Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

INTRODUCTION The Quiet Lion

Heroes rarely look the part. The first holder of the Medal of Honor I met looked more like a retired accountant than John Wayne, and when I introduced General Fred Franks to a physician friend, the latter remarked that he was a dead ringer for the professor of pediatrics at Cornell University Medical School. And that's really the basis on which we first met. In 1991, I knew a young lad named Kyle who was afflicted with a rare and deadly form of cancer. A friend of mine, Major General Bill Stofft, was heading over to the Persian Gulf after the conclusion of hostilities. There was a senior officer over there, I'd heard, who'd lost a leg in Vietnam. My little buddy had just endured the surgical removal of his leg, and I asked Bill if he might approach this officer and ask him to write a brief letter of encouragement to Kyle, then at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The officer, I learned from General Stofft, was Fred Franks, then a lieutenant general, and commander of VII Corps. Bill delivered the request, and Lieutenant General Franks responded at once, calling it a privilege. He wrote a warm letter to my friend, and copied it to me with a cover note thanking me for making him aware of my friend and his affliction. That, really, is the bond between us.

Soon thereafter, Fred received another star and a new post as commanding general of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Fort Monroe in the Virginia Tidewater, a plum job whose mission it is to look into the future and prepare for it, and it was there that we met for the first time. The first order of business was to thank him for his gracious solicitude to my little friend. He waved it off, thanking me again for the opportunity to look after a child, and really that's most of what I needed to learn about this gentleman.

Fred is a man of modest size and words — on the rare occasions when he swears, even that is quiet. There's an engaging shyness to this general officer. Don't be fooled. He's one of the undramatic people who gets the job done and moves on without fanfare to the next mission, leaving accomplishment in his wake.

Soldiers are not what we most often see portrayed on the screen. The best of them, the ones who ascend to generals' stars, are thoughtful students of their profession, scholarly commentators on history, and gifted observers of human psychology. The profession of arms is every bit as broad and deep as medicine or law. Like physicians, officers must know their subject in every detail, for they deal in the currency of life and death, and some mistakes can never be corrected. Like attorneys, they must plan everything in exquisite detail, because in some arenas you have but one chance to get it right.

The sheer intellectual complexity of command is something few have discussed with anything approaching accuracy. In preparing to move his VII Corps across the desert, Fred first of all had to consider the major pieces: U.S. 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions, the renowned 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized), the 1st Cavalry Division, U.K. 1st Armored Division, U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, and three separate artillery brigades. Those units alone account for nearly 100,000 soldiers, each of whom was assigned to a vehicle. Toss in the "loggies," the logistical troops whose unsung but vital job was to keep the "shooters" equipped with everything from diesel fuel to computer chips.

Okay, now imagine that you have to plan the rush hour for a city of, oh, say, 1 million, deciding how each worker gets home; that you have to account for every single one of them, from point of origin to destination, and that everyone has to arrive home at exactly the right time.

Oh, that's not all: Fred had to plan seven different options for his move. So you also must allow for seven different combinations of closed streets, road work, and broken bridges, while still allowing every commuter to make it home at the proper time.

By the way, if you mess this little job up, human lives will be lost.

Sounds easy? We haven't even gotten to the really hard part yet. People will be trying to kill the commuters — organized, trained people, with weapons — and you also must minimize that little hazard.

And yet, in a way, this was the easy part. Just to get to that point Fred Franks and his colleagues — men like Creighton Abrams, Ed Burba, Bill DePuy, Colin Powell, Butch Saint, Norm Schwarzkopf, Pete Taylor, Carl Vuono, and so many others — had to fix an Army that in their younger days as lieutenants and captains had been broken by poor political leadership and public antipathy. Fred lost part of a leg in Vietnam. His colleagues were all hurt in one way or another, and the Army nearly lost its soul, while America lost her confidence as a nation. As a major with 1.5 legs, lying in a bed in Valley Forge, he had to conquer pain and heartache, to wonder if he had a career before him at all, and to wonder also if his country gave a damn about him and his fellow amputees.

Remember just how dark those days were? The Army was on its back, its NCO corps bled nearly to death in Vietnam, drugs were rampant throughout the institution, and morale was so low that on more than one post, officers entered barracks only with an armed escort.

Fred was one of the men who had to make good all that others had conspired to destroy. Like the Army of the 1970s, he had to learn to walk all over again. As he had to repair the wounds in his heart, so the Army had to restore its confidence. All these things did happen, however, because Fred and men like him never lost faith in their country or their own ideals.

How great was their task? Looking back from today's perspective, it is more frightening, perhaps, than it was at the time, but the magnitude of the accomplishment can be measured simply: America won the Cold War because she and her allies were too strong to lose. That happened only because Fred Franks and his wounded but proud band of brothers made her so, and that only after healing themselves. I started meeting these men in 1988, and that's when the idea for this book really began. The public image of the Army is most often that of the cinema, and that is generally an infantry squad, because a movie can show only so much. By the same token, the heaviest firepower the Army has — tanks and artillery, which do most of the killing on the modern battlefield — has been largely ignored. And so the image we have of the military is not so much false as limited. That's a lesson I learned at Fort Irwin, California, on a cold January morning. Having had the taste, I had to learn more, and I was fortunate in finding a superb collection of teachers.

Any army is a vast community of people more than a collection of their awesome tools. It may seem grotesque to call war-fighting an art, but warfighting is more than anything else the leadership of people, and handling people is the most demanding of human arts, all the more so when the currency is life and death. More than that, in a nation's military, you find the nation itself, all of its qualities, whether good or bad, distilled to an odd sort of purity. Our Army has traveled in a single lifetime down a strange and crooked road, from the triumph of World War II through the embarrassment of Korea, through peacekeeping and holding the line in Europe, through tragedy and waste in Vietnam, through near total collapse thereafter, through a long and wrenching process of reconstitution, then again to dominance on the sands of Iraq and Kuwait.

It's a story I could hardly tell by myself, and it's a story for more than one book. From Fred Franks I learned the story of the United States Army, so grievously wounded in Vietnam. Though the viewpoints and perspectives are mine, much of the story is his, and in certain chapters I have felt it only fitting that he tell it in his own words. Other aspects of America's recovery and dominance will come from others in future books, and I hope the reader will come to grasp just how much was done, and how much is owed. There were plenty of infantry squads, and tank crews, and cannoneers, and loggies, all wearing their nation's colors. All of them were trained, supported, and led by the professionals who kept the faith.

And so the man and the army that advanced across sand and rock were ready for their task, their memories of Vietnam never far from their minds, and the lessons of that experience in their hands. The army America deployed to the Persian Gulf might well have been the finest in all of history, equipped with the best weapons, trained in the most realistic fashion, and led by men who'd learned the hard way why you have to get it done right the first time. We all saw the results on TV.

It's been my honor to get to know this man. A man of iron and letters — he's taught poetry at the university level — Fred Franks symbolizes our army as well as any man could.

— TOM CLANCY