Battle Ready

THE POINT OF THE SPEAR

Thoughout his convalescence, Zinni remained unaware that the Vietnam War had ended for him when he was evacuated from the Que Son Mountains.

By late December 1970, he had recovered enough to be transferred to Camp Hauge on Okinawa, where every Marine posted in the Western Pacific (including Vietnam) had to go for processing. When he arrived, Zinni expected a short stay, swiftly followed by return to duty to his unit in Vietnam. But new regulations, reflecting the growing reduction in U.S. forces, ended that hope: Since he’d been wounded and evacuated for more than thirty days, he was not allowed to return to combat. Neither could he go back to the States, since he had convinced the doctors, despite their strong concerns, to release him to full duty. Nor, finally, could he be assigned to an infantry unit based in Okinawa, such as the 3rd Marine Division, recently returned from Vietnam, since they were potentially redeployable to Vietnam, and Zinni could not be deployed there, by virtue of the rule previously stated. He had learned firsthand about catch-22s.

Zinni spent the remaining eight months of his yearlong Vietnam tour in the 3rd Force Service Regiment (3rd FSR), a logistics unit based at Camp Foster, Okinawa.

He expected to be bored. He was wrong.

Camp Foster was not boring. In fact, if his wish had been for combat, then his wish was granted. Camp Foster proved to be not all that different from a “real” combat zone… in many ways tougher than Vietnam.

After a few days of administrative processing, he set out to report in to 3rd FSR. His total possessions included a Red Cross-donated shaving kit and civilian clothes purchased out of his meager pay advance from the tiny post exchange at Camp Hauge.

Late one night, he walked out of the main gate and hailed an Okinawan taxicab to drive him to Camp Foster to report in. As the little car headed up the island road, his mood could not have been darker, thinking about his Marines in Vietnam and his family back in the States. He had managed to miss going back to either of them.

Okinawa— barely sixty-six miles long and perhaps nineteen miles at its widest — runs roughly north to south. In the north, the country is rugged, much of it jungle. The more populated areas are in the south. Its people are of mixed race — partly Chinese, partly South Pacific islander, and partly Japanese — with a complicated history. Before World War Two, the island had been occupied by Japan, but before that it had had an even longer history of independence. Okinawans have never considered themselves Japanese, and the Japanese in turn have always treated them like a poor sister. Most wanted a return to independence.

In those days, the island was still U.S.-occupied territory, governed by an Army three-star general — a situation much resented by Okinawans. (When the occupation ended, the U.S. returned Okinawa to Japan.) It was also crawling with U.S. military facilities — another cause of friction. Infantry units were located in the more remote areas in the north. Farther south were the base- and logistics-type units. Among these was Camp Foster, located in the southern third of the island near Kadena (the U.S. Air Force base) and the major city of Koza, one of the island’s two largest cities. The other, Naha, is the capital.

By 1970, this once-tranquil and beautiful island had become one large camp town for the American military. The devastation of World War Two had been followed by a huge influx of American military forces, and that in turn had been followed by seedy commercial strips, complete with bars, girly clubs, and pawnshops set up to service the troops. Women, booze, and drugs were readily available outside the gates.

As the cab entered Koza, Zinni noticed flames ahead; sirens were screaming. By the time they’d reached the main road in the city center, the driver had grown visibly anxious. For very good reason. A large, angry, chanting mob was roaming up ahead, many wearing red, communist headbands. Overturned cars were ablaze.

Some rioters, spotting the cab and the American inside, started running toward it. Without waiting for instructions, the driver threw the car in reverse, turned down a side street, and then raced through a maze of back-streets, his passenger bouncing around in the seat behind him. The driver was explaining all the while in broken English that the rioters were Okinawan communists, demonstrating against the occupation. Though he kept trying to reassure Zinni that they’d be okay, the whole city was in turmoil. They seemed to run into angry crowds at every turn, requiring yet another close-call getaway.

At last, with visible relief, the driver had them on the street leading to Camp Foster’s main gate.

His relief quickly evaporated. Massive numbers of Okinawans with red headbands and long bamboo poles were charging a line of Marine guards in riot control gear, using the poles like jousting lances to knock over the guards. The taxi again raced away, as the driver sought a safe way into the camp.

They eventually discovered a gate that wasn’t under attack, and the cab finally pulled up to its destination. Zinni rewarded his driver with a generous tip in gratitude for his courage and driving skills.

“Don’t judge all Okinawans by what you’ve seen,” the driver said in his broken English as he pulled away.[24]

Zinni checked in the next day. Since his evacuation had left him nothing from his last command, he had to get new uniforms and set up new records. Going about this business, he picked up interesting and disturbing information about his new assignment:

Though the previous night’s riot had been exceptionally bad, it was not uncommon. The race and drug crisis then coming to a head back in the States had reached Okinawa. Racial tensions were high. The threat of serious, large-scale violence was real. Between the communist demonstrations outside and the frequent race riots inside, the nights at Camp Foster tended to be exciting.

The race problems extended into the city. One Koza district, called “the Bush,” was dominated by the “Bushmasters” and the “Mau Maus,” gangs of black military men wearing distinctive gang garb. No white military man dared enter.

Inside the base, the gangs, in their gang uniforms, had taken to demonstrations — against real or perceived injustice, to let out rage, or sometimes just for the hell of it. Racially motivated incidents occurred daily. Some were minor, just knuckle-rapping displays and jive talk, but others were serious — like knifings. There was a white backlash as well — a Ku Klux Klan cell and cross burnings. And the racial divide was not simply black versus white. The Hispanics also had complaints, as did other minorities in the ranks.

Among the demonstrators were groups that were simply violent: gangsters and — literally — murderers. Other groups (largely out of the inner cities) felt oppressed, objecting not just to the Marine Corps but to society in general and its long-standing treatment of African Americans. Others saw everything white as an enemy, and still others had specific, military gripes of all shapes and sizes. One big one: Though the Corps was taking in ever-increasing numbers of young black officers, the senior officer ranks were still lily-white. The minority troops had reason to resent this.

Meanwhile, the Camp Foster guard force was unable to cope with the increasingly bloody racial incidents. Not only did other 3rd FSR units have to provide untrained, and therefore also ineffective, augmentation to reinforce it, but the 3rd Marine Division, located in camps at the northern end of the island, had to keep rifle companies on alert as reaction forces.

As he wandered around on his check-in rounds, Zinni noticed units practicing riot control formations and use of special riot control equipment. He knew that racial tensions were high throughout the military, made worse by growing opposition to the war and feelings of intergenerational betrayal; he was also aware of violent incidents in Vietnam and back home; and he’d himself handled a small riot as the officer of the day on duty in his battalion back at Camp Lejeune a few years earlier; but he’d never actually experienced significant racial problems in the units he’d commanded.

“This is a camp under siege,” he told himself. “We’re sitting on a powder keg.”

As the weeks passed, and as he came to personally face the problems of this command, Zinni grew to appreciate the depth of the issues he was then encountering for the first time.

The emerging Vietnam War legacy was evident.

During Vietnam, the need for bodies had been so great that recruiters were sending people into the military who never should have been there. The draft was in place (even the Marine Corps accepted draftees); the initial training was reduced; and, later, promotions came too fast — ignoring the normal leadership development. People were suddenly wearing grades they were too inexperienced to wear; they did not have the education and training needed to perform complex jobs. Many sergeants weren’t real sergeants; and many lieutenants, captains, and even higher should not have held those ranks.

There were also misguided attempts to turn the military into a big Head Start program for dropouts and other low achievers. Chief among these was Project 100,000—a Robert McNamara brainchild — which dumped a hundred thousand young failures into the military in hopes this would lead to a better society. Things didn’t work out that way. Project 100,000 simply unloaded the problems of society on the military. As if that weren’t bad enough, judges were using the military as an alternative to jails or rehabilitation.

The result of all this: The military were forced to accept below-standard troops, who were incapable of coping with the demands of service.

On top of all that, the growing drug culture had impacted heavily on the military. At Camp Foster — and at every other military facility — the number of troops caught, treated, and discharged for drug use was on the rise. This turned out to be Zinni’s first experience with it on a large scale. Like other leaders of his generation, drug use was alien to him. He was scrambling to understand it. “What makes so many people want to do this to themselves?” he would ask himself time and again. “Doesn’t beer do the job?”

Back home, wearing a uniform was not popular. Nobody was coming home a war hero; there weren’t a lot of ticker-tape parades. It was even hard to find Americans who’d actually chosen to fight in Vietnam. Most who served there had been forced to go.

After working through the administrative requirements and meeting the commanders, Zinni was assigned to command the Headquarters and Service Company of the regiment’s supply battalion — his fourth company command. Since command of a company was what being a Marine captain was all about, he felt grateful for that at least.

The H & S Company was a collection of troops with a variety of occupational specialties[25] and technical skills, who worked in numerous units throughout the battalion. The computer data processors, the cooks, the motor pool, the maintenance and housekeeping people, and so on were all placed in the H & S Company for administrative and command structure and for military training and proficiency (since they were Marines, they were still expected to be able to shoot), but otherwise they’d all go off every day to their own various offices or workplaces.

It was clear to Zinni that this was going to be a difficult company to command and in which to instill a sense of unit cohesion. Though it was a challenge he was willing to take on, his attitude was improved by some good advice from senior officers. “This is a difficult assignment for an eager young infantry officer,” they told him, “but like every other Marine, these men respond to good leadership. It’s important for you to provide that without showing how dissatisfied you are to be in a unit outside your specialty. And,” they added, “the experience will give you a unique opportunity to learn something about the various logistics functions the unit performs. It won’t hurt you at all later to know something about that.”

Zinni did his best to take this advice, and to put aside his disappointment and immerse himself in the job.

