All In (7 page)

Petraeus's soccer coach had been captain of the West Point team, and his math teacher had taught at the academy. The director of admissions lived right around the corner—Petraeus delivered his newspaper. During high school, Petraeus dated the daughter of an Air Force officer in the town and was influenced by her father's demeanor. It was almost preordained that he would become a cadet.

David Petraeus got in the family car with his parents on July 1, 1970, and drove the seven miles from Cornwall to West Point for “R-Day,” reception day for the incoming class of new cadets. He was assigned to Company C-1, “Charging Charlie.”

Although known as fun-loving by his peers, Petraeus was also driven to excel. His roommate, Chris White, had decided to pursue the pre-med track, one of the most demanding academic programs at West Point, which gave medical-school scholarships to around ten top graduates. The hypercompetitive Petraeus decided to join him—not so much because he wanted to be a doctor, he later realized, but because he found the competition irresistible. “It was the Mount Everest of academic tracks,” he recalled. Petraeus rarely stayed up past the 11:30
P.M.
lights-out curfew; the pace of the West Point day, which for him included competing on the intercollegiate soccer and ski teams, rendered him exhausted and in bed by lights-out.

By the time he was a firstie, as seniors are called, Petraeus had risen to the top 5 percent of his class based on his performance in leadership, athletics and academics—the three areas in which cadets are ranked against their peers. He and White, his roommate again during the last semester of firstie year, were known as the most focused students in their company. “I think every cadet questions the discipline at West Point at one time or another during his years here,” Cadet Petraeus said at the time, grinning.
“But in the long run the imposed discipline brings out self-discipline in each cadet, and I think that's very beneficial.”

While White remained intent on becoming a doctor, Petraeus realized that what he really wanted to do “was to lead folks in service, to serve in the essence of the military organization, that of a combat infantry unit.” He would impose discipline on himself to be the best in the infantry, and he later told his former girlfriend from Cornwall, Ellen Smitchger, that he “wanted to lead the Army” someday.

This inspiration to join the infantry came in part from a favorite West Point expression: “Much of the history we teach was made by people we taught.” Many of those heroes he had studied in his military history classes—MacArthur, Eisenhower, Ridgway and Galvin among them—came from the infantry. Infantrymen often rose to the top of the Army. At the time his class selected their branch choice and assignment, he knew he wanted to earn a Ranger tab, become an Airborne trooper and serve abroad. He knew his place at the top of the class would allow him to begin his career on the most likely path to the top. In time, Petraeus would be first in his Ranger School class and would command multiple airborne units.

White was prophetic in the description he wrote of Petraeus for the 1974 West Point yearbook, using the nickname that had stuck with Petraeus since Little League: “Peaches came to the Mil Acad with high ambitions, but unlike most, he accomplished his goals. A striver to the Max, Dave was always ‘going for it' in sport, academics, leadership, even his social life. This attitude will surely lead to success in the future, Army or otherwise.”

The reference to his social life was a nod to his engagement to Hollister Knowlton, the daughter of West Point's superintendent, a military intellectual who had distinguished himself on the battlefield in World War II and Vietnam. In the fall of 1973, “Holly” Knowlton was a senior at Dickinson College, a beautiful, smart and witty young woman who wrote her senior honors dissertation on François Mauriac, a French novelist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize. On a visit to West Point one football weekend, a friend of the family hoped to fix her up with a certain cadet to take her to the game. But when he was otherwise engaged, a call was placed to the cadet brigade headquarters to find a replacement, the assistant brigade adjutant on duty: David Petraeus. Not knowing who his blind date was, he agreed to take on this potentially sensitive mission. Soon, the two would find themselves commuting to each other's colleges whenever time allowed, sometimes braving fierce New York snowstorms to spend time together. Petraeus would sneak in the side door of the superintendent's home aside the Plain, the academy's parade field, to visit Holly when she made the trip back to West Point. Both maintained their first priorities of graduating at the top of their classes, and both did: Petraeus graduated fortieth in his class, a “star man,” signifying top 5 percent, cadet captain and varsity letterman, while Holly was summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in both French and English. The two were married on July 6, 1974, at the Cadet Chapel on West Point's campus a month after Petraeus received his commission from Lieutenant General Knowlton as a 2nd lieutenant in the infantry.

