Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

^{CHAPTER SIX} FROM THE ARMY TO THE MARINES—FORT BRAGG AND CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA ^{WINTER 2003–2004}

Returning home from Afghanistan, I encountered more discussion in the media about the role of embedded reporters in Iraq and elsewhere: to what degree they might have been manipulated by the military; to what degree they might have lost their professional detachment and begun to identify with the troops they were covering.¹ Taking stock after a year of traveling, while I had been critical in print of how the U.S. military was fighting the Global War on Terrorism, I happily admitted guilt on the second charge.²

I should explain: “Every reporter is a citizen of somewhere and a believer in something,” said Ernie Pyle, America’s best-known World War II correspondent, who was killed during the battle of Okinawa in April 1945.³ I was a citizen of the United States and a believer in the essential goodness of American nationalism, a nationalism without which the security armature for any emerging global system simply could not have existed. I did not doubt that at some point, perhaps as soon as a few decades, American patriotism itself might begin to become obsolete. I also had no doubt that we were not there yet.

I had served in the military: in the Israeli rather than the American. In Israel in the 1970s, finding life exclusively among Jews in a small country claustrophobic, I discovered my Americanness anew. For a quarter century thereafter, I had been covering wars and insurrections. During this time I made more friends in the American military than in the international media. At the conferences and meetings I attended in the U.S., I encountered military and national security types far more often than fellow journalists. I felt comfortable among soldiers. Stopping in Dubai en route back from Afghanistan, after two days of fine food and hot showers, I felt a bit lonely.

Most journalists had newsrooms to go back to, where they were swept back into a social and professional world that acted as a countervailing force to their reporting experiences. But I had not seen a W-2 form for thirty years. My articles had appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for two decades, yet I rarely visited the Boston office and lived out in the country.

I had little interest in breaking news. The last time I had filed a hard news story was back in the Cold War days of yellow telex tapes. I owned no satphone, a standard piece of equipment for embedded reporters. On most reporting trips, I went to places where my cell phone wouldn’t work, so I left it behind. The firebase at Gardez had two satphones for the fifty Green Berets. Like everyone else there, I called my family once a week, and talked for a few minutes.

I was not concerned about crossing a professional boundary. My goal as a writer was simple and clear. I wanted to take a snapshot for posterity of what it was like for middle-level commissioned and noncommissioned American officers stationed at remote locations overseas at the beginning of the twenty-first century: a snapshot in words that those sergeants and warrant officers and captains and majors would judge as sufficiently accurate, so they might recognize themselves in it. It should be something, I hoped, that they could give to their grandchildren, saying, “That’s sort of like it was, and like those countries were.” It did not mean that I ignored tough issues and problems. It did mean that I wrote about their problems and frustrations, informed by their perspective.

I once heard the columnist George Will say that he harbored an intelligent empathy for the politicians he wrote about, because he often found them more substantial and interesting than his fellow journalists. That’s how I felt about the troops. I wanted to think of myself as a traveler in the old-fashioned sense. A traveler accepts the people around him, and whatever happens to him. He never demands or complains; he merely listens and observes. I fell into frequent use of the words “we” and “our” because, although a journalist, I was also a fellow American living among the troops, taking part in most of what they did. World War II military correspondents such as Richard Tregaskis and Robert Sherrod made frequent use of those words for the same reasons.

To say that I was objective would be to deny a basic truth of writing: that to every story and situation a writer brings to bear his entire life experience and professional pressures as they exist at that moment. While a journalist may seek different points of view, he can portray and shape those different points of view from only one angle of vision: his own.

For these reasons, the objectivity of the media as a whole was problematic. The media represented a social, cultural, and regional outlook every bit as specific as the southern evangelicalism of the soldiers I knew. Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends or colleagues increasingly did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.

The Deep South was heavily represented in the military, just as the urban Northeast, with its frequent air connections to Europe, was heavily represented in the media. Whenever I did meet New Yorkers or Bostonians in the military, they were usually from the working-class boroughs and outskirts of New York City and Boston—heavily Irish and Hispanic.