Unlike an infantry company, where unit cohesion and unit pride tend to come fairly naturally, the H & S Company was a grab bag. Nobody felt like he belonged in it. The data processors thought of themselves as data processors, the motor pool guys went off to the motor pool, the cooks went off to the mess hall, and none of them thought of the company, H & S, as anything but an administrative element.

Coming from an infantry unit, however, Zinni wanted to try to build unit cohesion and unit pride. He knew this was going to be hard. Not only did everybody go off to their very different jobs every day, but there was a lot of friction between the company and the workplace.

For example: Every Marine has to fulfill specific military skill requirements. They’ve got to shoot their rifle. They’ve got to be in good physical condition. They’ve got to be capable of actually fighting. Zinni, a captain, was responsible for making sure they were proficient in such things — which was all well and good until the head of the data processing center, a lieutenant colonel, found that such training interfered with his guys’ data processing job.

Zinni did his best to minimize this friction and work out some kind of mutual understanding; but there was really no way to eliminate it totally. There was only so much time in a week. It was a zero-sum game.

In order to build unit cohesion and pride, he engaged with his guys as much as he could, to let them know who he was and to find out what made them tick. He organized more group events with the company — cookouts and sports and the like. He did what he could to look after their welfare, showing that there was command interest and proving that he was not just the administrative guy in charge but their company commander.

He was blessed in his support team — a feisty, hard-charging first sergeant who’d come out of Vietnam; an excellent gunnery sergeant who came from the Physical Fitness Academy and had been a drill instructor and on the Marine Corps shooting team; and a fine executive officer, a young lieutenant.

Over the weeks and months Zinni had the company, the unit began to come together in a satisfying way.

There were still worries. He wasn’t so naive as to believe that none of his troops belonged to gangs or took part in demonstrations or riots. Some troops were bad actors, and some had serious drug problems. By and large, however, they were mostly just regular Marines looking for leadership and direction and somebody to care about them; and everybody tried to work with that. Eventually, everybody’s hard work began to enhance the morale, the discipline, and the sense of a unit identity within the company.

In the spring of 1971, the rising racial tensions exploded. All during the winter, confrontations had increased; and the guard unit was increasingly incapable of handling them. A major eruption was inevitable.

Zinni was in his room at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ) after a hard day when a call came: A riot had broken out near his company area. He rushed back to his company. On the way, he passed the scene of the riot. The guard was clashing with blacks wearing gang-logo jackets. It was a mess.

As soon as he reached the company quarters, he ordered the doors secured and a personnel head count. By good luck, few of his troops were away. After those on liberty returned, he stopped all further liberty for the evening. He didn’t want any of his guys anywhere near the riot. He knew some might join the confrontation; but he also did not want to add curious bystanders to the mess.

It was a tense night, made more tense as the confrontation grew worse and the camp guards lost control. Some of their own minority troops joined the rioters, or just walked away.

Inside the barracks, Zinni and his guys talked about nothing else, and listened as events got out of hand — the shouts and the physical clashes — all confirmed by phone reports. Rioters tried to enter the barracks and coax some of Zinni’s Marines to join them. They got sent away.

In the end, military police units and reaction forces had to be called in to bring back order.

The next morning revealed a scene of destruction and a sick bay full of injured people.

The following night at the officers’ club bar, some of the younger officers were talking about the riot, when Zinni — his brain lubricated by a few beers — made the mistake of offering an opinion about the breakdown of the guard. “I can build a guard unit that can handle the problems we’ve got here,” he boasted.

His remarks got back to the regimental commander, and he was ordered to report to him.

A most embarrassed young captain stood before the colonel’s desk the next morning. “So,” the colonel said, gazing up at him, “I heard you think you can get the guard to handle the situation.”

“I did say that, sir,” Zinni admitted.

As he started to make his apologies, the colonel interrupted: “Good, you’re now the new guard company commander.”

“Oh, shit,” Zinni told himself, cursing himself for mouthing off at the club.

“You’ve got a free rein,” the colonel continued. “You can set up the guard any way you want. Take a day to decide what you want and get back to me with what you propose.”

That got Zinni’s attention. That just might make an impossible job possible.

He spent the rest of the day thinking through what might work.

The next day he laid out his request: He wanted a hundred-man guard force — all racially mixed volunteers. Each would be over six feet tall and weigh more than two hundred pounds (Zinni would be the shorter, lighter exception); and he wanted permission to interview anyone in the command he felt would make a good guard member.

That particular number was not chosen for any special reason. Zinni wanted a larger guard force than currently existed, and one that could handle any conceivable incident without having to be augmented by poorly trained troops, but he also had practicalities that had to be dealt with, such as the number of watches, posts, and hours he had to cover.

The colonel had doubts that Zinni could get a hundred volunteers, much less a hundred who were racially mixed; and so did Zinni, but he wanted to try. “Go ahead,” the colonel told him. “See what you can do.”

The response proved overwhelming — with an especially gratifying number of African American, Hispanic, and other minority volunteers. Nobody thought that so many guys would be so fed up with the bad situation. Within two days Zinni easily had his hundred men, all good Marines.

Among those he convinced to come on board as one of his two guard chiefs was the company gunnery sergeant from H & S Company, Gunnery Sergeant Bobby Jackson, an African American and a model Marine. Gunny Jackson had spent tours of duty as a drill instructor, competitive shooter, and instructor at the Marine Corps’s Physical Fitness Academy, and would go on to achieve the grade of sergeant major. Zinni knew his outstanding leadership abilities firsthand, and felt an African American enlisted leader was critical for the guard.

For the other guard chief, he recruited Gunnery Sergeant Dick DeCosta, a big, 250-pound Marine who had been made a temporary officer during the Vietnam War but had recently reverted to his enlisted grade as the war wound down. DeCosta had spent most of his career in the Orient, had married a Chinese woman, and was an expert in Oriental martial arts. He was a third-degree black belt in judo and the Marine Corps heavyweight judo champion.[26]

For his two lieutenants, he chose an impressively bright and dynamic black officer and a Jewish American from New York City.

Zinni’s plan was not to create just a reaction force, but to make the guard a very visible model for unit cohesion and spirit. He wanted everyoneto see that a diverse team could work together and play together. But he also wanted all to see that they were capable of knocking heads if they had to. He wanted to show everyone the new guard’s capabilities — psyops aimed at troublemakers:

The new guard did their physical training (PT) very visibly at times when the entire camp would see them, making sure nobody lost sight of the fact that these were big, tough guys who lifted serious weights and took martial arts training. They always made their PT runs through the barracks areas at double time, chanting and making a lot of noise. They worked out their riot control formations on the camp’s big parade deck in an area that everybody could see. They’d set up barrels to stand in for rioters; then bring out the water cannon truck and hose down the barrels. Zinni would leave the barrels where they’d fallen, and afterward people would go up and stare at it. He wanted them to think: “This could be me.” And that’s what they thought.

He would also bring individual units in for “riot control training.” The guard would take a unit — say, the supply company — and explain to them that they might be called in to augment the guard and had to go through training classes to show what the guard did to rioters and how they did it.

Zinni had no real intent to use them; he wanted to let them know what the guard could do to anybody who joined a riot.

Though all this psyops worked as intended, Zinni knew that wouldn’t keep his guard from being tested.

The first weeks of the new guard were filled with demonstrations and confrontations, requiring a response by the entire guard roughly every third day. Sometimes a demonstration turned violent. During one incident, a guard trooper was stabbed; many others suffered cuts and bruises. None of these setbacks, however, prevented the guard from containing, controlling, and ending every incident quickly.

Predictably, the minority members of the guard received threats from the gangs. They didn’t waiver, even though they sometimes actually sympathized with some of the demonstrators’ complaints.

When one obviously intelligent black NCO volunteered for the guard, Zinni asked him why.

“Look,” he said, “somebody’s going to have to enforce discipline and maybe even crack their heads. That’s got to happen. What they’re doing is wrong. Still,” he continued, “even though they’re going about it the wrong way, I sympathize with a lot of their issues. I see their point. They’re my brothers, but they’re going to be dealt with. And I would like to be on the other end to ensure it isn’t excessive and that it’s handled the right way, and to try to be a force for reason.”

“You’re exactly the kind of guy I want,” Zinni told him.

Integrating the guard did not come naturally; it took a lot of work. In those days, it was the natural thing for young men coming into the Marine Corps to separate by race. After Zinni integrated the guard, the threats continued, and not just to minority members. It was partly for purposes of security and partly to show that this was the right way to go that Zinni’s guard had their own after-hours bars and liberty spots, the only integrated group on Okinawa hanging together on liberty. This turned a lot of heads, including some native ones. Several Okinawans commented that these were the only places where they saw whites and blacks and Hispanics and Samoans mixing together and socializing as friends.

Zinni’s policy from the start was, in his words:

To respond to every incident with one of every kind. That is, I had the guard organized so that no matter what happened, we would get a black Marine, a white Marine, an Hispanic Marine, and a Samoan Marine — a rainbow detail — going out to handle it.

When we failed to do that, we always regretted it:

One day, we had an incident at the sick bay. The Navy doctors called to say that a Marine in there was going berserk, rampaging around, breaking things, and making wild threats. It turned out that the kid who had lost it had mental problems and had gone through some really bad times. It also turned out that he was black.

On that particular day, my duty sergeant sent four white Marines out to handle the problem.

When the four guards got to the sick bay, they found the crazy Marine in a recreation area, with a pool table and some soda machines, brandishing a pool cue and threatening to beat everybody up.

The four Marines did what they would normally do to take care of him. They grabbed him, cuffed him, and wrestled him down — with him kicking and fighting all the while. Then they manhandled him out to their jeep in order to take him to a holding cell until they could get him to a hospital for treatment.

