Commanding the regiment was far different from commanding a battalion. Leading three geographically dispersed units, each led by very experienced second-time commanders, drove a different type of leadership from the more autocratic styles I’d seen, and sometimes practiced, earlier in my career. I learned to demand high standards of performance but to be far more flexible in the approach used to attain them. Increasingly, I also sought for objectives to be jointly developed as people worked harder to meet goals they themselves had a hand in setting.
In my last month of command I was notified I’d been selected for promotion to brigadier general. Mike Hall passed me a note written on a page from one of the small notebooks he carried: “To my friend the new Brigadier General—congratulations.” It meant more than all the others.
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In the summer of 1999 I found myself in another fellowship, this time at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. The year was another opportunity for some unfettered thought. I attended meetings, many with fascinating news makers, and had the opportunity to work on a couple of interesting projects. But perhaps the greatest benefit was another period of time to read, think, and discuss issues that were difficult to spend time on in most army jobs.
As at Harvard, Annie interviewed for and got a job at the Council that allowed us to share experiences and friendships. Sam, exhibiting his too-often-exercised adaptability, attended the local public high school in Bay Ridge, along with more than five thousand other students, and we spent many evenings on then-seedy Coney Island, where his team practiced hockey. To give Sam a glimpse of the memorable experience I was having at the Council, I brought him to the Council’s father-son evening. United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan’s face broke into an appreciative grin when I introduced Sam—sporting his most recent look, bright blue hair—as displaying “U.N. blue” in the secretary’s honor.
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For much of the 1990s, America was the world’s sole superpower, buttressed by an ever-expanding economy. Vigorous debates on our foreign policy centered not on what America’s role could be but on what America should choose it to be. When should America intervene—as it did in Somalia and the Balkans but declined to do in Rwanda? What was our role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It felt as though America’s future was America’s to decide.
But not always. On the late morning of August 7, 1998, trucks bulging with explosives tore into the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The twin attacks killed 224 people and wounded 4,500—mostly Kenyans. Shattering glass blinded one hundred fifty people. Commanding the Ranger Regiment at the time, I remember the horror of the attacks, but even more I remember thinking that it was perpetrated by a faceless, amorphous foe that would be difficult to defeat.
The U.S. government immediately suspected Osama bin Laden. A decade after forming Al Qaeda, the forty-one-year-old Saudi financier, whose anti-American tirades had increased in the previous two years, was still unknown to most Americans. But he had been busy.
After Saudi Arabia forced bin Laden to leave in 1991, he had lived in Sudan. During his years there, he ran military training camps, kept apace as a businessman, and through his money was connected with terrorists across Africa and Asia. A guesthouse he ran in Pakistan sheltered the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef.
Under American pressure, Sudan evicted bin Laden in 1996 and he flew to Afghanistan, where the Taliban would take Kabul a few months later and begin their five-year reign. That August, purportedly by fax machine from the Hindu Kush, bin Laden sent a letter to Arab newspapers. His long epistle addressed Muslims worldwide, calling on them to wage jihad against the United States in order to expel its troops that still “occupied” Saudi Arabia, the “cradle” of Islam. Bin Laden, still considered primarily a financier, decried the Saudi government but directed to the United States his now-famous taunt, which sounded as giddy then as it does ominous now. “I’m telling you,” he said, “these young men love death as much as you love life.”