Battle Ready

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

Quantico’s Training And Education Center was a General Al Gray innovation — part of his overall effort to revitalize the Marine Corps’ education system. The aim of the center was to improve Marine training by providing realistic and demanding standards (which would define a Marine, the duties of his occupational specialty, the responsibilities of his grade — i.e., rank — and the duties of his billet — e.g., squad leader); and by providing methods for testing and evaluating whether these aims were being achieved in individuals and units.

These innovations were significant and far-reaching; and given the realities of a change-resistant military culture, their implementation was not a sure thing. Gray wanted a ramrod who shared his vision and had the credibility and capability to make it all happen. Zinni got the call to be chief of staff at the center.

Just before Christmas 1989, less than six months after arriving at the center, Zinni received a congratulatory phone call from Gray; he had been selected to the grade of brigadier general.[33]

The Marine Corps is a very lean organization… the opposite of top-heavy. Meaning, there are very few generals, and selection for the promotion is a true honor. Every year, perhaps one in ten Marine colonels make the leap to general officer. Of these only three or four come from the ranks of infantry colonels, such as Zinni.

Though Gray wanted Zinni to be assigned within the Marine Corps after the promotion, Zinni’s friend Jack Sheehan had other ideas. Sheehan, now a major general (he would later go on to be the commander in chief of the Atlantic Command), headed the personnel assignment division at Corps headquarters. If Zinni was going to have a shot at rising higher, Sheehan knew he would need what is called “a joint tour”—a position at a command staff manned by all the services.[34] Sheehan had just the place for him — a onetime near backwater that the fall of the Soviet Empire was just about to make one of the busiest spots on the planet.

After the holidays, Sheehan informed Zinni that the following summer he would become the deputy director of Operations at the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart, Germany.

“This is the very best joint tour we have,” Sheehan told him. “It’s hands down the best billet for Marine Corps brigadiers.”

“Sure, sure,” Zinni was thinking. “But, Jeez, what I’d really like is to be an assistant division commander or something like that in the Marine Corps, and forget the joint crap. What I’m getting is maybe okay for a staff job, but it’s still a staff job and goddamned painful.”

On the other hand, Zinni was excited about being a general. “So you’ve just gotta go over there two years and gut it out,” he told himself, “and hope you get something real when you come back.”

Later, after he was in Europe actually witnessing the landslide of transformations following the end of the Soviet Union, he began to have a very different take on his new job. “This place is changing,” he told himself then. “It’s getting exciting over here. We’re seeing something entirely significant taking place.”

Before going to EUCOM, Zinni attended the Capstone course for new one-stars at the National Defense University in Washington.

The collpse of the Soviet Empire came with a whimper. The bangs came later — almost always in unexpected places… as unexpected as the actual end of the empire. No one had predicted it. It happened so fast that even the most savvy foreign policy and intelligence professionals failed to get a handle on the specific events, much less to grasp their bigger picture implications. The disintegration started in ’89 when Gorbachev’s perestroika first let the demons out of the bottle. Later, Boris Yeltsin tried to pick up the pieces, but with limited success. What had once been the huge, proud, and powerful USSR had within a year fractured into separate republics, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Baltics, and the Stans.

The Soviet rapid free-fall collapse caused a series of quick reactions from the Western powers. Since the collapse was unforeseen, the reactions were unplanned — and inadequate. It was astonishing that the collapse came as such a surprise… or that none of the Western leaders had thought through what to do if containment actually worked and the Soviet Union imploded. “But here we were,” says Tony Zinni, “scrambling to stay ahead of remarkable events that surprised us virtually every day.”

This was not the hoped-for replacement of a worn-out and discredited communist structure with a new, better democratic and free-market one. The fall was far messier than that. True, the old structures had mostly vanished; but their replacements are even now nearly fifteen years later only still emerging. Nobody in or out of the former Soviet Union (FSU) had any idea about what had to be done next. So not very much was done.

When the Soviet Empire slouched off the world’s stage, there was a certain amount of euphoria (many wrongly imagined, for example, that its departure would remove the nuclear threat) and even more relief. “Thank God,” Americans sighed, “the Cold War is over. The Big World will take care of itself. We no longer need the vast, powerful military presence that kept the Evil Empire checked. Peace will bring incredible material dividends. Now we can go about our smaller, private business and get on with our personal lives. Everybody’s going to be secure… and happy.”

President Bush announced the emergence of a New World Order… without defining it.

It’s hard to find anybody then who realized that the fifty-year-old bipolar world structure — for all the risks and dangers it represented — had kept the lid on myriad and terrible demons… demons that made the ones Gorbachev had let loose almost seem harmless as spaniels.

Since conflict in the first and second world heartlands had been unacceptable, the superpower competition had mostly played out in the third world peripheries, where the norm among governing regimes was illegitimacy, instability, and corruption. No problem, these regimes could be propped up, bought off, or provided with military backing by one or the other superpower, in exchange for their support. Thus the world’s balance was maintained… though at the price of denying better lives to third world peoples. No matter. They didn’t have much to live for anyway.

But the long-suppressed demons of ethnic and national competitions and ancient seething hatreds and blood feuds remained alive. Once the lid was removed and the demons released, nobody was prepared to deal with them.

The Balkans exploded. The Horn of Africa. The Middle East. Iraq. West Africa. Rwanda. Zaire-Congo. Afghanistan. The Philippines. Colombia… And this is only a partial list.

The Capstone course is designed to give new brigadier generals and admirals[35] a heads-up on major strategic and national security policy. It lasts a relatively short six weeks. Part of the time is spent in study and seminars. Part of the time is spent with very senior leadership in Washington. And part of the time is spent in travel, talking with CINCs and other combatant commanders.

Zinni’s Capstone class trip, in March, took him and a handful of his Capstone colleagues to Europe — to Naples, where there’s a NATO and U.S. naval command; to Brussels and NATO headquarters in Belgium; to Germany and to EUCOM headquarters in Stuttgart; to Army headquarters in Heidelberg; to Air Force headquarters at Ramstein; and to Berlin. Their briefings at these commands all indicated that the impending collapse of the Soviet Union was about to unleash tremendous changes — changes that U.S. forces in Europe were having difficulty understanding or accepting. The rapidly unfolding events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were occurring so fast that U.S. and NATO leaders could neither grasp their implications nor make studied adjustments to them.

During their visit to Berlin, the Capstone team’s escort, a feisty second lieutenant from the U.S. Berlin Brigade, suggested an excursion through the recently abandoned Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. At that time, this was a bold idea. The famous security barrier that controlled access between East and West Berlin had ceased operation, there no longer being a reason for it. But its absence had left a rules vacuum. Nobody knew what regulations — if any — governed travel between the two parts of the no-longer-divided city. The new flag officers’ only guidance: They had to wear their uniforms.

“Is it okay to go across?” the Capstone team asked.

“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said, “but everything’s so confusing now that I doubt anyone will stop us. What’s to lose? Let’s give it a try.”

Though most of the new one-stars were a little concerned about getting stopped or even detained by East German or Russian guards — and about getting chewed out for putting themselves at risk without a good reason — they were unable to resist such a dare from a hard-charging young officer. So they piled into a van and headed for Checkpoint Charlie, where, to their astonishment, they found no guards. It was like the ghost of an old Cold War movie set.

On the other side, the main streets of East Berlin — Unter den Linden and Karl-Marx-Allee — offered a façade of modernity, an East German communist Potemkin village. But turning off the showplace avenues revealed the real differences between East and West — pockmarked walls still bearing bullet scars from the war — while more recent buildings were cheap and ugly Soviet-style cinder block and concrete, run-down and shabby. Instead of the new BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis of the West, they saw small cheap East German Traubis.

The most striking aspect of East Berlin was its quiet. Few people were about; there was no vibrant, urban bustle, as in West Berlin. In fact, there was little evidence of commerce… or activity of any kind.

East Berlin was a far cry from a great, modern world city like New York, London, or Paris… or its sister to the west. It was a poor, depressed, patched-together relic from the 1950s.

As they were taking all this in, the lieutenant came up with another bright idea. “Let’s go find a Russian military compound,” he said.

“Sure,” the one-stars agreed. “A terrific idea.” They were really game by then to push their luck. This was an opportunity they could have only dreamed about before this moment.

They drove around until they found a Russian military facility (they never figured out its function); drove inside; and out of the van stepped a group of American flag officers in uniform, who must have had the same impact on the stunned Russian military personnel and their dependents as squid-people out of a starship. The Americans wandered around the compound for most of the afternoon. During that time, no one spoke to them; there were no greetings, no questions, no challenges, no ideas about what to do with the American “invaders”—shoot them, kiss them, or say hello. There was no decision; nothing was done. The Russians and their families went about their business; the wives pushed their baby carriages or dealt with their children; in the commissary, people pushed their grocery carts and grabbed cans and boxes off the shelves; and without a “by-your-leave,” the American officers checked out everything that caught their interest. The only response they got from anybody was a shocked, deer-in-the-headlights look. When the Americans left the compound, the shocked looks followed them out the gate.

On the way back to Checkpoint Charlie, they stopped at a Soviet museum celebrating the fall of Berlin (the surrender had been signed in the building that housed it), and then at the Berlin Wall. “Do you want a piece?” the lieutenant asked, producing a small hammer. The others then chipped souvenir shards from the most powerful symbol of the Cold War.

Zinni had never before felt so close to living history. “It’s over,” he said to himself, truly realizing it for the first time. “There is no more Soviet Union. It’s gone. There is no more Soviet enemy.”

He wondered what new shape the world was taking.

In June 1990, Zinni arrived at EUCOM headquarters, located in Stuttgart at a place called “Patch Barracks,” an old Second World War German Army casern taken over by U.S. forces at the end of the war. These had emerged from Hitler’s policies during the military buildup that preceded the war: Since he wanted both to hide the buildup and to connect the army closely to the people, he’d built small regimental caserns in towns all across Germany, rather than large, centralized military installations such as those in the U.S. Patch Barracks had originally housed the 7th Panzer Regiment, a moderately sized armored unit. When U.S. Forces took Stuttgart, the casern became known as Patch Barracks, after U.S. General Patch, the commander of the troops who liberated that part of Germany.

It became EUCOM headquarters when the command was established. The original 1930s vintage stucco-clad barracks were turned into offices. In the ’50s and ’60s, apartment-type housing and a few individual houses were built on the post, but the majority of the people stationed there lived — as the military puts it — out on the economy (off the base).

EUCOM is the U.S. Unified Command that runs military operations and relations in an area that includes Europe, most of Africa (CENTCOM had the rest), and part of the Middle East (Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel). During the Cold War, its primary focus was NATO support; and the CINC of EUCOM was also the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), the NATO military commander. Except for the occasional African or Middle Eastern crisis, planning and logistics support for the NATO commitment were the priority efforts.

Traditionally, EUCOM has been an Army and Air Force-dominated theater of operations; and up until very recently, this dominance has been reflected in the service affiliation of the top officers.

When Zinni first arrived there, it struck him as odd that the Operations Directorate (J-3) was so heavily dominated by Navy and Marine officers; but he soon realized why: The emphasis in this command had not been on operations (this is not the case in other unified commands, where operations normally are the center of the staff). The difference lay in EUCOM’s NATO mission. NATO went to war, and EUCOM was primarily the U.S. base providing NATO with the American wherewithal for that. In consequence, it was not operations but plans (J-5) and logistics (J-4) that were traditionally the key elements in EUCOM. This was reflected in their personnel — primarily Army and Air Force — while the Operations Directorate had come to be predominantly manned by the Navy and Marines.

The operations shop mostly worked out on the edges — perhaps dealing with some minor crisis in Africa or the Mediterranean. It had the standing operating procedures for forming a Crisis Action Team (CAT) and could, in theory, gear up for a battle staff, but they’d never actually been called on for such a large-scale commitment; they’d never had to work twenty-four-hour operations over a long period of time. Suddenly, all that was changing. The NATO confrontation with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was gone, and the plethora of crises emerging from that were changing both EUCOM and NATO priorities. The Operations Directorate was no longer a sleepy hollow. During Zinni’s tour, the J-3 shop was on twenty-four-hour operations virtually the whole time he was there. It became the EUCOM centerpiece.

Tony Zinni takes up the story:

Since this was my first joint tour, getting used to serving in an environment and culture that wasn’t solely Marine Corps required adjustments; but I quickly found that the command was blessed with superb officers from all services. I could not have had better mentors — men who over the next two years entrusted me with the carrying out of several challenging and important missions.

I was particularly impressed with our CINC, General Jack Galvin, USA — probably the finest soldier-statesman I’ve known… the best we’ve had since George Marshall. Though his talents and accomplishments never got the recognition they deserved (they were probably lost in the rush of events like the Gulf War), if those events had not turned out as they did, he would have had the kind of recognition and stature Marshall enjoys. His vision, his depth of strategic understanding, his insightfulness, his statesmanship, his military competence, and his exceptional intellect were unsurpassed among CINCs I’ve known. Just as with Marshall, when you were around him, you sensed you were in the presence of somebody who’s really great.

Galvin was a soldier’s soldier, older than his peers. An enlisted medic in the Second World War, he had worked his way up through the ranks. When I got to Europe, he had been the CINCEUR for nine years, a long time.

Our deputy CINC was General Jim McCarthy, USAF. McCarthy’s a brilliant, high-energy guy, with exceptional organizational skills — qualities I’ve always admired. But I especially admired his openness… he was never set in his ways. He never met a new idea he didn’t like; they were all worth pursuing… even the wildest schemes would bring an open response: “Well, let’s think about that,” he’d say. “Let’s talk about it.”

The other reason he impressed me: He was the first true joint officer I met. The DCINC is a full general, a four-star, the same rank as the CINC. Since CINCEUR is a full-time, all-consuming job, the DCINC runs EUCOM. This puts a lot of distance between him and a lowly Marine brigadier general. But Jim McCarthy never paid the slightest notice to that distance. He looked at you and not the uniform you wore or the badge of rank on your collar. Air Force officers can be parochial (so can Marines and officers of all the other services), or, worse, hung up on “Air Power Doctrine” (bombing is the war-winning strategy par excellence), but McCarthy was never caught up in that kind of stuff. He was always totally open to all the possibilities and capabilities all the services could contribute. He took what you had to offer, regardless of your service. I learned a lot about being a general officer from him.

