraeus, at the start of the Iraq surge, told his battalion staff that they were there to secure the people and win, not just transition to Iraqi forces and race for the exits.

  Schooled in Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, Vowell knew that this large-scale air assault, code-named Operation Strong Eagle I, was unorthodox. Counterinsurgency was all about small footprints, not large offensive operations—though some of the latter were needed, as in Kandahar and Helmand. But Vowell had come to realize that the Taliban were a far more formidable force in Kunar Province than anyone had expected. Indeed, Vowell had lost eight soldiers during his first month in Afghanistan in a series of savage attacks and ambushes. The only way he could help build an effective provincial government in Kunar was to clear this valley of what he estimated to be three hundred Taliban fighters. He had told his men to dig in with heavy weaponry because he expected a ferocious assault. He didn’t have to wait long.

  Within hours after the battalion’s troopers assumed their positions, the Taliban opened up with a withering barrage. Vowell’s scout platoon leader, Captain Kevin Mott, was shot in the head at his position along the southern mountain. The impact threw him down the mountainside. His platoon fought off a determined series of enemy attacks intended to capture him. Barely conscious, Mott had managed to crawl to a rock outcropping and hunker down. Air Force pararescue jumpers were ultimately able to get him out. They also grabbed Mott’s radio operator, who had been hit in the body armor that protected his chest. Both were to make full recoveries. The next thirteen hours would be filled with frantic calls for medevacs, artillery, mortars, close air support and resupply.

  Vowell had intended to oversee setting the conditions for the battle from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, directing Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, reconnaissance drones and radio-jamming technology. He was planning to land once his soldiers started their push down into the valley. But as the Taliban unleashed simultaneous attacks on his positions, Vowell realized the mountainous terrain was making it impossible for his units to talk to one another. He decided to stay aloft in the Black Hawk in order to maintain full communications. He would return to Asadabad and refuel every two hours for the battle’s duration. He desperately wanted to be down on the ground, in the fight. But he knew that if he landed, he would lose control of the bigger picture. His men spent the rest of the day fighting down the mountain and seizing the town. They killed more than 150 insurgents. Vowell lost two sergeants and watched as numerous soldiers were wounded in a battle that raged for hours at maximum intensity in 120-degree heat. It was the No Slack battalion’s largest fight since Vietnam: Seven hundred U.S. and Afghan soldiers had assaulted nearly three hundred entrenched Taliban fighters—and won. “Finally, someone has done something good!” Fazlullah Wahidi, the district governor, told Vowell after the smoke had cleared. Nothing like this had happened in Kunar in decades. The Soviets tried but had dozens annihilated in the same valley Vowell’s men had just claimed.

  Strong Eagle I was the battalion’s turning point after losing so many soldiers during its first month. With it, they had regained the initiative and driven the enemy from a key stronghold. Now that they had the momentum, Vowell became convinced that his men should go farther into the Ghaki Valley to the town of Chinar and hunt down remaining insurgents. He convinced Major General Campbell and his brigade commander, Colonel Andrew Poppas, to support Operation Strong Eagle II. The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) was well trained and equipped for just this type of full-scale air assault. The division had six dozen Apache gunships and squadrons of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters that could fly four thousand soldiers more than one hundred miles in six hours. But when the operation launched in the dead of night, the No Slack soldiers encountered nothing but silence. There were no insurgents left to attack them. In talking to locals after the sun rose, Vowell was told over and over that the enemy was gone from the area. He realized he now had a chance to begin successful counterinsurgency operations with villagers, even start reconciliation efforts. Over the coming weeks, twenty insurgent fighters presented themselves to Governor Wahidi and said they were done fighting.

  Major General Campbell and his adviser from the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team, Doug Ollivant, had briefed Vowell on a strategy they had developed for reinforcing three key district centers with combat outposts. Vowell and Ollivant were friends from the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies. Vowell considered Campbell the best the Army had to offer, a general willing to listen to subordinates and support them with both sage advice and real freedom to command. Even so, Vowell thought this defensive strategy Campbell and Ollivant were pushing was misguided. None of the district centers were under attack, Vowell argued, and putting platoons in each of them would only invite Taliban attacks and send the message that Afghan political autonomy was a fiction. Campbell backed off. But he told Vowell that, having won the point, he almost had to guarantee success. Vowell thought he could pull it off.

  Petraeus arrived one late-summer morning at Vowell’s command center. He wanted a rundown on Operations Strong Eagle I and II. He stayed for eight hours. Vowell remembered feeling the morale of his men almost palpably surge during the visit. The atmosphere, he said later, was positively charged. It had seemed to Vowell that McChrystal had worked hard to hold U.S. forces back with his constant emphasis on limiting civilian casualties. Petraeus, on the other hand, came in and confirmed Vowell’s mantra that the stability component of counterinsurgency operations couldn’t begin until the security component had been pursued—i.e., until the Taliban had been cleared and the area was secure, just as had been done in Iraq. Petraeus told Vowell’s troops that the Afghan military would eventually take over the mission but needed time to develop, and that Kunar Province would always be contentious. He also said that he enjoyed a positive relationship with the Pakistani military, which Vowell himself had already discovered locally. Vowel and Petraeus visited two district governors and the provincial governor, then traveled to Combat Outpost Monti, where Petraeus pinned medals on those who had distinguished themselves during Operations Strong Eagle I and II. He also knew the names of all nine soldiers in A Company who had been killed during No Slack’s first six weeks in Afghanistan. He gathered the company in an orange grove on the base and told them how proud of them he was. It was clear from their eyes that the men were still hurting; Petraeus had come at the right time.

  THE FINAL BRIGADE FROM the 101st Airborne, its 4th Brigade Combat Team, arrived in Afghanistan in late summer 2010. The Currahees assumed bases and outposts along the Pakistan border in mountainous Paktika Province, about 100 miles south of Kabul. Two provinces and about 150 miles separated the Currahees in Paktika from the Bastogne Brigade in Vowell’s battalion, in Kunar Province to the northeast. The largest combat operations had been concentrated in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, in the south. Petraeus had been worried about the situation in these mountainous provinces along the Pakistan border from the moment he set foot in Kabul. “The challenges from the sanctuaries in a neighboring country are a bit more concerning than
even I had thought at Central Command,” he observed that summer.

  In the dead of night on October 30, at a desolate six-man observation post in Paktika Province, James Platt, a private first class in the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, reported to his sergeant, Donald Starks: “I see movement.” Within moments, they were under attack from three sides by thirty insurgents, so close the Americans could hear them talking. The attackers briefly commandeered the Americans’ MRAP and knew enough about it to shine one of the vehicle’s spotlights on them. Starks led a counterattack, firing on the insurgents with a machine gun, rendering the MRAP unusable and blowing up his own ammunition dump with a hand grenade. He soon realized that two of his men were wounded and he broke contact with the enemy, leading his men 500 meters back down the mountain to the main base, Combat Outpost Margah, firing and calling in “danger-close” indirect fire on the enemy as they scrambled down the rocks.