As it happened, it was noontime — chow break — so everybody was coming out of the supply areas and warehouses. When the black Marines saw the four white Marines roughing up this guy, throwing him into the jeep, and bringing him back to the guard offices, it sparked a riot.

When I came back to the guard offices after my own lunch, I found a large number of black Marines surrounding the place. I was instantly up to my neck trying to figure out what had happened and calm it down.

The black Marines had a leader — a lance corporal and a hard worker they called “Superman,” because he was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy who looked like Hercules came up and confronted me, all fired up that we had been beating up on one of the brothers. (And of course I was still in the dark about what was going on.)

He and I talked it over for a while, and I was starting to think I could maybe calm this thing down when in walked Gunny DeCosta, who instantly decided he didn’t like the way this guy was talking. He launched into him and had him blasted in short order. This shocked everybody and brought the situation under control. We learned from incidents like these how to handle things firmly and how to quickly defuse tense situations.

Zinni studied and used riot control techniques the way he had previously studied combat. Inspired by Gunny DeCosta, he and his guards trained in kendo, stick fighting (using their batons), and other martial arts with the riot police from the city of Naha, at their dojo.

Zinni encouraged innovation and experimentation in the unit, and his guards developed creative new ways to handle rioters. One big problem: How do you identify the bad guys after a riot? When a riot is raging, the idea is to shut it down. When that starts to happen, the rioters melt away, and then the next day they show up at their jobs looking like everybody else.

The eventual solution was to fill a fuel bladder on a truck with a solution containing the indelible blue dye that’s stamped on meats (the medical supply guys provided it). During a riot, the guard would hose down everybody there with this solution. The next day they’d check the barracks and pick up anybody who was purple.

As weeks passed, other lessons were learned.

For starters, there were too many weak commanders:

Though no units at Camp Foster escaped its problems, Zinni learned to predict where he’d find the biggest problems by identifying the weakest commanders. Not surprisingly, the worst incidents involved troops from units with the weakest leadership… a failure obviously stemming from the personnel imbalances resulting from the war, but amplified when officers in the more technical MOSs were suddenly confronted with major leadership crises they just weren’t equipped to handle.

Another, far more important lesson: The value of openly thrashing out the issues with the troops.

In those days, the Marine Corps was only just starting to require human relations training — trying to get the message across that just because a person’s skin was different, or he wore his clothes differently, or liked different music, he was not radically different from you or anybody else. You still shared the same basic values. The Corps tried to teach all Marines to understand and respect these differences, even as they had them looking inside for prejudices they didn’t realize they had… the unconscious automatic stereotyping with which they’d grown up.

This training got off to a rocky — and sometimes hokey — start (for instance, they tried Soul Food Nights at the mess hall, with fried chicken, hominy grits, and chitterlings… everybody thought these were a joke) and was more often than not poorly conducted; yet it did encourage dialogue and frank discussion of problems. When these discussions were well led and troops were able to talk constructively about their concerns, they paid dividends that overcame the poor initial construct of the program.

For all of its rocky beginnings, the Corps’ human relationship training had the right idea; the organization was doing its best to get at the real roots of its troubles; and it didn’t give up. The Marine Corps kept at the effort for as long as it took to make it work.

It took many years.

Needless to say, there was a lot of resistance to this process. The old tough Marines didn’t like it: “This is all touchy-feely shit we don’t need,” they said. “Forget all that race crap. There’s no black or white Marines; they’re all green. Every Marine’s green. Just put Marine discipline in the unit, that’ll solve any problems we got.” Fortunately, the leadership of the Corps combined a strict adherence and maintenance of its standards with a more open means for communications.

As a result, the quality of the training picked up, and it came to be more and more accepted. Not always, but every once in a while, troops would really let loose, air out what really bothered them, and begin to connect.

Eventually, as the good changes became the norm, the need for the training went away. For many, it got to be seen as a pain in the butt.

That was not a sign of failure but of success.

The other side to the process involved weeding out real troublemakers — the thugs, the radicalized, the violent. The best place for such people was the brig, followed by an aircraft back to the states and jail. But the Corps also found ways to get rid of lesser troublemakers without having to go through a long legal process, by issuing what were called “expeditious discharges.” That is, people were given the opportunity to choose to leave with general discharges, and so avoid legal procedures and a worse discharge. It was easier for everybody.

Throughout the 1970s, as the size of the post-Vietnam Corps came down, the Corps was increasingly successful at weeding out those who’d come in under Project 100,000 and others who didn’t fit or had chronic qualification problems.

Meanwhile, a few weeks of firm and effective guard work stopped riots and demonstrations at Camp Foster, and Zinni’s guard became very popular. Many in the command now wanted to join it. It was the elite unit, the best place to be at the camp.

Zinni’s eight months in 3rd FSR, he later realized, were the most difficult of his Marine career. He’d never imagined he’d face Marine-on-Marine confrontations; at Camp Foster, he had to deal with them almost daily… not to mention levels of violence that made a logistics base feel like a combat tour. These were hard realities for an eager and dedicated young Marine to accept. On the other hand, he was able to leave Camp Foster with some confidence. He had encountered the worst of the problems facing the Corps, and the rest of the military, and knew that they could be handled.

He left 3rd FSR in August 1971 and one month later reported in to the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He was back in his original command.

BACK TO THE INFANTRY

When Zinni checked in to the 2nd Marine Division, he fought off the personnel officer’s kindly attempt to give him a break after his two tough Vietnam tours and life-threatening wounds. He didn’t want an undemanding staff job; he wanted to go to a rifle company, where the action was — the heart of the Marine Corps. You don’t get more central to Marine identity.

“Okay, then, you got it,” the personnel officer told him, “if that’s what you want.” And he sent Zinni down to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. There the battalion commander offered him command of Company D, which was in cadre status[27] at that time. It was to be remanned in the coming weeks.

Zinni was delighted. He was to get command of his sixth company; and it was a rifle company.

A Marine rifle company is usually made up of three infantry platoons — called “rifle platoons”—and a weapons platoon, which has the company’s crew-served weapons: in those days, 60-millimeter mortars, M-60 machine guns, and perhaps an antitank capability. The number of men in a company varied based on a number of organizational changes at that time and the fluctuations in manning levels. Zinni found himself with a 120-man company, a far cry from the 250 he had in Vietnam, and a sign of the times.

He now had an opportunity to gain further command experience with a rifle company as well as to put into practice the many new training ideas that had come out of his time in Vietnam and his constant reading in matters military, from technical manuals to history and biography. Like most company commanders, he wanted to produce the best, most tactically proficient company in the division, but he also enjoyed actually teaching the skills he’d come by through trial and error, study, and observation.

Training a company takes many forms: There’s weapons and tactics, obviously, but also more specialized training for cold weather,[28] desert, or mountain operations; for working with tanks and armor; for amphibious operations (especially before a deployment). Some kinds of training were standardized, some were unique to whatever specialized mission or deployment was on the schedule.

Zinni’s company did it all — below-zero training in sixty inches of snow in upstate New York, training for jungle operations in Panama, and for amphibious operations in the Caribbean. The latter was Zinni’s first serious experience with the Marine Corps’ bread-and-butter mission, which was also the most complex of all military operations: the transfer of elements from a ship onto some form of transport (surface or air), and then moving them in a closely timed and synchronized way to a landing under fire on a hostile beach, followed by a continued buildup ashore. The entire process — from coming out of the ships through what’s called “the ship-to-shore movement” and into combat operations — must be accomplished in one smooth, continuous flow. Using air strikes and naval gunfire to support the units going ashore, passing control of the operation ashore from the ships, getting in the logistics and supplies, and matching it all up is an undertaking of tremendous complexity, requiring equally complex planning (landing sequence tables, assault schedules, helicopter deployment schedules), very close coordination, and a great degree of communication… while facing an enemy doing its best to disrupt and destroy it all.

As his career developed, Zinni made many sea deployments and amphibious ops — missions he came to love. He enjoyed life at sea, and the traditional image of the Marine Corps storming ashore and rushing up the beaches always excited him. In time, he became fascinated by these operations because of their enormous complexity — putting all the myriad pieces together in a synchronous yet dynamic way. The mission grew to be one of his passions. Later, he taught courses in amphibious ops at Marine Corps schools; and in Somalia, he was to command a force in an actual amphibious operation — the largest since the Inchon Landing during the Korean War.

Zinni commanded Company D for a little over a year, by which time he was sure they could handle any combat mission that came their way — an opinion he would soon have to prove when D Company took the division-directed company tactical test.

The test contained a series of tough challenges: The company might, for example, be asked to make an amphibious landing and then go into an armor-mechanized attack, or a night heliborne assault. The idea was to stretch the commander’s capabilities by whipping a number of missions on him and putting him under a lot of stress. He got no sleep, he had to keep moving; and all the while, the judges were looking at his ability to give orders and to successfully execute his tasks. At the same time, the judges were examining his troops’ performance, endurance, and tactical skills, and the NCOs and officers and their tactical skills.

So far, every company in the division had failed it.

Zinni and his company passed.

It was a big moment for Zinni, and (justifiably) swelled his ego. Soon came letters of congratulations and glowing calls from the regimental and the division commanders. Since the company was also excelling in its discipline statistics, reenlistment rates, and other nonoperational measures, there were further occasions for pride. Although Zinni reveled in his success, it came with a price.

He loved being a company commander; he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do except possibly to get back to the advisory unit in Vietnam.

The successes of his company ended that bliss.

Tony Zinni continues:

Not long before the end of one of our Caribbean deployments, my battalion commander called me to his office at our camp on Vieques Island (near Puerto Rico) and handed me a message from the division commander, Major General Fred Haynes. Haynes was asking for nominees from each battalion to be his aide-de-camp. The last line of the message directed that our battalion’s nominee be me.