Our chief of staff was Lieutenant General Bob Chelberg, a very personable Army artillery officer, who, like McCarthy, had superior organizational skills.

The EUCOM staff was overflowing with strong personalities. They were like bumper cars, slamming into each other… challenging each other. Chelberg kept all these big egos working smoothly; he held the staff together. He also had a gift for picking talent, and for encouraging everybody. He made you eager to work for him on his team; and he paid attention to morale, to the troops. He knew we were working long hours; he and McCarthy glued us together socially and created a strong sense of unit camaraderie that was remarkable in a joint environment.

My immediate boss, the director of operations, was Rear Admiral Leighton Smith, USN — better known as “Snuffy.” Snuffy Smith was the embodiment of the positive spirit that kept us going. He brimmed over with energy and was intellectually brilliant, yet nobody was quicker to laugh; he kept us smiling with his humor and animation. At the same time, he demanded the highest degree of professionalism and commitment, and he set the example by demanding no less from himself. He would go on to earn four stars and become a CINC in NATO.

These four officers provided me with an incredible learning experience.

On the EUCOM staff, I was operating at a totally new level. I was no longer dealing with just Marine Corps operations. Almost from the moment I arrived, we were doing joint planning, executing joint missions, forming joint task forces; and we were kluging together Air Force, Navy, Army, Marine, and Special Operations units to do these missions.

These were the consummate pros in these areas. They knew everything there was to know about them… And in some cases we were plowing ground nobody had been into before.

Just watching them operate, watching them explore options and poke into new and untried ways, watching them encourage and apply innovative thinking and refuse to get bound up by old paradigms… all of these things really left a deep mark in me.

One example sticks hard in my memory: In the 1990-91 Gulf War, EUCOM was behind the opening of a second, air front, attacking Iraq out of Turkey. We would never have opened up that front if it hadn’t been for General McCarthy.

Some young USAFE majors had come up with the idea and put together the basic work. But CENTCOM didn’t seem that interested in it. And I thought for sure it would be pooh-poohed away. But McCarthy said, “No, let’s pursue this. Let’s see what these guys can do.” And he kept pressing until Schwarzkopf came around. The second front made a difference.

The operations shop is normally the part of a military staff that’s responsible for training, for exercises, for oversight on exercises, and for contingency planning. They also run the Op Center — the command center — and all its associated communications. We also had some unique duties. We ran the EUCOM flight detachment, for example — a few C-21 and C-12 VIP aircraft and helicopters.

When I arrived, the J-3 command center had just been renovated. It was in a big room, with computers and data centers, screens for videoconferencing, CNN, and such, and spaces for charts and maps from the areas and regions where ops were taking place. There we’d get updates and briefs and would then process the information. It was an information center, intelligence center, and reaction center all in one. And this was where we would fuse all the information together and plan our response when a CAT was stood up in times of crises. (The function of a Crisis Action Team — CAT — was to handle a short-term event. You’d stand it up, deal with the event, and then it would go down.)

In normal times, when not much was happening, we kept a simple watch in the command center, with a duty officer and a few people. But in time of crisis, when we stood up a CAT, the number could rise to ten or fifteen or more, and we’d man it full-time (in eight-hour watches) with people from different sections, like logistics, plans, and intelligence — keeping tabs, keeping things updated, communicating with the people operating in the field, processing information, developing briefs and options, issuing orders… all the things that planners and operators do. This put a great demand on the staff, as they had to do their regular jobs and man the CAT as well. The numbers also depended on the kind of team we needed for a particular mission. For example, some events — like humanitarian relief — required the participation of Civil Affairs elements.

If the crisis grew big enough, or if we had multiple crises, the numbers would be higher still. And if the crisis got really serious — like the Gulf War — the CAT would transform into a Battle Staff, and we’d man it with as many as fifty or sixty people. Before 1990, the EUCOM J-3 shop had never done this; but 1990 brought a state of constant crisis, and we had to dust off and set up all these procedures. That responsibility fell on me. As deputy J-3, one of my jobs was to be the director of the Crisis Action Team and the Battle Staff. The CAT was in being for the entire two years of my tour of duty. (The more elaborately manned Battle Staff was up for a significant part of that time.)

When I checked in, the Operations Directorate was already bustling with activity. We had just started what is called a NEO (Non-combatant Evacuation Operation) of our embassy in Liberia — Operation Sharp Edge. Ships were off the coast, and a CAT had been formed. Meanwhile, the embassy had decided to call off the evacuation and hold out, so we now had to support and protect them in that mess.

Liberia wasn’t an isolated case. All sorts of challenges were starting to show themselves on the other margins (meaning outside the NATO area).

But the NATO area also brought its share of headaches: The end of the Cold War brought with it a “peace dividend” drawdown of forces — not an easy transition to plan and implement. Some Cold War armaments, like chemical munitions, were no longer needed. That meant moving them out of Europe on to destruction sites on Johnston Island in the Pacific — a dangerous and delicate operation (which was called “Operation Steel Box”). Arms reduction agreements with the former Soviet Union required inspections and verification of the destruction of weapons of mass destruction. We were involved. We were running the “Beirut Air Bridge” (security, supplies, and transport for our newly reestablished embassy in Lebanon had to be airlifted by Army helicopters from Cyprus). And General Galvin was beginning to push visionary ideas about starting military-to-military connections with the Russians and Eastern Europeans. The operations shop had a big part in managing all of these.

Very soon after I came to EUCOM, listening to the daily intelligence briefings, I began to get the sense that all this wasn’t going to be an aberration but a sign of the way things were going to be happening for a while. For instance, some of the really sharp intelligence analysts had begun to suggest that the Balkans might start coming apart. Though this tragedy was still months away, we would have been stupid not to start thinking about the possible consequences. As this and other impending crises began to show up on our radar screens, we came to realize that what we were getting into with, say, Operation Sharp Edge might not be all that unusual. The unusual might become the usual.

All this manifested itself in increased day-to-day tasks. The Crisis Action Team that had been put together for Operation Sharp Edge was left in place to deal with all of these ongoing crises and operational missions.

One of my first orders from Snuffy Smith was to get out and visit our components — the four service and the special operations subordinate commands. “Spend most of your time with the Army, Air Force, and Special Operations people,” he said. “You already know the Navy and the Marine Corps.”

I didn’t know it then, but Snuffy’s “get out and get acquainted” directive was the start of something, launching me on a series of trips that took me pretty regularly out of the nest: I spent most of my time at EUCOM away from our home base. It turned out that there was always some exercise, conference, or crisis area where they needed to send somebody on the staff, and only a general would do. I always volunteered for these. Since I always wanted to get the whole experience, I was willing to travel wherever I could get it; so I was constantly on the road. And I enjoyed the hell out of it. I just loved it.

I used to kid my wife Debbie. “You’re a bachelorette,” I told her. She took it well, though. She’s a resourceful, independent woman.

Since we had our own airplanes and helicopters and could travel easily, during my first weeks on the job I would take a day or two here and a day or two there to visit our components. I didn’t have a lot of time because the crises started hitting fast and hard, but I had enough to get out and get a sense of who we were working with — how they functioned, how they were organized, what they were like, and what were their capabilities.

As I traveled about, I got to see the vestiges of the Cold War — the massive prepositioned stocks in storage sites throughout Europe (including caves in northern Norway); the vast complex of bases and caserns around the continent; and the total orientation toward fighting a major land and air war in the center of Europe. This Cold War construct had served us well for half a century, but it was a difficult paradigm to restructure. Time and events were passing it by.

I wasn’t sure we could adjust fast enough.

Probably the high point of these visits was my first encounters with two splendid officers, Brigadier General Dick Potter and Major General Jim Jamerson. Potter ran the Special Operations Command at EUCOM — SOCEUR. Jamerson was the director of operations at the U.S. Air Force Europe (USAFE) headquarters. During the coming months he went on to command several joint task forces on EUCOM missions. (He later became a four-star general and the DCINC of EUCOM.)

Potter was a tough and colorful old Special Forces (SF) soldier, a consummate pro with more operational experience than anyone I knew, including major combat experience in Vietnam. His wealth of knowledge and experience had made him one of the premier people in Special Forces circles.

He was very operationally oriented and combat savvy in a straightforward, no-nonsense way (he didn’t tolerate fools). He got difficult things done efficiently, effectively, and thoroughly; and he’d put together an extremely competent staff; his people accomplished their missions extremely well. (Snuffy and I had tremendous respect for him.)

I liked Dick instantly. We were kindred souls, both of us brigadiers, sharing nearly identical views on operational issues. And since it happened that we were neighbors, our families got to know each other. So we hit it off right away and became close friends.

Jim Jamerson was the Air Force guy we dealt with day to day, and was one of the best joint officers. The first time I met him I could see that he really had his stuff together; he was sharp and perceptive, yet cooperative, responsive, and very easy to deal with.

I got to know him a lot better later on, working with him when he commanded Operation Proven Force — the joint task force air strikes and Special Operations missions we launched into Iraq out of Turkey during the First Gulf War. I worked under him as his deputy when he commanded Provide Comfort — the humanitarian relief effort that saved the lives of tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees after the Gulf War. Both experiences convinced me of his skills and brilliance. Like Potter, he was a great operator, with tremendous strength of character, a great leader, and always willing to accept new ideas and innovate.

We also became close friends.

I experienced many strange adventures with these two warriors over the next two years.

Big changes continued to pile up faster than anyone could handle them — German reunification, troop reductions, peace dividends, opportunities and problems rising from the opening to the east, a restructuring of NATO, a restructuring of Europe… and of course the New World Order (whatever that meant). It was all very heady.

So heady that very few noticed the fundamental conflict between what was called the “peace dividend” and the actual work it would take to reorder the world.

By late summer of 1990, what I was hearing from our leaders made it clear that the peace dividend was far more important to them than the reordering. They were looking at the fall of the Soviet Empire as though it was a winning lottery ticket that would let us cut defense spending, cut our troops and bring them home, close down overseas military bases, and use the money saved for all kinds of worthy projects (or tax cuts). The free world had triumphed, nobody ever again would suffer under the threat of communism, and all would be right with the world.

What I didn’t see was anybody trying to ensure that this new order would actually come into existence. Order doesn’t come out of chance. Somebody has to design it and make it happen.

Before the collapse of the USSR, the twentieth century had passed through two major democratic attempts to reorder the world — President Wilson’s after World War One and President Truman’s and George Marshall’s after World War Two. We were now embarked on the third. But now no one was trying to shape the new order. No one seemed to think we needed a vision. It would all work out on its own.

I could only wonder at that.

It seemed to me that our “victory” in the Cold War over the Soviet Union, or the Communist World, or whatever we might want to call it, had presented challenges similar to those we took on in Europe and Asia after World War Two. (The failure to address the challenges presented by World War One had led to the continuation of that war twenty years later.) Marshall and other visionaries had recognized the need to reshape the conditions that had given birth to the war, knowing that failure might make us again have to repeat it.

Now, as then, we were in a postwar situation. But here, the challenge wasn’t necessarily to reshape the conditions that had led to the war. The new threats were not going to emerge from out of the Soviet Union. Rather, the challenge was to reshape the world in the absence of the bipolar structure that had held all the other potential competing — or disruptive — forces in check. We had to replace the bipolar world order with a new structure that would create new balance, control, and justice. The alternative — the disorder — would unleash uncontrollable horrors… a chaos of failed states armed with WMD and exporting terror.

It was clear that the bipolar environment we had lived under for half a century had suppressed forces few politicians, statesmen, and foreign affairs analysts had paid much attention to. But now that the bipolar containment was off, the threats had broken loose.

During the Cold War, no one ever let a little remote country in the middle of nowhere go wobbly, because every little country was involved in the competition between the Soviets and the Free World. Each side invested whatever it took to keep the little countries in their camp. Though these investments went by names like “foreign aid” and “humanitarian assistance,” they were actually payoffs. These ended with the end of the bipolar world structure. There wasn’t a lot of support for humanitarian assistance and nation building once the Soviet Union had faded away.

The East-West competition had suppressed an underlying conflict (that emerged most visibly toward the latter part of the century): the North-South competition between the first world and the third world. This competition had never appeared serious because the East-West competition kept it suppressed. But when that was gone, it was immediately evident that the third world (South) had a serious quarrel with the first world (North).

Every world crisis we face today is a manifestation of that. Whether it’s the drugs and the political failures and instability in Latin America, the turmoil of extremism and violence as the Islamic world adapts to modernity, or the chronic health problems, deprivations, and violent anarchy in Africa… all of these were brewing as the last century neared its end. They were there; but kept down. They were secondary to the East-West struggle, which effectively suppressed the concerns of those who served the first world; namely, the third world. When the East-West struggle died, the third world came out fighting… but in unexpected ways.

It took us a while to see that we were in a conflict, and longer to begin to recognize its nature. The signs weren’t instantly obvious, we were feeling very good about ourselves after our great victory in the fifty-year war, and we were starting to enjoy the benefits of the emerging globalization. Globalized businesses, information technologies, borderless nations — all the webs that were increasingly linking everyone and everything in the first world did not inspire the same sense of hope and opportunity in the third world. They didn’t see the wonder. They saw inside the palace doors and knew they weren’t allowed in.

We took a stab at doing something about that. We began to invite them to our party… but without allowing them a place at the head table. (They saw this as patronizing and prejudiced.) We thought we were bringing in people who were seeking democracy, capitalism, freer trade, and a better life. We didn’t realize we were at the same time very subtly putting down a third world that already felt alienated, oppressed, and suppressed, and wanted to take on the first world.

