by Tom Clancy
At the very beginning of the twentieth century — a time when the daring and brave from many nations struck out for the promised land — two men from the rugged, mountainous province of Abruzzo in central Italy set off to achieve that promise. One of the men was a peasant farmer named Francesco Zinni; the other was a tailor named Zupito DiSabatino. They were my grandfathers. They had never met, and would not for many years.
Their trek followed the pattern followed by thousands of others. They came alone, found jobs, established themselves in this strange, raw, bustling land, and a few years later sent for their families. With the same courage and apprehension, my grandmothers, Christina Zinni and Cecilia DiSabatino, packed up the kids, headed to the Italian ports, and sailed across the seas to join their husbands. With Christina in 1910 was her fourteen-year-old son, Antonio, my father; and with Cecilia in 1906 was her three-year-old daughter, Lilla, my mother. I often look at faded old pictures taken around that time and wonder what my parents and grandparents were thinking as these great changes unfolded.
Neither of my parents had an easy life growing up. Like all young immigrants of the time, they managed only a few years of education before they had to go to work. My father worked in mills, and then in landscaping, and eventually became a chauffeur; my mother worked in garment factories.
Our family military tradition in America started with my father, who was drafted to fight in World War One — the War to End All Wars — shortly after he arrived from Italy. He got here and he was drafted. Later, I looked into it and found that twelve percent of America’s infantrymen in World War One were Italian immigrants. Their new homeland did not forget their wartime service. My father, who served in the 101st Aero Squadron in France, received his citizenship papers along with his discharge papers. He came out of the war as a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Just imagine what that meant to him!
Meanwhile, his family had settled in a mill town called Conshohocken on the outskirts of Philadelphia; and my mother’s family had settled in the Italian neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. These places were the center of my universe for the first two decades of my life.
They met during the 1920s, married, and raised four children: Frank, Christine, Rita, and me. I entered the wonderful, loving world of large Italian families on September 17, 1943, when my parents were well into their forties.
The people with whom I grew up were from working-class families. The mothers were full of love and caring, and raised the brood. The men worked hard, and most served their country in time of war — all as enlisted men. Besides my father, I had cousins who served in World War Two; my brother served in the Korean War; and my sisters married men who served. I listened to the stories these men told with fascination and envy. To them, service was an obligation of citizenship and, more important, a rite of passage to manhood. That obligation was engraved on my young brain. It was part of what had to be done as you grew into adulthood. If you were fortunate, I thought, you might even see action.
In my neighborhood were ethnic families that included Italian, Irish, Polish, African American, and “Mayflower” Americans. I don’t remember much friction between these groups. The mixed neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces tended to bring everyone together. I attended public school for the first five grades, then switched to Catholic school for the upper grades and for high school. The good sisters ran a tight ship. We learned self-discipline and a strong work ethic, mixed with a good dose of right and wrong.
These are the particular influences that have shaped me. Other, larger events shaped my generation. Those of us who survived those changes, and were able to advance more than we retreated, may have had advantages not shared by many young people starting out today. Of course it always helps to have good genes and DNA, and to come from families that function normally. But we also grew up in school systems that actually taught us something and imprinted us with a code, which helped move us along the path toward being useful citizens. And for most of us, our religious upbringing gave us an acceptance of a Higher Being in one form or another, at the core of our beliefs.
Of the events that shaped us, some came to us as a legacy; some we actually lived through. One of the biggest was World War Two, which has proven to be both a blessing and a curse to my generation. The blessing was that the Greatest Generation preserved our freedoms and our way of life, lifted us out of a severe depression on a wave of prosperity, and moved us into a role of world leadership. The curse is that it was the last Good War — the last with moral clarity, an easily identified and demonized enemy, unprecedented national unity in mobilization and rationing, pride in those who served in uniform (shown by the blue star flags hung by the families of those who fought and the gold star flags by the families of those who died), and welcome home victory parades for those lucky enough to return from overseas. Every war should be fought like that.
After World War Two, I learned about war at the knees of my cousins, who’d fought at the Battle of the Bulge in Europe and all over the Pacific — on the ground and in the air. A few years later, my older brother was drafted and fought in Korea. Their war stories were remarkable: sometimes gory and horrible, but always positive in the end. It was like winning the Big Game against your archrival — always clean and always good. So this was my generation’s legacy: World War Two was the way you fight a war. And all throughout our four decades of service, this notion kept getting reinforced. Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s famous 1984 statement of doctrine about the six criteria for the use of military force[88] is a recipe for refighting World War Two — not for fighting the Operations Other Than War (OOTW) that we face today. In fact, if you read the Weinberger Doctrine and adhere to every one of its tenets, you will be able to fight no war other than World War Two.
I joined the Marines in 1961 and officially retired on September 1, 2000.
I’d like to shine a spotlight on who we were — the military generations who went through the past four decades, from the 1960s up to the new millennium. If you looked at a snapshot taken when I first came into the service, all the generals looked the same — distinguished older white males with Anglo-Saxon names and Southern drawls — while the troops they led came from lots of different places. Let’s just say that the generals didn’t speak Philadelphia the way I speak Philadelphia.