David's roots stood in sharp contrast to his bride's patrician-military upbringing. To Petraeus, the stature of Holly's family was intoxicating. He loved becoming a part of it. Holly's well-connected and accomplished grandparents had a large compound in West Springfield, New Hampshire, with a boathouse on a nearby lake that they would visit often. Holly's father, Lieutenant General Knowlton, came from a prominent and well-to-do Massachusetts family and had graduated seventh in his class at West Point. He fought in four campaigns during World War II, beginning in Normandy. In the last weeks of the war, he was awarded a Silver Star for leading a reconnaissance mission deep behind German lines to make one of the first contacts with the Soviet forces north of Berlin. After the war, as the Cold War lines hardened, he was one of a handful of officers selected to help General Eisenhower establish the new NATO headquarters in Paris. Knowlton later served two years under General Westmoreland in Vietnam, where he visited every province as a senior official in the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program and commanded combat forces in the Mekong Delta. When he returned to the Pentagon, Knowlton pushed to conduct a serious investigation of the My Lai massacre. Promoted to three stars at West Point, he retired three tours later as a four-star general. He would become Petraeus's “military father,” according to Knowlton's wife, Peggy. Petraeus would be their “fourth son,” and General Knowlton would pass on to him tales of his fights against the Nazis and the Vietcong after Petraeus had proven himself as a cadet.

Petraeus was eager to fight and win the kinds of wars Knowlton described during dinners at the superintendent's house, Quarters 100—one of the most distinctive buildings at West Point. Sitting at the long rectangular dinner table in the historic supe's house was an honor afforded to the academy's rising stars. The dinner was always a cut above the mess hall. Petraeus's early interest in the topic of “uncomfortable wars” began at West Point—at these dinners. There were no mandatory classes on counterinsurgency warfare at West Point at that time.

Life at the academy generally shielded cadets from the antiwar sentiment that prevailed at the time, and Knowlton tried to inculcate in the cadets the virtues of the profession of arms, even while the Army was approaching its post-Vietnam nadir. In his oral history, Knowlton later reflected that he was the “commander of a stockade surrounded by attacking Indians.”

Knowlton served as the academy's forty-ninth superintendent. He was involuntarily ordered to West Point on twenty-four hours' notice by Westmoreland after the departure of Major General Sam Koster, whose record was tainted because of his association with My Lai. Westmoreland wanted Knowlton to establish some “consistency” and improve communications between the Pentagon and the nation's oldest military academy, especially as the Army began to resurrect itself after the morass of Vietnam. The rapid turnover in superintendents and the frequent personality clashes between them and the Army chiefs of staff had not been healthy for the Corps of Cadets; Westmoreland thought that if Knowlton stayed for four years, he could help stabilize important leadership initiatives in this time of transition for the academy. Westmoreland himself had served as superintendent and had a soft spot for the Corps and a burning interest in everything that went on at West Point.

Knowlton was determined to run West Point differently from his predecessors. From the time he arrived, he would write long memorandums to the Pentagon, sometimes every day. In the memos, he didn't ask for permission to conduct affairs the way he saw fit. Rather, he explained the critical issues facing the school and described how he planned to deal with them. Petraeus began drafting the same sort of “commander's update” for his boss when he was in Bosnia and carried the tradition with him to Iraq, Central Command and Afghanistan.

Knowlton buffered the cadets from the negativity surrounding Vietnam in part by sharing stories about his own positive experiences there. The Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) initiative was the main U.S. pacification program. The mission of CORDS was threefold: providing security for the local population, destroying insurgent infrastructure and building Vietnamese government capacity—and doing all of this on a scale large enough to be decisive. These concepts would later become part of Petraeus's strategy for the surge in Iraq.