The conflict that resulted is not primarily a fight between state and state — third world states versus first world states… Yes, we’ve seen state-against-state wars (such as those with Iraq); but that’s not where the serious action is. Again, we have to understand that this is a different kind of conflict. That is to say, it’s not a conflict born out of the ashes of some system that failed; namely, the former Soviet Union (as World War Two was born from the ashes of World War One). It’s a conflict with non-state entities.

By non-state entity, I’m not just referring to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and other violent adversaries but also to globalized corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have significant clout and power.

The global information revolution we’re now entering enhances the growing power and influence of non-state entities. So does the fading away of national boundaries (we’re becoming a borderless society) and the migration of vast numbers of third world people into first world nations (we’re becoming a transient society). Meanwhile, globalized extremist networks are doing everything in their power to bring down the structures that hold our societies together.

This whole new world was simmering underneath the Cold War. And we’ve had to meet this challenge unprepared. We should have gone full throttle into a visionary program like the Marshall Plan that would have injected energy, education, money — and hope — into the third world. Nothing like that happened.

The first changes to affect me as deputy J-3 involved the struggle over “peace dividend” troop reductions and the reshaping of NATO. These were soon followed by efforts to create new and productive relationships between NATO and the militaries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

In the summer of 1990, when we had perhaps 300,000 troops in Europe, forces back in Washington were already saying, “It’s over. NATO’s an anachronism. It’s dead. Let’s close it down. We’ve got to bring back troops. We’ve got to close military bases. We’ve got to start getting rid of troops — taking them off the payroll.” Within weeks, these hazy words had gone from thought to action. No real thought had been given to consequences — what we were losing, what we actually needed militarily, what these troops were actually doing for us both inside and outside Europe. It was all a matter of numbers: So many bodies equal so many dollars. The more bodies we can axe, the more dollars we free up. All for the sake of a vague “dividend.”

Over the next weeks, I watched the disintegration of the Army in Europe. It really worried me. All of a sudden all kinds of career officers and NCOs were simply told to pack up and find other employment.

One day, twenty-four lieutenant colonels got RIF (Reduction in Force) orders: “Go home. We don’t need you anymore.” Great young sergeants, with careers ahead of them, who wanted to stay in, were given an ultimatum: “Get out now and we’ll give you fifteen thousand dollars. Stay in and take your chance. You could be riffed, cut, and get nothing.”

“What to do?”

The officers were all in the same boat. “I don’t know what to tell you,” they said to the NCOs when they asked.

By good luck, the thoughts about disbanding NATO remained only thoughts. Though NATO had been born out of the conflict with the communists, it had come to fill many other essential needs. The alliance had to be maintained not just for the defense of the participating countries, but because it had become an organization where competent, responsible nations working closely together could actually get important things done that they could not accomplish on their own. In so doing, they were showing the rest of the world how to do it. NATO had become an irreplaceable model for everyone else.

Disbanding it was exactly the reverse of what had to be done. We needed to enlarge it. Fortunately, we did that. Later events in the Balkans and the NATO expansion to the east proved the continued importance of this vital institution to the stability of Europe.

Thank God for General Galvin. This World War Two enlisted man who’d risen through the ranks had the wisdom, experience, and prestige to keep us ahead of the dynamic challenges. Of all our leaders facing the new, post-Soviet world, he was the one who came closest to the vision George Marshall had given us fifty years before.

General Galvin did what he could to stop the slide in our troop strength: “We’re still going to have troop requirements in Europe,” he said, in essence. “Let’s figure out what they are going to be before we bring everybody home. Let’s figure out what new missions we are going to have. Maybe we ought to think about leveling off at 150,000 troops. Wait awhile, think everything through, maybe readjust NATO’s structure.”

The people back in Washington hit back at him: “Bullshit. 150,000’s nothing. That’s just a point on the way down. We’re cutting a lot deeper than that.”

“Wait a minute,” he replied. “We can’t go down to zero here. We have a position in Europe and NATO that we can’t abandon. How many troops do we need to make that credible? Is it 100,000? Is it a corps? Is it part of a corps? Should these forces be integrated?” (That is, for example, a corps composed of both German and American divisions.) “What’s the purpose of NATO? What do we need it for? How do we have to support that?”

The debate went back and forth, the Washington end of it was real down and dirty (as is the custom too often in Washington)… and the effect on our forces in Europe was devastating. With all the disruption and uncertainty, you could forget about morale.

But General Galvin kept plugging away. He was always the gentleman, yet always relentless, in the best Army tradition.

He knew NATO could not remain as it had been. It had to be reshaped. But he had a clear idea what form that should take (and it eventually took that form): He saw that NATO would grow to include the Eastern Europeans, that it would restructure its mission and begin to look at “out of area” operations — operations away from what had been its main objective.[36] He saw the importance of a continuing American leadership role in the alliance.

Meanwhile, he worried about Russia. The situation there remained troubling. The challenge from Russia was no longer about global hegemony but about the continued uncertainty over what was actually going on there, and what would come out of that. He felt the growing desperation in the former Soviet Union. He was deeply concerned that cutting it off from the West and letting it go adrift to sort itself out could bring serious problems.

His solution: First, to use NATO and the NATO context to connect with the FSU — and particularly with the military (to ensure the process of change was orderly and headed toward democratization). NATO had been their enemy. But that was no longer the case. Now NATO would be their guide on the road to positive change. Second: He realized that we needed a new Marshall Plan for the FSU. This would not have been a gift but an investment in future peace, stability, and prosperity.

Tragically, much of his vision was ignored. Washington was initially blind to his ideas about connecting with the Russians and the Warsaw Pact, the new Marshall Plan, and the restructuring of NATO… though later, in a different environment, many of his ideas were realized. They should have listened. He had his finger firmly on what had to be done.

A remarkable individual.

WEST MEETS EAST

In the fall of 1990, General Galvin realized his goal of connecting NATO with the military of what was still (just barely) the Soviet Union, by arranging a series of conferences — primarily in Moscow — between NATO flag officers and their Russian counterparts to discuss the role of the armed forces and military service in a democracy. The DCINC, General McCarthy, was tasked to lead the U.S. delegation, and to pick one other flag or general officer to assist him. Zinni got the call.

General Galvin had both overt and unspoken aims in this:

Because he wanted to communicate to the Russians that the real winners of the Cold War were the Soviet peoples, he did not want the NATO representatives to approach their counterparts like gloating victors dictating surrender terms. This wasn’t a victor-and-vanquished situation. This was fellow soldiers helping their new friends make the adjustment to democracy and a better, peaceful existence.

Galvin’s unspoken aim was to get a read on the role the Russian military intended to play in the fluid and erratic situation that was emerging in Moscow.

While the western side of the collapsing Iron Curtain enjoyed a peace dividend, the eastern side suffered a peace catastrophe. The sudden reductions in overseas deployment and the base closings that seemed such a windfall on one side were a potential source of political instability to the other. The Soviets were bankrupt. There was no dividend, because there was no capital… no money for the military, no money even for paychecks. High-status military officers had become nonpersons.

The Russian troops in Germany could not go home because there was no place to go. Back in Russia, families of senior officers were living in boxcars or begging on the streets.

This very unstable situation could easily blow up. There was a real worry that the once-proud Soviet military, fearing they were losing control over a country turning increasingly chaotic, would go into the streets and snatch back power from the obviously shaky Russian democracy, either returning the country to communism or instituting a hard-line military dictatorship.

The first of the conferences was held in Moscow late in 1990. It opened in the Russian Ministry of Defense (the Russians’ Pentagon). The visit — a first for American militaries — was a thrilling moment for Zinni.

The delegation entered the building through the ceremonial entrance, which opened into an enormous marble-walled hall. White marble tablets along the sides displayed the Order of Lenin and all the other awards of the Soviet Union. After a brief wait, tall doors at the far end of the hall swung open and out came an impressive phalanx of uniforms, Russian generals and marshals, led by the Defense Minister, Marshal Shaposhnikov, all large men, all marching in unison, their stomping tread making loud echoes as they approached. They were so formal and official, Zinni wondered for a moment if they hadn’t gotten their script wrong and come expecting a surrender ceremony. But the thought passed.

There were formal greetings and Russian-style handshakes (very stiff, very deliberate, and very hearty), and then the NATO officers were ushered into a conference room and seated at a long table.

The initial discussions, led by General McCarthy, focused on General Galvin’s message: The NATO delegation had come to celebrate a great victory for the Soviet people and to work hand in hand with the Russian military.

The Russians seemed to accept this gesture of goodwill… though without much visible enthusiasm.

Later, McCarthy and the others in his delegation subtly probed to detect if the Russians saw their role as being agents of political change or if they intended to take a more commanding part in the new Russia. It very quickly became apparent that they didn’t have much enthusiasm for politics, either.

After the initial, formal presentations, the Russian and NATO officers split up into more specialized groups, and later transferred to a conference center outside Moscow. Zinni was paired off with the Russian director of operations (the counterpart of the J-3 at the Pentagon); they talked cordially about operations issues[37].

As the day wore on, Zinni began to pick up strange vibes from this impressive collection of senior Russians. Not the vibes you might expect: He had zero sense that the Russian leaders were dangerous, or posed a threat. Far from it. They were not hostile; they were not unfriendly. Though they recognized that their system was defeated, they did not seem defeated or crushed or resentful. On the contrary, they were welcoming. Marshal Shaposhnikov and his senior staff were cordial and pleasant. But they never probed, never took initiative, never showed the slightest curiosity. If there had ever been fire in this group, the fire was dead.

At first, Zinni wondered why they didn’t seem especially enthusiastic about the NATO visit, or get immersed in any way in the discussion, but it soon became clear that they weren’t very enthusiastic about anything. Neither did he see any burning resistance… or any burning sense of cooperation; yet they proved to be as cooperative as the Americans wanted them to be.

For all their unresponsiveness and lethargy, the Russians were amazingly open… and this from some of the most secretive people in the world. Though none of them would take the initiative, they would certainly respond — and with astonishing candor. If asked about the change to democracy, they’d spill their guts. If asked about problems in their military, they’d show their dirty laundry. They didn’t blink at talking about the severe hazing in the ranks or the epidemic of alcoholism.[38] And Zinni was shocked to see the openly permitted dissent and criticism of the senior leadership by junior officers.

And yet — again — the unexpected openness did not carry with it a burning sense that “We have to do something about our problems.” There was no sense that these senior leaders expected to do much of anything.[39]

The truth, Zinni concluded later, was that the Russian military leaders were just there. Events had blown by them, and they were going through the motions. They had no plan. They had no vision — good or bad — about where they fit, what they would do. They were just along for the ride. Their message to the NATO delegation: “This is happening. You’re here. Okay. This is what we do today. And fine, you’re nice people, we like you. But don’t expect us to give a damn.”

The organization had resigned itself to being passengers in the car. The car was going wherever it was going, and they were along for the ride. They didn’t intend to drive it, steer it, or put the brakes on. They were just in there.

To Zinni, this was simply an astonishing mental state. It was beyond his experience. He couldn’t figure it out.

The good news, he realized, was the younger officers. The open dissent and criticism he’d noticed was a sign of hope. Many colonels proved to be fiery, outspoken reformers, railing at the collapse of the military and the corruption of senior officers. The younger officers were far more curious than their elders. They asked questions about America and Europe. They made it clear that they hadn’t bought the line they’d been trained to follow, that NATO was the enemy they were supposed to hate. “You guys are not bad guys,” they told the delegation. “We need to change things and learn from you.”

The most outrageously outspoken of the younger officers turned out to be the aide assigned to Zinni, a cadet from the Propaganda Corps named Vlad. Vlad, who had learned to speak English by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, salted his conversations with Schwarzenegger clichés — and Schwarzenegger-type attitudes. His irreverence got him in constant trouble with the stern, hard-nosed, never smiling, but extremely beautiful, female captain who supervised the aides. She was always shooting him with killer looks, but he never seemed to notice them. Zinni came to call him “Vlad the Impaler,” after his ability to skewer himself.[40]

In his comic Austro-Russian American accent, Vlad gave Zinni the low-down on life for the troops in the barracks: There was no morale. There was no unit cohesion and unit pride. There was no leadership (the senior leadership spent much of the time drunk). Vlad’s pay was so low (he got the equivalent of $4 U.S. every month) that by the end of the month he had no money; if his mother didn’t send him food, he was in trouble. He laughed: The old indoctrination had tried to promote the belief that America and the decadent West were on the edge of collapse, where the truth was the reverse. Everything he’d been led to believe about communism had been a lie.

It was hard to believe how far the great Soviet military machine had fallen.

But they were still capable of grand, old-style Russian hospitality, highlighted by lavish banquets for the NATO delegation. For Vlad these were a gift from the gods. He had never seen such meals. He wolfed them down like a starving man (which was not far from the truth), and drank with no less fervor; he never left a banquet sober. “For God’s sake,” he pleaded with Zinni, “I’ve gotta eat. Keep your toasts and speeches short. If you make them long, I’ll have to translate, and I’ll starve.”

On a trip one evening to the famous Moscow Circus, Vlad grabbed the tour bus microphone and performed a politically incorrect monologue aimed at the Russian leaders. This did not amuse the senior Russian officers on the bus. When Zinni told him to cool it, he just laughed, “Hey, man, no pain, no gain.”

Vlad was always in trouble, but he was also shrewd and a survivor; and it turns out that he had what amounted to an escape clause from the Russian Army. Though his father was Russian, his mother was Latvian. This meant he’d be able to choose his homeland in the emerging breakup of the USSR — Latvia or Russia. Since Latvia was becoming independent and would have its own military, he could, if he chose, join the Latvian Army… This was not an easy decision. The Russian Army was obviously a very bad fit; but did he want to make the big leap to Latvia? (Zinni never learned what happened to his irreverent young aide.)

The Moscow Circus’s grand finale was the magical appearance out of nowhere of a man on a white horse, who raced around the ring carrying a Russian flag. The crowd roared with joy. It was the Russian and not the Soviet flag they were cheering. One month later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially ceased to exist.

Some things took a long time to change.

