The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  Nothing in the Army ever came smoothly for Pete Chiarelli, it seemed. Returning to a combat unit after a seven-year academic sojourn, he had to prove himself all over again. Sosh had a track record of getting its people good assignments back in the regular Army, but plenty of them still saw their once-glittering careers plateau. They had stayed away from real soldiering too long and seen their less academically inclined peers bypass them on the path to colonel and general. Eventually the up-or-out rules forced them into retirement. General Barry McCaffrey, who had taught in the department in the early 1970s, joked that teaching at Sosh was the “best way to become a general and the worst way to become a lieutenant colonel.” Chiarelli was in danger of proving the punch line. He had saved himself, not for the last time, with help from Olvey, the head of Sosh, who had called his contacts to secure Chiarelli this job in Germany. Olvey had sent him off with assurances that he was certain to make general one day. Maybe so, or maybe Olvey was just letting him down gently after not choosing him for the permanent faculty at Sosh. Either way, Chiarelli needed to prove he could do things his service valued and do them well. By coincidence, a month after he arrived, Colin Powell had taken over as commander of the Army’s V Corps in Germany, giving him overall responsibility for two divisions and 75,000 American troops. Always attentive to the political currents in Washington, Powell informed his officers that winning the Canadian Army Trophy would be one of his goals. Word soon reached Gelnhausen, a forty-five-minute drive from Frankfurt. As the operations officer, Chiarelli got the job of training the battalion’s Delta Company for the contest.

  The assignment came as the Chiarellis were still settling into their new life. For the first few months, as they searched for off-post housing, the family crammed into the unused attic in the officers’ quarters at Coleman. There was no bathroom, so they had to walk a few doors down to Joe Schmalzel’s place to use his. When the attic finally became intolerable, they moved to a nearby hotel before finally finding a charming house for rent in a small farming village. The locals were used to the Americans after forty years of living side-by-side with the U.S. soldiers, and the kids went to the post’s Gelnhausen Elementary School with other American kids. Officers and their wives socialized on Friday nights at the officers’ club. Beth’s biggest complaint was the same one she always had with the Army—Pete was always working. It got so bad that when their son Patrick was born, she rearranged his sleeping schedule just so he would be awake when her husband arrived home in the evening, usually sometime after 10 p.m.

  There was no mistaking the importance the brass attached to winning the trophy. A few weeks after taking command, Powell came to Gelnhausen, ostensibly for a get-acquainted dinner at the officers’ club. One of his motives was to make clear that anything less than first place was unacceptable. The post held special memories for Powell. His first assignment as a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant was as commander of an infantry platoon at Coleman Barracks. Then as now, such dinners were boisterous affairs with thick steaks and plentiful German beer. Colonel Stan Luallin, the commander at Coleman, escorted Powell and his wife, Alma, into the club a little after seven in the evening for cocktails. Chiarelli had not been able to attend the dinner, but Schmalzel and a few other junior officers watched the youthful-looking general circulate around the wood-paneled room in his sharp blue dress uniform. Powell shook hands and made small talk with his new subordinates, eventually making his way around to the CAT team. He said he expected them to bring home the trophy that year. “Well, we’ll either win or we won’t,” a nervous Schmalzel replied with a cartoonish chuckle. Powell fixed the twenty-seven-year-old captain with a stare. “I don’t joke with company-grade officers,” he said, abruptly moving on.

  He loosened up a little after dinner, recalling that in his day young lieutenants and captains after a night of drinking in the very same officers’ club used to climb out onto a small second-floor balcony and leap off in a show of toughness. “I came to understand GIs during my tour at Gelnhausen. I learned what made them tick,” Powell later wrote in his autobiography. “American soldiers love to win” and “they respect a leader who holds them to high standards.” Neither victories nor high standards had been common early in Powell’s career. After Germany, he had done two tours in Vietnam and soldiered through the 1970s. He and other officers of his generation had emerged from those traumatic times vowing to resist being drawn ever again into an insurgent war where they were prevented from using the full might of the U.S. armed forces, as many felt they had been barred from doing in Vietnam. “Many of my generation … vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support,” Powell wrote.

