Warrior King: The Triumph and Betrayal of an American Commander in Iraq - Hardcover

Chapter One

I was a soldier made, not born.

While the tradition of military service is deeply rooted in some families, it was little more than white noise in my early life. Four of my uncles on my mother’s side and one uncle on my father’s side of the family had served in the army: one in World War II, one in Korea, two in peacetime, and one in Vietnam. Their war stories were offered only grudgingly, and I have no recollection of sitting at their feet, taking in with wide- eyed innocence everything they said. It was just something they had done once, a long time ago, and was no more or less important or interesting than the jobs they held now or the families they raised. It would be many years later, when I entered West Point, before I began to understand the depth of commitment that runs through some families, and how many of my classmates were third- and fourth-generation cadets. There was a time, when I worked in the West Point admissions office, that I received a call from a gentleman by the name of Westmoreland. I don’t think it was the General Westmoreland, but it was definitely one of his relatives—a brother or a son, perhaps—and he wasted little time in letting me know that his daughter was applying to West Point, and that the Westmoreland line at the Academy could be traced back, unbroken, to 1827. So the message was clear: Just go ahead and get her in, because this is where she belongs. The Ivies, I learned, had nothing on West Point when it came to tradition and legacy.

If our house hold lacked any overt connection to the military, however, it did not want for structure and guidance. My parents both grew up in Pennsylvania and met as students at Roberts Wesleyan, a small Christian college located near Rochester, New York. My dad, Marcus Bailey Sassaman, attended Western Evangelical Seminary in Portland, Oregon, and eventually he and my mother, Nancy Jean Sassaman, settled in the Northwest and began raising a family. My father was a Free Methodist minister and his vocation was the family business, so to speak. Mom and Dad subscribed wholeheartedly to the precepts of Samuel and Susanna Wesley in matters both personal and theological, so ours was a conservative upbringing, to say the least. There is a line of scripture that says, in essence, If a pastor can’t control his own home, then he has no business being in charge of a church and a congregation. My parents were young and I was the firstborn, and as a result I suffered the consequences of their taking that advice rather literally. They did not spare the rod, and I can recall taking it in the shorts quite a bit early on. I can also remember as early as first grade, sitting in the front row of my father’s church, and trying desperately to remain still as a statue for the duration of the entire service. No small task for a six-year-old, especially one as energetic as I was, but I understood what would happen if I succumbed to the urge to twitch or even itch. Mom was at the piano, Dad was in the pulpit, and the entire church was watching. If I caused them any embarrassment, someone would take me out afterward and administer a little parental discipline—usually a shoe or a belt across the backside.

There was less of this as time went on, a natural loosening of the leash as more children came into the home (I was the oldest of three children) and my parents grew more comfortable with their social and professional standing. I know they probably look back on this period with some regret, maybe even a little bit of horror, but I’d be dishonest if I said mine was an unequivocally happy childhood. It wasn’t a sad childhood, either. My mother and father were very affectionate toward each other and very kind and generous toward others, but when it came to their children, there was some fear and intimidation involved, coupled with compassion and love. So there were some conflicting dynamics and emotions in our house hold. I guess you could say it was a childhood of... expectations. There was, from my earliest memory, a drive to succeed, and I think it was initially focused on the classroom and in music, and then it just carried over into athletics.

Both of my parents were musical. Dad sang in the choir in high school and college, and later at his church, but my mother was the gifted musician in the family. By the time she completed a twenty-plus-year career as a music teacher in the Beaverton, Oregon, School District, she had become something of a legend for the passion and professionalism she brought to the staging of elementary-school musicals and choir concerts. My brothers and I all became reasonably accomplished musicians, thanks to our parents’ influence. I had to take piano lessons for four or five years until I brokered a deal with my mother in seventh grade. By this time I had also begun studying the slide trombone, and my parents agreed to let me stop playing piano—as long as I promised to remain committed to the trombone throughout my high school years. Having grown tired of watching my friends playing baseball on summer days while I sat inside practicing the piano, I jumped at this offer. In the end I wound up forming a brass trio with my younger brothers, Jonathan (who played trumpet) and David (French horn).