On a shopping expedition near the U.S. Embassy, Zinni got interested in a Christmas present for his wife Debbie. Since he was in uniform, he was treated with special attention (he didn’t realize how special), but that did not spare him from the incredibly tedious process everyone had to go through to buy anything at a communist store. The idea was to provide as many jobs as possible, which meant that the purchaser had to pass through multiple lines, each presided over by a clerk who had zero interest in serving customers. First, you stood in a line to wait your turn to look at an item. Then, if you wanted it, you were given a chit to pay for it at the end of another line. You then took your chit to another line to wait for your purchase to be wrapped.

Zinni went through this process to buy a Father Frost tea cozy (Debbie collected Santas; Father Frost is the Russian version of Santa).

Back home a few weeks later, as she was getting the Zinni house ready for Christmas, Debbie took Father Frost out of his box, planning to put him on display in the dining room, when she discovered a strange device in his pouch of toys.

The next day, curious, Zinni took the device into the EUCOM security section. They confirmed what he expected: It was a listening device… a bug.

Before taking it in, he yelled into it: “The Cold War’s over!”

He doubted if anybody heard him.

Shortly after the Gulf War, Zinni took part in a Marine Corps delegation that visited several former Eastern bloc nations[41]—as part of the growing military-to-military exchange programs developed by EUCOM. Unlike his trip to Moscow, this proved to be a hopeful experience. Eastern Europe was adapting far more easily to democratization and a free-market economy than their eastern neighbors in the FSU. Unlike the Russians, they were ready and eager for the change, having, in their past, experienced free political and economic systems, while earlier Hungarian, Czech, and Polish rebellions against their Soviet masters had given their enthusiasm some bite.

Since this visit came just after the Gulf War, the former Warsaw Pact militaries were in something like shock over the quick and total defeat of Iraq’s military, trained, organized, and equipped as they were by the Soviets. Since the rout had serious implications for other Soviet-style militaries, Zinni was bombarded by questions about American tactics and capabilities, as well as considerable curiosity about how Americans had viewed them as potential adversaries. His answer: “We saw you as formidable enemies; we respected you; and we hoped we wouldn’t have to fight you.” His answer — which happened to be the truth — pleased them.

But their chief concern was not about facing the past but about facing the future. At that time NATO’s expansion was beginning to surface; and all of them badly wanted to bring their military services up to speed to join it. They were eager to show Zinni the military reforms they had already implemented, they briefed him on those that were planned… and of course they were quick to tell him that they needed all the help the U.S. could give.

The most striking change for Zinni was the reorientation of defenses. For obvious reasons, Warsaw Pact nations had not been permitted forces facing to the east. Now that had changed; and they had organized allaroundsecurity, with forces positioned on all of their borders. This must have been demoralizing to the Russians.

Yugoslavia, even then, was already a special and dangerous case. After the death of Tito and the fall of the Soviets, the country had fragmented, and old ethnic hatreds had reemerged. In 1990, the descent into ethnic violence had started in Bosnia, with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all fighting each other. Of course, the ordinary people who just wanted to live their lives suffered.

That year, EUCOM put together the first of many aid missions to Bosnia, a humanitarian airlift operation called “Provide Promise.” Though Provide Promise was actually implemented by the Air Force, the EUCOM J-3, as the Unified Command headquarters, monitored and controlled the operation and supplied intelligence. This new priority caused Zinni to take in the Balkan reports and briefings provided by the command’s intelligence experts and analysts — an extremely knowledgeable and insightful collection of young majors and captains.

They were not optimistic about the future of what had been called Yugoslavia. “This place was an artificial nation,” they reported. “Tito was strong enough to hold it together by force of personality, but there was never such a thing as Yugoslavia. Its pieces were never meant to be joined together; and it’s ready to burst. It’s going to come apart like an old suitcase.”

Though these insights won’t be news to anyone now, better than ten years later, at the time they were prescient. The EUCOM analysts saw the future of the Balkans much earlier than anybody else. Other than Zinni, they got few listeners. And he was in a quandary about how to respond.

“How important are the Balkans?” he asked himself. “Are they vital to American or European security? Can we just let the region go and blow itself up?”

Zinni’s answer: “If we want to stop it, we’re going to have to get involved in this. Provide Promise does not go far enough. It’s a small Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound, and it’s only going to get worse. We need to get involved early, when the situation is resolvable. We need to consider an international peacekeeping mission that only the U.S. can put together. It’s pay me now or pay me more later.”

Meanwhile, everybody in Europe and the West in general was in the euphoric stage of the peace dividend. Nobody was interested in taking on the problem. Though others in EUCOM, like General McCarthy, saw the value of early involvement, they couldn’t generate interest in the kind of operation that would have to be mounted.

Eventually, of course, the problems spread throughout the region and forced the UN and NATO to face them.

Flash forward to 1992, near the end of Zinni’s EUCOM tour. Zinni was asked to sit in for his boss on a first-time staff brief for the new CINC, General Shalikashvilli. During the briefings, General McCarthy asked each person on the staff to give the new CINC their prediction of the single most challenging issue that would dominate his time and attention during his tour.

“That’s going to be the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia,” Zinni told Shalikashvilli, without hesitation, basing this statement not on intuition or inspiration but on hard analysis and the day-to-day involvement he and his colleagues had already been going through in handling the growing problems in the Balkans. These could easily be seen by anyone who was paying attention.

His words, however, did not sit well with everyone at the briefing. The EUCOM director of intelligence, for example, an Air Force major general, jumped all over him. “You’re crazy, Zinni,” he declared. “Everyone knows that dealing with the former Soviet Union will be the major issue facing us.”

What would that general say now?

The other regions in the EUCOM area of responsibility also generated their share of crises.

In Africa, three Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO) were launched during Zinni’s time at EUCOM. All of them were run out of the EUCOM Operations Directorate.

The first of these was Zinni’s earliest EUCOM crisis.

Operation Sharp Edge in Liberia (mentioned earlier) was conducted by the Sixth Fleet’s Amphibious Ready Group, after fighting between various brutal local factions threatened foreigners. It started out as an evacuation mission, but when the ambassador realized he had Marines on hand to protect him he decided he might as well hang in there. And the quick in-and-out evacuation turned into a several-months-long operation to provide security for the embassy. This required a large military presence, because of the chaos and slaughter in the streets of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. And this in turn stirred up a serious debate over whether the mission was worth tying up key Navy-Marine assets of EUCOM’s fleet. The embassy was not in fact doing anybody in Liberia much good. Though the battle went upstairs to the State Department and the Department of Defense, months went by before it was finally ended as Liberia calmed after the assassination of the President of the country, Samuel K. Doe.

The other two African NEOs were executed by Dick Potter’s Special Operations Command, who conducted flawless operations in Sierra Leone (Operation Silver Anvil) and Zaire.

THE GULF WAR

The Persian Gulf War added tremendous and unexpected demands on top of all the changes and crises EUCOM was facing.

In the Cold War, EUCOM had always been the center of focus — the priority Unified Command. The theater had traditionally been the receiver of forces from elsewhere for NATO employment. Even during a major war (like Vietnam), the command never gave up forces. It was totally geared to take forces in, not to give forces out. That was about to change. EUCOM was now being called on to be a supporting Unified Command and to flow forces out to another theater of operations.

General Galvin immediately saw the significance of this new role for EUCOM: It was ideally suited to become a forward base supporting operations elsewhere from the well-established bases in Europe. The strong relationships among NATO nations, forged over half a century, could be used to build the strategic bridge necessary to reach both the Gulf, and, later, other world trouble spots.

The job ahead was enormous. Creating the strategic bridge meant working out air and sea lines of communications, overflight rights, diplomatic clearances, sea transit permissions. Since most of the troops and supplies for CENTCOM from the States had to flow through EUCOM’s area of responsibility, EUCOM was responsible for it all. EUCOM had to worry about getting them down there, protecting them, and coordinating with the countries involved.

It was an entirely new experience for the command, which had to redesign not only their philosophy of getting such things done but the mechanics of doing it. They had to work through all the complexities of the German rail system, barges, road transport, and convoys to the ports. They had to work through the most efficient use of all the ports — using Rotterdam and the ports on the North Sea and the Baltic as well as the more obvious Mediterranean ports.

Galvin’s direction to the staffs and commands was simple: “When you get a request for support from CENTCOM, the answer is yes. Then you can ask what the question is.”

During Operation Desert Shield, the buildup phase of the war, the EUCOM J-3 formed the Battle Staff to handle the massive transit of air and sea craft moving forces and supplies to the Persian Gulf. Early in this process, they were tasked with sending the U.S. Army Europe’s (US-AREUR) largest fighting unit, the heavily armored 7th Corps,[42] plus other units and material to the U.S. Central Command in the Gulf. This significant accomplishment was superbly handled by General Butch Saint’s USAREUR.

Though the EUCOM staffs were working round the clock on the massive logistics effort, they all hoped for a more direct involvement. But it appeared that this would be their only role in the conflict… until a much more interesting mission dropped in their lap (and allowed Zinni to “get out in the field” on a series of operations generated by the Desert Storm attack).

Tony Zinni continues:

As Desert Shield was beginning to fall in place, Major General Jim Jamerson, the USAFE[43] operations officer, called up and said, “Hey, for what it’s worth, a number of our young, energetic, bright young majors have looked at the upcoming attack on Iraq and come up with a pretty good new idea. This is what they’ve been saying: ‘Look, we have a chance to open up a northern second front in the air. The air defenses at that end of Iraq are not very formidable. If we could base out of Turkey, we could conduct air operations from up there.’ ”

My first reaction was, “No way. Turkey will never approve this, and neither will CENTCOM. This is CENTCOM’s fight; they’re not going to like EUCOM coming in and adding their piece.”

But the plan caught the interest of Generals Galvin and McCarthy; and the young majors came down to EUCOM headquarters, bearing maps, intel on the Iraqi radar rings and air defenses, info on the bases in Turkey — and all the other elements a good plan requires.

“Well, hell,” McCarthy said when he’d given it a look, “let’s give it a shot.”

After clearing the proposal with Washington and the Central Command, Jim Jamerson, Snuffy Smith, and I went down to Ankara to brief our ambassador, Mort Abramowitz, and (if all went well) to present the plan to the Turkish general staff.

Again, my expectations were not high. I thought we’d get told: “Dumb idea. Go home. Are you kidding?”

But Mort Abramowitz proved to be positive. “It’s possible,” he said. “Let’s do it. I think the Turks will be open to the idea.”

He was right. When we briefed the Turks, they approved the plan to conduct the operations from air bases in southeastern Turkey. I was amazed not only that this thing was falling into place, but how quickly.

A joint task force was formed under Jim Jamerson’s command, consisting of the air component to conduct attacks in northern Iraq and a Special Operations component, under Dick Potter, tasked to provide Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) and some psyops. Both the JTF and the operation were called “Proven Force.”

During Desert Storm, the JTF attacked numerous targets that would have been difficult or impossible for allied air forces based in the south to hit. The sanctuary of Iraq’s northern air bases was taken away and Saddam was forced to send his planes to Iran in order to avoid destruction.

The EUCOM planners kept thinking: “Since the Turks were being so remarkably cooperative, maybe we could open up a second ground front.” When we talked about the possibility, the Turks seemed game to do it. But by the time we took the plan to Schwarzkopf, it was fairly late in the air war (and too close to the launch of the ground attack), and he said no. “I don’t object to the principle,” he said, “but it’s too late. My plan is in place. Adding to it now would screw things up too much.”

Back to the drawing board: The Army had developed a deception capability that created the appearance of a major headquarters. Now seemed to be a good time to use it. The idea was to seem to move 5th Corps headquarters down to Turkey as a prelude to a major ground effort from the north.

But once again, we came in too late. “It’s a great idea,” CENTCOM said, “but we just can’t accommodate it. We’re just too far into our other plans.” If we had come to him earlier, I think Schwarzkopf would have bought into it.

Another disappointment came when they were making the choice for Jim Jamerson’s ground deputy. I would have loved the job, but Snuffy wouldn’t let me go. However, at my suggestion, the job went to Charlie Wilhelm, another Marine. It actually worked out later that I was able to spend a lot of time down in the AOR; Snuffy and I were down there often. And I also had a chance to spend time in the field with Dick Potter and his troops doing CSAR training exercises in the snow-covered hills of southeastern Turkey.

I also had the opportunity to fly on the AWACS over Mosul and Kirkuk in northern Iraq as B-52s and F-111s bombed airfields there. You can’t beat the view from the cockpit as the bombs explode and the sky is filled with antiaircraft fire.

These missions were obviously interesting and exciting, but the real learning experience for me came from getting ready for them — going through the planning and briefs. Because Jamerson and Potter let me spend a great deal of time both with the planners and the troops who executed these operations, I was able to get a detailed understanding of how air campaigns and special operations missions were run. This invaluable joint experience served me well in the future.

I was especially fascinated with the complexities of air campaigning, a new experience for me. Though I had run air operations at a much smaller level in the Marine Corps as a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) commander, this was my first exposure to planning and developing an air mission, generating the air tasking orders, and actually taking part in the operation… And watching the operation unfold with a master like Jim Jamerson was worth a year at War College. I went through all the briefings, the planning, the workups; and during the AWACS mission, I was in back with the guys watching them pull all their thousands of pieces together — the barrier CAPs (Combat Air Patrols — the fighter umbrella), the tankers, and the bombers.

Later on, when I was CENTCOM commander running air attacks against Iraq, my familiarity with master air attack plans came in very handy. Not a bad piece of acquired knowledge for a Marine infantrymen.

During the war, Iraq struck Israel with Scud missiles. Because of their range and their potential lethality (they could carry nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads), Scuds can be delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction. Actually, their uncertain accuracy and Saddam’s well-founded fear that using his WMD would provoke even worse retaliation limited the Iraqi Scuds to use as terror weapons. Though they did little damage, the terror they caused was very real; and the Israelis were outraged. It doesn’t take much to provoke the Israelis into acts of retaliation. As Saddam knew very well, an Israeli retaliatory air attack on Iraq stood a strong chance of causing the breakup of the Coalition President Bush had carefully constructed. We wanted to prevent that.

