by Tom Clancy
Generals Kelley and Trainor then decided to take these findings to Fleet Marine Forces Atlantic, now under the command of Lieutenant General Al Gray, for further study (Zinni participated as the headquarters representative). This led to Gray’s development of the Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) program, which took forward deployed Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) and drastically changed their training, organization, equipping, taskings, and certification so that they could better meet the new crises. Since the “new” units remained designated as conventional forces, the change didn’t violate the Corps’ long-standing special operations policy. The units were just made far more capable.
Though the program was controversial both in and out of the Marine Corps, the MEU (SOC)s proved to be one of the Marines’ greatest innovations — often called the “jewel in their crown”… and an ongoing demonstration that the Corps has maintained its expeditionary heritage.
Late in 1984, Zinni was selected to become a colonel, and then made head of the Concepts and Capabilities Branch, a recent creation of his immediate boss, Major General Jack Godfrey, the director of the Operations Division at headquarters. The Concepts and Capabilities Branch was charged with conceptually integrating all the exciting new Marine programs with existing capabilities and operating concepts. It was another job that allowed Zinni to work where he loved to be — on the cutting edge of operational issues and thinking. His branch worked on several major emerging capabilities such as the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons, Norway Prepositioning Program, and Tilt Rotor Aircraft development (which turned into the Osprey). It became the central source for providing the “how to fight” basis for all new capabilities.
In the summer of 1986, Zinni was assigned as a fellow of the chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) — six Navy captains and three Marine colonels selected to spend a year working a strategically significant special project under the direction of a retired senior diplomat. The group was based in Newport, Rhode Island, but traveled extensively to interview both U.S. and international military leaders. The 1986 project reexamined the American maritime strategy in a war with the Warsaw Pact. The current strategy, which had been in place for several years, had already been very well discussed and practiced in many exercises. The CNO, Admiral Trost, and the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, wanted the SSG to examine Soviet reaction to the strategy and to propose improvements.
To that end, they were given access to Soviet defectors, and highly classified U.S. intelligence material and programs. They also structured war games to test out their recommendations. For Zinni, this was a heady time, something like going through another year at a war college; the depth of understanding he gained on strategic issues and on the ways the war with the Soviet Empire was actually expected to go down was invaluable.
Since he also had free time (his family had remained at their home at Quantico), he decided to enter a second master’s program in international relations at a university in Newport.
While Zinni was at the SSG, the Marine Corps gained a new commandant, General Al Gray.
During a visit to the group, Gray offered Zinni a chance to return to Camp Lejeune to command a new MEU (SOC). Naturally, returning to the operational forces greatly pleased — and excited — Tony Zinni. But a few weeks later, he received a call from Lieutenant General Jack Godfrey, his old boss at headquarters and now the commanding general of the Marine Expeditionary Force in the Western Pacific (III MEF), offering command of one of his infantry regiments, the 9th Marines—“the Striking Ninth.”
The choice was tough, but Zinni decided to ask for the regiment.
As an infantry officer it was difficult to pass up a regimental command. But he had several other reasons as well: He already had three tours of duty at Camp Lejeune and in the 2nd Marine Division, and he had deployed twice to the Mediterranean and was familiar with Europe and the Caribbean, while his tours in the Pacific were limited to Vietnam and Okinawa. The only division he had not served in was the Third, and this would also allow him to experience more of the Western Pacific… and ensure he would not be seen as one of General Gray’s “pets.” Since many officers did not want to serve overseas in accompanied tours (that is, with their families), and particularly on Okinawa, it was hard to find officers who’d accept assignments there. This was a chance for Zinni to show he wasn’t getting special consideration. Though his family was truly happy living at Camp Lejeune, they were willing to try something new.
The decision to take the regiment proved to be one of the best he had ever made.
THE STRIKING NINTH
I began the ’70s on Okinawa, and ended the ’80s there.
The “Striking Ninth” Marines, a legendary regiment that had seen tough combat on Iwo Jima and in Vietnam, was now based at Camp Hansen in the northern part of Okinawa. The regiment’s three battalions were rotational units that deployed to Okinawa for six-month periods from parent commands on the West Coast and Hawaii. This meant that the regiment always had full-up, highly trained units.