  The lessons of Vietnam may have been all the rage in Sosh and at Southern Command. But most of the Army wanted nothing to do with training to fight limited wars. It had spent much of the last two decades trying to restore the fighting prowess it had lost in Vietnam. By the second half of the 1980s, the Reagan-era military buildup was beginning to pay off. New advanced equipment was pouring into Army units. Along with the bruising M1 tank, there were the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, the Bradley troop-carrying vehicle, and the Patriot antimissile defense system—all of them expressly designed for fighting the mechanized armies of the Soviet Union or its proxies. After years of tight budgets, money was plentiful for better soldier pay and training. American officers were being schooled in an aggressive new conventional fighting doctrine called “Air-Land Battle,” which preached the importance of precision strikes on the enemy and swift maneuvers by large armored formations. Now it was time to show off the new American capabilities. Short of war itself, nothing would demonstrate more clearly to enemies and allies that the U.S. Army was back than a victory at CAT.

  There was a satisfying continuity to his new assignment, Chiarelli thought. Once his father had stood in the turret of his Sherman tank as it motored into the Nazi heartland. Now he was in Germany, too, still dreaming, as he had as a kid, of one day commanding hundreds of tanks in wartime. There were many times when he felt in over his head. He was an armor officer but had never commanded a tank company and, after nearly a decade out of a frontline unit, had only a rudimentary understanding of the new technology in the M1 tank. But in a volunteer army that increasingly saw itself as separate from the larger American society it protected, Chiarelli was a throwback to the citizen soldiers of the draft era. There was something about him that soldiers responded to. Anybody who spent more than five minutes with him could see it. He could be demanding and intense, but people liked him and worked hard for him. When Powell traveled to Grafenwöhr to observe the battalion during maneuvers that fall, he noticed it, too. A lieutenant colonel was nominally in command, but the men looked to Chiarelli to make all the decisions. “You have a problem,” he warned Luallin, the commander at Coleman. “That Major Chiarelli is running the battalion.” Luallin assured him they had the situation under control.

  Chiarelli soon began remastering the intricacies of tank gunnery. Several of the Army’s best tank gunners from Fort Knox were brought over to Germany to tutor the teams. One of the reasons the United States was continuing to lose at CAT, Chiarelli learned, was that its gunners weren’t taking full advantage of the tanks’ revolutionary technology. Under the competition rules, each tank team training for the competition was permitted to fire a total of only 134 live rounds in the twelve months before CAT. The idea was to replicate the amount of training a normal tank crew might receive, to stop teams from skewing the competition by spending day after day at the gunnery range. Chiarelli ordered his gunners to expend precious ammunition zeroing their guns, a process that often took as many as five or six rounds for each tank. If his men learned to calibrate their weapons precisely, he reasoned, the payoff in accuracy would be much greater than if they simply did more target practice. A properly zeroed gun could repeatedly hit an eight-inch-wide bull’s-eye at a d
istance of 2,000 meters. Whatever rounds were left could then be used for target practice. “We were going to give these guys confidence that this tank really worked,” Chiarelli recalled.

  He was in the observation tower at Grafenwöhr one day after losing yet again, watching his tanks drive off the range. Lieutenant Colonel John Abrams, an officer from division who was overseeing the training, stood next to him. One of the M1s suddenly started belching plumes of smoke before clanking to a halt. Abrams was the son of Creighton Abrams, the legendary general for whom the M1 tank was named. Enraged, the younger Abrams summoned Lieutenant Joe Weiss, the maintenance officer. “What the hell happened?” he demanded. As Weiss tried to explain that a part had failed, Abrams cut him off. “You guys don’t get it!” he yelled. “You’ll never win this thing. What we need is excellence. Do you understand?” Chiarelli, standing nearby, was incensed that Abrams was bellowing at his soldier. “Don’t talk that way to a member of my team again,” he said icily.