Iraqi Scuds were first launched at Israel on the afternoon of January 17. EUCOM immediately dispatched a U.S. Army Patriot unit to Israel. And an Israeli battery that was then training stateside was rushed home and put into operation; a Dutch battery also joined the force. The operation, called “Patriot Defender,” was under the command of a superb U.S. Army colonel, Dave Heebner (later a general).

The Patriots in Israel were then linked to our early warning facilities, whose hub was in the U.S. This system was a complicated, jerry-rigged affair: from satellite indications of missile launchings, to the U.S. base for analysis and determination of the missile’s flight path, to the EUCOM command center, and then to the Patriot unit. In seven to eight minutes, the Patriot batteries could be cued to the incoming Scuds for engagement and destruction. Seconds later, the Patriots began actual engagement.

Because of the continuing questions about Israel’s commitment to stay out of the fight, a decision was made to send a not-too-senior general officer from EUCOM to Israel to check on our Patriot unit and to provide a friendly presence to reassure the Israelis.

I jumped at the opportunity and was on a jet to Tel Aviv a few hours later.

I moved in with the Patriot unit… actually lived in the tents with the young troops in the Patriot battery, observed their operations in the command and control vans, and watched them go through their procedures when they shot.

I also spent time at the Israeli battery, and of course paid calls on a number of senior Israeli commanders… not always an experience I’d care to repeat. In their view, America was holding them back from the retaliatory attack that was their right and their obligation. They were incredibly determined and incredibly frustrated, and they really beat up on me about it. Though they understood why we’d asked them to refrain from retaliating, this did not sit well with them, and I felt they would not sit back much longer.

Meanwhile, the Patriot crews had learned from each Scud attack.

There’ve been a lot of misconceptions about the Patriots and their capabilities… and about their perceived failures. Some reports even claimed — falsely — that they didn’t work at all, as though all the Scud warheads got through untouched. Let’s set the record straight.

First, the Patriots were designed to be point defense systems. That is, they were built to protect small areas like air bases or command centers. So if you’re at air base X, and you have your Patriots there, and the Patriots intercept and stop an attacking missile, fine. But whatever’s in the sky still has to come down. When all the junk left over from the Patriot and the attacking missile doesn’t crash down on the air base, that’s a success. But our Patriots had to defend the Tel Aviv-Haifa megalopolis. (We set up our batteries there; the Dutch battery was sent to defend Jerusalem.) When all that junk scatters over a metropolitan area like that, you’ve got problems. People say, “Wait a minute. What the hell? You obviously didn’t vaporize the thing. And a piece the size of an engine block just came through my roof.” I don’t want to deny this guy’s distress. His complaint’s legitimate. But we should also be aware that a Scud warhead going off in the same place would have ruined his day even worse.

Second, these were new systems. When the Patriots first went in, we had never used them in battle. The crews had to learn how best to engage them. They made mistakes. For instance, at first they put them on what you might call “automatic mode” (which is the fastest way to get missiles into the air against attacking missiles). But when they were on automatic, some of the Patriots were launching on atmospheric clutter. The lessons learned from these Patriot Gulf War experiences led to many needed improvements in the system.

To make matters even more difficult and complicated: The Iraqis were often shooting their Scuds at greater ranges than they were designed for (the Iraqi scientists had hot-rodded modifications that allowed them to reach Israel from western Iraq; some of their Scuds landed in the Mediterranean). But since the Scuds weren’t designed to take that kind of stress, they frequently broke up into hundreds of pieces during their descent.

When the lieutenant in the van saw these breakups in his scope, he had to make a choice fast: “What do I shoot at?” He’d pick out a likely piece in all the clutter, and shoot at it. If he didn’t pick the warhead, then it would continue on and blow up somewhere in Israel.

I know what the guys in the vans had to deal with. I saw the tape replays of previous engagements.

But these were very resourceful guys.

Later on, as they studied the tapes (they replayed them over and over), they came to realize that it was possible to distinguish the warhead from the clutter. The warhead, they began to see, continued to travel at its original velocity, while the other pieces slowed down. This was not at all obvious to an untrained eye. The difference was almost imperceptible. I couldn’t see it. These sharp young soldiers could.

Once they had that little gleam of an advantage, they began to be able to pick out the warhead and hit it. And as time went on, they got even more proficient.

All the noise about the shortcomings of the Patriots did not affect the Israeli public. The Patriot soldiers were their heroes. You could see Patriot logos on signs everywhere; and “Patriot” became the name du jour for all sorts of new products (I saw an advertisement for Patriot condoms). Now that the Israeli Patriot crews were the darlings of the people (my Israeli air defense officer escort, Colonel Romen Moshe, told me), everyone in the Air Force wanted to join the unit, which upset the pilots (who always consider themselves the elites in any air force).

Another learning experience for me took place at an Israeli military base where top Israeli missile experts had been gathered and set up at what they called “the Scud Farm.” The experts would go out the instant a Scud impacted, gather up all the pieces they could find, and bring them back and reconstruct what they could. (It was amazing how fast they could do that.) They’d lay them out in a large open area outside like a big 3-D jigsaw puzzle and study the configuration of the missile. There were several possible variations. What they learned gave them insights into Iraqi missile capabilities and how to counter them.

On a tour of the reconstructed Scuds at the Scud Farm (a few partially reconstructed Patriots were also there), I was given insights into what they had learned. “Look,” they said, pointing to a collection of Scud pieces, “here Saddam tried to enlarge the warhead.” And pointing toward another set: “In this case, he tried to increase its fuel capacity and give it more range.”

The Iraqis were running all kinds of science projects, using a long-obsolete Soviet missile as their test bed.

The last shot they took at Israel used an all-concrete warhead, which hit somewhere in the more or less trackless southern desert. Everybody laughed. “Well, Saddam is shooting a practice round,” they said. “He’s desperate. He’s run out of warheads.”

A scientist at the Scud Farm showed me a map on the wall with all the trajectories of the Scud shots. All of them were aimed in the general direction of Tel Aviv or Haifa except this one. It had a really weird trajectory, and they were seriously concerned about it. Rumors later floated that an Israeli nuclear plant facility was the actual target. If the concrete warhead had penetrated the plant’s containment shield, there could have been a terrible catastrophe.

A few days into my trip, I had visited all the Patriot batteries except the Dutch battery on a hill outside Jerusalem. “While you’re here,” my Israeli escort suggested, “you ought to visit the Dutch battery.”

“Sure,” I said. “It would be a great experience for me.” I had never been to Jerusalem before. Here was an opportunity not only to show the flag for the Dutch but to encounter the spiritual home of my own religion.

But when I checked in with the U.S. Embassy to get their okay for the visit, the ambassador turned me down. There was a lot of sensitivity and tension in Jerusalem at that time. The Palestinians had supported Saddam; and the ambassador thought it was best to low-key the American presence until things got quieter in the city. He didn’t want any Americans there, especially senior American military.

When I told that to my escort, the Israeli colonel, he was incensed. “The hell with that,” he announced. “That’s like saying we can’t protect you. This is our country. We can take you to Jerusalem. You’re safe with us. No problem.”

“This is not a security issue,” I protested, giving him the ambassador’s position as best I could. “It’s political sensitivities.”

“Well, to hell with that,” he said, all fired up. “It’s an insult to us.” And then he took the issue up with his bosses, who agreed with him: They all wanted Zinni to visit Jerusalem. It had become a matter of face to them.

At this point, I said to myself, “Hey, Zinni, the Israelis are already angry and poised to attack, and you’re down here to keep them happy.” For the past few days, we’d worked our tails off and I’d subjected myself to a lot of slings and arrows to keep them calm and now this Jerusalem thing could maybe get them upset. I knew I had to go to Jerusalem, but I also knew I had to minimize my footprint there.

“Look,” I told the Israelis, “I’ll go to Jerusalem, but we have to do it without stirring up anybody. We just visit the battery and come back.”

“Not a problem,” my escort said. “We’ll drive out very quietly, visit the battery, and that’s it.”

We took our trip out to the Dutch battery on February 28, and it went without a hitch. We met the commander and talked to the troops. Since no Scuds had been fired at Jerusalem, they hadn’t seen action, so they didn’t have a lot of operational information; but it was a good, friendly meeting. The view from their hill overlooking Jerusalem, however, was spectacular. This was the first time I’d seen the Old City of Jerusalem, and the religious and historical significance hit me powerfully.

As Colonel Moshe and I were chatting about this, he said, “Let’s go down to the Old City.”

“No, I’d better not do that,” I thought to myself. “I’m already out here when I shouldn’t be; I shouldn’t push this thing.”

“Look,” he said. “Nobody’s around. I’ll take you to West Jerusalem; the Jewish section. You can see the city’s empty.”

He was right. Everything was quiet. People were all indoors, hunkered down.

“Listen,” he said. “We go into the Old City, go to a cafe, have a little coffee or something, and it’ll all be okay.”

And that’s what we did. We found a little cafe, with all its doors closed and its windows shuttered and taped in anticipation of Scud shots; but we could still get coffee.

We were sitting there with our cups when the end of the war hit.

It was like an angel had passed overhead. Suddenly, there was a rumbling sound. It quickly grew louder, and before we knew it thousands of people burst outdoors and came into the streets yelling. Everybody in West Jerusalem was in the streets cheering. We were swarmed (I was in my Marine cammies). Women ran up and kissed us. “The war’s over!” they screamed. “The Iraqis have just surrendered!”

Pretty soon a camera crew showed up. I tried to duck out and get back to our car, but it was no use. When they saw my general’s star, they had to ask me who I was and why I was here. I explained as best I could; but of course the embassy had their TVs on; and there was Zinni in Jerusalem where he was not supposed to be.

On the way back to Tel Aviv, I received a call from the embassy telling me to go right to the airport and leave. I notified our aircrew, picked up my gear, said a quick good-bye to the troops, and headed for the airfield.

Israel is the only country I’ve ever been thrown out of; but I couldn’t think of a better place other than Jerusalem to be at the moment the Persian Gulf War ended.

OPERATION PROVIDE COMFORT

Back in Stuttgart, the command was celebrating. And when I came in, so was our staff; they were elated but exhausted. The nearly yearlong twenty-four-hour manning of the CAT and the Battle Staff had drained all of us. Everybody in the EUCOM J-3 shop was just beaten… worn thin. And yet there was still a lot to do before we could shut down the Battle Staff and the CAT and get back to normal. We kept targeting a stand-down date, but it kept getting delayed.

Finally, on Friday, April 5, we came to the point when we thought we could actually shut it down.

There was one possible hang-up to that. A situation was developing on the Iraqi-Turkish border that merited concern (much of the following information we did not learn until later): Urged on by promises of U.S. military support (that subsequently was not provided), the Kurds had mounted a revolt against Saddam, which Saddam had brutally crushed. The Iraqi military had then pushed the panicked Kurds into the mountains along the Turkish border, slaughtering many in the process. Just about the entire Iraqi Kurdish population was involved in this exodus; hundreds of thousands of refugees were now pouring over the border, few carrying more than the clothes on their backs, all of them in dire straits. The Turks (who had had a bad previous experience with Kurdish refugees, and have a Kurdish problem of their own) refused to let the refugees down from the mountains; and the harsh winter conditions were threatening to devastate these traumatized masses.

Early on the fifth, we got a call to tell us that Secretary of State James Baker had become concerned about the refugees and wanted to take a firsthand look. (He was already in the region.) He flew into Turkey, and we provided him with a pair of Navy CH-53 helicopters to carry him out to the camps where the refugees had collected.

We were monitoring this developing situation, but it didn’t take up very many pixels on our screen.

Later that day, a call came from the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. “Maybe you ought to keep the CAT in place,” they advised us, “in case Baker wants to take some action.” So we were ready to keep the CAT going. But then they came back: “No, forget it. It’s no big deal. Baker’s gone up in the helicopters. Nothing much is going to come of it.”

That meant we could close down the CAT at last. “At the end of the workday — normal hours,” Snuffy Smith announced, “we’re going to shut down the CAT.” The exhausted staff was in heaven after two solid years of double duty.

Then Snuffy took me aside. “Get Debbie,” he said. “I’ll get Dotty”—his wife—“We’re going down to Pietro’s.” Pietro’s was a little Italian restaurant just outside the gate, one of our favorite places. “We’re going to have a big dinner and get shitfaced tonight. Have a good time and celebrate the end of all the crises.”

That sounded pretty good to me. In some very real ways, going out to Pietro’s was like getting released from prison. Not just because we’d been working hard. Security on the base had been iron tight. Except for flying off to do our jobs, we’d been locked in: German police had discovered terrorists observing General McCarthy’s house (located in a nice neighborhood in town where Americans had been living for a long time). This raised serious security fears. There had also been peace demonstrations, and some of the demonstrators had managed to get inside the base. The resulting precautions were necessary, but a burden: All the officers were issued.45s; and guards armed with machine guns had been placed all around the base.

This was going to be the first time we could just go out and relax since the war started (though we still had to have a security detail outside the gates).

Pietro, the owner, and everybody else at the restaurant were all delighted to see us; it had been a long time; everybody was laughing and in high spirits. There were mandolin players; and we sang along with them. We were enjoying a splendid Italian feast; Snuffy and I were drinking a lot of wine; and we were feeling really good.

All of a sudden, the door swung open and the colonel that runs our command center rushed in. “Sirs,” he told us, “you have to get back to the base right away. The director of operations at the Joint Staff wants to talk to you immediately. It looks like you need to launch an operation ASAP.”

“Holy shit,” I said to myself. It was the middle of the night, and we were feeling no pain; but we dropped everything, got our wives out of there, and hurried back to the command center.

When we called the director of operations, this is what we learned: Secretary Baker had spent the day observing the Kurdish refugees, and he was appalled. The refugee situation was developing into a terrible catastrophe. There were already tens of thousands of people collected in makeshift camps; and hundreds of thousands more were in the mountains moving in. Worse, the Kurdish authorities were pointing the finger at George Bush for encouraging them in their revolt. The Bush administration potentially had a lot of egg on its face. If something wasn’t done fast, things were going totally to hell.

