day.
CHAPTER THREE
The New Centurions
Fort Stewart, Georgia
1979
C olonel James Shelton had never seen anything like it. The letter from a captain named David Petraeus went on for two pages, ticking off all the honors and achievements he had accumulated in his short career—Star Man at West Point, promoted early to captain, master parachutist badge, top of his class at Ranger School, exemplary fitness reports. Shelton and Petraeus had met each other exactly once. A few years earlier they had shared a tent one night during a NATO exercise in eastern Turkey. Petraeus had cracked up when Shelton pulled a bottle of scotch from a spare boot in his rucksack, and the two soldiers had shared a drink. Now it was Shelton’s turn to chuckle. This brash captain was lobbying for command of a rifle company in his brigade. He passed the letter around his headquarters, and everyone got a kick out of it. “What do you want to do with Superman here?” the brigade’s personnel officer asked. “Let’s give him a shot,” Shelton replied. He had only taken over command a few months earlier and already had bawled out several shoddy junior officers. If Petraeus was half as good as he claimed, he would be an improvement.
Petraeus and his wife, Holly, pulled into Fort Stewart in their yellow Corvette a few weeks later, newly assigned to Shelton’s brigade in the 24th Infantry Division. Everything moved at a languid pace in rural Georgia, they found. Holly could speak French fluently, but she had a harder time with southern drawls. When, shortly after arriving, she heard a radio commercial referring to “Vince’s Dawgs,” she had no idea it was a reference to the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team and its coach, Vince Dooley. The 24th Division headquarters was in a creaky white clapboard building built in the early months of World War II. Beyond the main post lay the vast training grounds, nearly 300,000 acres of dense scrub pine and swamp. But training wasn’t much of a priority. The commanding general spent long hours on his boat, which he kept moored near Savannah, twenty-five miles away. Days at a time would go by without him saying a word to his staff. “You’re in command,” he told his deputy. “Just tell me if something goes wrong.” A lot was going wrong. The year Petraeus arrived, the 24th was rated “not combat ready” in the Army’s internal unit assessments.
He and Holly had spent the previous four years at the U.S. base in Vicenza in a parachute infantry brigade. They had loved life in Italy, or he had anyway. The only work Holly could find as the wife of an officer was tutoring soldiers seeking their high school GEDs. Petraeus, however, spent weeks at a time traveling around Europe on joint exercises with parachute units from other NATO countries. In 1976, he and a couple of dozen soldiers from his unit went to France to train with its paratroopers. After ten days, they ended up in the Pyrenees Mountains, executing a tricky drop onto a hilltop. From there the Americans and their hosts marched several miles to a rustic château, where they were served a memorable meal by black-coated waiters. A picture snapped that evening by one of his men shows a youthful Petraeus standing outside the farmhouse in his paratrooper beret, looking deeply happy.
On the trip Petraeus noticed a larger-than-life portrait of a French officer displayed in the regimental mess and asked about it. The painting was of Marcel Bigeard, his hosts told him, a revered French general. He had fought in Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, was taken prisoner during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and later forged the counterinsurgency tactics thatFrench units used in their war in Algeria. After returning to Vicenza, an intrigued Petraeus began reading about Bigeard, poring over a copy of
Hell in a Very Small Place
, Bernard Fall’s classic account of the French war in Indochina, and a translation of the
The Centurions
, Jean Lartéguy’s novel
CHAPTER THREE
The New Centurions
Fort Stewart, Georgia
1979
C olonel James Shelton had never seen anything like it. The letter from a captain named David Petraeus went on for two pages, ticking off all the honors and achievements he had accumulated in his short career—Star Man at West Point, promoted early to captain, master parachutist badge, top of his class at Ranger School, exemplary fitness reports. Shelton and Petraeus had met each other exactly once. A few years earlier they had shared a tent one night during a NATO exercise in eastern Turkey. Petraeus had cracked up when Shelton pulled a bottle of scotch from a spare boot in his rucksack, and the two soldiers had shared a drink. Now it was Shelton’s turn to chuckle. This brash captain was lobbying for command of a rifle company in his brigade. He passed the letter around his headquarters, and everyone got a kick out of it. “What do you want to do with Superman here?” the brigade’s personnel officer asked. “Let’s give him a shot,” Shelton replied. He had only taken over command a few months earlier and already had bawled out several shoddy junior officers. If Petraeus was half as good as he claimed, he would be an improvement.
Petraeus and his wife, Holly, pulled into Fort Stewart in their yellow Corvette a few weeks later, newly assigned to Shelton’s brigade in the 24th Infantry Division. Everything moved at a languid pace in rural Georgia, they found. Holly could speak French fluently, but she had a harder time with southern drawls. When, shortly after arriving, she heard a radio commercial referring to “Vince’s Dawgs,” she had no idea it was a reference to the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team and its coach, Vince Dooley. The 24th Division headquarters was in a creaky white clapboard building built in the early months of World War II. Beyond the main post lay the vast training grounds, nearly 300,000 acres of dense scrub pine and swamp. But training wasn’t much of a priority. The commanding general spent long hours on his boat, which he kept moored near Savannah, twenty-five miles away. Days at a time would go by without him saying a word to his staff. “You’re in command,” he told his deputy. “Just tell me if something goes wrong.” A lot was going wrong. The year Petraeus arrived, the 24th was rated “not combat ready” in the Army’s internal unit assessments.
He and Holly had spent the previous four years at the U.S. base in Vicenza in a parachute infantry brigade. They had loved life in Italy, or he had anyway. The only work Holly could find as the wife of an officer was tutoring soldiers seeking their high school GEDs. Petraeus, however, spent weeks at a time traveling around Europe on joint exercises with parachute units from other NATO countries. In 1976, he and a couple of dozen soldiers from his unit went to France to train with its paratroopers. After ten days, they ended up in the Pyrenees Mountains, executing a tricky drop onto a hilltop. From there the Americans and their hosts marched several miles to a rustic château, where they were served a memorable meal by black-coated waiters. A picture snapped that evening by one of his men shows a youthful Petraeus standing outside the farmhouse in his paratrooper beret, looking deeply happy.
On the trip Petraeus noticed a larger-than-life portrait of a French officer displayed in the regimental mess and asked about it. The painting was of Marcel Bigeard, his hosts told him, a revered French general. He had fought in Vietnam in the 1940s and 1950s, was taken prisoner during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and later forged the counterinsurgency tactics thatFrench units used in their war in Algeria. After returning to Vicenza, an intrigued Petraeus began reading about Bigeard, poring over a copy of
Hell in a Very Small Place
, Bernard Fall’s classic account of the French war in Indochina, and a translation of the
The Centurions
, Jean Lartéguy’s novel
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