Knife Fights Read online

  Not everyone who saw dawn break that morning had similar opportunities to begin telling war stories, sadly. Small bomblets from previous MLRS and air strikes littered the battlefield and proved irresistible even to artillerymen who should have known better; several were killed picking them up from the desert sands.

  Despite these losses, the experience of Desert Storm had been extraordinary. The U.S. military, still struggling to overcome the lingering shadow of Vietnam, had turned the fourth-largest army in the world into the second-largest army in Iraq in a mere one hundred hours of ground combat. President George H. W. Bush, thrilled with the flush of victory, proclaimed, “By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” Officers in the Pentagon, still haunted by specters of that earlier war, hung a sign that informed the world, “We only do deserts.”

  The reaction back at Fort Hood, Texas—now mercifully free of crickets—was out of all proportion to the fighting we’d experienced.For weeks after our return, it was difficult to pay for meals in the local eating establishments, as veterans of earlier wars—especially Vietnam—picked up the tab, and M1A1 tanks rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue led by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. America simultaneously celebrated the end of the Cold War, the defeat of Saddam Hussein, and the exorcism of the ghosts of Vietnam in a unipolar moment that would stretch for a decade.

  Chaplain Peter Johnson in 2008, at my retirement parade. He was thinner in Desert Storm. So was I.

  Pete Johnson and I rented a two-bedroom apartment in Killeen, in a complex on New Bacon Ranch Road that featured a pool and a lot of people our age. A religious man, he engaged in long debates on the Bible and the nature of God with secular Susi, my British girlfriend, when she returned to Killeen for part of the summer after the war. They ultimately agreed to disagree on most things spiritual. Coming from Bedfordshire, familiar with centuries-old designations like New London Road and Kingston Road, Susi was amused by the name New Bacon Ranch Road, wondering about the provenance of Old Bacon Ranch Road. She was hugely impressed by the giant wolf spider we caught in my bedroom and kept in a terrarium in the kitchen. I named it after her and regularly fed crickets to Susi the Spider, releasing her back to the wild only when she became with spiderlets just before the Ghostriders deployed to the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, for a monthlong exercise in February 1992, almost exactly a year after our fight in Desert Storm.

  Turtle became the battalion motor officer, responsible for keeping all the forty-four tanks, fourteen Bradley fighting vehicles, and numerous trucks and armored personnel carriers up and running, and I replaced him as Ghostrider 5, the Alpha Company second in command. Life centered on fixing everything that we’d broken in the Iraqi desert and getting ready for the rotation through the NTC, slated to occur exactly a year after Desert Storm. The NTC simulated fights between visiting American units and an American opposing force (OPFOR), which used Soviet tactics and visually modified American equipment in a high-tech game of “laser tag.” NTC rotations were the toughest challenge faced by Army units in the United States. The NTC was the crown jewel of the Army’s training revolution of the 1980s, designed by Vietnam veterans who wanted to ensure that the next time their army had to fight, their successors would experience the traumas of their “first battle” against weapons that hurt nothing but their pride. Combat is hard, and those fighting for the first time make many mistakes—crazy things like troops shooting themselves accidentally with their own weapons, and hard things like not maintaining security in 360 degrees all night long, a mistake the Ghostriders would fall prey to at the NTC despite our recent experience of real combat. The NTC intentionally presented more difficult challenges than Army forces could expect to see on a real battlefield.

  The three-week NTC deployment in February 1992 was as difficult as promised. The fight was a home game for the OPFOR; they knew the ground like the backs of their hands, which, given the time they spent in the desert every year, themselves resembled high plains desert. Hundreds of miles away from anything that resembles civilization, the only pleasure the OPFOR gets on a regular basis is beating up on conventional Army units that rotate through fights in the desert sands to learn combat tactics, techniques, and procedures. The OPFOR was particularly grumpy at the time we visited, unimpressed by the jaunty First Cavalry Division combat patches we were sporting to indicate our service in Desert Storm. These soldiers had missed the war, remaining at Fort Irwin to train National Guard units for the fight, and had something of a chip on their combat-patchless shoulders. The OPFOR intended to show the Ghostriders what it was like fighting a well-trained, well-led enemy rather than the ragtag Iraqi army we had sliced through a year before.