Along with command of the regiment came command of Camp Hansen, which was the largest Marine Corps camp in the Western Pacific, with over fifty units and agencies based there. A total of seven thousand Marines and sailors and over one thousand civilians worked at the camp, and many of the troops were housed there.
The demands on running a base like Camp Hansen was a new experience for me and presented a lot of challenges — from the day-to-day business of keeping things running, to planning for future growth, to securing our facilities during severe typhoons.
The camp consisted of 421 buildings spread over 605 acres; and during my tour, it underwent tremendous construction and reconstruction, requiring a great deal of planning and supervision.
These two commands came with a third responsibility — maintaining relationships with the local Okinawan community. The district included a number of small towns and villages and the major town, Kin, adjoining the camp.
Operational command of the camp gave me the fascinating and new experience of running what was in effect a small city, while my connection with the local community added to the diverse cultural experiences I’ve always enjoyed and taught me a great deal about the art of negotiations and cross-cultural communications. This would come in handy many times in the future.
In Oriental cultures, form and politeness can be more important than our preferred in-your-face direct responses. Orientals see these as insulting.
My Civil Affairs officer, a local Okinawan, taught me a great deal about the customs and procedures necessary to be effective in that community. I also tried to pick up a little of the language — not just Japanese but the local Okinawan. I rehearsed speeches in front of the “mama-sans” who worked at the camp as laundry workers and housekeepers.
As time went on, I made a number of Okinawan friends, frequently attending family dinners, weddings, and funerals. I also participated in festivals and social events, and met regularly with the mayors, the assembly, the chamber of commerce, police chief, and other civic leaders and groups. Civic action programs that we set up allowed volunteer troops to do good works for their Okinawan neighbors: We fixed up orphanages and schools for special children and helped with local celebrations. Days of recognition and appreciation for the local community on the base encouraged understanding.
At times we had tensions, but the strong personal relationships we built allowed us to work through them. Fortunately, our troops did not cause any significant problems during my tour. According to my local friends, this was the longest period without a serious incident between our troops and Okinawans. (All the work to cure the myriad problems from the aftermath of Vietnam was now paying off.)
Later two other commands were added to my original three responsibilities:
The 9th Marines was designated to provide the core unit for Regimental Landing Team-9, the Ground Combat Element of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), our amphibious force in the Western Pa
cific. And during a visit to Okinawa, General Gray directed the commanding general of III MEF to develop and establish a MEU (SOC), the first in this command. I was ordered to organize, train, and command this unit.
The MEU has a battalion landing team as a ground component, a reinforced helicopter squadron as an air component, and a logistics component. We did extensive training in the highly specialized equipment, tactics, techniques, and procedures for the unit’s unique missions. This involved intense and demanding certification evaluations conducted in difficult locations like the Philippines.
In one night helicopter training event, we had a helo crash at sea and lost a number of Marines. This was not the first time I’d seen a fatal training accident, and it wasn’t the last. Despite all of our best efforts, shit happens. Yet, each time I’ve been torn by the loss of some great Marines. Peacetime training deaths in your unit are, in many ways, far more difficult to deal with than combat deaths. After a memorial service the next day and an extensive air and sea search, we resumed the training. Though I knew this was difficult for young men to understand (and it was hard for me as well!), I felt I had to send a message that we had to immediately get our minds back into our training. I knew the demands of combat don’t give us the luxury of grieving for long.
For over two years, 1987-89, I was blessed with these five grand responsibilities. The icing on the cake was the enjoyment my family got out of this tour of duty. They loved Okinawa. They had never been happier.
Meanwhile, like any commander, I wanted to have the best-trained and operationally capable regiment in the Marine Corps. We immersed ourselves in rigorous training and education programs.
Okinawa is small, which meant there were serious live fire and range restrictions. These problems had given the island a reputation as a difficult place for training, and impossible for large unit training. But I refused to accept this. To prove it could be done, I took the entire regiment to the field on exercises. This meant we had to look for innovative approaches and to ignore imagined limitations, but we got the job done. Of course, the island did have training limitations; and I scraped or volunteered for every opportunity to get my units off the island for training and exercises. They went to Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Guam, Iwo Jima, and many other locations in the region. In my two-plus years in command of the regiment, the RLT, and the MEU, I took these units to over twenty large-scale exercises, and sent smaller units to many more.