In fact, the charge that embedded journalists had lost their objectivity was itself a sign of class prejudice. Even with the embed phenomenon, the media maintained a more incestuous relationship with academics, politicians, businesspeople, international diplomats, and relief charities (among other nongovernmental organizations) than it did with the military. The common denominator among all of these groups, save for the military, is that they spring from the same elevated social and economic strata of their respective societies. Even relief workers are often young people from well-off families, motivated by adventure and idealism. But the military is part of another America, an America that the media establishment was increasingly blind to, and alienated from.[58]

I am not talking about the poor. The media establishment has always been solicitous of the poor. I am talking about the working class and slightly above: that vast, forgotten multitude of America existing between the two coastal, cosmopolitan zones, which journalists in major media markets had fewer and fewer possibilities of engaging in a sustained, meaningful way except by embedding with the military.

The American military, especially the NCOs, who were the guardians of its culture and traditions, constituted a world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobaccos, like Copenhagen and Red Man. It was composed of people who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty.

Most of all, the divide between a media establishment clustered in the Northeast and a military clustered in the South and the heartland brought regional tensions to the surface.

Journeying from my home in the Massachusetts’ Berkshires, whose voting patterns put it at the extreme edge of Democratic “blue America,” to Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in the heart of Republican “red America,” made me think of my experiences crossing the Berlin Wall in the 1970s and 1980s. The change in political attitudes registered in the local newspapers, in the conversations you overheard at restaurants, and in the people you met was that stark and extreme.

I had been shuttling back and forth between Massachusetts and military bases in the South for seven years now, but it was only in 2003, as casualties mounted in postwar Iraq, that the regional differences moved from the background to the foreground of my thoughts.

The southern bent toward militarism, especially in the Tidewater South, and the Greater New England bent toward pacifism were historically long-rooted tendencies, manifesting themselves in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Indian wars, both world wars, and the Vietnam War.[59] Indeed, though the South was opposed to President Franklin Roosevelt’s liberalism in domestic affairs, it supported his military buildup against Nazi Germany, even as it was distinctly cool to the isolationist America First committee.⁴

Such history revealed itself in differing attitudes over the casualties in Iraq and the Bush administration’s response to them. It had occurred to me

in Afghanistan that Americans were actually no more casualty averse than the citizens of other nations. The working class’s attitude to casualties was fairly tough, to judge by the soldiers I had met in Gardez and Kandahar. It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines.⁵

Many of the people I knew at home were well-off New Yorkers who had moved out of Manhattan; the people I knew at military bases in North Carolina, Tidewater Virginia, and other parts of the South were of working-class origin, with modest military salaries. The latter group had friends and family members, many of them deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. For them, casualties were not a symbolic issue to be discussed at seminars and dinner parties; they were intensely personal business.

While people where I lived were aghast that the White House had barred photos of the coffins of dead soldiers arriving back in the U.S.—a decision they believed reeked of callousness and political calculation—people I knew in North Carolina said they understood the White House action. They believed it saved lives.

Their logic went like this: In small, unconventional wars, especially in an age of global media and battles televised in real time, the home front was even more important than in previous conflicts. The number of American troops killed by insurgents and suicide bombers in postwar Iraq may have been strategically and tactically insignificant, but the casualties mattered politically, because the steady accumulation of KIAs demoralized the home front. Thus, the greater the impact that these deaths appeared to have on the American public, and especially on the White House, the greater the incentive of the insurgents to keep on killing them, and the more likely that the insurgents’ ranks would swell. As one Green Beret in Afghanistan, a southerner, had put it to me after Sgt. Sweeney was killed: “The less emotion the President displays over our deaths, the better for us, here and in Iraq.”

Or as some Marine officers simply put it: “We grieve in private.”

The ghost of Vietnam hovered over this debate. The administration didn’t want the public to see recurring images of flag-draped coffins, as it had in Vietnam. Many anti–Iraq war people I knew in the Northeast had not served in Vietnam. Embarrassment and guilt over that fact helped facilitate their zero tolerance toward casualties. As for those I met in the military, particularly the noncommissioned officer class, because they and their relatives had paid a considerable price in Vietnam, they were free to think pragmatically about the casualty issue—ruthlessly even. Because they were free of complexes, and were closest to the dead and wounded, I trusted their opinion the most.[60]

On my latest visit to Fort Bragg from Massachusetts, in mid-December 2003, I came to pay off a debt. U.S. Army Special Forces and the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center had opened doors for me in Colombia, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. Now I would brief their top echelons on what I thought the defects of Special Forces were, and how I thought Special Forces should evolve over the coming years.