We were ordered to have relief supplies on the ground in thirty-six hours.

This seemed like an impossible task, given the remote locations where the ravaged people had clustered and the lack of forces in position to react immediately; but we put our heads into the problem.

The first thing we did was call Jim Jamerson at USAFE to give him a heads-up: His guys had to rapidly develop a plan for a humanitarian airlift. Jamerson, who had just returned from commanding JTF Proven Force in southeast Turkey, instantly began piecing together a force to move back into position and conduct airdrops to the refugee sites. The mission would be organized very like Proven Force. Though he’d have a different mission and different kinds of airplanes, the structure and the staff control would be the same. And knowing the area was going to be a big plus. “We’ll need C-130s and helos to carry the stuff; and they will need escorts to fly with them. Where will we get all of that? Can we get enough parachute riggers? Where can we get the food?” We spent all that night trying to answer questions like these… and at the same time getting the CAT back up and running.

About halfway through all this scrambling, Snuffy said, “We’ve gotta call Galvin and tell him what we’re doing.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Then Snuffy looked hard at me. “Talk to me,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Go ahead, talk to me.”

So I tossed him a few words.

“I think you’re sober,” he laughed. “You call Galvin.”

I called General Galvin and told him what was going on.

The next day, Saturday, the sixth of April, after a rapid coordination effort with the Turkish government, Jim Jamerson moved his USAFE forces into bases in Turkey. On Sunday, U.S. Air Force transport planes, with air cover from our fighters, airdropped thirty-seven tons of supplies into the snow-covered mountain tent camps.

No one really believed that it could be done in thirty-six hours. But we got fired up, beat the thirty-six, and put the first airdrops on the ground, thanks to Jim Jamerson and his USAFE team.

By Monday, we were able to start looking at the longer-term needs of the mission. At first, it looked like the original mission would require about ten days’ worth of airdrops; but we realized very rapidly that the problem was going to be much bigger than that.

We initially concluded that given the force we had, we could extend the immediate mission to provide thirty days of support, while we worked to get a better handle on the situation and came up with a longer-term solution. Parachute riggers from all the services were ordered to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to set up a massive operation to package relief supplies for airdrops. The two CH-53 Navy helos that had carried Baker were ordered to remain to support the movement of the supplies.

Meanwhile, Dick Potter was sent to Turkey with his staff to form a Special Operations component. Potter had commanded the joint Special Operations task force under Proven Force. Now his mission was to get up in the mountains, make an assessment, and then get his SF (Special Forces) troops into the refugee camps, where they could do a great deal of good.

Once this emergency operation was under way, we began planning a more robust response.

What do we do? What do we need? We had no experience with refugees and humanitarian problems. They were all totally new to us. How do we craft a humanitarian operation? Already NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) were starting to head into the area. How do we deal with them? Obviously, somebody senior would have to go down to Turkey to handle that end. Who’d go? We knew we had to send more people down to Jim Jamerson. We also knew this wasn’t strictly an air operation. It would grow. But Jamerson’s organization was solely designed for air operations. It wasn’t going to be able to handle everything else we’d need down there. We’d need a full-blown joint operations center capable of dealing with ground troops, a humanitarian effort, the logistics, the UN, the NGOs, the Turks, and God only knows what else. We knew how to put together a Joint Operations Center, but we’d never done anything like the one this was shaping into.

We were doing all this planning fast and furious, trying to improvise with this unusual mission, when somebody came in and announced, “Sir, there are two Army captains out here. They say they need to see you.”

We were too wrapped up in the battle to make sense of the humanitarian task to listen to a couple of Army captains. “I can’t deal with them right now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

Finally, a few hours later, I took a break and went out to where they were waiting. They looked bright, eager, and enthusiastic. A good sign.

“Sir, we’re Captain Hess and Captain Elmo,” they said, introducing themselves. “We’re the EUCOM staff’s Civil Affairs guys.”

“Okay,” I said. “What have you got?”

“Sir, we know what to do in this humanitarian relief situation.”

“Oh, great,” I said to myself. I didn’t think anybody in the world could help with this thing. It was all just totally new. But I didn’t want to send them away, either, just in case. And I did like their enthusiasm. “Well, I don’t have time for any long discussions,” I said.

“Sir, we really ought to brief you,” they said. “You need to hear what we have.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling I’d taken enough of a break and needed to get back into the Op Center, “but give me a minute.”

Later, I found a few extra minutes and was able to give the captains a listen. But after they started throwing at me what they could provide, I suddenly realized that they did have something — most of the answers to the questions we’d been breaking our heads over. They had practical solutions for all the operations we were trying to design out of our brains from scratch. They knew what was required in terms of food, shelter, housing; they knew how to set up health-care facilities; they knew how to set up combined civil-military operations centers; they knew how to deal with NGOs and the UN; they knew how to process refugees; and they knew how to organize and staff all this.

“You’ve got to brief Admiral Smith,” I told them.

But when I went to Snuffy, he pushed me off: “I just don’t have time for these guys… later. I’ll deal with them later.”

“No, sir,” I said. “You’ve got to hear them now. These guys have got the answer.”

“Okay, bring them in,” he said, with visible skepticism. But his hesitation didn’t last long. “Where the hell have you guys been all day?” he told them when they’d finished.

We took them on then and there, and by the end of the day (Monday) we had a plan. Later, we brought them with us into Turkey, and they were indispensable in getting the operation going and moving it forward.

With the help of Captains Hess and Elmo, we designed a joint task force to fill out Jim Jamerson’s operation. Its initial priority was to stabilize the refugees in the mountain camps. Late Monday afternoon, the decision was made to send me to Turkey to function as Jamerson’s deputy. Since I’d been in on the planning, I’d be better able than anybody else to get the JTF off the ground and then to make an assessment of how all of it was working.

“You’re just going down there for a week to ten days,” Snuffy told me. “That’s all. You’ll stand up these things, make an assessment, see what’s needed, and come back.”

I left for Turkey the next day.

Seven months later, I came back.

The operation was named “Provide Comfort.”

My first order of business as Jim Jamerson’s deputy was to set up a Joint Operations Center at Incirlik that turned his predominantly Air Force command into a joint task force.

I brought with me a few key people from the J-3 staff who physically set up the Joint Operations Center. They took care of all the necessary nuts and bolts — the communications, the internal systems, the planning; and they began to make the assessment of what else we needed.

My next order of business was to connect with Dick Potter, who was just getting out in the field, and see what was going on out there.

My first visit to the camps via one of Potter’s MH-53 helos was a shock. In fact, to call the forty-three locations where the refugees had massed “camps” was a real stretch. We had over 500,000 refugees strewn over freezing, desolate hilltops, all with desperate looks on their faces. Most had come with little to help them survive in the snow. Many were city or town dwellers with no experience living in the wild. Nobody had enough clothes to keep warm; everybody was shivering and shaking, not only from the cold but from hunger. Everybody was desperate for food. Children were dying. Mothers were scraping out little graves.

When our two CH-53s made their first lifts of food into the camps, they were swarmed by panicked mothers who desperately threw their babies onto the choppers. (The Kurds were incredibly fertile. We learned later that seventy percent of Kurdish women of childbearing age were pregnant. Infant mortality was high.)

The brutal slaughter along the way by Saddam’s troops had only added to their trauma.

The Turkish military had been doing all they could to provide order and security (I have to hand it to them), and they were also providing food, medicine, and shelter, but far from enough to begin to cover what the refugees needed for survival. More important, the Turks were insistent that the Iraqi Kurds remain close to the border (even when that resulted in many deaths from exposure), forcibly preventing them from coming down the mountains into Turkey. In their eyes, the refugees were an Iraqi problem and not a Turkish problem… and they did not want to add the Iraqi Kurds to the problems they already had with their own Kurdish population.[44]

It did not take Dick Potter long to realize the magnitude of the potential humanitarian disaster we faced. He had originally gone in with a single battalion from the 10th Special Forces Group (commanded by Colonel Bill Tangney[45]); but early that first week he requested that the entire 10th Group (two additional battalions) be sent into the camps to stabilize these sites. His request was immediately granted; and the rest of the group had begun to ar- rive by the end of the week. This act saved tens of thousands of lives. Though more than 10,000 people perished in the flight from Iraq and later in the camps, this number would have been far larger had the relief effort not have been accomplished so swiftly. The efforts of the 10th Special Forces Group was the most significant contribution to that effort.[46]

Another pressing order of business was to learn as much as I could about these people: I had never heard of the Kurds before this operation. Fortunately, a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Nelgun Nesbit, who had grown up in Turkey before immigrating to the U.S., was available to fill in our ignorance; she was with us giving expert advice from very early in the mission. Her language capability and knowledge of the Kurds proved invaluable. Nell provided much of the information that we based our planning on. (She later went on to become a colonel in the Army.)

Nell was assertive, self-confident, and knew her own mind. She did not blindly follow the party line, which tended to upset the traditionalists; but I liked her. She got things done.

The point she repeatedly emphasized: We didn’t understand how the Kurds’ social system worked. As a consequence, we were trying to connect with them in ways that didn’t match their culture… picking the wrong people to deal with (a fact that I had already started to realize).

In the camps, we initially tried to connect with people we’d have normally linked up with — the ones who spoke English, the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the Western-educated. Many of these types came forward and curried our favor, but nothing was coming out of it. So then we looked for the political leadership — the mayors, the provincial executives. Still nothing was happening.

Nell Nesbit made it plain that we had to forget all of that Western thinking and reach out to the tribal chiefs (the Kurds are a tribal society) and figure out how the tribes were structured.

She brought in a Kurdish schoolteacher who answered my questions about social structure and decision making by mapping out the Kurdish tribal and political structures: how Kurds do things, who makes the decisions in the society. These were important issues for us as we tried to determine who were the actual leaders in the camps.

There were two major political factions among the Kurds. One was the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), under the leadership of Masoud Barzani (the son of a legendary resistance fighter), and the other was the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) under Jalal Talabani, who had broken away from Barzani’s group to form his own faction. Each faction had a tribal, political, and geographical base (the KDP — the stronger of the two — had power in the west, while the PUK had power in the east).[47] Each had its own militia; and each had been contending with the other — sometimes violently — for years. They did, however, cooperate during Operation Provide Comfort.

The Kurdish fighters (the militias of each faction) were called “Peshmerga,” which meant “those who face death.” They were tough, battle-hardened guerrilla fighters who’d proved more than a match for Saddam’s soldiers, man for man, but had been no match for the artillery barrages, air attacks, and gas attacks they’d been subjected to during their many years of resisting Saddam.

We also found others in the camps, including Turcomans, Assyrian Christians, Chaldeans, and Arab Iraqis… all fleeing Saddam’s brutal regime. Some were defectors from his own government and personal staff.

During the first week, we were really scrambling. Potter and his Green Berets on the ground were taking an assessment of what had to be done in the camps. We were working to connect with the Turks. NGOs were trying to get in with medical supplies; and the UN had also started to move in some teams. We had to set up procedures for working with both of them. All the while, we were setting up the civil-military operations center. But by the end of the week, we had managed to put all this together and were functioning adequately.

As we were working to stabilize the people in the hills, General Galvin and others were soliciting NATO and international support. Soon we were getting offers of medical, transportation, and combat units.

From April to June, we delivered seventeen thousand tons of supplies to the camps, while Dick Potter’s guys took control of the chaos. They organized the camps and ended the “survival of the fittest” atmosphere.

As time went on, we began to realize that the airdrops were not the most efficient way to deliver supplies to the camps. The airdrops quickly provided emergency supplies to the most remote areas; but they were highly inefficient, and very expensive. Bundles ended up all over the hillsides; and then we couldn’t control the distribution once they were on the ground.

We knew we had to shift increasingly to helo delivery and eventually ground transportation. But that was easier to talk about than to do. The road networks up in the mountains were ghastly. There’d already been serious accidents that had cost us some people. So before we could switch from air to ground, we had to improve the mountain roads and consolidate the refugees in more accessible locations.

Toward the end of April, Ambassador Abramowitz advised us to contract for Turkish food, tents, and transportation. This was wise advice. The change reduced costs by four-fifths — a huge saving. Turkish food was more in line with the refugees’ normal diet (they didn’t like the relatively expensive MREs we’d been giving them). Instead of the military tents we’d been forced to use in the camps (also expensive, and we never had nearly enough of them), we were able to contract with Turk tentmakers who took tarpaulins and other ready-to-hand materials and turned them cheaply into usable shelters. Several thousand Turkish truckers, who’d been put out of work because of the sanctions against Iraq (most drove oil tanker trucks), took the big oil tanks off their frames, turned them into open-bed rigs, and went back to doing what they did best — navigate the tricky and dangerous mountain roads. They moved the food and supplies into the mountains. All of this gave a big boost to the Turkish economy — badly hurt by the cutoff of trade with Iraq — which encouraged Turkish support for all of our programs.

The embassy sent us an excellent liaison team headed by Marc Grossman, the Deputy Chief of Mission. Their excellent advice and close coordination were invaluable.

As winter turned to spring and the snows melted, our problems did not ease. Though we had supplied the refugees with food and shelter, the summer temperatures of up to 120 degrees in these locations would bring diseases and water shortages. The weak and traumatized refugee population — crammed into small areas, drinking, bathing, urinating, and defecating into an already contaminated water supply — was very susceptible to disease. And, sure enough, we began to see cholera, dysentery, and other communicable diseases.[48]

Some of the Kurds from the towns didn’t have a clue about basic sanitary procedures, such as: You don’t crap upstream and then draw your drinking water downstream. The Special Forces troops saved thousands of lives simply by educating people about adhering to proper sanitary conditions.

The end of the snow cover also meant the end of most of our water supplies. It was clear that we would soon have no water in the hills — a truly dangerous situation. There was only one solution to both the disease and the water problems: We had to move the refugees down from the mountains. We couldn’t keep them up there. Since it was clear that they weren’t going to be allowed to move farther north into Turkey, there was only one direction we could safely take them — south.