“Do you know anything about this?” my battalion commanding officer asked. “Why are we the only battalion with a directed nomination?”

“I’m as much in the dark about this as you are, sir,” I told him. “I definitely do not want the job.” It was a staff job, and I never wanted staff jobs.

“Okay, then. I’ll tell him that,” the CO said, and sent a message back to the commanding general stating that I declined the nomination.

I forgot all about this thing and went back to the field with my company.

Two weeks later, as our ship docked at Morehead City, North Carolina, to off-load our battalion landing team, I was greeted by an officer from the division staff who told me I was to immediately get in the staff car waiting at the bottom of the brow and proceed to the division commander’s office to report to General Haynes.

“I can’t do that,” I said to him. “I have to get my company back to Camp Lejeune and settled back into our barracks.”

“That’s an order,” he laughed.

So I let my battalion commander know where I was headed, took off for the division headquarters, and nervously entered the general’s office. Haynes was a tall, distinguished-looking Texan, an Iwo Jima veteran, who was considered one of the most brilliant men in the Marine Corps. At his invitation, I took a seat.

After asking me about the deployment and how things were going, he explained what he was looking for in the job. “I want my senior aide to be my ‘operational aide,’ ” he explained. “I’ll have the junior aide, a lieutenant, to handle all the social requirements, the proper uniforms, and all that kind of business. For my ‘operational aide’ I want an adviser, somebody who’s been in the pits whom I can trust. I want a guy that knows what the hell goes on in a division, knows about training and operations, and who’s been in combat. I want someone who the junior officers and NCOs of the division will honestly talk to, who’ll be my point of contact with them, and who can tell me what they’re thinking and their perspective on what we need to improve.

“When we go out in the field and see what’s out there, I want a guy savvy enough to say, ‘What you’re seeing there, General, is not good,’ because he knows it’s not… I’m removed from that. That’s years ago, in my past. Now I get screened and filtered. If I talk to colonels and other generals, I get good information, but it doesn’t come from the ranks. I want my operational aide to give me that sense.

“I’ve already interviewed all the nominees,” he went on, “but waited to make my decision until you returned and I could interview you.” He then read to me the list of other nominees.

“Sir, I know most of them, and you couldn’t pick a finer group of captains. I’m sure you’d be satisfied with one of those guys.”

Then he looked at me. “You know, Captain, the message from your CO is very interesting. It seems that you’re the only nominee who does not want the job.”

“I don’t feel that I’m really aide material,” I told him; and I meant it. You always think of an aide as a tall, bullet-headed, poster Marine. And here I was, a short, squat Italian guy, rough around the edges, and he’s a better than six-foot-tall Texan — a golf-playing gentleman. (A little later, when I told him I didn’t play golf, I thought I’d put the final nail in the coffin.)

By then he was smiling at me… just playing with me. “I take it that’s just because you want to stay on as a rifle company commander,” he said. “This I can understand. You don’t have anything against being my aide, do you?”

“Certainly not,” I said, thinking, “Shit, I hope I haven’t insulted him”—the last thing on my mind.

“Well, I understand you don’t want the job. I’ve had some tremendously talented captains who are interested and who’ve interviewed for it; and I appreciate your coming by. I didn’t want to make the decision until I interviewed all the candidates.”

This kind of confused me because I didn’t think I was a candidate. I thought the message from my CO had killed that. But because I thought there might have been a misunderstanding, I said, “Well, I appreciate your interest, sir. But, no, I really don’t want the job, and you have some fine officers there.”

“I do; and I also understand your position; and we’ll go ahead and make the decision.”

“Thank you, sir, for the understanding,” I said, and left.

When I got back to the battalion area, I went to my CO’s office and told him everything was okay. It all seemed to be just a formality the general needed to go through so he could say he had interviewed all the nominees. But when I arrived back at my company area, there was a call waiting as I walked in. It was my CO. He’d just received a call from General Haynes. I was selected as the aide and was ordered to report for duty the next day.

It was obvious that Major General Haynes had made up his mind before he met me. Later, I found out why:

He had prepared a list of eight or nine criteria — most of them fairly obvious, like commanding a company in Vietnam in combat, attendance at the career-level school for captains, and commanding a company in the 2nd Marine Division. As luck would have it, I came out as the only guy in the division who met every one of the criteria.

Meanwhile, his current aide (I didn’t know him well) had talked to other people who had mentioned my name; and when they matched these recommendations up with the other thing, he seems to have fixed on me.

I spent a year as the aide to two generals — first to General Haynes; and after he got orders to Korea, I became the aide to Brigadier General Jake Poillion, who’d been Haynes’s assistant division commander. When Haynes left, Poillion was fleeted up as the CG and told it was just an interim; a major general would be coming down the track very shortly. In fact, the interim turned out to be six or seven months. Later, when the major general did finally come down, he started making noises like he was going to keep me in place, too. So I had to really fight to get out of the job.

Though in many ways my tour as aide was a valuable experience, I never really enjoyed it; my original reasons for not wanting it remained valid. Still, I was fortunate to work for generals who were interested in my views and were highly respected leaders. And the experience exposed me to a different level of perception than I was used to. Problems I’d been sure I had absolute answers to when I commanded a company got a lot less simple. I came to realize that there was a great deal I didn’t know and had to learn.

When you’re down at the company level, you see things in black and white; you don’t have a broader view. I’d see all kinds of things wrong in the weapons ranges, for instance, and it seemed obvious to me: “These ranges should be better. They’re shabby. They need serious maintenance and renovation. This is what we’re all about, and we’re letting it go to hell.”

Well, all of a sudden I was seeing things from a general’s point of view, looking at the budget he has to work with, looking at all the alternatives, realizing he has to give some things up. Now, suddenly, I was forced to realize that my “absolute answers” were not as absolute as I’d thought. And I came to appreciate that a lot of the choices generals had to make did not come out of a lack of interest or a failure to care. It was a matter of priorities. It was a matter of other realities you don’t have a sense of when you’re down at company level.

One thing really bothered me while I was an aide, however: The captains were more interested in war fighting than the senior officers.

The captains loved talking about operational issues — working them through, worrying over them, coming up with new ideas. We were the Vietnam guys. We’d suffered through all the lousy tactics, the poor policies, and the shitty things that went on in the field. So we had a burning desire to make sure we had the skills we hadn’t seen there. We went into the crucible right out of the blocks.

But the senior officers were another thing; and this really shocked me. I expected to learn a lot about war fighting from the horse’s mouth; but it didn’t happen that way. They certainly knew war intimately; they had all experienced it in World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam. But war fighting was pretty far down on their agenda. Operational competence was simply not valued or demanded as much as administrative competence. In those days, they were judged on their management and not their tactical skills.

It was rare, in fact, to find anyone above the rank of captain who talked tactics and war fighting.

I understood that Vietnam was ending and the big concerns presented by the war’s aftermath — race and drug problems, the critical shortage of personnel, the severe budget cuts, reorganizations, and many other issues — consumed their time and attention. Yet I expected there would be far more focus on the core of our profession — how to fight. This was my passion; I thought it would be the passion of every Marine. It wasn’t.

One day I was chatting with General Poillion.

“My God,” I said to him, “there’s something badly wrong with us. We’re losing our operational edge. We don’t hold people to task. I see senior officers — battalion or regimental commanders — that either don’t know anything about war fighting, or else they’ve forgotten it. They were in Vietnam and all, but they’ve lost it. There’s no way we hold them accountable. We run TAC tests on the company commanders and the tests are tough. But after that there’s nothing. What happens to test the others?”

He thought a moment, then he looked at me. “Have you ever heard of anybody being relieved for poor, shitty tactics?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Have you ever heard of anybody being relieved for poor administration or logistics?”

“Yes.”

That happened all the time — for badly managing money and personnel and the like.

“Well, there it is,” he said. “Officers are held accountable for poor leadership or poor administration, but not for poor operational skills. That’s the problem.”

There was one notable exception to this pattern.

Back when I commanded D Company, a fellow captain and company commander, my friend Jack Sheehan (I’d known him since my early days at Quantico; he eventually became a four-star general), had bragged a lot about his great battalion commander. Jack’s commander really knew the stuff the gung ho younger officers were living and breathing and spending every spare moment talking about — landing plans, tactics, small units, patrol formations, weapons employment, all of that stuff. He’d had a long stretch in Vietnam, five or six years, and his operational skills were legendary; and like all the best leaders, he’d read everything. Not only that, he was one of the few senior officers who actually liked to sit down and talk tactics and hold forth on his own with the junior guys. His name was Al Gray.

“Hey, how about coming to dinner?” Jack said to me. “You and I can hook up with Colonel Gray — sort of like a guys’ night at the club.”

“Sure,” I said.

I knew something about Gray; it was hard not to at Lejeune. He was a legend. The troops loved him, and he was truly great with the enlisted Marines. He himself had come up through the ranks and never lost that connection. Later, as the aide, I learned that he was held in equally high regard by the generals.

So I met Al Gray at the officers’ club at Camp Lejeune with Jack Sheehan. When he walked in, the first thing that impressed me was how down to earth he was. He talked to us, not down to us (he was not patronizing). But what really impressed me was how much he was really into the operational stuff. “He knew his shit,” as the troops would put it. He had the same sort of fire that I had. No matter what came up for discussion, he had an informed and pointed opinion about it. I had seen this kind of fascination for tactics and war fighting in only a very few senior officers. I was really impressed.

Of course, I hoped I’d have a chance to see him again and take our discussions further; but being realistic, I figured it was unlikely. Not only was I in another battalion, I was in another regiment, and probably just another captain to him. Well, it turned out that he must have seen something worth cultivating in me; and he stayed in contact — took me under his wing.

