I decided to get down to the village for a firsthand look. After putting my executive officer in charge of the security mission at the naval bases, I scheduled a C-130 to take me and additional security personnel to reinforce our platoon down to the dirt strip near the village. From there, we'd move on to the village by helo. We were to leave the following morning.
That night I was awakened by an urgent report from the platoon commander at the village. The NPA had killed a villager and left his body near our positions; an attached note threatened our troops. I immediately ordered more troops added to the security force on the C-130.
Before we landed the C-130 at the dirt strip, I had the pilot fly over the village so I could get a sense of the area.
The downed helo was an incredible sight. "Minor damage? No big deal?" Forget about it. It was stuck in the mire of a coastal tidal stream; its blades snapped off. This was no minor, easily repaired problem.
After flying into the village via chopper, I made a quick inspection of our position with my battalion commander, then turned the security situation over to him and turned my attention to the helo. I came down on the squadron like a ton of bricks. This, I learned, was how the crash came about:
The lieutenant flying the CH-53 had overloaded it with heavy sacks of food. As he was coming into the tiny landing zone in the center of the village, it hit him at the last moment that the zone was too small for his big bird. He pulled up sharply, but the weight onboard did not let him get the lift he needed, and he settled into the nearby tidal stream, just missing the straw huts crowded between the LZ and the water.
Time then became a critical factor. The tide was coming in within a few hours. When the helo could not be repaired as quickly as everyone had hoped, the rising saltwater tide set it drifting into the trees bordering the stream, which further damaged the bird, making it impossible to get it out on its own power. It was now stuck in the mud.
I was furious. I understood the squadron's focus on repairing the helo and appreciated their round-the-clock efforts to work on the bird under difficult conditions, but the squadron's failure to accurately report the status of the helo was inexcusable. Their failure had caused me to put them in a very dangerous situation for more than a day.
That wasn't the only source of my fury. Those who had tasked us with this mission had failed to properly analyze the intelligence and security situation, and I expressed my feelings to those up the chain of command who needed to pay more attention to what was going on. Fortunately, we had Philippine Marines in the area to help.
We eventually arranged for a powerful CH-53E to pull the helo out of the muck. From there it was to take the damaged helo to a recovery tug offshore. The operation started out all right. The CH-53E successfully raised the busted bird; but on the way to the tug, the CH-53E dropped it into the Philippine Sea.
The tug skipper said, "Not to worry. I can easily recover it from the seafloor."
He actually made good on his promise, and the tug recovered the helo, then brought it to the naval base and dumped it on the shore near our own base camp . . . now a total write-off.
The story does not end there.
On a later deployment, we were ordered to clean up the helo and put it aboard a ship bound for Okinawa. Since it had been sitting on the edge of the jungle for almost a year, the cleanup was a tough job. In the helicopter's current condition, the Navy was not eager to have it aboard their ship, and this caused heated discussions.
The helo was again making my life miserable.
When we got the helo back to Okinawa, it was placed at Camp Hansen, for use in training on helicopter embark and debark drills (old helo hulks are often used for this purpose). And there it sat, in clear view, every day for the remainder of my tour, as a reminder of all the griefs it had dragged me through.
DURING MY tour of duty with the Striking Ninth, General Gray called me back to Washington several times to participate in studies aimed at tackling the many problems arising from the inevitable shrinking of the military. He wanted the Corps to be able to reduce personnel and forces with minimal disruption and without losing capabilities. These were hard efforts to sell. Though the commandant's study group had a highly select membership from all over the Marine Corps, several commanders fought our recommendations. Nobody wanted to give up anything. Nobody wanted to face the reality of impending reductions and change.
Meanwhile, it became increasingly difficult for me to handle these time-consuming studies while running my other duties on Okinawa--a conflict that General Gray did not fail to notice. "I doubt that you'll finish a regular three-year tour of duty on Okinawa," he told me.
He was right. After two years and a couple months, I received orders back to Quantico, where I was to become the chief of staff of the Training and Education Center, an organization recently established by General Gray to implement the changes he had directed. My experience in this area made it inevitable that I'd be returned early to help.
CHAPTER FOUR
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 admirals35 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 facade 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), an
d 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.
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