The initial plan we worked out with General McCarthy was to make an incursion into a valley in northern Iraq and set up huge refugee camps there.

By that time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had set up a liaison office with our JTF. Because they are used to dealing with refugees, they proved to be enormously helpful. Right away, they tossed cold water on the idea of creating refugee camps. “Don’t build them,” they warned. “They become miserable, and you’ll be running them for years. These people have to go home.

“If you have to make camps, make them austere. They should only serve as transient facilities.”

Since Washington was not ready to make the political decision to take over northern Iraq, we began to establish a few camps as an interim measure as we worked on plans for a more permanent solution.

After centuries of oppression, the Kurds had learned how to be tough survivors and to keep stoic through their suffering. But, fearing Saddam, they refused to leave the apparent safety of the Turkish border and go down to the new camps. We took videos and showed the Kurdish leaders how they’d have greatly improved quality of life and security in our new camps. They still balked.

But after much persuasion, we convinced them to send a delegation down to check out what we were building.

They didn’t like what they saw: We were building the camps like military camps, with everything lined up in lines, grids, and squares. “We can’t live like that,” they said. Their communities had a very different kind of structure from our “straight line” military alignment. “We build our communities around clusters of cul-de-sacs. We like to have several families facing inward.”

They then insisted on redesigning the camps, to make them more reflect their community structure, and on actually taking part in their construction. This was a good idea. It not only gave them the kind of environment they were comfortable with, it let them buy into the whole process. At the same time, it made us realize that the UN was right about the camps. They weren’t going to work as a long-term solution.

So then we thought, “Okay, we’ll stretch out a little bit more and take part of northern Iraq. At least we can get some people into camps and others into their villages.”

In several stages, we took the northern part of the Kurdish areas, stretching to the provincial capital of Dohuk (sixty kilometers south of the Turkish border) and out toward Iran. (There were thousands of Kurdish refugees across the border in Iran, whom the Iranians were taking care of. These refugees also wanted to come back home.)

But the UN was persistent: “If you’re going to get a little bit pregnant, get all the way pregnant. Take them all home.”

They were right again; and we made an assessment of what it would take to move them there.

Once the decision was made to enter Iraq, we knew we would need additional forces. We also had to expand our own organization in order to control these new forces and coordinate our operations with those of the UN, the NGOs, the aid and security forces from other nations, and the agencies of our own government that had joined the humanitarian relief effort.

The JTF became a CTF (Combined Task Force), with the inclusion of forces from twelve other nations (including Great Britain, France, Spain, and Italy). Lieutenant General John Shalikashvilli (General Saint’s deputy at USAREUR, and, later, as a four-star general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was sent to command the CTF; Jim Jamerson became the deputy commander; and I moved to chief of staff. Shali (as everyone calls him) had the command until June. Then Jim and I resumed our original billets.

A subordinate JTF (JTF Alpha) under Dick Potter’s command was responsible for the refugees in the mountain camps and getting them back into Iraq. Another JTF (JTF Bravo) was formed under Major General Jay Garner, U.S. Army, to enter Iraq and secure the Security Zones we were establishing. The Air Forces component was under the command of Brigadier General Jim Hobson. A Civil Affairs Command was formed under Brigadier General Don Campbell; and a Combined Support Command (CSC) for logistics under Army Brigadier Hal Burch. We also put in place a Military Coordination Center (MCC) under Army Colonel Dick Nabb, to work coordination with the Kurds and the Iraqis. There was a DART (Disaster Assistance Response Team) team led by Dayton Maxwell,[49] and over sixty NGOs and PVOs (Private Volunteer Organizations) were also working with us.

The allied contributions to Provide Comfort were significant. The French, under the command of Major General Maurice LePage, a superb French Marine paratrooper, provided mobile combat teams that cleared the routes from the mountain camps back down into Iraq. The Royal Marines, under General Robin Ross, whose units had just returned from Northern Ireland, provided an excellent force for initial entry into the cities in the Security Zone. The Italians, under Lieutenant General Mario Buscemi, provided elaborate hospitals. The large brigades contributed by the French, British, Italians, and Spanish allowed us to give them each a sector of the Security Zone. General Shali ran this coalition brilliantly, with few (if any) written agreements.

We pieced together this highly nontraditional, ever-evolving organization on the go. Though some of its components were first-time structures, they met the task. Even so, these strange new structures bothered many older officers. This made me come to realize that nontraditional operations like ours were best handled by younger, more innovative officers who could think outside the traditional and rigid wartime doctrine with which the older officers had grown up.

General Shalikashvilli, a highly intelligent and capable senior officer and a real internationalist, was extremely effective dealing with the Iraqis and the thirteen-nation coalition. I learned a lot from watching him do that kind of business — persuading people, coordinating at that level. But when it came to the technical, tactical, and operational side of things we were trying to put in place, he was very traditional. He liked to follow standard Army doctrine.

For example, when we were looking at how to handle the Security Zones in Iraq, I said, “We’ll create a joint task force, we’ll stick it out front, with Jay Garner and Dick Potter in charge.”

“No, wait a minute,” he protested. “You’re going to put a joint task force under a joint task force? Is that doctrinally correct?”

“General Shalikashvilli,” I said, “who gives a shit? It’ll work. We should not worry about doctrine here.”

And when we started to change the refugees’ transition camps to reflect the Kurds’ cultural needs, he was skeptical. “What’s wrong with the way we built them?” he laughed… In time, he came to accept the need for cultural sensitivity (which I thought was essential; we constantly emphasized this in our briefs); but I felt he didn’t think it was really all that important.

Our area of operations was roughly the size of Kansas, encompassing 83,000 square miles of rugged mountainous territory, with little infrastructure. The biggest challenge after the initial crisis was to establish a logistics distribution system in this austere and rugged environment. The transportation system was frail, it was austere; the road networks were extremely limited.

Normally, the services provide logistics support to their own service components, while each nation similarly provides their own logistics to their own components. That’s an okay system under normal circumstance. But it did not reflect the realities we faced — an omnium-gatherum of nations, services, and agencies all trying to force their stuff through the fragile infrastructure, all at the same time. We had major humanitarian and military demands on the distribution system (besides our military supplies and equipment, we were handling relief supplies contributed by over thirty nations), and nobody was pulling it together. We had no central management, no prioritization, and very thin security. It was like forcing a gallon of water through a soda straw.

We could see right away that we needed to put in place a centrally designed distribution system, with forward staging bases and interim bases, where we could build up stocks of supplies which everybody could draw from.

The component commanders — Garner and Potter — fought this; each wanted to run his own logistics support. I had constant battles over this issue with them, two of my closest friends. They were shouting at me and I was shouting at them. “Don’t mess with our logistics,” they kept telling Shali. “We’re running our own show. We need our own stuff here.”

From the other direction, our logisticians were begging me to convince General Shali to form a Combined Support Command. But when I told him the logistics were going to break, and we were going to see a real disaster, he was reluctant to change the book-dictated system.

Finally, when it was totally obvious that it was either change or endure the world’s most embarrassing traffic jam, he made the decision to set up the CSC.

We opened small Humanitarian Service Support Bases (HSSB) in a “hub and spoke” system that let us stretch our reach well into Iraq. We brought down Army Brigadier Hal Burch (a USAREUR logistics commander), and he set it up.

Our unorthodox command structures eventually caught the attention of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During a visit in May, Colin Powell, who is a very quick study, was initially impressed with how well the operation was going, but wasn’t clear how we had it all organized. The easiest way to explain that was to show him our organizational chart… The chart was of course as weird as our organization; but we had done what we could to draw the lines and links and labels according to the proper doctrinal procedures. So we had lines for “Operational Control” and for “Tactical Control” and so on. Of course, when Powell looked at the chart, he saw right through it. “Is this for real?” he asked. “Tell me the truth. What kind of control do you really have here? What are your real lines of authority? Is it Operational Control?”

“Sir,” I told him, “what we really do is HAND CON (Handshake Control). We work out our problems on the fly and shake hands on the deals. We don’t have time to do anything else.”

He laughed. He loved that. It became one of General Powell’s favorite stories.

Our relationship with the Iraqis was predictably tricky. Though the war was obviously over, the Iraqi forces in the north still presented a problem. Unlike units in the south, they had not experienced combat with superior American and Coalition power; and they were not as cowed. Later, after several units from southern Iraq were moved north, we used to watch with fascination how the southern and the northern Iraqi units reacted when our planes flew over their positions. Those who had faced us in the south during the war waved nervously and looked for cover, while the northern troops were more frequently defiant, and once in a while even fired at our planes.

The Military Coordination Center was set up to maintain contact with the Iraqi military; and an Iraqi, Brigadier General Nashwan Danoon, was assigned as our point of contact.[50] For more important meetings with General Shali, the Iraqis sent a Lieutenant General Saber from Baghdad.

As we moved the refugees back to their homes in the south, we increased the size of the Security Zone and demanded the Iraqi military pull back. They were — unsurprisingly — reluctant to do that; and on several occasions we had to threaten them. A show of force always brought compliance (we had in all sixteen incidents of hostile fire with the Iraqis[51]).

Eventually, we decided to create a zone that allowed all 500,000 of the Kurds to return home… and we also decided to help them repair their homes and make them livable. We not only repaired much of the damage to the areas evacuated by the fleeing population, we provided services and utilities to forty-one communities until their local services could be reestablished.

At this point, we realized that wasn’t going to be enough. We just couldn’t leave them on their own. We had to make sure the Iraqis didn’t return once we pulled out.

To emphasize that point, the Iraqis massed seventeen divisions on the borders of the Security Zone we had formed. These divisions were there to block further expansion and to seal off the zone… and to convey a threatening posture toward the Kurds. As a result, we established what was called “the Green Line” as the border of the Security Zone. None of the Iraqis were allowed to pass it. Our air cover in the no-fly zone (which was larger than the Security Zone) further ensured the good behavior of the Iraqi military.

The process of moving the refugees and managing the Iraqis went through several stages. In the beginning, we agreed to allow the Iraqis a police presence in the Security Zone; but it quickly became clear that idea was a non-starter. The Iraqis’ idea of a “police presence” was the Mukhabarat — their secret police.

The Kurds were dead set against any Iraqi government presence, and the Peshmerga set about eliminating it the old-fashioned way — by killing the Mukhabarat and other Iraqi officials. Eventually, all Iraqi government presence was removed from the Security Zone.

Another agreement that didn’t work out was the protection arrangement for Saddam’s eight lavish palaces in the region. We had approved a plan that allowed the Iraqis to retain military security over the palaces; but when an Iraqi unit guarding one of them opened fire on a British Royal Marine patrol, the Marines blasted the Iraqis; and that ended the agreement.

Saddam’s private airfield at Sirsenk was turned into a logistics base for our operations. Our troops made pen sets from its black marble wall panels and passed them out “Compliments of Saddam.”

At one point, I went out to see one of the palaces. It was still under construction, occupying the top of an imposing hill; and it was massive — like a fairy-tale castle. Luxurious villas were scattered down the hillside; and water pumped up to the top flowed down the side of the hill in a system of water-falls. Underneath the hilltop castle was a vast tunnel complex. At first, we thought this may have been for WMD storage; but it turned out to be for something like a casino. It was shocking to see these grand structures in the midst of the poverty of the local population.

During the same trip, I visited the villages that had been gassed by the Iraqis in 1988… a chilling sight. They were not only empty of people, but the Iraqis had left not one stone upon another. The Kurds who’d made their homes there had asked to return; but when we did soil tests, we found dangerous toxic chemical traces that made return impossible.

The humanitarian aspects of the operation were of course its primary focus. Except for our Civil Affairs officers, this was a new experience for most of us; and it led to many coordination problems.

When the NGOs started showing up, most of them had had no experience working with us, we had had no experience working with them, and there was mutual suspicion.[52] They were all wonderful, well-meaning humanitarians; but they all seemed to think they could do their own thing without much coordination with the common effort: NGO planes would suddenly show up in our airspace demanding landing permission, unable to understand why we had a hard time accommodating them.

To minimize these problems, we established a Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC) under Civil Affairs control to coordinate with the NGOs, DART, and the UNHCR. Though friction between the military and the relief agencies continued (on a much smaller scale), the CMOC provided an excellent forum to work out the problems. EUCOM established a Civil Agency Response Element (CARE) at their headquarters that helped a great deal to sort out problems at the Unified Command and Washington levels.

In spite of our mutual problems, working with the NGOs and the various government agencies like DART and the Centers for Disease Control was not at all a bad experience. I learned a lot from the teams advising us. Each of them provided valuable lessons in their specialty areas (water, food, medical care, etc.) that I would use later in missions of this sort.

From the CDC I learned about the nature of diseases — the cycle, the causes, and the treatment… the conditions that lead to them, the signs that diseases are spreading, and what you have to do to prevent that. This was a totally unique experience… and it’s not an instrument you normally find in the military tool kit.

Cholera, for example, is difficult to cure — especially in the case of children. The kids will initially seem to be improving, but they’re really not. They’ll look like they’re getting better; then they’ll sink down; then they seem to be getting a little better; and then they sink down a little more. The process is really a gradual decline, but you’ll find upswings that give you hope. The upswings can fool you.

I also learned a lot from the teams sent in by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). They are not only fine doctors; they are also culturally sophisticated in dealing with refugees and third world peoples. They had serious concerns about the level of care we were providing.

The Kurds needed a great deal of medical help instantly. To fill that need, we brought in what we had — technically advanced military medical units and field hospitals. (I observed a major operation at a Belgian field hospital, where they were doing elective surgery. It was a world-class facility.) Our idea was to come in and lay down a massive effort… really flood the place. But when we pulled out, we’d leave a tremendous void. That is, we were bringing in a level of care that couldn’t be maintained after we left.