  As an experienced combat unit, we expected to have a relatively easy time of it but were quickly disabused of that notion. Our rotation was made even more difficult by the addition of an Alaska National Guard infantry company that augmented the OPFOR’s understrength infantry units. The Nanooks, as we called them, didn’t all speak understandable English—they were particularly hard for Puerto Rican Claudio to comprehend—but they did delight in shouting “Woop! Woop! Woop!” to imitate the sounds the laser-tag Military Integrated Laser Engagement System on our tanks made when hit with a simulated anti- tank guided missile. Twenty years later I still sometimes wake up from NTC nightmares with cheerful Nanook shouts of “Woop! Woop! Woop!” echoing in my ears. This is not as crazy as it sounds. An old friend of mine, a graduate of the Army’s incredibly challenging Ranger school as well as two tours in Vietnam, used to wake up in Southeast Asia in a cold sweat, calming himself down by repeating the mantra “It’s only Vietnam, not Ranger School.”

  The memory of one simulated fight in particular still stings. We dug our tanks into fighting positions—an arduous exercise involving bulldozers preparing ten-foot-deep holes with parapets to enable the tanks to pop up and down like the fuzzy little creatures in the Whac-A-Mole arcade game. Digging a single fighting position is a matter of six or even eight hours, almost always done at night when tank crews would rather be sleeping, but it’s worth the hard work and lost sleep. Tanks in well-prepared fighting positions are all but invulnerable to enemy tank fire. In Iraq, the enemy tanks had been hidden behind sand berms that didn’t stop bullets but did indicate their locations to marauding airplanes. Pushing up berms is easy; digging tanks in is harder but far more effective. This night we managed to get all fourteen tanks dug in, with good fields of fire over the expected enemy approach route the next morning—and, almost unbelievably, got them dug in while a few hours of shut-eye were still available.

  Or so we thought. The Nanooks had crept up on us from behind, infiltrating through the mountains that protected our flanks and rear from enemy armored vehicles but not from Eskimos. Methodically, one by one, the Nanooks defeated a dug-in tank company in detail, using man-portable (albeit heavy) missiles, precisely targeted artillery shells, and sheer dogged determination. The world’s most advanced ground combat systems—M1A1 tanks that only a year earlier had defeated the world’s fourth-largest army on its home turf with ease—were perversely vulnerable to small bands of determined human enemies whose language we could barely understand but who knew our vulnerabilities and had the right weapons to take advantage of them.

  The experience was, frankly, infuriating, although I didn’t have much time to process it as I watched the OPFOR tanks roll untouched past our tank company the next morning, our laser-tag lights flashing and sirens sounding “Woop! Woop! Woop!” We had another battle to prepare to “fight.” Its details are lost to my memory, but I’m pretty sure the Nanooks were again featured and again got the better part of the bargain.

  I kept returning to that fight in my mind for months afterward—having defeated an enemy tank army in Iraq, how was it that we had been rolled up by light infantry, and by Eskimo light infantry at that? Soldiers we couldn’t see and were unprepared to fight had struck us in our vulnerable flanks and rear, defeating millions of dollars in moder
n technology with simple weapons and stealth. Sitting at Susi’s kitchen table in Oxford a month after the fight, cleaned and caught up on sleep, I described the two fights to her and decided at her urging to work out the lessons on paper.

  The result, “A Tale of Two Battles,” was published as the cover story in Armor magazine a few months later—fortunately for my Army career, with a painting of my unit in combat in Iraq, rather than of us being defeated by an Eskimo infantry at the NTC, on the cover of the magazine. By then I had left Fort Hood and arrived at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the Armor Officer Advanced Course, a school designed to prepare captains to command tank companies and cavalry troops. The nation keeps its tanks and its gold at Fort Knox; we joked that the tanks were there to protect the bullion, and every year some lieutenant got in trouble for intentionally hitting his golf ball onto the grounds of the bullion depository, which was right next to the golf course.