Much of what I had to say did not represent my own ideas as much as those of the noncoms and middle-level officers whom I had met in the field. Because the Army was burdened by so many layers of bureaucracy—and travel to the field, even for the generals’ own aides, involved much red tape—journalists like me were occasionally useful for communicating ideas from the bottom to the top of the command chain. My Atlantic Monthly colleague James Fallows once noted that the press enjoys unique protection under the Constitution because it is an indispensable part of representative democracy. As an indispensable element of the system, I believed that helping different levels of it to communicate with each other was quite appropriate, especially in wartime.

Hovering in the background of my brief was the issue of money:

Army Special Forces was hot. Not only had it played the lead role in taking down the Taliban, and a significant role in Operation Iraqi Freedom, but it was also involved in the capture of thirty-eight of the fifty-five most wanted Iraqis—the so-called deck of cards—including Saddam Hussein himself. Yet this state of affairs had made Special Forces only more vulnerable. It was like Apple about to be overtaken by Microsoft after having just launched the personal computer revolution. To wit, in Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker the Big Army had a truly innovative chief of staff, a man who wanted to make the Army as a whole more like Special Forces. The Marines, too, were consciously reemphasizing their own unconventional roots. Thus, if Special Forces did not evolve and correct its shortcomings, and stay ahead of the regular Army and Marines, it would go the way of Apple, shortchanged in the Pentagon budget battles.

Having thus gotten the attention of my audience, I told the assembled generals, colonels, sergeant majors, and others that a world of more democracies meant a world of more restrictive rules of engagement. New democracies, besieged by aggressive and newly liberated local medias, could not politically countenance American troops running around on their soil killing people. Therefore, Special Forces had to become much better than it was at winning without firing a shot.

The culture of direct action had taken over Special Forces, and that was bad, I went on. For the real heart and soul of Special Forces was tied to the Kennedyesque vision of embracing their indig brothers, and winning alongside them. Special Forces had to move a few steps away from the direct action culture and back toward the culture of the combat advisor.[61] That meant more one-man missions in which a single Green Beret would be immersed in the local culture during all his waking hours: more Tom Wilhelms, in other words, even if Col. Wilhelm himself was a foreign area officer from the regular Army. In any case, foreign area officers and Green Berets had much in common, I said.

Moving back to the culture of combat advisor meant better linguistic skills. Yet except for the Spanish speakers in 7th Group, I had not been particularly impressed with the linguistic skills of Green Berets. The United States was more than two years into the War on Terrorism. Pushtu should have become a common language by now among Green Berets assigned to Afghanistan. But with few exceptions, even the counterintelligence officers I met barely spoke the language. The situation was no better in the Pacific; almost everyone I encountered in 1st Group knew some oriental language or other, but rarely the one needed in the country where he was currently deployed.

A number of measures had to be taken. Linguistics had to become an occupational Special Forces skill the same as weaponry, communications, medicine, and intelligence gathering. Gifted foreign language speakers had to be cultivated and tracked through the bureaucratic system. They had to be awarded special consideration to help them over other hurdles, the kind of practice that an impersonal and overly regulated Army was loath to do. In the Middle East and the Pacific, where numerous languages and dialects were spoken, there needed to be a mix of language expertise within every A-team, so that wherever a team was deployed, it would have at least one or two people on the team who spoke the local language. More emphasis had to be given to cultural training, something the Marines had been doing for years.

Furthermore, A-teams in the field were simply not versatile enough. Linguists, psy-ops, and civil affairs specialists needed to be integrated into counterintelligence teams, just as counterintelligence skills were needed at MEDCAPS and other humanitarian exercises. Humanitarian relief facilitated intelligence gathering, as the exercise on Basilan in the Philippines had shown. There were satisfactory ways to do this that did not undermine current laws. Policing skills—the ability to cultivate snitches, to deal with hordes of teenagers in third world villages, to set up stakeouts and roadblocks—should not be confined to National Guard units, who were overstretched as it was. Community policing was central to the War on Terror. It had to be a major part of active duty training.

Women, I went on, who were still barred from the ranks of Special Forces, were also needed. Women attracted less notice during stakeouts and intelligence-related operations. Women could search females detained during mission hits. Women were going to be forced on SF anyway at some point. Might as well develop a plan in advance for using them.

