for a few more hours of work.
His foray into civilian graduate school had its humbling moments. Used to top grades and glowing reviews, Petraeus received a D on his first exam in advanced microeconomics. A seminar paper in his second semester came back marked with a B. “Though the paper is reasonably well-written and has some merit, it is relatively simplistic and I am left feeling that the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” his professor, Dr. Richard Ullman, had written on the cover sheet. Petraeus had worked hard on the paper, and Ullman’s blasé reaction had taken him down a peg. “I had been the number one guy in my class at Leavenworth and a few other things over the years. I wanted to prove to myself that I could really measure up,” he recalled. A chastened Petraeus asked if he could take a shot at writing a new seminar paper that looked at how the Vietnam War influenced the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations’ calculus on using military force. He threw himself into the project, even volunteering to shuttle Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been national security advisor during the Carter administration, back to Washington following a speaking engagement at Princeton so that he could interview him during the four-hour drive. Ullman gave the paper an A, and Petraeus decided to write his doctoral thesis on Vietnam’s impact on the American military. He crammed in as much research as he could before leaving Princeton, and then wrote his dissertation while teaching at Sosh.
It was an unexpectedly rich time to revisit Vietnam—especially in the intellectual hothouse of the Sosh department. The war was a painful subject that held little interest for most Army officers. Sosh instructors, however, debated it incessantly. In June 1985 the department hosted an academic conference on the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Olvey assigned William Taylor, a fiery infantry officer with a Ph.D. who had served in Vietnam, to help Petraeus expand his Princeton paper and present it at the conference.
When Taylor arrived at West Point in the 1970s there were no courses on Vietnam. At the Army’s Command and General Staff College, counterinsurgency and guerrilla war were almost entirely absent from thecurriculum. To Taylor it seemed as if the Army was trying to blot out the memory of the painful war, and he made it a personal crusade to force it to confront its failures. Taylor wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a professorial air and was so skinny he looked almost frail, but when he started talking about Vietnam his face reddened and his voice thundered. He had spent a long year leading patrols through rice paddies and small hamlets in the Mekong Delta, but those forays had accomplished little. Even when his unit could find the enemy, which wasn’t often, they returned to their base at night, turning the villages they had just fought and bled for back over to the Viet Cong. “Anything you could do wrong, we did it,” he often shouted. Taylor’s anger spread like a virus through the restless minds in Sosh. “Bill would go into a rant and absolutely make your brain itch,” said Asa Clark, another Vietnam vet who arrived at Sosh in the late 1970s. By the time he and Petraeus teamed up on their Vietnam paper, Taylor had left the Army and was working at a policy think tank in Washington.
The conference, held in early summer in a large auditorium on the West Point campus, attracted a diverse crowd of military officers, academics, and Pentagon officials. Though Petraeus had done most of the actual writing, the better-known Taylor gave the public presentation on the paper, which argued somewhat prosaically that Vietnam had made the U.S. military and its political leadership reluctant to use force. Afterward, Petraeus settled into a folding chair in the back of the auditorium for the conference’s main attraction. Major Andy Krepinevich, a Sosh professor with a doctorate from Harvard, had
His foray into civilian graduate school had its humbling moments. Used to top grades and glowing reviews, Petraeus received a D on his first exam in advanced microeconomics. A seminar paper in his second semester came back marked with a B. “Though the paper is reasonably well-written and has some merit, it is relatively simplistic and I am left feeling that the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” his professor, Dr. Richard Ullman, had written on the cover sheet. Petraeus had worked hard on the paper, and Ullman’s blasé reaction had taken him down a peg. “I had been the number one guy in my class at Leavenworth and a few other things over the years. I wanted to prove to myself that I could really measure up,” he recalled. A chastened Petraeus asked if he could take a shot at writing a new seminar paper that looked at how the Vietnam War influenced the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations’ calculus on using military force. He threw himself into the project, even volunteering to shuttle Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been national security advisor during the Carter administration, back to Washington following a speaking engagement at Princeton so that he could interview him during the four-hour drive. Ullman gave the paper an A, and Petraeus decided to write his doctoral thesis on Vietnam’s impact on the American military. He crammed in as much research as he could before leaving Princeton, and then wrote his dissertation while teaching at Sosh.
It was an unexpectedly rich time to revisit Vietnam—especially in the intellectual hothouse of the Sosh department. The war was a painful subject that held little interest for most Army officers. Sosh instructors, however, debated it incessantly. In June 1985 the department hosted an academic conference on the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Olvey assigned William Taylor, a fiery infantry officer with a Ph.D. who had served in Vietnam, to help Petraeus expand his Princeton paper and present it at the conference.
When Taylor arrived at West Point in the 1970s there were no courses on Vietnam. At the Army’s Command and General Staff College, counterinsurgency and guerrilla war were almost entirely absent from thecurriculum. To Taylor it seemed as if the Army was trying to blot out the memory of the painful war, and he made it a personal crusade to force it to confront its failures. Taylor wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a professorial air and was so skinny he looked almost frail, but when he started talking about Vietnam his face reddened and his voice thundered. He had spent a long year leading patrols through rice paddies and small hamlets in the Mekong Delta, but those forays had accomplished little. Even when his unit could find the enemy, which wasn’t often, they returned to their base at night, turning the villages they had just fought and bled for back over to the Viet Cong. “Anything you could do wrong, we did it,” he often shouted. Taylor’s anger spread like a virus through the restless minds in Sosh. “Bill would go into a rant and absolutely make your brain itch,” said Asa Clark, another Vietnam vet who arrived at Sosh in the late 1970s. By the time he and Petraeus teamed up on their Vietnam paper, Taylor had left the Army and was working at a policy think tank in Washington.
The conference, held in early summer in a large auditorium on the West Point campus, attracted a diverse crowd of military officers, academics, and Pentagon officials. Though Petraeus had done most of the actual writing, the better-known Taylor gave the public presentation on the paper, which argued somewhat prosaically that Vietnam had made the U.S. military and its political leadership reluctant to use force. Afterward, Petraeus settled into a folding chair in the back of the auditorium for the conference’s main attraction. Major Andy Krepinevich, a Sosh professor with a doctorate from Harvard, had
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