By the time I became the general’s aide, he had moved up to become regimental commander of the 2nd Marines, and I saw him frequently… he always had a lot of business with the general; and we grew increasingly friendly. Later, as we both rose up the ranks, the friendship continued to develop and mature — the classic mentor relationship. I’ve always considered him as my strongest mentor (and I’ve had several, starting with General Mick Trainor). It was a relationship that has stood for thirty years. Gray went on to become the commandant of the Marine Corps and significantly change the way the Corps thought and conducted combat operations.

When my tour as aide ended, I had an offer to command another company (it would have been my seventh). I jumped at the chance, but General Poillion snuffed out that idea. I’d already had six companies; it would not be well received if the general’s aide got a seventh.

I was assigned to the G-3, the operations section of the division — a disappointment. But the good news was that Al Gray, now a colonel, had just given up command of his regiment and was to be the new G-3. If I couldn’t be in an infantry unit, then the next best assignment, in my view, was in an operations or training assignment. I knew I would learn a lot from Colonel Gray.

When I checked into the section, Colonel Gray surprised me. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

“Something in training will be great,” I said, thinking the best I could get as a captain was to be some sort of training assistant — an administrator who kept the statistics or arranged schedules. It was a boring job, but it would at least allow me to observe training. Such was the fate of junior officers on a division staff.

“No, Captain, you didn’t hear me,” Colonel Gray said. “I didn’t ask you what job you expected to get stuck with. I asked you what you really want to do. I want you to take a few days to think about your answer.

“You and I have talked a lot about improving the infantry skills of the units in the division,” he continued. “We both think that our units lack tactical skills they should have and that company commanders have not been given the assets and help they need to train their units. Since you feel so strongly about that, why don’t you think about something you can do to help that situation.”

I came back a few days later with a wild idea — a center of excellence for infantry operations and weapons skills that provided training and training support for the infantry companies and battalions, a facility that could put units and their leaders through training courses and programs, and offer training “packages” containing references, support materials, suggested schedules, ranges and training area recommendations, specialized instructor support, and unit training evaluations.

Colonel Gray liked the idea; and we drew up detailed plans. We’d get around the limited assets, personnel, and funds available in the postwar drawdown by converting an old training facility scheduled for demolition and running it with a minimum staff. It was in the most remote part of the base, and deep into the woods and swamps. Access was only through dirt roads, and many of the old firing ranges from the now-defunct Infantry Training Regiment were close by. It was perfect for what I had in mind.

After reviewing the final plans, Colonel Gray took them to the new commanding general, Major General Sam Jaskilka, a hard-as-steel old fighter whose heroism in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir under massive Chinese attack was legendary.

The general liked the idea and gave the go-ahead, with directions that the center should be austere and the training tough and realistic, with lots of live fire and fieldwork. “I’m going to spend a lot of time out there checking up on Zinni,” he told Colonel Gray. “I better not see rugs on the floor, or troops living in anything but tents.” He was a man after my own heart — a warrior general and not a business manager.

The center proved to be a great success, for several reasons.

First, the assessments were only given to the commanders training there and never to their superiors. So they could test their limits and work on their weaknesses without fear of report cards. (I fought off attempts to use the center to make reportable evaluations on the units training there.) This allowed me to be brutally honest about their shortfalls; and it allowed them to fail and improve.

Second, though my instructors were not always the very best available (and this was deliberate; taking the best guys would have gone down very badly with everybody else), all of them were competent enough to do the job, and I sent them to the best leadership and tactical courses to increase their knowledge and skills. The work for my instructors was hard and demanding and the hours were long, but they loved it.

We also did a great deal of instructor training at the center. I revised the Special Operations[29] courses and further trained my instructors in these specialized skills. To spice up the training for the troops we added courses on survival and adventure training, but we never lost sight of our primary mission, to develop advanced infantry skills in the division units.

As time passed, the shooting qualification scores of troops and units that went through our training skyrocketed upward, and the positive feedback from the division was overwhelming. We even trained the division’s Competition Squads for the annual Marine Corps competition at Quantico, Virginia. The 2nd Division squads were traditionally the doormats in this competition, but the squads we trained that year took the top two honors.

I ran the Infantry Training Center for well over a year — loving every minute of it, learning a great deal, and experimenting with ideas I had wanted to try ever since Vietnam. Some worked and some didn’t; but the chance to concentrate on small-unit tactics, weapons, environmental operations, and combat leadership training was invaluable.

Later on, the Marines addressed the problem of tactical evaluation of units beyond the company level. Their eventual solution came from an Army program.

After Vietnam, all the services faced serious problems, but, of all the services, the Army had the longest way to go; they needed the most radical reforms. To their credit, they did what they had to do and did it superbly.

One of their biggest and most enduring reforms was to create the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP), which allows them to tactically evaluate unit and command performance all the way up to the corps level. The idea is to train people by letting them see how and where they make wrong decisions or wrong moves, and to see how they can more reliably make the right choices. The program is not used as a measure for promotion, or as a hammer to beat people with. But it is tough. A three-star Army general at the corps level goes through a battle test and an evaluation; and it’s cold and pointed, and the evaluators don’t want to hear any gripes, bitches, or excuses. That’s it.

The first time I observed a BCTP exercise, a three-star general screwed up somehow, and admitted it without excuses. “Yeah, I screwed up,” he said. “I should have made a different choice.”

This was a sign of a remarkable transformation.

When the Marine Corps saw how well the BCTPs worked, we grabbed onto the idea and developed a similar program, now called “the Marine Air Ground Task Force Staff Training Program” (MSTP). We found a site for large-scale combined arms field exercises at Twentynine Palms in California where battalion units and larger get tested and evaluated. (The Army does the same thing not far from there at the NTC — National Training Center.) And we developed a Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation System (MCRES) that provided unit and individual standards and a test for our units preparing to deploy.

STAFF DUTY AND SCHOOL

As 1974 rolled around, Tony Zinni had been a captain for eight years and a company-grade officer for over nine. Early that year, he was selected for major, but the actual promotion was a long time coming, since he was very junior on the list. Since majors generally got staff jobs, he knew that his wonderful and exciting times “in the field” and “with the troops” were coming to an end. Since Marine advisers were still operating in Vietnam, he had dreams of still getting back to the advisory unit… yet he knew that possibility was becoming ever more remote.

Barring that, he hoped to teach tactics again at Quantico. But that did not happen. Toward the end of the year, he was ordered to Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to the Manpower Department, where he became the retention and release officer and later the plans officer of the Officer Assignment Branch. He couldn’t imagine a worse fate.

Zinni doesn’t like Washington — doesn’t like the high concentration of brass and paper pushing. His first job in the Manpower Department (think “Personnel Department”) was to be a plans officer, running the program that assigned occupational specialties to officers at the Basic School and that determined augmentation.[30]

In his words, “It was really boring… really boring.”

Any available free time was spent moonlighting at Quantico (which is only a few miles southeast of Washington), helping with field exercises and teaching tactics. And the young officers continued their informal seminars in tactics and operations.

In those days, the feeling was growing among his peers that the Corps needed to revamp and reassess its operational thinking; officers at the schools at Quantico began meeting after hours to talk about these issues and discuss the future of the Corps. Much of their thinking was far outside of the conventional box, which some of the senior leadership and even some of Zinni’s peers perceived as a danger. But not Zinni. He was excited by this quiet revolution in the ranks.

With Vietnam winding down, the services were turning their focus back to the Cold War requirements of defending Europe. Because this was also a time of tough budgets, military value was being measured primarily by the capability of the services to meet that commitment and only that commitment. Since the battle with the Warsaw Pact was going to be fought by the heaviest mechanized forces, many questioned the existence of the Corps — at least in its current form as an expeditionary light infantry. Many defense experts were recommending everything from disbanding the Marines to radically altering it.

There was a battle over the soul of the Marine Corps.

Tony Zinni continues:

The first thing Marines have to realize is that our service is not vital to the existence of the nation. The second thing we have to realize, however, is that we offer to the nation a service that has unique qualities — qualities and values that the nation admires, respects, and can ill afford to lose. These include:

One: Our first identity as Marines is to be a Marine. We are not primarily fighter pilots, scuba divers, tank gunners, computer operators, cooks, or whatever. The proper designation for each Marine from privates to generals is “Marine.”

Two: Every Marine has to be qualified as a rifleman. Every Marine is a fighter. We have no rear area types. All of us are warriors.

Three: We feel stronger about our traditions than any other service. We salute the past. This is not merely ritual or pageantry. It is part of the essence of the Marine Corps. One of the essential subjects every Marine has to know is his Corps’ history; he has to take that in and make it an essential part of himself.

Four: We carry a sense of responsibility for those who went before us, which ends up meaning a lot to Marines who are in combat. We don’t want to let our predecessors down or taint our magnificent heritage.

Five: We make the most detailed and specifically significant demands on our people in terms of iron discipline and precise standards. Yet of all the services, we probably have the greatest tolerance for mavericks and outside-the-box thinkers. In other military services, if you don’t fit the usual pattern, you rarely succeed. You punch all the right tickets, and you move up. In the Marines, you’re much more likely to find people who succeed who don’t fit the usual pattern.

This means also that we are encouraged to speak out… to let it all hang out, no matter whose ox gets gored. Outside the Marine Corps, I have a reputation for being outspoken. This has always sort of surprised me, because within the Corps being outspoken is the expectation.

This also means that we are an institution where people are judged on their performance and not their opinions.

Six: We have a reputation for innovation. After the Battle of Gallipoli in World War One, a badly blundered amphibious attack, the instant wisdom became: “You can’t accomplish an amphibious operation under hostile fire against a hostile beach.” But the Marine Corps decided, “We don’t agree with that,” and we created the nation’s invaluable World War Two amphibious capability.

Later, we looked at the traditional separation of air, ground, and naval power, and we came up with the idea of integrating all three capabilities at a much lower level. So today, we don’t need much artillery; we rely on our own close air support, closely integrated with ground actions into a single focused force.