While on Westmoreland's staff, Knowlton had made it a goal to visit as many of the districts in Vietnam as he could, to gather local knowledge and perspectives from the detachment teams. He went into the countryside to show the interest of the central government in the life of his teams and the people in the area. These teams would gather “atmospherics” and then initiate locally requested projects to improve standards of living, which included building medical facilities, schools and bridges. This level of understanding of local socioeconomic factors helped Knowlton to establish the Hamlet Evaluation System, an initiative to capture metrics for levels of security throughout the sub-provincial geographic areas.

But metrics in counterinsurgency are messy, as both Knowlton and Petraeus learned in their respective military commands.

WHEN HE ARRIVED IN
Afghanistan, Petraeus, who had gone on to study advanced economics and international relations at Princeton, devoured statistics and data to help him understand the state of the war. He also knew that a commander could improve “situational awareness” and his understanding of the circumstances in various locations by reaching out to those in the field. He'd been schooled in techniques for achieving situational awareness by Knowlton and other early mentors, and now he worked to gain it by dint of his own eighteen-hour days, part of which he spent communicating directly with soldiers, scholars and journalists in the field, in locations ranging from the desolate outposts in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, on the Pakistan border in northeastern Afghanistan, to the main fighting effort in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, to the southwest.

He was painfully aware that he didn't know Afghanistan nearly as well as he had known Iraq when he assumed command of the surge in Baghdad in 2007. Others noticed it as well. In Iraq, he had already had nearly two and a half years on the ground when he arrived to command the surge. He'd had an inner circle team that was familiar with Iraq, too. This was, by contrast, his entry-level position in Afghanistan. He'd visited the country many times but he'd never lived there. Other than his military aide, no one on the small team he brought with him from Central Command had deployment experience there, either: not his executive officer, Commander's Initiatives Group director, personal security detachment commander or personal public affairs officer. Petraeus valued their loyalty and their ability to interpret his vision more than their specific expertise. They would all gain that in time, he thought, and in the interim they would rely on the subordinate commanders and the personal and headquarters staff with Afghan experience whom he had inherited and would also reach out to his “directed telescopes.”

In the meantime, he set out immediately to build what were perhaps his two most critical relationships. The first was with Ambassador Eikenberry, with whom there had long been some professional tension with the military in Kabul. Eikenberry had been in the news most recently for feuding with McChrystal. The second was with President Karzai, whom Petraeus had met a number of times in person in Kabul and Washington and with whom he had communicated periodically by telephone from the States.

Petraeus had more than a little in common with Eikenberry, a retired Army lieutenant general who had graduated from West Point and Ranger School. They weren't close friends, but they weren't rivals, much less enemies. Petraeus had worked well with Eikenberry in past years, and he respected Eikenberry's long service in, and knowledge of, Afghanistan. One Petraeus aide said the two men were determined to work together and put the past civil-military tensions behind them. Petraeus had invited Eikenberry to fly into Kabul from NATO headquarters, in Belgium, with the team. “It's about creating a culture of teamwork,” the aide recalled. “He was setting a tone: We're going to work
together
.'”

After Eikenberry's cables critical of Karzai were leaked in 2009, Eikenberry became the focus of complaints from Karzai. The Afghan president would repeatedly bring up the cables and also Eikenberry's supposed interference with the presidential elections in 2009 with visiting officials, including Petraeus, over the course of the next year. Although Petraeus and the ISAF staff had a good partnership with the embassy, Petraeus found that Karzai's visceral reaction to Eikenberry prevented the general from operating the way he had with Ambassador Crocker in Baghdad. There, Petraeus and Crocker attended all meetings with Iraq's Prime Minister Maliki together to present a united front. Ultimately, Petraeus stopped including Eikenberry in most of his personal meetings with Karzai because of the unhelpful atmosphere generated by his presence, according to Petraeus's aides. Over time, Petraeus found that one-on-one meetings with Karzai were the most productive.