That led to another fact of life. The world was changing, especially global demographics. The future was neither white nor black, but coffee-brown mestizo. Special Forces could not go on indefinitely as a bunch of tattooed, muscle-bound white guys, peppered with blacks and Hispanics, who all went around chewing Skoal, Red Man, and Copenhagen. It needed to aggressively recruit from Afghan, Arab, Persian, and other immigrant communities.

In sum, Special Forces needed a dramatic return to its roots, in which small American commando teams made up of Eastern European immigrants had bonded with indigenous forces behind enemy lines in Nazi- and communist-occupied Europe. It needed more people with funny accents like Gen. Sid Shachnow.

I noted that the Jedburgh tradition lived on only in 7th Group in Central and South America, with its Spanish-language skills and Hispanic soldiers. The ethos of not just 7th Group but all of SOUTHCOM, in fact, was particularly appropriate to fighting a worldwide counterinsurgency. SOUTHCOM was known to insiders as a Strategic Patience Theater—that is, SOUTHCOM saw problems like the drug trade as long-term and intractable, where victory was a matter of decades of suppression, and constant application of unconventional warfare, which included the training of indig armies. The fact that the media ignored Central and South America actually helped in this effort, for all too often the overall effect of the media was to foster impatience on the home front.

SOUTHCOM and the sub-Saharan African component of EUCOM were underdeployed, even as CENTCOM was overdeployed in the Middle East. I said that it made sense, therefore, to add sub-Saharan Africa to 7th Group’s domain and move it away from 3rd Group, which had more than enough on its hands in Afghanistan and nearby countries. After all, Africa and South America were linked to some extent by the Portuguese language, and also by extreme underdevelopment, which led to similar tactical and operational challenges.

My thoughts were put on the agenda for a meeting in January 2004 in Cody, Wyoming, about the future of Army Special Forces. I would not be at the meeting, though. It was time to immerse myself with the Marines. The Special Forces part of my odyssey was over, for the time being.

From Fort Bragg, outside Fayetteville, to Camp Lejeune, outside Jacksonville, was only about eighty miles east through North Carolina as the crow flies. Yet it brought me out of one American military culture and into another: from the Army world of Hoo-ah to the Marine world of Ooh-rah.

Ooh-rah, like Hoo-ah, meant roughly the same thing: “Roger.” “Great.” “Good-to-go.” “How ya doing?” “Stay motivated.” The words were a standard greeting that basically meant anything you wanted it to mean except “no” and “It can’t be done.” And yet each greeting harked back to a different tradition, a different emotion, perhaps, that was key to differentiating the Army and Army Special Forces from the Marines.

The Marines had always been the poorest and scrappiest of the armed services. I remember a visit I had made in the early 1990s to Camp Pendleton, California, where I spent the night in austere, barracks-like quarters. When I made the mistake of telling the Marine driver that, at Fort Leavenworth, the Army had put me up in a lovely suite, he remarked coldly: “Yeah, in the Army people really live the high life.”

Whatever sensory deprivation an aesthetic-minded person might experience with the Army or Special Forces, it was more so with the Marines. Whereas Fayetteville, the Green Beret home base (known as Fayette-nam during the Vietnam War), was a fairly funky, ratty place, measured against Jacksonville it seemed positively upscale. Jacksonville—a Marine chow hall for all intents and purposes—was a wasteland of crumbling 1970s facades and unpaved parking lots that housed strip joints, tattoo parlors, pawnshops, lock shops, judo centers, and barbershops advertising “military haircuts.” Adjacent Camp Lejeune, the principal Marine base on the East Coast, was, likewise, a more blighted version of Fort Bragg. Yet I was not the only journalist for whom being with the Marines felt like a blast of invigorating cold air on an oppressively hot day.

“Good morning, Marine,” Marine Capt. David Nevers of Chicago—my escort at Camp Lejeune—said to the Marine guard at the checkpoint to the command headquarters of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

“Good morning, sir,” the guard shot back.

“Ooh-rah,” Capt. Nevers replied.

“Ooh-rah,” the guard repeated.