It was in the musical arena that I first learned to deal with pressure. In some ways playing in the Army-Navy football game, even on national television, is a walk in the park when compared to playing a trombone solo at a state musical competition when your mother is a music legend in the state and you’re being judged by three of her peers. Slide trombone did not come naturally to me, either—I had to work really hard at that, and there were high expectations in my family to achieve as a musician. By the time I was able to go into sports, which was a more natural fit for me, I had already gone through a crucible of fire with the trombone. Through music I learned the value of discipline and mastery, skills that proved useful in just about any competitive endeavor.

Not that my parents were particularly interested in sports. In fourth grade, on a whim, I entered a football skills contest known as the Punt, Pass & Kick competition, and finished first in my age group at my elementary school. The following week I won the citywide competition, which allowed me to qualify for the regional level. I’m pretty sure this surprised my parents (it surprised me, as well), who no doubt had never considered the possibility that one of their children might have any athletic ability, since it wasn’t of any great concern or interest to them. In fact, I wasn’t permitted to compete in the regionals—my father had planned a family vacation and wasn’t about to delay the trip so that I could kick a football. At the time, my parents considered music and academics far more important than sports, so they went through an education process with their children as we began to excel on the playing field; they started to see that sports, and the natural attention that came with success in the athletic arena, might have some benefit after all.

My first lessons in competitiveness, interestingly enough, were taught by my father. Although Dad had run cross-country and track, and played soccer and basketball in high school, sports seemed to play no role in his life by this time; as far as I could tell, he was a nonathlete. Yet, there was quite a bit of the Great Santini in my father, an unwillingness to appear weak or fragile in even the most benign of situations. Thus did a simple game of backyard basketball become something akin to March Madness. The very first time I shot baskets with Dad it turned into a war. I was ten years old at the time, and absolutely enthralled with the game of basketball. We had just moved to a new parsonage, and I had been begging almost daily for a hoop of my own. It had been this way for a few years. Once I discovered balls, nothing else (including music) held my interest. I never played with toys, trucks, or cars. (I never even played "war" with my friends.) I was always about balls. If you gave me a ball I could disappear for hours on end. Baseball came first, in second grade, followed a couple years later by basketball and football. My father eventually put a basket up in the driveway, probably just because he was tired of listening to me whine. I stayed out there for hours on end; Dad even put up a spotlight, and soon I was dribbling tirelessly through the drizzle and fog of the northwestern nights. One day, tired of playing alone or with one of my brothers, I tried to entice my father to join me in the driveway. I had no motive, no objective, aside from wanting to show my dad what I had learned since he had erected the basket. Basically, I just thought it would be neat to shoot some hoops with my father.

He had something else in mind.

"Let’s play a game."

Even better, I thought.

Dad laid out the rules: two points per basket, fifty-point game. Winner’s outs, of course.

All right! This should be fun!

The final score was 50–2; it would have been 50–3, but we didn’t have a three-point shot in 1973. My only basket resulted not from a concession or moment of generosity on the part of the old man, but rather from a stroke of luck—a hook shot from twenty-five feet that sailed over my father’s head and through the basket. We must have played hundreds of games over the next five or six years, and Dad never relented. Every time we picked up the basketball and walked outside together, it was with one objective in mind: to win the game. We never just shot baskets, never played a lighthearted game of H-O-R-S-E or P-I-G or Around the World. It was always a game, always a battle, the two of us bumping and throwing elbows and doing our best to dominate the other in the driveway. He never went easy on me, never let me win to boost my ego. Over time, of course, the inevitable happened: I got bigger, stronger, and better, and my father got older, slower, and less dominant. I still recall the day we played in the backyard of our home in Portland. I was sixteen or seventeen years old. We were almost the same height by then, and I was perhaps a little wider across the shoulders, a bit thicker in the chest. I had discovered that I could move my father around, put him on my hip and muscle the ball to the basket. I beat him for the first time that day, and I do not recall him taking the loss well. That was the last time we ever played one-on-one basketball.