  But Chiarelli was worried. A month before the competition, Delta Company’s tanks were consistently hitting only twenty-six of thirty-two targets, which was not enough to win the trophy, if past competitions were any guide. In May, Chiarelli’s parents visited from Seattle. It was their first chance to see their new grandson, Patrick, who was turning one year old, and Pete took some time off to spend with his father, who was back in Europe for the first time since World War II. A few days after arriving, his father complained that he wasn’t feeling well and checked into the U.S. Army hospital in Frankfurt. He had suffered a heart attack a few years earlier, and the long plane ride from Seattle had left him fatigued. He returned to his son’s house some days later with doctor’s orders to rest, but his condition soon deteriorated. Rushed one night to a nearby German hospital, he died on May 7. The Chiarellis flew home to Seattle for the funeral.

  Two weeks later Chiarelli, still grieving, was back in Germany for the start of the CAT competition. He had started smoking again and looked haggard. But Schmalzel greeted him with some welcome news for a change: the three platoons had fired the last of their 134 rounds the previous week and scored their best results so far. Not only had they hit most of the targets but, after a year of training, the crews had cut the amount of time it took them to reload and fire a round to just seconds.

  It was overcast and raining lightly the first morning of the competition when Chiarelli’s best platoon, commanded by Lieutenant John Menard, rolled onto Range 301. With a booming shot from its main gun, the lead tank fired at the first target, putting a hole right in the center. Turrets swiveling, the M1s advanced down the sloped range, four abreast. Each pop-up target, a plywood silhouette of an enemy tank, appeared for forty seconds. Menard’s men hit the first twenty-eight pop-up targets without a miss. But fifteen minutes into their run, the downpour intensified. It was so severe that Menard could barely see five feet in any direction. Four final targets appeared over the next forty seconds, but Menard’s men, unable to make out any of them, didn’t fire another shot. They finished with twenty-eight hits out of thirty-two targets, a decent showing but not good enough for first place even on the first day of competition. Chiarelli demanded the chance to rerun the course but was rebuffed. At the end of the first day, the Dutch were in the lead, having missed only two targets in their first run. The next American platoon, competing on Wednesday, had clear weather and earned a better score, hitting thirty of thirty-two targets. But Thursday afternoon, the Germans’ 124th Panzer Battalion completed a perfect run, a feat that had only been accomplished one other time.

  Going into the final day, the Americans’ last chance rested with Massar’s platoon, the weakest of the three. Even if the Americans matched the Germans’ perfect score, they could only win outright—and claim the trophy as the best tank unit in NATO—by finishing their round in a faster time, giving them a higher overall score. The night before, to get fired up, they had watched a rerun of the U.S. hockey team’s improbable victory over the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Massar’s platoon made the second run of the day, in the afternoon, after the British finished on the course. By then, it had been several hours since Chiarelli had received the sequence of targets the Americans would face. Chiarelli had gone to his boss, Luallin, and told him he wasn’t going to pass along the information. It would only confuse them, he told his superior, insisting that they were ready. As Chiarelli watched the four tanks roar onto the range, he knew he was taking an extravagant risk. Another loss at CAT would only intensify questioning in Washington about whether the Abrams tank was worth the money.

  As the four tanks of 1st Platoon started onto the range, the thumping Top Gun theme song was playing at top volume over the loudspeaker until a gruff voice rang out from grandstand, “Turn that goddamn music off!” The recording cut off abruptly. The order came from General Glenn Otis, the top U.S. Army commander in Europe, one of several three-and four-star generals in the VIP grandstand. As the M1s began moving four abreast down the range, the two tanks on the right side of the formation fired almost at once, the explosions from their main guns sending tongues of flame ripping toward the targets. For the next twenty minutes, Chiarelli got reports from his observers as 1st Platoon tanks tore around Range 301, hitting target after target. They completed the course without a miss.

