MONS, Belgium — One month before the bombing of Yugoslavia began last year, Gen. Wesley K. Clark was playing host to Montenegrin politicians and business leaders at a NATO facility in The Hague, the Netherlands.
In the press conference as part of Clark’s visit with the Montenegrins, a Montenegrin journalist kept peppering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe with questions and comments about Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Clark kept his composure during the exchange with the journalist, but it was obvious the general was getting irritated at the woman’s accusations about his relationship with Milosevic, which began while Clark was the top U.S. military official during the 1995 Dayton Peace negotiations.
“You aren’t going to do anything to him,” she told Clark. “You are his friend.”
She alleged the two were drinking buddies during the Dayton peace negotiations that produced an accord ending the three-andahalf year war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Clark tried to tell her the alliance would hold Milosevic to task if he didn’t agree to the principles hammered out at the Rambouillet, France peace, talks which had just ended.
At the end of the press conference, Clark pulled the journalist aside, where she continued her accusations. This time, with only two journalists remaining in the room, Clark let loose with four-star anger.
He leaned over the table and pointed his finger at the woman. “We’re going to get that SOB,” he exclaimed.
That he hasn’t toppled Milosevic and sent him to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague is probably Clark’s greatest disappointment as he comes to the end of his four-year NATOcommand and 34-year military career.
The Yugoslav president remains in power — despite a 78-day bombing campaign by NATO — and Clark is leaving his post Wednesday to return to Washington. He plans to retire at the end of June.
Although his career took him to Vietnam, Washington, Panama and the Balkans, it wasn’t until he stepped into Ohio in 1995 as the senior U.S. military advisor in the Dayton peace negotiations that Clark’s star shined on the world’s stage.
His work on the Dayton Peace Accord eventually led to Clark becoming the top U.S. and NATO commander in Europe in 1997. As SACEUR, Clark was preoccupied by the Balkans — first Bosnia, then Kosovo — and Milosevic became-his nose-to-nose and knee-to-groin adversary.
“He has seen the issues in the Balkans, in some respects, as something of a battle of good and evil,” said one Western diplomat, who asked not to be named. For Clark, the diplomat added, “there has been this evil figure — Milosevic. He saw it as leading the coalition of democracies against the forces of evil.”
But Clark contends he has no hatred for the Yugoslav president, even though talking about Milosevic gets his ire up. He describes Milosevic with contempt as a “communist bureaucrat who yearns to be a dictator and the puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes, who started four wars with hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries with billions of dollars of damages.”
“It’s not personal,” Clark said of his relationship with Milosevic. “It’s nothing other than the way any general would feel about his adversary. It’s been my role to know my adversary, and I know my adversary.”
Getting things done
It’s his passion, intelligence and straightforwardness that make Clark who he is, according to those who have dealt with him.
“He’s had a passion for the issues in the past two years and during Kosovo,” said Alexander Verschbow, the U.S. ambassador to NATO. “That reflects his temperament.”
Richard Holbrooke, the main U.S. negotiator during the Dayton peace talks, describes Clark’s passion another way.
“Wes is an activist,” said Holbrooke, now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Clark’s critics have accused him of being too much of an activist.
“His aggressive style evidently produces critics and that goes with the territory,” said Holbrooke. “The bottom line is he produces results.”
Clark brought a unique quality of soldier-diplomat, learned in the power corridors of Washington, to the job of SACEUR, colleagues say. Those talents and his aggressiveness brought results during last year’s Yugoslav air war.
Clark had to balance the delicate diplomacy of handling a 19-member alliance that worried about public opinion at home with the needs of his commanders in the field.
NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson said Clark met that challenge and was respected by the allies for it.
“He was an enormous authority-throughout the air campaign,” Robertson said.
As U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Short, the commander of the Air Forces in the war, pushed for a knockout punch early in the air campaign, Clark was restricted by allies who wanted to select what targets NATO planes would hit. Clark took a gradual approach to bombing in the early part of the war. But the incremental way of bombing Yugoslavia wasn’t solely the NATO ambassadors’ fault, the western diplomat said.
“It was built into the plan because you needed to take out the air defenses first,” the diplomat said. Clark then pushed to go to downtown Belgrade and the ambassadors began to have faith in him.
“There was a lot of shakiness from different capitals as this thing wore on,” the diplomat said. The more that Clark appeared before the North Atlantic Council, the ambassadors became more confident.
“It was his steely determination and optimism that we would prevail [that built the confidence.]”
Clark said this was only part of the most difficult thing he had to do during the war.
“The hardest thing was to balance off the need to escalate and broaden the air campaign with the needs to protect innocent civilians on the ground,” Clark said. “There were very few nights that I didn’t worry about who was going to be hurt on the ground — Serb or Albanian.”
Former NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana affirms Clark felt the pain of the victims and his pilots when alliance planes didn’t hit their intended targets and killed civilians.
“He was the commander, and he had sentiments and he suffered,” said Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy and defense minister. “He knew what his responsibility was, but he was able to continue with the job.”