In high school, as I became more obsessed with football, my father expressed his competitive nature in other ways. Even though he had never played a down of football, Dad was the kind of guy who felt compelled to share his views on the sport in general, and my performance in particular. After a Friday-night game, I’d typically go out for pizza with my teammates or my girlfriend; sometimes I wouldn’t get home until well after midnight, but my father would always be awake, waiting for me to return, not so much because he worried that I might have gotten into trouble (as I said, bad behavior wasn’t an option), but so that we could review the evening’s competition. It happened without fail. Dad would be sitting in the living room with the light on, reading the Bible, and after an exchange of pleasantries, he would invite me to sit down beside him; there, together, we would analyze the game, breaking it down play by play. He would offer compliments on what I had done right, and suggestions on how to improve in areas where I had been less than stellar. Whether he was trying to help me realize my potential or simply projecting his ambition onto me, I don’t really know. Maybe a little of both. I only know that he’d be sitting there, program in hand, with a description of each play scribbled in the margins. I used to joke that I never had to worry about film sessions in high school, because by the time Monday afternoon rolled around, I’d already spent hours reviewing plays with my father.

It’s different around my house today. I remember when my son, Nathan, was in third grade, and I took him to basketball practice after I’d been away for some time on a deployment. Nathan just sat there bouncing the basketball, kind of dreamily, while the coach was talking, and the coach responded by ordering Nathan to run a few laps—punishment for interrupting and not paying attention. When we came home that evening I said nothing to Nathan, but I told my wife, "In twenty years of playing organized sports, I never had to run laps because of not paying attention. I ate it up, hook, line, and sinker." She just smiled and shrugged, and I knew what she meant: my son was not like me. At first I was mortified, and then I got over it. I think he enjoys the social part of the game more than anything else. He’s going to be a good athlete, he’s going to contribute, and it’s my hope that he becomes the go-to guy. That’s okay. I’ve tried to be very careful about giving advice to my kids or micromanaging their childhood. I’ve lost more backyard basketball games than I’ve won. I’ve never questioned any of their coaches. All I do is thank coaches for spending time with my son or daughter. Again, I think that’s just a by-product of my upbringing. My father was neither an athlete nor a soldier; I was both. Yet, in some ways, particularly when it comes to family and children, I am gentler than he ever was.

Challenging as it might have been, the tough love we received at home had its advantages. I had no chance to go to hell when I was growing up. None whatsoever. From the earliest age I was engulfed by the church and all it represented. There was no alcohol, no smoking, no drugs. There was, instead, devotion and prayer and meditation; there were Bible lessons. None of this seemed odd to me, for it was my only frame of reference, and as a result I was among the most naive teenagers you’d ever want to meet. Here’s an example of the ways things worked in our family. When I was thirteen years old, and it came time for Dad to have the age-old father-son talk with me—you know, the one about the birds and the bees—the exchange of wisdom occurred not in the comfort of our home, but at my father’s office. The time was scheduled into Dad’s day—my mother even called to make an appointment. I arrived at his office early, shuffled in nervously, and sat patiently and silently as my father walked through the dusty pages of a Christian book on human sexuality and emerging manhood.

And that was that.

There were no questions afterward. He checked the block. We had the appointment. The forty-five-minute meeting ended and we never talked about it again. Dad closed the book, gave me a pat on the back, and went back to work, figuring I was good to go. This was fine with me, since I was extraordinarily uncomfortable for the duration of the meeting and wanted nothing more than to get out of there as quickly as possible. High school, for me, was one surprise after another, as the realities of adolescence came slowly into focus. I can recall even as late as my senior year, while visiting colleges as a football recruit, an acute awareness that for all my success as a student and athlete, I was incredibly immature and inexperienced.

"Mom . . . Dad," I’d say when I returned from these visits. "You guys have sheltered me so much. Do you have any idea what’s going on out there?"

They did, of course, and their attempts to protect and shield their children, while perhaps a bit extreme, no doubt sprang from someplace genuine. In many ways my parents were (and are) an amazing couple. They have totally dedicated their lives to God and to their work (and to their family). I learned from my father not only competitiveness, but compassion. It would be unfair to suggest that my father was a total monster; he wasn’t. He was an in...