We were the first to recognize the value of helicopters and used them effectively as early as the Korean War. Now we have the tilt rotor MV-22. Though it has been controversial, it will end up adding greatly to our mobility.

We’ve always gone after innovations like these.

Seven: Unlike other services, we aren’t tied down to fixed techniques and doctrines. We have never been hidebound doctrinaires. We are more flexible and adaptable; concepts based rather than doctrine based. That is, we really believe in the individual. We don’t like big proscriptive structures. We really believe that if we educate and train our leaders and our officers to take charge, and give them broad conceptual guidelines, but don’t bind them to these as a strict “doctrinal” necessity, they’ll do a better job.

Eight: We are by our nature “expeditionary.” This means several things. It means a high state of readiness; we can go at a moment’s notice. It means our organization, our equipment, our structure are designed to allow us to deploy very efficiently. We don’t take anything we don’t need. We’re lean, we’re slim, we’re streamlined. We don’t need a lot of “stuff”—whether it’s equipment or comforts. We can make do with what we have, or else live off the land. We are the taxpayers’ friend.

It’s a mind-set, too, about being ready to go, about being ready to be deployed, and about flexibility. We can easily and quickly move from fighting to humanitarian operations.

There are also systems we have to know, either to board ship or get into airplanes or get our gear ready to go; and there are computer programs that tell us what we need and how we can load it rapidly. The Marine Corps has perfected all these systems.

Finally, it is how we organize, prepare, and train.

All of this came home to me most powerfully back when I was lying in the hospital after I’d been wounded in Vietnam. It wasn’t a conceptual thing then, but an overwhelming feeling. It just sort of hit me: This is my home. These are my guys.

In the hospital, I was seeing how my Marines were dealing with their own wounds. And on TV I was watching images of my Marines fighting for other Marines. I was watching how we all care for each other, and how they cared for me.

The moment took my breath away. Suddenly, all of what the Marine Corps means in itself and as an institution came home to me. These were my Marines. That’s the only way I can put it. These were the guys I wanted to lead and to care for. I loved my Marines. They’re the greatest treasure America has.

There were times later on when I was tempted to get out. But, ultimately, that’s why I stayed in.

Meanwhile, in 1974, ’75, and ’76, those of us within the Marine Corps recognized that we had to change. The battle was over how.

Some defense thinkers began talking about the Marine Corps as an institution that had passed its prime. In today’s world, they believed, light forces were fading into extinction. The future was with heavy forces.[31] In their minds, we could neither adapt nor contribute to the kind of fighting we could expect in the Fulda Gap (the plain in Germany where it was expected the battle for Europe would be decided). Their solution was for the Marines to make itself over into a very different kind of organization… to “heavy up”—“mech up”—with many more tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery pieces.

Others felt: “No, that’s the wrong way to go. It’s going after what’s trendy and not what’s necessary and right. It’s not our mission to duplicate the Army’s heavy units. They do that job just fine. Yes, we’ve got to change; and yes, we’ve got to find ways to make ourselves more relevant in Europe; but we shouldn’t dump our expeditionary nature doing it. The nation still needs a highly expeditionary and ready crisis response force, and that’s what the Marine Corps does best.”

This was another area that really fascinated me: How the Corps could mech up and fight tanks and infantry in this new environment but not lose its expeditionary character. And I got caught up in these debates and injected myself into them wherever I could.[32]

Meanwhile, a number of thinkers inside and outside the Marine Corps were beginning to look at ways to fight that differed from the traditional force-upon-force, attrition-type models. Though these people came to be called “maneuverists,” the term was not used in its normal technical military sense — the movement of forces to gain position. Rather, it was a mind-set, where you weren’t necessarily looking to apply brute force and then grind your enemy into submission. The idea was to find innovative — and unexpected — ways to checkmate the other guy. The concept became known as “Maneuver Warfare.”

In history, there have been many cases where small forces have defeated much larger ones after creating a situation that convinced the opposing commander that he had lost, or that made the larger force’s situation untenable, by outpositioning it, or by disrupting, dislodging, or destroying what Clausewitz called “a center of gravity”—anything essential to a force’s ability to operate. There are many centers of gravity: It can be a person, like an indispensable leader; a place, like a national capital or other strategic location; command and control; transportation; fuel supplies; and much else.

The Maneuver Warfare advocates looked to discover an enemy’s centers of gravity, pick one that would cause the enemy’s eventual unraveling, and focus on it.

The primary objective was to get inside the enemy commander’s decision cycle and mess him up — gaining both a psychological and a physical advantage by gaining control of the tempo of operations, conducting relevant actions faster and more flexibly than the other guy can.

Accomplishing these aims became quite complex, sophisticated, and subtle. It was not easy to correctly blend the components of maneuver, fires, control and protection of information; and then to sustain and secure the force and put it into action. We had always been too rigid about the standard organization of units, thinking it had to fight that way and only that way. Instead, the maneuverists began to realize that we might have to break units down and modify them in the field in a more flexible and adaptive manner.

I took to these revolutionary ideas like a duck to a pond.

Naturally, the old thinking was very hard to change. Not only did senior officers feel challenged because these ideas were new and different, but these same ideas challenged an entire operational culture which didn’t take easily to its subtlety and intellectual sophistication. There was a lot of controversy and many camps; and all kinds of people misunderstood the new ideas; but the Marine Corps eventually grasped them and adopted them — though it took several years for that to happen.

When General Gray was named commandant, he came in as a strong proponent for Maneuver Warfare. We had someone at the top advocating change in operational thinking, the way we fight, and the way we train and educate our leaders. This generated a tremendous upheaval as we transitioned over into the 1990s; but acceptance did come (though with holdouts).

Years earlier, in the spring of 1975, Tony Zinni had been hit by a double blow. Shocked and sickened as South Vietnam crumbled, he’d followed the remnants of his Vietnamese Marines as they fought on in the hills north of Saigon until all radio transmissions ceased.

The day Saigon fell, he took off from work, and then for several hours immersed himself in what you could call “a warrior’s meditation”… thinking about all the troops — and the many friends — that had been lost, and about the fate of the many Vietnamese he had known.

As these thoughts pressed down on him, he had a sudden flash: He had been a Marine for ten years, halfway through a normal career, and he had never made a conscious decision to stay in… or even given staying or leaving much thought. It was always just a matter of not leaving because he couldn’t do that while there was a war to be fought. It was always the war — and his connection with the guys on the ground fighting it — that had given his life in the Marine Corps meaning. And now that meaning was gone. His whole purpose for being was ripped away.

Fortunately, it was not a lasting depression, and as it faded, he came to realize that an era had ended for himself, for his nation, and for the Corps. It was time to move on.

With that came a deeper realization: He was going to stay in for as long as the Corps wanted him. He could think of nothing else he could ever do.

As the years passed, Zinni’s career followed a more or less traditional pattern, considering his antipathy to staff jobs: a year at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College at Quantico; operations officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, at Camp Lejeune (beginning in August 1978); battalion executive officer, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; regimental executive officer (1979-80); and in April 1980, he took command of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (initially as a major, which was very rare; he was selected for lieutenant colonel during his time commanding the battalion). Battalion command was, in Zinni’s mind, a perfect completion to his third tour in the 2nd Marine Division. He had deployed several times to significant NATO exercises and Mediterranean commitments with the Sixth Fleet and was proud of the superior achievements of his battalion by virtually every administrative and, more important, operational measure.

Zinni’s promotions and command experiences were great sources of pride; but his high spirits were deflated when his father passed away in 1980. He was able to see his father one last time before he lost him.

In 1981, he went back to Quantico as an instructor at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College to teach operations and tactics (and to earn a master’s degree in management and supervision). And during the 1983-84 school year, he attended the National War College.

In October 1983, while he was at the War College, the Marine barracks in Beirut was suicide-bombed by Hezbollah terrorists — a horrific event that impacted heavily on everyone in the Corps. The growing threat of terrorism not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe and Latin America, began to increasingly occupy Zinni’s interest and attention.

The disaster in Beirut put a lot of scrutiny on the Marine Corps (many asked if they were to blame for the security failures that allowed the tragedy to happen), but it also pointed up how little understood was the terrorist threat to U.S. forces abroad. Terrorist groups were becoming more active and deadly throughout the world, and U.S. military personnel were an attractive target.

In the spring of 1984, a few months before graduation, Zinni got a call from his old Vietnam battalion commander and mentor, Mick Trainor, now a lieutenant general and the deputy chief of staff for Plans, Policies, and Operations at Marine headquarters. After the War College, Zinni had been told he would be a plans officer in the Marine Corps Headquarters dealing with European and NATO issues. “That’s not going to happen,” Trainor explained. “We have other plans for you.”

“After the Beirut bombing, there’s been enormous pressure to get our act together on the terrorist threat,” he continued. “I need you to follow through on an effort we’ve started to develop a program aimed at dealing with that threat. We want to beef up our counterterrorism and security efforts and to educate the Corps into a far greater awareness of the threat we are facing; and we also want you to work on the emerging programs and issues regarding special operations.” (By this time, the Marine Corps had begun to use the term in the now commonly understood sense — as referring to all forms of unconventional warfare.)

“So you can forget about the plans officer assignment. We’re going to make you the Special Operations and Terrorism Counteraction officer at headquarters.” This sounded like exciting and interesting business to Zinni. He knew the Marine Corps had been hit hard in Beirut and was serious about dealing with this new threat of terrorism.

“Yes, sir,” Zinni replied, his brain churning. He knew how hard it was going to be to get himself up to speed on both terrorism and special operations.