Soldiers go through their careers learning how to fight a war. Clark was trained at every level of fighting. In December, he said wars are won at the platoon level and only generals can lose a war.
Conducting a war for Clark was all he had trained for, but he said it was anything but fun.
“It was long and agonizing. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone,” he said.
With the end of the war came the race with the Russians to the airport near Pristina, Kosovo. Clark ordered airborne troops to take the airfield, but his order was not carried out by his field commander, British Lt. Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, who became the first commander of the Kosovo peacekeeping force.
Clark was painted as a warmonger after it was reported that Jackson refused the order by telling Clark he wasn’t going to start World War III.
“He was upset by how things unfolded,” the western diplomat said. “He was sometimes portrayed as the guy who was impulsive and irrational. He was following the guidance of Secretary-General Solana to get the airborne forces on the airfield. He was following orders and had the backing of Washington.”
No role in Waco
Before his involvement with the Balkans, Clark commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in Fort Hood, Texas. In 1993, then-Maj. Gen. Clark’s troops had a brush with international attention. Though it’s not been widely reported, his troops had a small part in the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
According to an Oct. 1999 report in The Dallas Morning News, 1st Cavalry Division crews were sent to maintain Bradley fighting vehicles and armored M-60combat engineering vehicles from Fort Hood on loan to the FBI during the siege. After a 51-day siege, government agents stormed the compound and in the ensuring fire, nearly 80 religious followers of David Koresh perished.
Clark said last week he had no role in the siege. Only the post commander at Fort Hood was ordered to provide assistance to civil law enforcement authorities.
“Some vehicles were levied from the division,” Clark said. “The vehicles were delivered out there and driven by the experts out there. We taught them how to drive them. They were used, but not by us.”
One of Clark’s subordinates met with then-Texas governor Anne Richards to advise her on military equipment and tactics
“My assistant division commander was an expert on special operations and the [III] Corps commander asked him to go down there to meet with Gov. Richards,” Clark said.
From West Point to Nam
He learned to be a good soldier as a cadet at West Point and he was recognized as a rising star, even in the mid-1960s, according to Bill Taylor, Clark’s debate coach at West Point.
“He was one of those special young men you knew would go somewhere,” said Taylor, who retired as a Army colonel 20 years ago and now is the director of Political and Military Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “He was a prophetic gentleman with brain power. I have tracked him throughout his career — from Vietnam until now.”
It was in Vietnam that Clark learned about war.
In 1970, 1st Lt. Clark was leading a reconnaissance patrol searching for North Vietnamese soldiers near Long Thanh. Suddenly, he heard what he thought were hornets buzzing around his head.
Bullets hit him in the hand and leg. He crawled away to direct the fight. He rallied his men in an assault on the enemy and was shot two more times. He was awarded a Silver Star for Valor and a Purple Heart.
“I was shot four times, and I got only one Purple Heart,” Clark said while joking with journalists last year in his office. “If I would have been shot four different times I would have got four Purple Hearts.”
The general still carries the nasty scars from that day.
“Everything the guy ever did, he did just right,” Taylor added. “There was always some jealousy in the Army over the superstars.”
Although Clark’s critics at every level have said he is a micromanager, Taylor said that’s just jealousy in the Army.
“Wes has commanded just about everything there is in the Army to command,” Taylor said.
Now that Clark’s military career is coming to an end, and he will vacate Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s desk at SHAPE headquarters, Clark said his fondest memories of his military career weren’t commanding the world’s largest military alliance or negotiating peace on a world stage. His top memories? Commanding a tank company at Fort Knox, Tenn., while recovering from his wounds in 1970. The unit’s job was to prepare tanks for deployment to the field.
“I remember with a tremendous amount of affection the men who served in that company,” said Clark. “They all had been wounded in Vietnam. We worked seven days straight that summer. It was a stressful environment, but a great environment.”
“It was a conscript force,” he said. “They were all gimped up, and had every reason to be unhappy, but they loved their country and did their duty to the fullest.”
Clark’s career at a glance:
Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commanderin-chief, United States European Command, July 1997 to May 2000.
Commander-in-chief, United States Southern Command, Panama, June 1996 to July 1997.
Director, Strategic Plans and Policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 1994 to June 1996.
Commander, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas, August 1992 to April 1994.
Deputy chief of staff for Concepts, Doctrine and Developments, U.S . ArmyTraining and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Va., October 1991 to August 1992.
Commander, National Training Center, Fort Irwin, Calif., October 1989 toOctober 1991.
Commander, 3rd Brigade,-4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo., April 1986 to March 1988.
Commander Operations Group at National Training Center, Fort Irwin, Calif., August 1984 to January 1986.
Chief of the Army’s Study Group, Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Washington, D.C., October 1983 to July 1984.
Chief, Plans Integration Division, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., July toSeptember 1983.
Commander, 1st Battalion,-77th Armor, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo., February 1980 to June 1982.
White House Fellow in 1975 to 1976.
Master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, August 1966 to August 1968.
1966 graduate of the United-States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
