Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

FOOTNOTES

1

Michael Vlahos, “Culture’s Mask: War & Change After Iraq,” Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., 2004. Albeit to a lesser degree, President Bill Clinton also encouraged an expeditionary spirit by frequently deploying the military. Service in the Balkans, despite strict rules of engagement that severely minimized risk, constituted a morale boost compared to interminable training exercises in Germany.

2

See Sallust’s The Jugurthine War, composed between 44 and 40 B.C., and Douglas Porch’s introduction to the Bison edition of Col. C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (1896; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996). These are but two examples of a vast military literature about how imperial powers used their influence.

3

Initial estimates of Marine casualties were 1,026 killed and 2,600 wounded, later revised to 685 killed, 169 missing, and 2,100 wounded.

4

Robert Sherrod, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), p. 126. For another book with a stirring description of the fighting on Tarawa, see Leon Uris, Battle Cry (New York: Putnam, 1953).

5

First Sgt. Edward Smith of Chicago.

6

Months later, I received a message from Sgt. Chris Singley—from Fallujah. Soon after he had left Niger, he got his wish: deployment to Iraq as the senior advisor to a company of the new Iraqi Army, which assisted U.S. marines and soldiers during the fighting in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. It was a long e-mail, telling me about the 103 Purple Hearts issued as of Christmas Eve 2004, and of the Americans and their Iraqi allies who died there. The few months he had spent in Iraq were clearly the most meaningful of his life.

7

Named after Hugh Merle Elmendorf, born in 1895 in Ithaca, New York. A pioneer in high-altitude formation flying, he died while test piloting a Y1P-25 in 1933, near Wright Field in Ohio.

8

The Army had two other Stryker brigades, both based out of Fort Lewis, Washington.

9

See Chapter 4 of Imperial Grunts for a description of PACOM headquarters overlooking Pearl Harbor, the PACOM area of responsibility, and the Hawaiian island of Oahu’s significance to the U.S. military.

10

The Missouri was decommissioned for the last time in 1992, during the administration of President Bill Clinton.

11

Saigon was still the name of the port of Ho Chi Minh City.

12

H. P. Willmott, Sea Warfare: Weapons, Tactics and Strategy (New York: Hippocrene, 1981), pp. 3–4. The following paragraphs draw significantly from this fine, succinct book.

13

Anyone who has sailed knows the phenomenon: motoring through the water on a calm day, you may think you have enough wind to sail until you turn off the engine, when you discover that the wind you felt was only that artificially generated by the boat moving through the water under motor.

14

James (later Jan) Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), pp. 421, 424, 425. In fact, as Morris mentions, the Royal Navy was already past its prime by then, though few in 1897 had the perspective to notice.

15

Named after Lt. Col. Horace Meek Hickam, born in Spencer, Indiana, in 1885. A graduate of West Point, Lt. Col. Hickam served in the Philippines and in the expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico. He became an early advocate of airpower in its own right, not merely as an adjunct to ground forces. He was killed in 1934 when his plane hit an embankment at Fort Crockett in Galveston, Texas.

16

Named after Brig. Gen. James R. Andersen, former chief of staff of the Army Air Forces, Pacific, who was lost at sea in a B-24 crash while returning to Honolulu in 1945.

17

In all of America’s overseas military deployments, sealift has been responsible for the overwhelming percentage of dry cargo and petroleum supplies.

18

The term “leathernecks” is often used for U.S. marines. It refers to the leather collars that marines wore earlier in their history to protect them against sword slashes. The leather collars, no longer worn, are symbolized by red stripes on the collars of the Marines’ dress blues.

19

Named after Lt. Eugene Hoy Barksdale of Goshen Springs, Mississippi, born in 1897 and a veteran of the Somme, Amiens, and Cambrai offensives in 1918. He died in 1926 test piloting a Douglas O-2 at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio.

20

The other members of the crew were Jason West of Hawkinsville, Georgia, and Noah Vogt of East Alton, Illinois. The standby crew was Lts. Ricademus Breitwieser of Susanville, California, and Jason Morton of Eddyville, Kentucky, Crew Chief Michael Bageant of Baltimore and Second Crewman Edmund Hooper of San Bernadino, California.