Since he had not taken any of the elective courses on terrorism offered by the War College, opting instead to study Europe and NATO (since that was the area of expertise he had expected to use next), he had to scramble to pick up anything he could on the subject from literature and faculty experts. Thus armed, he reported for duty to Marine headquarters immediately after graduation.

Soon his five-man section had built a program that aimed to make every Marine aware of the new threat. It provided realistic training and education on countering it; developed the concepts, tactics, and special equipment needed to fight terrorists; improved the Corps’ intelligence capability in this area; and improved security at Marine installations.

Meanwhile, as the Marine Corps’ special operations officer at headquarters, Zinni represented the Corps in the joint arena on all matters dealing with that ever-more-important area.

A Marine sailing into these seas knew they were infested with dragons, for the Corps had long rejected special operations forces and capabilities. The aversion to special units comes from a belief that the entire Corps is “special”; it does not need elites within elites.

Ever since the disaster at Desert One (the tragically failed special operations attempt to rescue the American hostages held in revolutionary Tehran), developing a credible joint special operations capability was a top priority. In a 1983 memo from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, all the services were directed to designate special operations forces for this capability. When Zinni put on the Marine special operations hat, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had already designated their own “special” units, and the controversial issue of organizing them into a joint force was being dealt with in Washington. This action would eventually lead to the creation of the Special Operations Command, a separate unified command with its own budget authority (making it not quite a separate service). This ensured the services would evenly support their force contributions to this command.

The Marine Corps chose to ignore the directive, and, true to its long-standing policy, refused to create or designate any “special” units or capabilities.

This policy went back to the Second World War, when the Corps had created Raider Battalions at the insistence of President Roosevelt, but had quickly disbanded them and other special units.

Later, when President Kennedy attempted to persuade the Marine Corps to form special capabilities to deal with counterinsurgency missions, General David Shoup, the commandant, countered that the Marines could handle these missions as they were currently structured; they didn’t need special units. Kennedy, not impressed with Shoup’s answer, turned to the Army and supported the development of Army Special Forces.

By 1984, it was clear that the Marine Corps could no longer avoid taking on a special operations capability… in some form. The question was: How? In what form?

When at one point a powerful congressman actually proposed putting all the special operations forces under the Marine Corps, the Marines had to scramble desperately to make a reply. A Marine study came to the (un-surprising) conclusion that there were obvious benefits to having all the special capabilities under one service, and the Marine Corps was the ideal service for that; but taking that course would be prohibitively disruptive and create animosities and disadvantages that would outweigh the benefits.

The Marine Corps efforts to dig in their heels ended there. The growing pressure for a special capability caused the then commandant, General P. X. Kelley, and Lieutenant General Trainor to relook at developing a special capability.

As the Corps’ action officer on special operations, Zinni attended all meetings, briefings, and joint sessions on the subject; observed all training; and visited all service units with these capabilities. He soon knew special operations as well as any other Marine.

He was charged with developing the initial study, which concluded that the Marines needed some “special” capabilities, and proposed several options, including the formation of special units. Some of the “special” missions the study looked at were the Corps’ amphibious raid and amphibious reconnaissance capabilities (missions the Marines were already very good at), as well as counterterrorism operations and direct action missions like oil platform takedowns, noncombatant evacuation operations, raids, and other highly specialized missions.

Generals Kelley and Trainor then decided to take these findings to Fleet Marine Forces Atlantic, now under the command of Lieutenant General Al Gray, for further study (Zinni participated as the headquarters representative). This led to Gray’s development of the Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) program, which took forward deployed Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) and drastically changed their training, organization, equipping, taskings, and certification so that they could better meet the new crises. Since the “new” units remained designated as conventional forces, the change didn’t violate the Corps’ long-standing special operations policy. The units were just made far more capable.

Though the program was controversial both in and out of the Marine Corps, the MEU (SOC)s proved to be one of the Marines’ greatest innovations — often called the “jewel in their crown”… and an ongoing demonstration that the Corps has maintained its expeditionary heritage.

Late in 1984, Zinni was selected to become a colonel, and then made head of the Concepts and Capabilities Branch, a recent creation of his immediate boss, Major General Jack Godfrey, the director of the Operations Division at headquarters. The Concepts and Capabilities Branch was charged with conceptually integrating all the exciting new Marine programs with existing capabilities and operating concepts. It was another job that allowed Zinni to work where he loved to be — on the cutting edge of operational issues and thinking. His branch worked on several major emerging capabilities such as the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons, Norway Prepositioning Program, and Tilt Rotor Aircraft development (which turned into the Osprey). It became the central source for providing the “how to fight” basis for all new capabilities.

In the summer of 1986, Zinni was assigned as a fellow of the chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) — six Navy captains and three Marine colonels selected to spend a year working a strategically significant special project under the direction of a retired senior diplomat. The group was based in Newport, Rhode Island, but traveled extensively to interview both U.S. and international military leaders. The 1986 project reexamined the American maritime strategy in a war with the Warsaw Pact. The current strategy, which had been in place for several years, had already been very well discussed and practiced in many exercises. The CNO, Admiral Trost, and the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, wanted the SSG to examine Soviet reaction to the strategy and to propose improvements.

To that end, they were given access to Soviet defectors, and highly classified U.S. intelligence material and programs. They also structured war games to test out their recommendations. For Zinni, this was a heady time, something like going through another year at a war college; the depth of understanding he gained on strategic issues and on the ways the war with the Soviet Empire was actually expected to go down was invaluable.

Since he also had free time (his family had remained at their home at Quantico), he decided to enter a second master’s program in international relations at a university in Newport.

While Zinni was at the SSG, the Marine Corps gained a new commandant, General Al Gray.

During a visit to the group, Gray offered Zinni a chance to return to Camp Lejeune to command a new MEU (SOC). Naturally, returning to the operational forces greatly pleased — and excited — Tony Zinni. But a few weeks later, he received a call from Lieutenant General Jack Godfrey, his old boss at headquarters and now the commanding general of the Marine Expeditionary Force in the Western Pacific (III MEF), offering command of one of his infantry regiments, the 9th Marines—“the Striking Ninth.”

The choice was tough, but Zinni decided to ask for the regiment.

As an infantry officer it was difficult to pass up a regimental command. But he had several other reasons as well: He already had three tours of duty at Camp Lejeune and in the 2nd Marine Division, and he had deployed twice to the Mediterranean and was familiar with Europe and the Caribbean, while his tours in the Pacific were limited to Vietnam and Okinawa. The only division he had not served in was the Third, and this would also allow him to experience more of the Western Pacific… and ensure he would not be seen as one of General Gray’s “pets.” Since many officers did not want to serve overseas in accompanied tours (that is, with their families), and particularly on Okinawa, it was hard to find officers who’d accept assignments there. This was a chance for Zinni to show he wasn’t getting special consideration. Though his family was truly happy living at Camp Lejeune, they were willing to try something new.

The decision to take the regiment proved to be one of the best he had ever made.

THE STRIKING NINTH

I began the ’70s on Okinawa, and ended the ’80s there.

The “Striking Ninth” Marines, a legendary regiment that had seen tough combat on Iwo Jima and in Vietnam, was now based at Camp Hansen in the northern part of Okinawa. The regiment’s three battalions were rotational units that deployed to Okinawa for six-month periods from parent commands on the West Coast and Hawaii. This meant that the regiment always had full-up, highly trained units.

Along with command of the regiment came command of Camp Hansen, which was the largest Marine Corps camp in the Western Pacific, with over fifty units and agencies based there. A total of seven thousand Marines and sailors and over one thousand civilians worked at the camp, and many of the troops were housed there.

The demands on running a base like Camp Hansen was a new experience for me and presented a lot of challenges — from the day-to-day business of keeping things running, to planning for future growth, to securing our facilities during severe typhoons.

The camp consisted of 421 buildings spread over 605 acres; and during my tour, it underwent tremendous construction and reconstruction, requiring a great deal of planning and supervision.

These two commands came with a third responsibility — maintaining relationships with the local Okinawan community. The district included a number of small towns and villages and the major town, Kin, adjoining the camp.

Operational command of the camp gave me the fascinating and new experience of running what was in effect a small city, while my connection with the local community added to the diverse cultural experiences I’ve always enjoyed and taught me a great deal about the art of negotiations and cross-cultural communications. This would come in handy many times in the future.

In Oriental cultures, form and politeness can be more important than our preferred in-your-face direct responses. Orientals see these as insulting.

My Civil Affairs officer, a local Okinawan, taught me a great deal about the customs and procedures necessary to be effective in that community. I also tried to pick up a little of the language — not just Japanese but the local Okinawan. I rehearsed speeches in front of the “mama-sans” who worked at the camp as laundry workers and housekeepers.

As time went on, I made a number of Okinawan friends, frequently attending family dinners, weddings, and funerals. I also participated in festivals and social events, and met regularly with the mayors, the assembly, the chamber of commerce, police chief, and other civic leaders and groups. Civic action programs that we set up allowed volunteer troops to do good works for their Okinawan neighbors: We fixed up orphanages and schools for special children and helped with local celebrations. Days of recognition and appreciation for the local community on the base encouraged understanding.

At times we had tensions, but the strong personal relationships we built allowed us to work through them. Fortunately, our troops did not cause any significant problems during my tour. According to my local friends, this was the longest period without a serious incident between our troops and Okinawans. (All the work to cure the myriad problems from the aftermath of Vietnam was now paying off.)

Later two other commands were added to my original three responsibilities:

The 9th Marines was designated to provide the core unit for Regimental Landing Team-9, the Ground Combat Element of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), our amphibious force in the Western Pacific. And during a visit to Okinawa, General Gray directed the commanding general of III MEF to develop and establish a MEU (SOC), the first in this command. I was ordered to organize, train, and command this unit.