Such exchanges repeated themselves throughout the day at Camp Lejeune. With Special Forces, which considered itself somewhat of a bastard child of the regular Army, I had never heard Hoo-ah much. Indeed, one high-ranking Green Beret officer told me that he had joined SF “to get away from that Hoo-ah shit.” At regular Army gatherings over the years, I had heard Hoo-ah used mainly as an expression of solidarity during group get-togethers. But Marines exploded in Ooh-rah during one-on-one encounters as though they had deeply internalized it.

When I asked a young female sergeant at Camp Lejeune, a pale and innocent-looking wisp of a girl from Kentucky, why she had joined the Marines, not hesitating half a second even, she barked back: “Because they’re the best. And I wanted to be the best.” Next to her stood a towering sergeant major, an old-timer who described himself as a “southern redneck.” He told me, “You know why we’re going to win eventually in Iraq? I’ll tell ya. Because Marines are there. And Marines don’t fail. We just don’t. Because from boot camp on up, we learn and relearn our history and tradition.”

Such boastful pride may conceal insecurity within. But that did not seem to be the case with the Marines, to judge by the way they handled journalists. In the Pentagon a few weeks earlier I had run into a Marine general who, after I had told him that I would be traveling with the Marines, said: “Write all about us, warts and all. We don’t hide anything. We want the world to know exactly what we’re like.” Arranging trips with the Marines was simply a matter of telling them where I wanted to go. The Army, as I had learned years before while researching a story about Fort Leavenworth, wanted to manage every minute of your day. The Marines let you go off on your own inside the base. They weren’t afraid what you might see by accident.

The United States had marines in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War. They were disbanded, though, and reborn as the Corps of Marines in 1798 to fight Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, hence the line in the Marine Corps anthem, “to the shores of Tripoli.” The Marines helped in the 1846–48 Mexican War (“From the halls of Montezuma”). And for three decades beginning with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Marines staged landings in Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Mexico, Guam, Samoa, China, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic—part of the legacy of America’s small wars.

From 3,000 marines in the nineteenth century, the corps had risen to only 11,000 at the time of America’s entry into World War I. At the turn of the twenty-first century, with upwards of 174,000 marines, the corps was still by far the smallest and most tightly knit of the services under the Pentagon’s umbrella;[62] it was less than half the size of the Navy and of the Air Force, and slightly more than a third that of the Army. In perhaps the most insightful words written about the Marines, Washington Post military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks observes:

In fact, the Marines had fewer officers per enlistee than any of the other services, even as they had twice the percentage of the lowest-ranking troops.⁷ More than two thirds of all marines were young enlistees in their first four-year tour. And partly because reenlistment was selective, the corps was kept deliberately young, hungry, and dynamic. It went with the mission: Whereas the Army won wars, the Marines won battles. The Marines were the ones who broke down doors; “the tip of the spear,” they called themselves.

Because embassy evacuations and humanitarian relief involved quick insertions and a get-it-done-fast approach, the Marines did those things, too, in southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, and Afghanistan.

The Marines were a flattened hierarchy in the manner of the most innovative global corporations, with responsibility pushed out to the farthest edge of the battlefield. Every marine a rifleman was the literal truth. Whether a Marine aviator, auto mechanic, or cook, every marine was familiar with infantry skills, and had to keep practicing them. It was a system that suited the guerrilla-style conflicts of the twenty-first century, where battle lines had dissolved and a support unit could easily find itself fighting for its life, as happened during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Marines did not quite have the educational opportunities that the Army had, with its vast network of schools and war colleges. The Marines did not have a West Point. Marine sergeant majors did not have a sergeant majors’ academy like the Army’s at El Paso, Texas. The Marines made do with OJT (on-the-job training). Marine OJT taught everyone the job “one up,” so that he could fill the shoes of his immediate superior.

While in Special Forces, a master sergeant was the effective leader of an A-team of twelve men; in the Marines, a lower-ranking staff sergeant led a platoon of thirty-nine men divided into three squads of thirteen, each led by a corporal. They were in turn divided into fire teams of three or four men led by a lance corporal. Most of these noncoms were in their early twenties.

Because the Marines were young, they offered sheer aggression—a not inconsiderable tool in war. Special Forces, on the other hand, with its older and more experienced noncoms, offered deliberation and maturity. Thus, Green Berets may have been better prepared for the nuances of peacekeeping, occupation, and the training of indigenous forces. Still, the Marines had organizational advantages. As I had learned in Afghanistan, Special Forces teams had air support in theory only; they had to fight and bargain for helicopters that were, in fact, owned by the regular Army and joint task forces. But the Marines had, as they put it, “organic” air—helicopters specifically assigned to each unit, giving these young Marine commanders real autonomy and bureaucratic power.