21

The base was named for a Medal of Honor winner who had jumped on a grenade.

22

Capt. Philip Treglia of Elida, Ohio. See Chapter 8 in Imperial Grunts.

23

The South accounts for 40 percent of all Army officers: Greg Jaffe, “A Retreat from Major Cities Hurts ROTC Recruiting,”The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2007.

24

For an epic documentation of the sufferings of Australian prisoners of war, including on the Burma-Siam railway, read Ray Parkin’s wartime trilogy: Out of the Smoke, Into the Smother, and The Sword and the Blossom (London: Hogarth, 1960, 1963, 1968).

25

The hiking trail itself was built by Rodney William Beattie, another Australian.

26

I spoke with Professor Beaumont, of Deakin University, who was working at the Thai-Burma Railway Centre at the time of my visit to western Thailand. Much of this paragraph reflects her insights, even though her opinion of Prime Minister Howard is less benign than my own.

27

Named after Maj. Harold M. Clark, born in Minnesota and reared in the Philippines, who was the first U.S. airman to fly in Hawaii. He died in a seaplane crash in the Panama Canal Zone in 1919.

28

For an excellent briefing on the connection between al-Qaeda and the Philippines, see Maria A. Ressa’s Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia (New York: Free Press, 2003).

29

W. Thomas Smith, Jr., “Angels with Rotary Wings,”National Review Online, Jan. 7, 2005. Smith, a former U.S. Marine infantry commander, wrote perhaps the best concise summary of the U.S. military’s relief effort, on which my account is mostly based.

30

This section on Conrad borrows from my Introduction to Lord Jim and Nostromo (New York: Modern Library, 1999).

31

The Cole was the next Arleigh Burke destroyer built at Pascagoula, Mississippi, after the Benfold.

32

The original name was “torpedo boat destroyer.”

33

An even number would indicate to port of the centerline.

34

USNS was a designation for Navy ships with mixed crews, of both sailors and civilian merchant seamen.

35

Beyond “full” was “flank” speed of over thirty knots.

36

Indeed, not even Britain’s Royal Navy could refuel at sea until 1943, and almost had to let the Bismarck go as a result.

37

For a heartfelt evocation of conditions on troopships during World War II, see Leon Uris, Battle Cry (New York: Putnam, 1953).

38

Going unshaven was a privilege that required the individual sailor to make a donation to the ship’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) fund. Also, beard growth had to be trimmed to allow a gas mask to seal onto the face.

39

In other ways, though, the Navy had a rigid hierarchy. The gulf between a common seaman and an admiral was much greater than that between a grunt and a general in the other services. Moreover, senior noncoms in the Navy were not encouraged to go to Officer Candidate School to the degree that they were in the Army and Marines.

40

The weapon is actually a CIWS (pronounced “seawhizz”), which stands for Close-In Weapons System; it has a gyroscope and its own radar apparatus for identifying a target. It is a last line of defense against sea-skimming missiles like the Exocet.

41

The term was initially coined by Marine Gen. and Commandant Charles Krulak in 1999.

42

Contreras’s point about a hangar for two helicopters deserves expansion. Choppers were perfect for anti-submarine work. In the air, the noise of the ship did not interfere with their dipping sonar when it was in passive mode, and when it was in active mode the chopper did not give away the position of the ship to the enemy because it was flying some distance from it. Moreover, two choppers flying about with dipping sonar covered a much wider range of territory than would a ship by itself.

43

He was subsequently named Sailor of the Year for all surface ships in the Pacific Fleet, and was promoted to chief petty officer in 2005.

44

Number seven was Ayad Futayyih Khalifa Al-Rawi, Quds Forces chief of staff.

45

Only the commanding officer was allowed to punish, done through nonjudicial punishment (“captain’s mast”).

46

The origin of “manning the side” when on a friendly port visit was to demonstrate that the crew was not down below manning the guns.

47

A Navy lieutenant is the equivalent of a captain in the other services.

48

Carl Vinson of Georgia was a member of the House of Representatives for over fifty years, and played a substantial role in getting the funds for a two-ocean navy.