  The two dozen teams stood in formation as the judges tallied the final scores. A few minutes later, the announcement came over the loudspeaker: “The high-scoring platoon was 1st Platoon, Delta Company!” The American troops erupted in raucous cheers, embraces, and backslaps. The U.S. and German teams had both hit all the targets, but the final result was a blowout. Massar’s men had taken an average of a full second less than every other competitor to fire, reload, and fire again. The U.S. team ended with a total score of 20,490, a comfortable 800 points ahead of the 124th Panzer Battalion.

  Walking up to Chiarelli afterward, the division officer who had slipped Chiarelli the target sequence said, “Well, congratulations, but you had some pretty good intel, didn’t you?”

  “Yes I did, but I didn’t tell them a goddamn thing,” Chiarelli fired back.

  “You took a hell of a chance,” the officer said finally.

  Driving back to the barracks to celebrate over a beer with his men, Chiarelli found a pay phone and called his mother in Seattle. His father would have been so proud, his mother told him as they both cried. Chiarelli had worked hard. He had come back from near-irrelevancy in an Army that only a year before had been ready to cast him aside. Maybe for the first time he could be confident there was a future for him in the military. Word of the victory was quickly relayed back to Colin Powell at the White House. He had lasted only five months in Germany before being summoned to Washington to be national security advisor in the waning days of the Reagan administration. But Powell allowed himself the general’s prerogative of claiming credit. “Two initiatives that I had set in motion paid off soon after I left,” he wrote in his memoirs, referring to the victory at CAT and another NATO competition that the United States had won around the same time. “These competitions may mean little to the layperson, but in NATO this was the equivalent of winning the World Series and the Super Bowl in one season.”

  The victory party continued when Chiarelli’s men arrived back at Gelnhausen by rail car. For the first time anyone could remember, they were allowed to drive their massive M1s through the front gate, pulling up in formation to cheers from the soldiers and families who had assembled to welcome them home. The division band played the theme to the movie Patton as generals made speeches and handed out medals to every member of the platoon. Originally, the Army brass had wanted to decorate only Massar’s men. But Chiarelli had insisted on medals for the other two platoons, too. This was a team, he declared, and they had trained just as hard. He got his way. He was still just a major, but for the moment he might as well have been Patton himself.

  A few months after the CAT competition, a Pentagon study examining the U.S. victory began with an unusually wo
rded introduction addressed to the Soviet Red Army and its allies. “Warning to the Warsaw Pact,” it read. “If you make the decision to attack NATO ground forces in Western Europe, the most highly-skilled, best equipped and supported armored forces in the world will cut you to ribbons… We, the American victors in the 1987 Canadian Army Trophy competition, issue this warning on behalf of our allies and from a position of strength.”

  The next war came not against the Warsaw Pact but in the Middle East after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq’s army had been equipped by the Soviet Union and was familiar to the vast U.S. force sent to eject them from Kuwait. There was another fortunate coincidence about the 1991 Gulf War: Saddam and his generals decided to fight a conventional war in the open desert. The big tank battle that the Army had been preparing for at Grafenwöhr in Germany and in the Mojave Desert of California actually came to pass. Chiarelli was certain he was going to be sent to the fight. He was back at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, commanding a motorized infantry battalion. At a Christmas party in December his boss, who was a bit tipsy, had even broken the news to his wife, Beth. “Don’t tell anybody, but by February fifteenth you guys will be out of here,” he whispered to her. The Chiarellis drove down to the Rose Bowl to watch their beloved Washington Huskies beat Iowa and made a quick stop at Disneyland with their three kids. Chiarelli and Beth were on edge the entire trip. Finally, in early February, he was told to have his men ready to go to the Middle East in six days. A week passed and the orders to move never came. Then they were told that they were going in two days. Again nothing.