The MEU has a battalion landing team as a ground component, a reinforced helicopter squadron as an air component, and a logistics component. We did extensive training in the highly specialized equipment, tactics, techniques, and procedures for the unit’s unique missions. This involved intense and demanding certification evaluations conducted in difficult locations like the Philippines.

In one night helicopter training event, we had a helo crash at sea and lost a number of Marines. This was not the first time I’d seen a fatal training accident, and it wasn’t the last. Despite all of our best efforts, shit happens. Yet, each time I’ve been torn by the loss of some great Marines. Peacetime training deaths in your unit are, in many ways, far more difficult to deal with than combat deaths. After a memorial service the next day and an extensive air and sea search, we resumed the training. Though I knew this was difficult for young men to understand (and it was hard for me as well!), I felt I had to send a message that we had to immediately get our minds back into our training. I knew the demands of combat don’t give us the luxury of grieving for long.

For over two years, 1987-89, I was blessed with these five grand responsibilities. The icing on the cake was the enjoyment my family got out of this tour of duty. They loved Okinawa. They had never been happier.

Meanwhile, like any commander, I wanted to have the best-trained and operationally capable regiment in the Marine Corps. We immersed ourselves in rigorous training and education programs.

Okinawa is small, which meant there were serious live fire and range restrictions. These problems had given the island a reputation as a difficult place for training, and impossible for large unit training. But I refused to accept this. To prove it could be done, I took the entire regiment to the field on exercises. This meant we had to look for innovative approaches and to ignore imagined limitations, but we got the job done. Of course, the island did have training limitations; and I scraped or volunteered for every opportunity to get my units off the island for training and exercises. They went to Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Guam, Iwo Jima, and many other locations in the region. In my two-plus years in command of the regiment, the RLT, and the MEU, I took these units to over twenty large-scale exercises, and sent smaller units to many more.

I have always enjoyed teaching operations and tactics. This experience had led me to conclude that most commanders neglect the operational education of their subordinate leaders. As a result, I established an extensive officer, Staff NCO, and NCO education program in the command. All the twice-weekly officer school sessions — classes, map exercises, and field sessions — were focused solely on war fighting, and were taught or supervised by me. We made every attempt to make them fun and challenging.

I tasked my sergeant major to run the Staff NCO sessions, and (together with the battalion sergeants major) to supervise the NCO program. But I taught many of these sessions as well.

Since the contingency requirement to respond to a crisis in Korea was our most demanding potential mission, the regiment and RLT spent a great deal of time engaged in enormous exercises there, involving thousands of U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK) troops. Conducting operations in the Korean countryside among the small villages and towns made the exercises realistic and interesting for our troops. The training was tough, often done during the winter or early spring months when the weather was extremely harsh.

Twice my MEU was called out to handle crises in the Philippines, when assassins from the NPA, a Philippine terrorist group, murdered U.S. military personnel.

In the first incident, U.S. airmen from Clark Air Force Base were killed in the town near their base. In the second, the U.S. military attaché to the Philippines, Colonel Nick Rowe, was shot while driving in Manila (Rowe was a hero, having escaped from Vietnam after surviving years of captivity there).

Our mission following both incidents was to provide immediate security to the naval base at Subic Bay and the nearby naval air base at Cubi Point. Our units patrolled the jungle around the bases and provided security for forces required for missions outside the bases.

I knew this jungle well, since we had done extensive training there. The Negrito scouts, from one of the many Philippine ethnic groups, had conducted the jungle training, and they were superb — teaching us about jungle plants that stopped infections and bleeding and helped wounds heal quicker, about other plants that were ordinarily poisonous but which could be bleached (to remove the poison) and eaten, and much else… a tremendous wealth of field skills. Though I had taken a number of jungle training courses and had firsthand experience in Vietnam, these scouts taught me more about jungle craft than I had ever learned before.

The most significant event during these deployments came when the admiral in charge of our forces in the Philippines decided we should conduct a humanitarian mission after a fierce typhoon had hit a remote area of southeastern Luzon. When U.S. troops were locked down on the bases the resulting tensions from the loss of revenue to locals had started to cause problems. The admiral saw the opportunity to help the ravaged coastal villages as a way of easing some of these tensions and improving relations.

The humanitarian mission he laid on us required my aircraft, C-130s and CH-53s, to move relief supplies. The C-130s flew the supplies to a dirt airstrip in the region, while the big CH-53 helos took the supplies from the dirt strip staging area into the villages.

Though I certainly appreciated the humanitarian and public relations benefits at a sensitive time, I was not comfortable with the mission. The area we were operating in was over three hundred miles from our base, and no one was paying much attention to security requirements and potential threats from the NPA and other terrorists and local insurrections.

Our aircraft ran the first missions with no problems and were into the second day of operations when I received a call that one of our CH-53s had made an emergency landing in a village and suffered minor damage. No big deal, my squadron asserted. They’d make a quick inspection and minor repairs, and the helo would be out in a few hours.

That estimate turned out to be wildly optimistic… The fallen helo was about to become the bane of my existence.

The next day, the news from the helo was not so positive. Damage was now seen to have been somewhat worse than originally reported, but the CH-53 could still be easily fixed.

“Okay,” I said to myself, but when I asked the Philippine Marines about local security and threats from bad guys I was shocked to learn that this particular area was heavily threatened and influenced by the NPA. The situation there was so bad that the Philippine military sent in only their most elite forces, Marines and Rangers. Though I was aware that these forces were operating in the region, I had not connected that with the threat information. My upset got worse.

I immediately ordered my battalion to rush a satellite communications- equipped platoon to the village to provide security for the one more day of work needed to get the helo functioning.

When the platoon arrived, its commander reported that the village chief was worried that all of this American military activity would attract NPA guerrillas. The platoon commander had accordingly set up security for the helo and the village. That was the good news. The bad news was that the helo was actually in much worse condition than previously reported.

I decided to get down to the village for a firsthand look. After putting my executive officer in charge of the security mission at the naval bases, I scheduled a C-130 to take me and additional security personnel to reinforce our platoon down to the dirt strip near the village. From there, we’d move on to the village by helo. We were to leave the following morning.

That night I was awakened by an urgent report from the platoon commander at the village. The NPA had killed a villager and left his body near our positions; an attached note threatened our troops. I immediately ordered more troops added to the security force on the C-130.

Before we landed the C-130 at the dirt strip, I had the pilot fly over the village so I could get a sense of the area.

The downed helo was an incredible sight. “Minor damage? No big deal?” Forget about it. It was stuck in the mire of a coastal tidal stream; its blades snapped off. This was no minor, easily repaired problem.

After flying into the village via chopper, I made a quick inspection of our position with my battalion commander, then turned the security situation over to him and turned my attention to the helo. I came down on the squadron like a ton of bricks. This, I learned, was how the crash came about:

The lieutenant flying the CH-53 had overloaded it with heavy sacks of food. As he was coming into the tiny landing zone in the center of the village, it hit him at the last moment that the zone was too small for his big bird. He pulled up sharply, but the weight onboard did not let him get the lift he needed, and he settled into the nearby tidal stream, just missing the straw huts crowded between the LZ and the water.

Time then became a critical factor. The tide was coming in within a few hours. When the helo could not be repaired as quickly as everyone had hoped, the rising saltwater tide set it drifting into the trees bordering the stream, which further damaged the bird, making it impossible to get it out on its own power. It was now stuck in the mud.

I was furious. I understood the squadron’s focus on repairing the helo and appreciated their round-the-clock efforts to work on the bird under difficult conditions, but the squadron’s failure to accurately report the status of the helo was inexcusable. Their failure had caused me to put them in a very dangerous situation for more than a day.

That wasn’t the only source of my fury. Those who had tasked us with this mission had failed to properly analyze the intelligence and security situation, and I expressed my feelings to those up the chain of command who needed to pay more attention to what was going on. Fortunately, we had Philippine Marines in the area to help.

We eventually arranged for a powerful CH-53E to pull the helo out of the muck. From there it was to take the damaged helo to a recovery tug offshore. The operation started out all right. The CH-53E successfully raised the busted bird; but on the way to the tug, the CH-53E dropped it into the Philippine Sea.

The tug skipper said, “Not to worry. I can easily recover it from the seafloor.”

He actually made good on his promise, and the tug recovered the helo, then brought it to the naval base and dumped it on the shore near our own base camp… now a total write-off.

The story does not end there.

On a later deployment, we were ordered to clean up the helo and put it aboard a ship bound for Okinawa. Since it had been sitting on the edge of the jungle for almost a year, the cleanup was a tough job. In the helicopter’s current condition, the Navy was not eager to have it aboard their ship, and this caused heated discussions.

The helo was again making my life miserable.

When we got the helo back to Okinawa, it was placed at Camp Hansen, for use in training on helicopter embark and debark drills (old helo hulks are often used for this purpose). And there it sat, in clear view, every day for the remainder of my tour, as a reminder of all the griefs it had dragged me through.

During my tour of duty with the Striking Ninth, General Gray called me back to Washington several times to participate in studies aimed at tackling the many problems arising from the inevitable shrinking of the military. He wanted the Corps to be able to reduce personnel and forces with minimal disruption and without losing capabilities. These were hard efforts to sell. Though the commandant’s study group had a highly select membership from all over the Marine Corps, several commanders fought our recommendations. Nobody wanted to give up anything. Nobody wanted to face the reality of impending reductions and change.

Meanwhile, it became increasingly difficult for me to handle these time-consuming studies while running my other duties on Okinawa — a conflict that General Gray did not fail to notice. “I doubt that you’ll finish a regular three-year tour of duty on Okinawa,” he told me.

He was right. After two years and a couple months, I received orders back to Quantico, where I was to become the chief of staff of the Training and Education Center, an organization recently established by General Gray to implement the changes he had directed. My experience in this area made it inevitable that I’d be returned early to help.