By way of contrast: when Doctors Without Borders work within a third world environment, they try to leave something behind that can be maintained. It’s the old idea: You just don’t hand people fish, you try to leave the skill of fishing behind. They know how to leave the skill behind far better than we in the military do. And I took many lessons from this which I used later in Somalia and elsewhere.

Returning refugees to their country of origin was no simple task. The large number of international laws and regulations created to safeguard the rights of refugees generate a large administrative and technical burden. This was the first operation at this level of civil-military coordination; and many lessons learned emerged that would be useful in future operations. For example, I had never known before that there’s a difference between “displaced persons” within borders and “refugees.” Each class has rights, but the rights of displaced people are not the same as the rights of refugees.

Processing all that took a great deal of our time and energy; but it was all necessary. You assume all these people want to go home; but that assumption is not totally correct. Some Kurds did not want to go back. Some were simply too paralyzed with fear to move. We knew they couldn’t stay in the hills. But we couldn’t just herd them into trucks and carry them wherever we thought it best to take them. We had to convince them we would protect them and take care of them before we could get their agreement. It was not easy.

Every single Kurd had to have written documentation spelling out that they weren’t going home under duress and that they understood what they were doing. Forms had to be filled out for each Kurd, and somebody had to fill them. That meant Potter’s guys in the camps had to interview every adult among the 500,000 Kurds and take care of all the necessary paperwork.

Later, each Kurd had to be continuously accounted for — where they started from, where they were at that particular moment, where they would end up. We set up a transit system with checkpoints, way stations, and the like, to keep track of everybody; but of course things didn’t work out the way we planned. Some of the Kurds moved out without telling anybody… just took their donkeys or whatever and went back down the trails. We were losing count. “My God,” Shali told me one day, “I’ve lost 100,000 Kurds. Where have they gone?” We sent recon airplanes to find out, but we didn’t have much luck with that. The Kurds had simply scattered into the hills. We had to trust that they knew their way home.

Over the course of Operation Provide Comfort, eight tasks had evolved for the CTF (and the operative word here is evolved):

1. Provide immediate relief and stabilize the population in place.

2. Build a distribution system/infrastructure for continuous logistics support.

3. Establish a Security Zone in northern Iraq.

4. Construct temporary facilities, i.e., transit centers, way stations, support centers, etc.

5. Transfer the refugee population to the temporary sites.

6. Transition the humanitarian operation to the international relief organizations.

7. Provide continuous security for all aspects of the operation.

8. Enable the ultimate return of the refugees to their homes.

The mission was continually changing. We didn’t just get instructions up front, look at the expected end state, and go and do it. We were probing our way through every stage — often thinking when we reached one stage that we were at the end state. But then we’d see other paths opening that we’d have to follow. Once we’d stabilized the refugees in the hills, we realized we had to move them out of the hills; then we realized we had to put them in a sustainable area; then we realized we had to bring them home; then we realized we had to protect them from the Iraqis. Tasks emerged from other tasks. We were developing them as we went. And we had no idea what the end state would be until we got there.

By mid-June, the Kurds were back in their homes, and we were able to withdraw our ground forces back to Turkey. There we established a temporary base for a ground reaction force just inside the border at a town called Silopi. Though humanitarian airlift missions were no longer required, continuous combat air patrols were maintained over the Kurdish areas, and the MCC remained in the Security Zone. The ground troops left Silopi in July.

On July 24, Provide Comfort I ended and Provide Comfort II began. General Shalikashvilli returned to USAREUR, Jim Jamerson resumed command, and I went back to being the deputy. With the ground troops gone, Provide Comfort became an air operation again. Only the MCC and a CSAR capability remained on the ground.

Now that the air operations had transformed into combat patrols, and the Rules of Engagement gave only Jim Jamerson and me authority to order certain responses to Iraqi threats, Jim felt that I needed greater familiarity with air operations. I was not only thoroughly briefed, but I was taken on a flight in a two-seater F-16 to get a hands-on feel for what the pilots faced. And since we had an aircraft carrier in support, I also flew in a Navy A-6—including a series of catapult shots and traps aboard the carrier. This valuable experience served me well in future joint tours of duty.

Later, when Jamerson left and Brigadier General Glenn Profitt took command, I was asked by General Galvin to stay on to provide continuity.

I finally returned to EUCOM in November.

Provide Comfort evolved into Operation Northern Watch, and continued on for well over a decade until Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

OPERATION PROVIDE HOPE

By the end of 1991, it was becoming increasingly evident to Secretary of State Baker that the New World Order was not happening. The twelve republics that had split off from the former Soviet Union — many of them nuclear-armed — were not going to blossom painlessly into democracies and free-market economies. That much-desired outcome faced serious obstacles. Baker concluded that achieving world stability required helping the FSU recover by means of a new international Marshall Plan.

This was a gigantic undertaking, with many uncertainties: Could the U.S. muster the international community, use NATO, bring in the Japanese and other developed nations, and get the necessary resources? And then, how would this undertaking be received in the FSU itself?

Baker’s vision was to jump-start this post-Cold War Marshall Plan by means of a humanitarian airlift of food, medicine, and other supplies to the republics of the FSU. The operation, called “Provide Hope,” was conducted by the U.S. military during January and February of 1992. Once that was under way, Baker hoped other countries would join the effort. He foresaw down the road not just a humanitarian gesture but a follow-up international effort to reconstruct the economies and political systems of the FSU, to encourage investment, to provide the technical expertise needed to bring them up to international standards, and to show them how to operate in the international community.

The project was headed up by Ambassador Rich Armitage; Congress approved $100 million for the initial effort.

Though the natural inclination of the military is to avoid getting tangled up in such projects, Generals Galvin and McCarthy jumped on the effort right away. It obviously fitted in with Galvin’s long-standing inclinations. He saw the importance of supporting Provide Hope, yet it was far from clear how EUCOM would help.

Early in January, the decision was made to keep the Provide Comfort Crisis Action Team going, with a focus on Provide Hope; and a meeting was held at EUCOM headquarters to decide what else to do. Someone obviously had to link up with Ambassador Armitage and find that out.

Tony Zinni got the call.

General McCarthy turned to Zinni: “We’re not sure what this is all about, but it looks like a very good thing, and EUCOM needs to be a big part of it. Rich Armitage is in Bonn [on a trip to solicit European assistance]. Get up there and tell him you’re there to support him. Figure out what he needs and go make that happen.”

To Zinni, these are the assignments he loves best — missions that nobody knows how to define or execute; and you go out with what are called mission-type orders: “Go get it done.”

When Zinni arrived in Bonn, Armitage was holding a meeting with German and U.S. officials at the U.S. Embassy. During a break, he was ushered into the conference room to meet Armitage.

Armitage, a Naval Academy graduate and later a Navy SEAL, had had a long history in Vietnam both in combat and working for the State Department. In a long career in government, he had been an Assistant Secretary in the Department of Defense, and then an ambassador-at-large — a troubleshooter. In that capacity, he had brought acceptable settlements to a number of knotty negotiations, such as the Philippine bases contract. All the recent Republican administrations have used him as their frontline troubleshooter… the man who can handle the really tough jobs, get done what has to get done, no matter what it takes. He has had vast experience both at the Pentagon and in the State Department. (He became Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell.)

Armitage is a big, powerfully built man, blunt, forceful, to the point, and easily intimidating to those susceptible to intimidation. He does not tolerate fools or people who waste his time, and he doesn’t tolerate a lot of idle brainstorming. He knows where he wants to go; he wants to see what people can do, not what they can say. At the same time, he’s a very smooth and savvy operator on the playing fields of Washington, with fine-tuned political instincts. He makes few wrong moves.

Zinni took an instant liking to him. All his instincts told him he and this hard-driving diplomat would work well together.

But Armitage was not thrilled when he was introduced to the Marine brigadier general from EUCOM. He was polite enough, but his expression said, “Who the hell are you? And what do you want?”

“I’m on orders from EUCOM to report to you,” Zinni said, “and get you any military support you need. I’m here to help you.”

“I’m not sure I need your help,” Armitage answered suspiciously, with an expression that was even less encouraging. His long familiarity with the military — always wary of nonmilitary missions like his — had made him skeptical of generals bearing gifts. It was more than likely that Zinni had been sent to keep an eye on him, and to make sure he didn’t tap into military assets.

Armitage knew he did not need EUCOM, and he made that instantly clear (though without saying so directly). His mission was from the Secretary of State; that is, from a level several notches above EUCOM. And Colin Powell was one of his best friends (and remains so). As far as he was concerned, Zinni — and EUCOM — were probably obstructions rather than solutions. “Who needs EUCOM? I can blow EUCOM away and get whatever I need.”

Zinni quietly pressed his case: “General Galvin is totally sincere. He did not send me to sabotage Provide Hope, but to offer you everything we have on a silver platter. We want to help you get this thing off the ground.

“Believe me,” he assured Armitage, “I have both General Galvin’s and General McCarthy’s ear: You will get what you want.”

After a time, Armitage softened into a “Well, we’ll see” attitude. That was enough for Zinni.

Back at EUCOM, General McCarthy set up a joint task force (under a special outfit in the Crisis Action Team) to carry out the airlift mission. The JTF was commanded by Brigadier General Jim Hobson, USAF, who had also worked with Zinni on Operation Provide Comfort, and it was composed of U.S. Air Force airlift units — a logistics component to move, stage, handle, and pack the supplies; a psychological operations unit to translate the instructions on how to properly use the relief supplies provided and convey our messages of cooperation; an information bureau to handle the public relations aspects; and the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), which was tasked to provide advance contact and coordination at the delivery locations.

Though OSIA’s mission was normally arms control verification, their capabilities (language, small-team deployability to remote sites, etc.) made them ideal for this task. Many airlift delivery locations were in places U.S. aircraft had never flown into — remote airfields where there was little or no information about fuel availability, field conditions, and navigational aids. The OSIA teams made their way to these locations a week in advance, made the contacts on the ground for handling the supplies, and passed on all the necessary information by means of satellite communications.

The U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) supported the operation; EUCOM established a Special Projects Team in their command center to run it; and a Disaster Assistance Response Team from the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance joined the effort.

The relief supplies themselves came from Cold War stocks, prepositioned in Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany — food, medicine, blankets, and medical supplies — much of it in storage since the 1950s. EUCOM units gathered these up and moved them in a massive series of airlifts to places they had never seen before — Dushambe, Almaty, Tashkent, Kiev, Bishket, Baku, and other remote spots in the FSU.

Meanwhile, Armitage’s team watched over the JTF, visited countries and organizations in NATO and the European Union (to gain participation and support for the follow-on efforts), and traveled to the various republics of the FSU (to establish contact with local officials, coordinate future activities, and make assessments of needs). Secretary of State Baker chaired a multination donors’ conference in Washington to solicit support and resources for the long-term effort.

Secretary Baker kicked off the operation in a ceremony at Rhine-Main on January 23, 1992.

EUCOM had put together a system that would deliver everything Armitage might want. Thus when he came to Zinni and asked, “Can we get a plane to deliver medicine to Kiev?” Or: “Can we move some supplies to Almaty?” Zinni got him the airplanes and set up the deliveries.

Zinni made things happen — contributing to, demonstrating his loyalty to, and becoming part of Armitage’s team; and that impressed Armitage. Loyalty and team playing are important to Armitage — probably a legacy from his military background.

Meanwhile, the two men were connecting on a more personal level. They liked each other’s company, and they shared deep, bonding experiences — combat in Vietnam, weight lifting. It didn’t take long for Zinni to become one of Armitage’s right-hand men.

After a time, somebody asked Zinni, “Okay, so what are you now? What do they call you?”

Zinni gave the question a second’s thought, and then made up his title: “I’m the Military Coordinator for Armitage,” he said. The title stuck.

Zinni was provided an office with Armitage’s team at the State Department in Washington, and he had another office at the Rhine-Main Air Base[53] in Germany, where they were running the JTF. But he spent most of his time crisscrossing Europe with Armitage. They flew to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to Ankara, to Brussels. They dealt with NATO and the EU. They coordinated support, participation, receipt, and distribution of the aid and the future larger-scale reconstruction effort. They worked with U.S. government assessment teams on the ground in the FSU and with local officials. They were all over the place.

The airlift operation ran until the end of February and delivered 2,100 tons of food and medical supplies to twenty-two locations.

Zinni spent three months on Provide Hope after the end of the airlift. During that time, Armitage worked tirelessly to transform into reality the vision he and the Secretary of State had put together.

As time passed and the military requirements ended, Zinni’s work for Armitage took him increasingly into the economic[54] and political realm. Though Armitage wanted to keep Zinni around, it had grown obvious that the military aspects of Provide Hope had faded away.

“There’s no point in your hanging around here anymore,” Armitage told Zinni finally. “Why don’t you go back to EUCOM? As things move on, we might get you back in, but there’s no sense in your hanging out here.”

The need for Zinni to come back never materialized. By the end of spring, the mission was folding. The silence from the international community had been deafening. Other countries did not have the will or share the vision; they were simply not interested in participating in a new Marshall Plan.

What kept them away?

The world of the early ’90s was not the world of the late ’40s. This wasn’t a devastated Europe threatening to collapse into communism. It was a Europe of individual nations who were not only beginning to feel their own oats but had serious problems of their own to solve. The Germans, for instance, had to pay for German reunification.

No one was interested in working under a U.S.-led program… or in laying down the necessary resources.

It was nevertheless a badly missed opportunity; and much of the turmoil and instability that came afterward in Russia, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere could have been avoided if the nations of the free world and their organizations (like the UN and the EU) had been more farsighted.

Zinni’s involvement in “Operations Other Than War”—like Provide Comfort, Provide Hope, Provide Promise, and others while at EUCOM — provided a wealth of experience that he later drew on constantly. These were fascinating, exciting missions… like military operations, even combat operations. On these missions, he got to do what he loved best — get out into action in the field, but with the added thrill that he was saving people’s lives.

Later he participated in several other Operations Other Than War — such as the one in Somalia — that have been seen as the most advanced models for military-civil operations, peacekeeping, and humanitarian missions. No one has had more experience in these kinds of operations than Zinni.