I have always enjoyed teaching operations and tactics. This experience had led me to conclude that most commanders neglect the operational education of their subordinate leaders. As a result, I established an extensive officer, Staff NCO, and NCO education program in the command. All the twice-weekly officer school sessions — classes, map exercises, and field sessions — were focused solely on war fighting, and were taught or supervised by me. We made every attempt to make them fun and challenging.
I tasked my sergeant major to run the Staff NCO sessions, and (together with the battalion sergeants major) to supervise the NCO program. But I taught many of these sessions as well.
Since the contingency requirement to respond to a crisis in Korea was our most demanding potential mission, the regiment and RLT spent a great deal of time engaged in enormous exercises there, involving thousands of U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK) troops. Conducting operations in the Korean countryside among the small villages and towns made the exercises realistic and interesting for our troops. The training was tough, often done during the winter or early spring months when the weather was extremely harsh.
Twice my MEU was called out to handle crises in the Philippines, when assassins from the NPA, a Philippine terrorist group, murdered U.S. military personnel.
In the first incident, U.S. airmen from Clark Air Force Base were killed in the town near their base. In the second, the U.S. military attaché to the Philippines, Colonel Nick Rowe, was shot while driving in Manila (Rowe was a hero, having escaped from Vietnam after surviving years of captivity there).
Our mission following both incidents was to provide immediate security to the naval base at Subic Bay and the nearby naval air base at Cubi Point. Our units patrolled the jungle around the bases and provided security for forces required for missions outside the bases.
I knew this jungle well, since we had done extensive training there. The Negrito scouts, from one of the many Philippine ethnic groups, had conducted the jungle training, and they were superb — teaching us about jungle plants that stopped infections and bleeding and helped wounds heal quicker, about other plants that were ordinarily poisonous but which could be bleached (to remove the poison) and eaten, and much else… a tremendous wealth of field skills. Though I had taken a number of jungle training courses and had firsthand experience in Vietnam, these scouts taught me more about jungle craft than I had ever learned before.
The most significant event during these deployments came when the admiral in charge of our forces in the Philippines decided we should conduct a humanitarian mission after a fierce typhoon had hit a remote area of southeastern Luzon. When U.S. troops were locked down on the bases the resulting tensions from the loss of revenue to locals had started to cause problems. The admiral saw the opportunity to help the ravaged coastal villages as a way of easing some of these tensions and improving relations.
The humanitarian mission he laid on us required my aircraft, C-130s and CH-53s, to move relief supplies. The C-130s flew the supplies to a dirt airstrip in the region, while the big CH-53 helos took the supplies from the dirt strip staging area into the villages.
Though I certainly appreciated the humanitarian and public relations benefits at a sensitive time, I was not comfortable with the mission. The area we were operating in was over three hundred miles from our base, and no one was paying much attention to security requirements and potential threats from the NPA and other terrorists and local insurrections.
Our aircraft ran the first missions with no problems and were into the second day of operations when I received a call that one of our CH-53s had made an emergency landing in a village and suffered minor damage. No big deal, my squadron asserted. They’d make a quick inspection and minor repairs, and the helo would be out in a few hours.
That estimate turned out to be wildly optimistic… The fallen helo was about to become the bane of my existence.
The next day, the news from the helo was not so positive. Damage was now seen to have been somewhat worse than originally reported, but the CH-53 could still be easily fixed.
“Okay,” I said to myself, but when I asked the Philippine Marines about local security and threats from bad guys I was shocked to learn that this particular area was heavily threatened and influenced by the NPA. The situation there was so bad that the Philippine military sent in only their most elite forces, Marines and Rangers. Though I was aware that these forces were operating in the region, I had not connected that with the threat information. My upset got worse.
I immediately ordered my battalion to rush a satellite communications- equipped platoon to the village to provide security for the one more day of work needed to get the helo functioning.
When the platoon arrived, its commander reported that the village chief was worried that all of this American military activity would attract NPA guerrillas. The platoon commander had accordingly set up security for the helo and the village. That was the good news. The bad news was that the helo was actually in much worse condition than previously reported.
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 o
ur 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.