49

Because I departed the Benfold in Honolulu, I was not there to experience the arrival at its home port in San Diego, where helicopters flew overhead in formation to celebrate its return, and the crew lined the rails with roses in hand for their loved ones.

50

The Tomahawk was designed originally as a submarine-launched weapon.

51

Both were two-star admirals, or rear admirals upper-half.

52

Submarine tenders are massive surface ships that service almost every aspect of a submarine. Their size is necessitated by their Tomahawk and torpedo magazines, and the numerous machine shops that repair and manufacture everything from engines to lockers. Women constitute around half of a tender’s crew. It was Frank Cable, at the turn of the twentieth century, who commanded the sea trials of some of the earliest American submarines.

53

For Navy SEALs, the sub was the preferred method of insertion and extraction in 90 percent of their missions.

54

In World War II, submarine casualty rates were six times as high as other American naval forces: 52 submarines and 3,500 submariners lost.

55

Officially, the color of U.S. submarines was “dark gray,” and that of surface warships the much lighter “haze gray.”

56

As on a destroyer, the captain of the boat holds the rank of commander, or lieutenant colonel in the other services. But since function takes precedence over rank, he is referred to as “captain.” Similarly, aboard a submarine, the various lieutenants are not addressed as such, but as “nav” for the lieutenant in charge of navigation, “weaps” for the one in charge of the weapons systems, “eng” (soft g ) for the reactor engineer, “chop” for the supply officer, and so on.

57

Only on Saturday, Field Day—when everyone cleaned the boat—was there reveille.

58

Lt. Michael Murphy of Raleigh, North Carolina, was the navigator; Lt. Comdr. Michael Luckett of Banning, California, the engineer.

59

Wet transmission checks refers to checks on the circuitry of torpedoes while they are in tubes pressurized with seawater. Magnetic silencing, or degaussing, is the process of removing the boat’s magnetic signature by running electric currents through it, so that it cannot be threatened by magnetic mines. Thermoluminescent dosimetry refers to the measurement of radiation levels on the body.

60

A submarine, like an aircraft carrier, was usually referred to as a “boat.” But it was also a warship, so calling it a boat was not a hard and fast rule.

61

The cooks—the true heroes of submarine existence—also did the officers’ laundry.

62

Because sailors had a habit of telling sea stories whenever they congregated to unravel strands of old line, telling a sea story came to be known as “spinning a yarn.”

63

A submarine nuclear reactor has a life span of thirty-three years, but requires a refueling after twenty years. The $200 million was reasonable considering that a new SSN could cost as much as $1.4 billion, with even a diesel-powered sub running up to $800 million.

64

In order to embed for an extended period on a fast-attack nuclear submarine, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement with the Pacific Fleet. Certain details about the exercises I agreed in advance not to disclose.

65

The crews of SSBNs (ballistic missile subs), wherever they happened to be in the world, used ZULU time—Greenwich mean time not adjusted to daylight savings.

66

The combination acted as a diuretic, which helped the sailor pass the contaminant out of his system.

67

The actual “best” speed of a fast-attack nuclear submarine is something that I experienced, but that I am not allowed to print because it is classified. The same with the deepest depth it can attain.

68

EUCOM was working with other branches of the U.S. government to construct transmitters for an FM radio network throughout the Sahel, in order to counter messages broadcast by the Salafists. But this was a targeted information operation, designed to achieve fast, measurable results, rather than traditional, broad-based nation-building.

69

The official name of the effort was Operation Flintlock.

70

For an explanation of JSOTFs and C-JSOTFs, see Chapters 4 and 5 in Imperial Grunts.

71

I had been embedded with the 3rd of the 3rd in southern Afghanistan in late 2003. See the last part of Chapter 5 in Imperial Grunts.

72

For an argument in favor of admitting women to Special Forces, see Chapter 6 of Imperial Grunts.

73

JDAM: Joint Direct Attack Munition, a massive GPS-guided air-to-ground bomb.

74

Sgt. 1st Class Carlson was born in Iowa and moved from place to place growing up in Illinois, as his father, an engineer, kept getting better and better jobs.