  “A Tale of Two Battles” analyzed our “Woop Woop Woop” defeat at the hands of the sneaky Nanooks. It concluded that, in the wake of the Cold War and the defeat of the Iraqi Army in Desert Storm, the United States was far more likely to face unconventional challenges, like ghostly infantry light fighters conducting night raids, than the tank-on-tank conflict that we had engaged in so convincingly in Iraq. The article, which urged the Army’s armored forces to spend more time preparing to fight light infantry and decrease its focus on defeating enemy tank armies, was the talk of Fort Knox for a few weeks, until other issues intervened. The lessons of that fight, however, continued to bounce around in my head for years to come. You learn more from a defeat than from a win, and both the Army and I had a lot to learn from that fight at the National Training Center.

  The advanced course was full of twenty-six-year-old captains, a majority of them veterans of Operations Desert Shield and Storm, confident in themselves and in the organization of which they were a part. In those days, Army men married early, usually to high school or college girlfriends, and the maternity ward was busy celebrating postdeployment arrivals. Those officers who had somehow missed the memo and had not married a girl from back home or the general’s daughter from their first duty station were strongly encouraged to do so. In fact, the major who instructed my small group pulled me aside and chided me for living in sin with Susi, who spent much of the summer at Fort Knox with me. Knox was a big step up from Fort Hood two years before, as the Kentucky crickets remained largely outside our bedroom. The second-floor apartment made their invasion plan much more difficult.

  Filled with the joy of being young and alive and with orders to Germany, and without properly considering the difficulties inherent in combining an agnostic only child from England with a recovering Catholic and oldest of six from Omaha, Susi and I eloped to St. Louis over Columbus Day weekend. Hints of the challenges inherent to the relationship should have been clear when my mother, visiting Oxford a few months before Desert Storm on her first overseas trip, had innocently asked Susi about her religious beliefs. Judy was relieved when Susi said she was a Druid, patting her on the hand and replying, “At least you’re not a Protestant.”

  We married without the required wedding permit in St. Louis’s Botanical Gardens on a splendid autumn day, my best man a West Point classmate, her maiden of honor another American Rhodes scholar who happened to be driving cross country on the fateful weekend. The minister, Rev. Cedric Booker, wears a lapel pin that proclaims “Love” and is grinning from ear to ear in the only surviving photo of the entire wedding party, taken by the Botanical Gardens’ wedding police. Attempting to enforce the marriage tax, the wedding police failed to break up the brief ceremony before the bride was kissed. They good-naturedly took a wedding photo and posed for one themselves before driving off in their golf cart to check other wedding parties for permits. There was something in the air that weekend. The best man and best woman subsequently fell in love with each other, got engaged, and then married other people after my West Point classmate fell for his French tutor while his fiancée was in Russia. We remain friends with both couples today, although we’re careful not to invite them both to the same events.

  Now freed of the social opprobrium that emanated from the Army toward officers who chose to live in sin with their girlfriends, I bade Susi farewell as she returned to Oxford to finish up her master’s thesis. We would reunite in Germany early in the new year, in a splendid town named Büdingen—“Swingin’ Büdingen” to the troops. The cavalry squadron headquarters and the officers’ club still featured swastikas left over from the Nazi army in the iron stair railings, but the focus of the unit was on another war.

  The conflict in Bosnia raged even as the American public attempted to ignore it, but the prospect of our involvement there focused the attention of the First Squadron, First U.S. Cavalry. The Army was so uncomfortable with low-intensity conflict and stability operations that it called this kind of fight Military Operations Other Than War, or MOOTW for short (pronounced “moooh-twa”). We spent many weeks at the old German army training center of Grafenwöhr conducting crowd control operations, hunting insurgents (although that was a word we never used), and otherwise working through tactical solutions for ethnic conflict situations. Despite the fact that the fight we were preparing for had numerous similarities to the war in Vietnam, we were writing the book as if for the first time. I continued to write for Armor magazine, penning a piece with another officer from the squadron about the lessons we had learned during our training in an attempt to disseminate them more widely through the Army.

