 |
| NATO Supreme Commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark. (AFP) |
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 1999; Page A26
When an armored personnel carrier transporting three U.S. negotiators plunged off the muddy, red clay road over Mount Igman into Sarajevo in August 1995, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, following behind in a Humvee, immediately ran toward the scene.
He was warned against descending the heavily mined mountainside after them. But within minutes, Clark, in 20 pounds of protective armor, was tying a rope around a tree stump, then around his mid-section, and rappeling down toward the vehicle. By the time he got there, the APC was in flames and his colleagues were dead.
It was Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader and now Yugoslav president, who had forced the U.S. officials to drive the dangerous road, dening them permission to fly over the terrain to reach the Bosnian capital. And it is because of Milosevic that, once again, Clark finds himself in the middle of a minefield.
As commander of the seven-day-old air war against Milosevic's forces in Yugoslavia, Clark must navigate through the wishes of 19 NATO nations, a gun-shy White House, Pentagon worries about the limits of air power in a guerrilla-style war and his own Army's reluctance to get involved in a ground war it has not been preparing to fight.
But the modern-style Army general -- first in his West Point class of '66, a Rhodes scholar who was stumping throughout England for the Vietnam War as then-student Bill Clinton was protesting it -- seems perfectly matched to the job. "He's a dashing general, a guy who can be a charmer," says John Wheeler, a former classmate and longtime friend. "But he's a killer. He knows where the jugular is."
An armor officer who headed a reconnaissance platoon in Vietnam, and who was badly machine-gunned there, Clark, 54, has also been surprisingly brave in publicly pushing not-so-subtle course corrections in the double fog -- of war and diplomacy -- that has enveloped NATO's first major offensive in its 50-year history.
Where Vice President Gore and other administration officials say a primary goal of the air war is to stop the humanitarian tragedy in Kosovo, Clark stated boldly: "There is no way air power can stop the paramilitary from carrying out their campaign of 'ethnic cleansing.' "
Where NATO spokesmen say the bombs and missiles being loosed by NATO planes are meant to diminish the Yugoslav Army's capability, Clark said he intends to "destroy these forces."
Where the White House rules out ground troops and talks about phased bombing that will limit risks to pilots, Clark emphasizes the mission in another way: "When men and women put on the uniform of their country, they understand that public service entails risk," he told NBC on Sunday. "You have to subordinate your individual will; you have to subordinate your personal desires."
All these cues and signals, say people who know him, come from a combination of unusual brillance, diplomatic savvy and combat experience.
"He started life with a handful of hand grenades and a rifle," said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug policy director who has known Clark since both were 25. "It colors how he views the deployment of military power."
Clark's views may also be colored, suggest friends and colleagues, by the fact that he is probably the American officer who knows Milosevic best, having headed the military delegation helping negotiate the Dayton Peace Accord, signed in 1996, that ended the Bosnia war.
At one point during the exhausting talks, Clark wanted to give Milosevic the sense of how a proposed eight-mile-wide corridor linking an isolated Muslim town through Serb territory to Sarajevo would look from the air. So, breaking with security, he allowed the Serb leader to use a computerized Pentagon modeling machine to look at the corridor from a variety of angles in simulation. The gesture worked, leading to a breakthrough in the talks.
The road was quickly dubbed "Clark Corridor" or sometimes the "Scotch Road," references to the heavy drinking that went on during the nights of talk at Dayton, according to a book by Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who represented Washington at the negotiations.
With that in his background, Clark has been dispatched to Belgrade on more than one occasion to threaten NATO strikes against Milosevic. And he is the one who has watched the daily violence emerging from intelligence reports documenting the Yugoslav government's crackdown against Albanian separatists waging a secessionist war in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In all these ways, Clark operates in a world that is fundamentally different from President Clinton's public opinion-driven foreign policy arena in Washington. Yet the two share some life-forming experiences as well. Both were born with powerful intellects -- both were Rhodes scholars. Both grew up without fathers. And both hail from Arkansas.
Clark left early from Oxford, where Rhodes scholars study, partly on the advice of Peter Dawkins, who had been a West Point football star and Rhodes scholar and who reminded Clark of the old Army truism that it doesn't matter which war you were in, as long as it was the most recent one.
He served in the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, was shot four times in a firefight and retains a lifelong bitterness that he missed the invasion of Cambodia because he was recuperating in the United States, say friends. After Vietnam, he became a West Point instructor, teaching courses in political philosophy to which McCaffrey, an instructor at the same time, was drawn.
"This is an extremely thoughtful, broad-gauged person," McCaffrey said.
Clark spent much of the 1980s as a battalion commander, than a brigade commander, in armored divisions in Germany. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he commanded the Army's National Training Center in California, where he trained many of today's top combat leaders.
In the early 1990s, he became commander of 1st Cavalry Division, one of the heaviest divisions in the Army, and the one that just happens to have 9,800 troops in Bosnia right now as peacekeepers.
When Clark moved back to Washington as director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was dispatched to the Dayton peace talks. Two years ago he was named as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He is, at the same time, the head of all U.S. forces in the European theater.
Since his appointment, it has become common to hear snickers in the Pentagon, especially among Army officers, about Clark's comfort and elan with the media. Some also complain that he has taken on princely trappings. One colonel in Europe said recently that Clark's entourage now exceeds that of a number of NATO heads of state.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMSxedKrrWihnpbBrXvLqKWgrJWnunCuwKWimqajZMC1u9GinKxnk6Gus7ePbGpqcWljtbW5