75

See Chapter 6 of Imperial Grunts for a more detailed discussion of how Special Forces needed to evolve.

76

The other sniper was Mike Salzwedel.

77

The 12.5-inch combat utility knife was named after Lt. Gen. William P. Yarborough.

78

It was the same principle when fighting from Humvees. The fire would come from a stationary Humvee while another advanced.

79

Lines of tape were spread over a flat surface to simulate partitions in a building.

80

There was another side to this argument, provided to me by an Army sergeant major some months later in another theater. The Army was about structure and discipline, he explained, not self-expression. If Green Berets had to grow beards and wear pakols to ease their relationships with Afghans, or if civil affairs officers at a Kenyan beach resort had to grow their hair long to look more like tourists and NGOs, that was accepted and encouraged even. But wearing ball caps served no practical purpose in terms of a mission.

81

See, among other articles, Pankaj Mishra, “A Nation Out of Time,”The New York Times, June 10, 2001; and Stanley A. Weiss, “China and India Face Off in Nepal,”International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2001. Among the best studies of the Maoist revolt is Robert Gersony, “Sowing the Wind: History and Dynamics of the Maoist Revolt in Nepal’s Rapti Hills,” submitted to Mercy Corps International in 2003.

82

Experts also assumed that the Maoists were receiving aid from the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.

83

The Gurkhas of the British Army have had nothing whatsoever to do with either the current Royal Nepalese Army or the Maoists.

84

Gorkha was also the place from where the current monarchy set out to conquer the country and establish the Nepalese state. Because it was the kings of Gorkha whom the British initially fought, they referred to Nepalese soldiers as Gurkhas.

85

Dharamsala, an Indian town near Nepal, was now the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

86

I had interviewed Fermor three years earlier. See the last chapter of Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece York: Random House, 2004).

87

See Chapter 8 of Imperial Grunts. The Second Battle of Fallujah occurred in the autumn of 2004.

88

Nestorians are a sect that originated in the fifth century, based on the teachings of Nestorius, who emphasized the difference between the divine and human qualities of Christ.

89

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, Eng: Oxford University Press, 1939, 1946). Toynbee’s source is Xenophon’s Anabasis. I write more on Assyria’s collapse in Eastward to Tartary (New York: Random House, 2000).

90

“The Coming Anarchy,”The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. The article was completed in autumn 1993.

91

FBCB2: Force Battle Command for Brigade and Battalion.

92

A telling complaint about the new uniforms was that they were too dark for the desert and too light for the jungle. The Marines still had it right: tan camouflage uniforms for the desert and greenish ones for the jungle.

93

The A-10 was more properly called an “attack” jet, but the word “fighter” was applied liberally to it.

94

The military analyst Ralph Peters goes so far as to suggest that the Air Force be eliminated and broken up into these two new-old components. See New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy (New York: Sentinel, 2005), p. 269.

95

For example, there were three line companies, a weapons company, and a headquarters and support company.

96

Navy lieutenants (the equivalent of captains) clustered only in the wardroom, otherwise at sea you usually found them among their petty officers and chief petty officers. Major was the go-to rank in the Pentagon and in staff headquarters at battalion level and above. But in the Army and Marines, outside the base perimeter, majors were much less in evidence.

97

The measurement began with Army field artillery. In the air the circle is vertical rather than horizontal.

98

Air Force tradition demanded naming bases after deceased fliers. To wit, Army Air Corps Lt.Col. Frederick I. Eglin was killed in 1937 when his plane crashed. Lt. Frank B. Tyndall, a Florida native and World War I ace, was killed on active duty in 1930. First Lt. Donald Wilson Hurlburt was killed in an air crash in 1943 in northwestern Florida. Second Lt. William C. Maxwell of Atmore, Alabama, died on August 12, 1920, in the Philippines when his DH-4 aircraft hit a flagpole after he had turned to avoid striking a group of children. Lt. Col. Leon Robert Vance, Jr., a native Oklahoman, was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor recipient. First Lt. William Harrell Nellis of Las Vegas, a P-47 pilot, died in action during the Battle of the Bulge.