  Ultimately 1-1 Cavalry didn’t intervene in former Yugoslavia until late 1995, by which time I had completed both a year as the squadron supply officer and taken and then given up command of Apache Troop, a unit with nine tanks, thirteen Bradleys, and two mortar tracks. One of the high points of my command was the gunnery exercise in which my tank crew earned a perfect thousand-point score on the culminating test of individual tank proficiency, Tank Table VIII. Although the range at Grafenwöhr is relatively narrow and the M1A1 quite a tank, shooting a grand is still a rare event and was good enough to earn us recognition as the top tank crew in the U.S. Army in Europe that summer.

  The massacre of some eight thousand Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica finally led the United States to overcome the lingering ghosts of Vietnam and intervene in force to put an end to the bloodshed. It was one of my tanks that led the American convoy across a bridge over the Sava River into Bosnia, red and white cavalry guidon snapping in the breeze.

  But I wasn’t in it; by the time Apache Troop finally was sent into this fight, Susi and I had returned to Oxford, against the advice of the Army. It wanted me to command another cavalry troop or, even better, accept Major General Montgomery Meigs’s offer to serve as his aide-de-camp as he assumed command of the famed First Infantry Division. Either job would increase my chances for a coveted early promotion to major and pave the way for a career that might include general officer rank. I ignored the good advice of my assignment officer and chose a different path, returning to one of the oldest universities in the world to study an ancient form of warfare. The battle against the Nanooks continued to work inside my head, and I was determined to learn about a kind of warfare that I was increasingly convinced the United States would have to fight again, whether it wanted to or not. Insurgency, I was convinced, was coming back, and the Army needed people who understood it.

  2.

  Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife

  A Counterinsurgent at Oxford and West Point

  Returning to Oxford was a gift; in fact, Susi gave me a copy of an old book titled A Time of Gifts to commemorate the adventure we were facing. Few Army officers get one chance to attend graduate school, and almost none get two. I was fully aware of my good fortune in earning an assignment to teach at West Point and deeply gratified by the assessment of the Military Academy’s faculty that I probably needed a refresher course in intellectual pursuits after five years of tanking in Iraq, Texas, California, and Germany.

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p; It was an odd time to choose to study counterinsurgency. The newspapers were full of the conflict in Bosnia, and the thinkers who mattered in defense policy circles were studying peacekeeping or a nascent revolution in military affairs (RMA) that promised to apply the lessons of the information revolution to the future of warfare. According to the dictates of the RMA, what could be seen would be hit, and what could be hit would be killed—all painlessly (for our side, anyway) and from a great distance. These ideas, and the difficulty the Army faced in rapidly deploying units to Bosnia, were the wellsprings behind the Future Combat System, a proposed series of Army combat vehicles that would rely for protection not on heavy armor but on situational awareness. The idea was that we would see our enemies and shoot them long before they could shoot us. Moreover, future battles would be fought in deserts, like the last one, and the population would be just as irrelevant as it had been when the First Cavalry Division bypassed nomadic Bedouin tribes en route to Basra during Operation Desert Storm.

  I was convinced that these conclusions were incorrect, that in fights to come we were far more likely to fight insurgents and guerrillas in cities than tanks in open deserts. The rest of the world had seen the ease with which America’s conventional military forces cut through the Iraqi military. They would have to be crazy to fight us that way again. I therefore resolved to write my doctoral dissertation on counterinsurgency, the kind of war that I thought was the most likely emerging challenge for American troops. The more I learned, the more I realized that it was also in many ways the most dangerous kind of war that the U.S. military could face.

  It was certainly the most likely. Throughout the history of warfare, guerrilla conflict has been more prevalent than conflict between nations represented by armies on a “conventional” field of battle. It is an ancient form of war. In the latter stages of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia in 329 B.C., after a decisive conventional campaign, Alexander confronted a problem that would frustrate the U.S. Army (and me personally) in Iraq more than two thousand years later. British General and military strategist J. F. C. Fuller captured well the dilemmas faced by any army fighting an insurgency: