by Tom Clancy
On that particular day, my duty sergeant sent four white Marines out to handle the problem.
When the four guards got to the sick bay, they found the crazy Marine in a recreation area, with a pool table and some soda machines, brandishing a pool cue and threatening to beat everybody up.
The four Marines did what they would normally do to take care of him. They grabbed him, cuffed him, and wrestled him down — with him kicking and fighting all the while. Then they manhandled him out to their jeep in order to take him to a holding cell until they could get him to a hospital for treatment.
As it happened, it was noontime — chow break — so everybody was coming out of the supply areas and warehouses. When the black Marines saw the four white Marines roughing up this guy, throwing him into the jeep, and bringing him back to the guard offices, it sparked a riot.
When I came back to the guard offices after my own lunch, I found a large number of black Marines surrounding the place. I was instantly up to my neck trying to figure out what had happened and calm it down.
The black Marines had a leader — a lance corporal and a hard worker they called “Superman,” because he was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy who looked like Hercules came up and confronted me, all fired up that we had been beating up on one of the brothers. (And of course I was still in the dark about what was going on.)
He and I talked it over for a while, and I was starting to think I could maybe calm this thing down when in walked Gunny DeCosta, who instantly decided he didn’t like the way this guy was talking. He launched into him and had him blasted in short order. This shocked everybody and brought the situation under control. We learned from incidents like these how to handle things firmly and how to quickly defuse tense situations.
Zinni studied and used riot control techniques the way he had previously studied combat. Inspired by Gunny DeCosta, he and his guards trained in kendo, stick fighting (using their batons), and other martial arts with the riot police from the city of Naha, at their dojo.
Zinni encouraged innovation and experimentation in the unit, and his guards developed creative new ways to handle rioters. One big problem: How do you identify the bad guys after a riot? When a riot is raging, the idea is to shut it down. When that starts to happen, the rioters melt away, and then the next day they show up at their jobs looking like everybody else.
The eventual solution was to fill a fuel bladder on a truck with a solution containing the indelible blue dye that’s stamped on meats (the medical supply guys provided it). During a riot, the guard would hose down everybody there with this solution. The next day they’d check the barracks and pick up anybody who was purple.
As weeks passed, other lessons were learned.
For starters, there were too many weak commanders:
Though no units at Camp Foster escaped its problems, Zinni learned to predict where he’d find the biggest problems by identifying the weakest commanders. Not surprisingly, the worst incidents involved troops from units with the weakest leadership… a failure obviously stemming from the personnel imbalances resulting from the war, but amplified when officers in the more technical MOSs were suddenly confronted with major leadership crises they just weren’t equipped to handle.
Another, far more important lesson: The value of openly thrashing out the issues with the troops.
In those days, the Marine Corps was only just starting to require human relations training — trying to get the message across that just because a person’s skin was different, or he wore his clothes differently, or liked different music, he was not radically different from you or anybody else. You still shared the same basic values. The Corps tried to teach all Marines to understand and respect these differences, even as they had them looking inside for prejudices they didn’t realize they had… the unconscious automatic stereotyping with which they’d grown up.
This training got off to a rocky — and sometimes hokey — start (for instance, they tried Soul Food Nights at the mess hall, with fried chicken, hominy grits, and chitterlings… everybody thought these were a joke) and was more often than not poorly conducted; yet it did encourage dialogue and frank discussion of problems. When these discussions were well led and troops were able to talk constructively about their concerns, they paid dividends that overcame the poor initial construct of the program.
For all of its rocky beginnings, the Corps’ human relationship training had the right idea; the organization was doing its best to get at the real roots of its troubles; and it didn’t give up. The Marine Corps kept at the effort for as long as it took to make it work.
It took many years.
Needless to say, there was a lot of resistance to this process. The old tough Marines didn’t like it: “This is all touchy-feely shit we don’t need,” they said. “Forget all that race crap. There’s no black or white Marines; they’re all green. Every Marine’s green. Just put Marine discipline in the unit, that’ll solve any problems we got.” Fortunately, the leadership of the Corps combined a strict adherence and maintenance of its standards with a more open means for communications.
As a result, the quality of the training picked up, and it came to be more and more accepted. Not always, but every once in a while, troops would really let loose, air out what really bothered them, and begin to connect.
Eventually, as the good changes became the norm, the need for the training went away. For many, it got to be seen as a pain in the butt.
That was not a sign of failure but of success.
The other side to the process involved weeding out real troublemakers — the thugs, the radicalized, the violent. The best place for such people was the brig, followed by an aircraft back to the states and jail. But the Corps also found ways to get rid of lesser troublemakers without having to go through a long legal process, by issuing what were called “expeditious discharges.” That is, people were given the opportunity to choose to leave with general discharges, and so avoid legal procedures and a worse discharge. It was easier for everybody.
Throughout the 1970s, as the size of the post-Vietnam Corps came down, the Corps was increasingly successful at weeding out those who’d come in under Project 100,000 and others who didn’t fit or had chronic qualification problems.
Meanwhile, a few weeks of firm and effective guard work stopped riots and demonstrations at Camp Foster, and Zinni’s guard became very popular. Many in the command now wanted to join it. It was the elite unit, the best place to be at the camp.
Zinni’s eight months in 3rd FSR, he later realized, were the most difficult of his Marine career. He’d never imagined he’d face Marine-on-Marine confrontations; at Camp Foster, he had to deal with them almost daily… not to mention levels of violence that made a logistics base feel like a combat tour. These were hard realities for an eager and dedicated young Marine to accept. On the other hand, he was able to leave Camp Foster with some confidence. He had encountered the worst of the problems facing the Corps, and the rest of the military, and knew that they could be handled.
He left 3rd FSR in August 1971 and one month later reported in to the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He was back in his original command.
BACK TO THE INFANTRY
When Zinni checked in to the 2nd Marine Division, he fought off the personnel officer’s kindly attempt to give him a break after his two tough Vietnam tours and life-threatening wounds. He didn’t want an undemanding staff job; he wanted to go to a rifle company, where the action was — the heart of the Marine Corps. You don’t get more central to Marine identity.
“Okay, then, you got it,” the personnel officer told him, “if that’s what you want.” And he sent Zinni down to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. There the battalion commander offered him command of Company D, which was in cadre status[27] at that time. It was to be remanned in the coming weeks.
Zinni was delighted. He was to get command of his sixth company; and it was a rifle company.
A Marine rifle company is usually
made up of three infantry platoons — called “rifle platoons”—and a weapons platoon, which has the company’s crew-served weapons: in those days, 60-millimeter mortars, M-60 machine guns, and perhaps an antitank capability. The number of men in a company varied based on a number of organizational changes at that time and the fluctuations in manning levels. Zinni found himself with a 120-man company, a far cry from the 250 he had in Vietnam, and a sign of the times.
He now had an opportunity to gain further command experience with a rifle company as well as to put into practice the many new training ideas that had come out of his time in Vietnam and his constant reading in matters military, from technical manuals to history and biography. Like most company commanders, he wanted to produce the best, most tactically proficient company in the division, but he also enjoyed actually teaching the skills he’d come by through trial and error, study, and observation.
Training a company takes many forms: There’s weapons and tactics, obviously, but also more specialized training for cold weather,[28] desert, or mountain operations; for working with tanks and armor; for amphibious operations (especially before a deployment). Some kinds of training were standardized, some were unique to whatever specialized mission or deployment was on the schedule.
Zinni’s company did it all — below-zero training in sixty inches of snow in upstate New York, training for jungle operations in Panama, and for amphibious operations in the Caribbean. The latter was Zinni’s first serious experience with the Marine Corps’ bread-and-butter mission, which was also the most complex of all military operations: the transfer of elements from a ship onto some form of transport (surface or air), and then moving them in a closely timed and synchronized way to a landing under fire on a hostile beach, followed by a continued buildup ashore. The entire process — from coming out of the ships through what’s called “the ship-to-shore movement” and into combat operations — must be accomplished in one smooth, continuous flow. Using air strikes and naval gunfire to support the units going ashore, passing control of the operation ashore from the ships, getting in the logistics and supplies, and matching it all up is an undertaking of tremendous complexity, requiring equally complex planning (landing sequence tables, assault schedules, helicopter deployment schedules), very close coordination, and a great degree of communication… while facing an enemy doing its best to disrupt and destroy it all.
As his career developed, Zinni made many sea deployments and amphibious ops — missions he came to love. He enjoyed life at sea, and the traditional image of the Marine Corps storming ashore and rushing up the beaches always excited him. In time, he became fascinated by these operations because of their enormous complexity — putting all the myriad pieces together in a synchronous yet dynamic way. The mission grew to be one of his passions. Later, he taught courses in amphibious ops at Marine Corps schools; and in Somalia, he was to command a force in an actual amphibious operation — the largest since the Inchon Landing during the Korean War.
Zinni commanded Company D for a little over a year, by which time he was sure they could handle any combat mission that came their way — an opinion he would soon have to prove when D Company took the division-directed company tactical test.
The test contained a series of tough challenges: The company might, for example, be asked to make an amphibious landing and then go into an armor-mechanized attack, or a night heliborne assault. The idea was to stretch the commander’s capabilities by whipping a number of missions on him and putting him under a lot of stress. He got no sleep, he had to keep moving; and all the while, the judges were looking at his ability to give orders and to successfully execute his tasks. At the same time, the judges were examining his troops’ performance, endurance, and tactical skills, and the NCOs and officers and their tactical skills.
So far, every company in the division had failed it.
Zinni and his company passed.
It was a big moment for Zinni, and (justifiably) swelled his ego. Soon came letters of congratulations and glowing calls from the regimental and the division commanders. Since the company was also excelling in its discipline statistics, reenlistment rates, and other nonoperational measures, there were further occasions for pride. Although Zinni reveled in his success, it came with a price.
He loved being a company commander; he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do except possibly to get back to the advisory unit in Vietnam.
The successes of his company ended that bliss.
Tony Zinni continues:
Not long before the end of one of our Caribbean deployments, my battalion commander called me to his office at our camp on Vieques Island (near Puerto Rico) and handed me a message from the division commander, Major General Fred Haynes. Haynes was asking for nominees from each battalion to be his aide-de-camp. The last line of the message directed that our battalion’s nominee be me.
“Do you know anything about this?” my battalion commanding officer asked. “Why are we the only battalion with a directed nomination?”
“I’m as much in the dark about this as you are, sir,” I told him. “I definitely do not want the job.” It was a staff job, and I never wanted staff jobs.
“Okay, then. I’ll tell him that,” the CO said, and sent a message back to the commanding general stating that I declined the nomination.
I forgot all about this thing and went back to the field with my company.
Two weeks later, as our ship docked at Morehead City, North Carolina, to off-load our battalion landing team, I was greeted by an officer from the division staff who told me I was to immediately get in the staff car waiting at the bottom of the brow and proceed to the division commander’s office to report to General Haynes.
“I can’t do that,” I said to him. “I have to get my company back to Camp Lejeune and settled back into our barracks.”
“That’s an order,” he laughed.
So I let my battalion commander know where I was headed, took off for the division headquarters, and nervously entered the general’s office. Haynes was a tall, distinguished-looking Texan, an Iwo Jima veteran, who was considered one of the most brilliant men in the Marine Corps. At his invitation, I took a seat.
After asking me about the deployment and how things were going, he explained what he was looking for in the job. “I want my senior aide to be my ‘operational aide,’ ” he explained. “I’ll have the junior aide, a lieutenant, to handle all the social requirements, the proper uniforms, and all that kind of business. For my ‘operational aide’ I want an adviser, somebody who’s been in the pits whom I can trust. I want a guy that knows what the hell goes on in a division, knows about training and operations, and who’s been in combat. I want someone who the junior officers and NCOs of the division will honestly talk to, who’ll be my point of contact with them, and who can tell me what they’re thinking and their perspective on what we need to improve.
“When we go out in the field and see what’s out there, I want a guy savvy enough to say, ‘What you’re seeing there, General, is not good,’ because he knows it’s not… I’m removed from that. That’s years ago, in my past. Now I get screened and filtered. If I talk to colonels and other generals, I get good information, but it doesn’t come from the ranks. I want my operational aide to give me that sense.
“I’ve already interviewed all the nominees,” he went on, “but waited to make my decision until you returned and I could interview you.” He then read to me the list of other nominees.
“Sir, I know most of them, and you couldn’t pick a finer group of captains. I’m sure you’d be satisfied with one of those guys.”
Then he looked at me. “You know, Captain, the message from your CO is very interesting. It seems that you’re the only nominee who does not want the job.”
“I don’t feel that I’m really aide material,” I told him; and I meant it. You always think of an aide as a tall, bullet-headed, poster Marine. And here I was, a short, squat Italian guy, rough around the edges, and he
’s a better than six-foot-tall Texan — a golf-playing gentleman. (A little later, when I told him I didn’t play golf, I thought I’d put the final nail in the coffin.)
By then he was smiling at me… just playing with me. “I take it that’s just because you want to stay on as a rifle company commander,” he said. “This I can understand. You don’t have anything against being my aide, do you?”
“Certainly not,” I said, thinking, “Shit, I hope I haven’t insulted him”—the last thing on my mind.
“Well, I understand you don’t want the job. I’ve had some tremendously talented captains who are interested and who’ve interviewed for it; and I appreciate your coming by. I didn’t want to make the decision until I interviewed all the candidates.”
This kind of confused me because I didn’t think I was a candidate. I thought the message from my CO had killed that. But because I thought there might have been a misunderstanding, I said, “Well, I appreciate your interest, sir. But, no, I really don’t want the job, and you have some fine officers there.”
“I do; and I also understand your position; and we’ll go ahead and make the decision.”
“Thank you, sir, for the understanding,” I said, and left.
When I got back to the battalion area, I went to my CO’s office and told him everything was okay. It all seemed to be just a formality the general needed to go through so he could say he had interviewed all the nominees. But when I arrived back at my company area, there was a call waiting as I walked in. It was my CO. He’d just received a call from General Haynes. I was selected as the aide and was ordered to report for duty the next day.