99

The big exceptions to this rule were the naval bases in San Diego and near Seattle.

100

George E. Day, Duty, Honor, Country (Fort Walton Beach, Fla.: American Hero Press, 2002). It is an updated and expanded version of Return with Honor (Mesa, Ariz.: Champlin Museum Press, 1989).

101

The A-10 pilots who participated in Cope Tiger 2006 not otherwise mentioned in the text were Maj. Brian “Milli” Gross of Phoenix; Capt. Michael “FAAC” Bullard of Crofton, Maryland; Capt. Ryan “APE” Hayde of Massapequa, New York; and 1st Lt. Michael “Beaker” Kump of Flint, Michigan. The flight surgeon was Capt. Martin “Tails” Harssema of Houston.

102

Delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910.

103

The Air Force’s principal large force exercise held at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

104

The Internet lacked the bandwidth for reasonably fast transmission of such high-quality mapping.

105

In Imperial Grunts, I argue for the introduction of women into Special Forces precisely for missions like this one. See Chapter 6.

106

For an account of my previous visit, see the chapters on Georgia in Eastward to Tartary:Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (New York: Random House, 2000).

107

See Chapter 4 of Imperial Grunts for a full account of Army Special Forces operations in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, and a historical-cultural overview of the region.

108

Though Mattis once came to the media’s attention when he mentioned that marines like to kill people, ironically, the fact was that he was among the most well-read, intellectual, and civil affairs–oriented generals in the military.

109

Though smaller in size than Basilan, Jolo had a population of 620,000 as opposed to Basilan’s 380,000. Whereas Basilan’s population was over 60 percent Muslim, Jolo’s was over 90 percent.

110

Despite guidelines from SOCOM, I had found that there was no hard and fast rule regarding the use of real names and faces in SF. You could reveal more in print than on television.Some Green Berets were comfortable being quoted by name; others not. Whatever they were comfortable with, I respected.

111

As of June 2006 when I flew on the B-2, the number of people who had been in space was 447.

112

James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of the Korean War (New York: Morrow, 1988), p. 15. Much of the basic background about the Korean War comes from this book.

113

South Korea paid 40 percent of the stationing costs for American military personnel here, less than Germany and Japan paid for U.S. troops in their countries. If these troops were to come home as part of a withdrawal, the American taxpayer would have to pick up the tab for some of their living costs, unless the Army itself was downsized.

114

In functional terms, the relationship between the four-star general in Baghdad and the one at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa was somewhat comparable with that of the four-star commander in Seoul and the one at PACOM in Honolulu. Of course, Korea had further levels of complexity: the American four-star was also the head of the U.N. command, and of the combined command that comprised the forces of the United States and South Korea. This was all a legacy of the Korean War, in which the U.S. and its allies fought officially as a U.N. force.

115

This and succeeding paragraphs of background information regarding the nature of the regime, the force structure on the Korea Peninsula, and likely responses to a meltdown of North Korea rely heavily on the writing and thinking of both Army Col. David S. Maxwell, a Special Forces officer and Korean area expert, and Stephen Bradner, a special advisor to the United Nations Command and USFK in Korea.

116

“Dear Leader Absolutism” was a term coined by Hwang Jang Yop, who defected from the North in 1997.

117

Whereas in 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang along the demilitarized zone, by 2003 over 70 percent were.

118

See Imperial Grunts, Chapter 4, for a profile of Lopez.

119

Speech delivered April 23, 1910, see p. 299.

120

Possibly Sun-Tzu never existed at all. His book may represent the accumulated wisdom of many people.

121

Johnson was actually referring to a specific group of patriots.

122

Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 65–67, 157. Roy draws, in part, on the work of Jean-Paul Charnay, L’Islam et la guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1986).

123

The Weekly Standard, Feb. 20, 2006. The fact that The Weekly Standard published this and the Peters article is not surprising. Non-establishment journals with modest budgets often have been the venues for path-breaking ideas, and as neoconservatives take an especial interest in military matters, it follows that The Weekly Standard would be strong on this general subject—and open-minded. Peters, for example, is not a neoconservative.