As in innovative businesses, tremendous personal responsibility at the lowest reaches of command was combined with the complete sublimation of the individual within the organizational cult. If you remained an individual, by definition you could not be a marine.⁸

The Army Green Berets with their beards, ball caps, and Afghan dress were individualists; the Marines, with their extreme, “high and tight” crew cuts and digital camouflage uniforms, were standard-issue company men. And yet they both shared something vital, something which deeply attracted me: the history and tradition of Special Forces and the Marines were in counterinsurgency and unconventional war. Special Forces and the Marines, each in its own way, epitomized military transformation. Both these branches of the military combined nineteenth-century techniques with twenty-first-century technology. Because the lessons of conventional industrial age warfare of the twentieth century did not apply to the War on Terrorism, real military transformation would come about only when the Big Army and the Big Navy became more like Special Forces and the Marines, rather than the other way around.

Max Boot writes that like Special Forces, the Marines “focused on people, not weapons systems.” Like Special Forces, the Marines saw themselves less as tank drivers or fighter pilots than as warriors. “Although caricatured in certain books and movies as homicidal Neanderthals,” Boot goes on, “the Marines were the most intellectually supple of the services.”⁹ For example, along with Special Forces, the Marines began practicing crowd control and urban warfare long before the urbanization of the planet became a cliché among policy elites.

The greatest intellectual contribution of the United States Marine Corps has been its Small Wars Manual, a summary of lessons learned in the many landings, raiding expeditions, occupations, and nation-building exercises in which it took part in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific. Published in 1940 with a restricted distribution, because of its growing relevance the Small Wars Manual was declassified in 1972, republished in the 1980s, and updated at the turn of the twenty-first century.¹⁰

Echoing Clausewitz, the Marine Small Wars Manual observes that in small wars neither military operations nor diplomacy ever stops, and the battle plan “must be adapted to the character [that is, the culture] of the people encountered.” Small wars “are conceived in uncertainty, are conducted often with precarious responsibility and doubtful authority, under indeterminate orders lacking specific instructions.”

As if foreseeing the situation in Iraq, the Manual notes that after major fighting,

To countervail such hostile forces, numerous presence patrols must be organized with the help of native militias, and outposts erected that are “dispersed over a wide area, in order to afford the maximum protection to the peaceful inhabitants” of the country.¹¹

Written decades before the War on Terrorism, with experience from even earlier decades, the Marines’ Small Wars Manual showed the U.S. how to fight unconventionally in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Marines were still thinking ahead. They now defined their mission as “Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare, “ instead of “Amphibious Warfare.” As Capt. Nevers explained, “In the future, because of technology, we won’t need to storm ashore like at Iwo Jima, or the way the Army did at Normandy. The sea will be the Navy’s giant maneuver space. We won’t have to telegraph our location; we will be able to operate from beyond the three-mile territorial limit.”

At the moment, military base rights required negotiation with foreign countries, but new planes like the V-22 Osprey might help obviate the need for that; in the Marines’ plan, technology would trump diplomacy in specific instances. The Osprey, scheduled to replace the Marines’ CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter, could take off vertically like a helicopter from the smallest clearing, in mud or sand—no runway or military base would be necessary; then it could fly like a plane and be refueled in the air.

The Marines, like Special Forces, understood that virtue resided in practicality. Marines were articulate in a very nuts-and-bolts way. In the mid-1990s, at Camp Lejeune, I had listened to a typical “down and dirty” from an instructor talking to a group of Marines about to be deployed to the southern Balkans:

Irony, subtlety, and diplomacy were in short supply at Camp Lejeune. “With marines you will always know where you stand. If we have a problem with you, you’ll know it,” a marine informed me. I had entered a world stripped to its bare essentials, the inhabitants of which had taken a veritable monastic vow of poverty. “In our recruitment drives we don’t advertise material or educational benefits like the other services do,” Capt. Nevers said. “We just challenge people to be marines.”

In the deserts of the Horn of Africa I would meet my first marines in the field. As with Army Special Forces, I planned to get to know the Marines in stages, one deployment at a time.