But things were changing in the 1960s. Marine Corps officers were still coming in from the service academies and military institutes, yet more and more were coming in from Catholic colleges in the Northeast (as I did), from state colleges and universities around the nation, and from other schools with strong NROTC units or other strong military traditions. At the same time, we were seeing people coming up through the enlisted ranks to become officers — not just the tough old mustangs or limited-duty officers with midgrade terminal ranks, but young people whom we would send to school as an investment in the future. Back then, whatever our various backgrounds, we all came into the service with a code imprinted on each of us by family, school, or church. Those who had come from military schools received the imprint from their officers. One way or another, all of us were programmed to believe that we were not just doing a job, or even a profession, but were pursuing a calling.
It was never a drag for me to go to work. The troops, the leaders and mentors, the day-to-day experiences, always gave me a charge. I just loved it from day one. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t always fun. There were bad times. And some of the times were truly harrowing. But I never tired of engaging with the challenges. I could wrap my entire self around them — body, mind, and spirit. I never once regretted that I took that course through life.
Around the turn of the millennium, I had occasion to talk with old World War Two vets. It was often unnerving to face the old guys who’d look at me and seem to say, “How in hell did you screw it up? We had it right and we did it right and we fought and we understood and we left this country an incredible legacy, and now look at where we are…”
It’s
hard to escape the feeling “God, I’ve let them down,” because the second major challenge that affected us was the Vietnam War — our nation’s longest and least satisfactory. It was my second-lieutenant experience, and I was pretty green (that changed fast). I didn’t see then all the problems we see now — the war was fought in the wrong way; it was badly led. I went through serious pain and suffering. I was sick; I was badly wounded. Yet despite all these problems, I would do it again. We had to do it.
Not because it was a “good” war, but because even in our failure we delivered a message that had to be delivered. We have to understand Vietnam within its context. We were in the Cold War. We were fighting communism. We had to stop it from spreading. We made a stand and didn’t hold that line. But communism didn’t spread. You can’t tell me that the Soviets didn’t get the message that we would stand if we had to.
The veterans of that war, in their losing fight, were no less heroes than the veterans of World War Two; and in some ways their heroism goes deeper, because it was never truly recognized and appreciated by the American people.
As my time in Vietnam lengthened, I began asking questions… wondering just what in hell our generals — my heroes who fought in World War Two — thought they were doing. Those of us who were platoon commanders and company commanders fought hard, but could never understand what war our most senior leaders thought we were fighting. The tactics didn’t make sense and the personnel policies — such as one-year individual rotations instead of unit rotations in and out of country — were hard to comprehend.
Today, of course, we are seeing a stream of apologetic books by the policymakers and military leaders of that era — as though saying mea culpa enough will absolve them of the terrible responsibility they still bear.
The third major test we went through was the challenge of the ’70s. It was the toughest time for me in my four decades of Marine Corps service — racial problems, drug problems, generational problems, authority problems… flower children, peace marches, demonstrations (some of them violent), the loss of trust in the military by a large portion of the American people. But in passing through that tumultuous cauldron, our military has, in my view, put together its greatest achievement during that forty-year period. To name just one example, it is the one segment of society where integration of the races has fully taken hold. Sure, we still run into problems, but nowhere else in American society can a person of color find the kind of opportunity he or she can find in our military. And we in the military are far better off for their presence. I am proud of them. We want the best and the brightest, and we get them.
The fourth challenge that affected my generation was the Cold War — which was actually a forty-year commitment to refight World War Two, if ever the need arose. Once again, we were energized to engage in global conflict, but this time against the evil “Red Menace.” Problem was, we could never figure just how this particular war would actually start. After playing a bazillion war games at the Naval War College and other places, I still could not come up with a logical or convincing way such a war would kick off. It was just too hard to show why the Soviets would want to conquer a burning, devastated Europe, or how that could possibly benefit the communists in any way. So we would just gloss over the way the miserable war got started, jump into the middle of things, and play on. The Cold War was ever-present, and it was great for justifying programs, systems, and force structure — but, deep down inside, no one seriously believed that it would actually happen.
Still, it necessarily drove things. It drove the way we thought; it drove the way we organized and equipped; and it drove the way we developed our concepts of fighting. It totally shaped us. It totally defined who we were. And when it was all over, we achieved our aim. The war didn’t happen. This was not a dog that didn’t bark. The readiness we worked so hard to achieve for so many years was apparent to the Soviets and their surrogates. They could see the level of our commitment. They didn’t want to take us on. Our readiness and commitment acted as a deterrent — exactly what we wanted them to do.
That taught us one other vital lesson: How to contain and how to deter — the use of the military to prevent wars. This was the first time in history, to my knowledge, that a great power has taken that course. It’s a course we will have to take again and again in the twenty-first century.
Then suddenly, at the end of the 1980s, the Berlin Wall came down, the Evil Empire collapsed, and we found ourselves in the New World Order. It would require a major adjustment. We didn’t do that right.
The next influential event was Desert Storm, which, as far as I am concerned, was an aberration. Though it seemed to work out okay for us — indeed proved beyond doubt how enormously powerful our Cold War military really was — it was the final salute of the Cold War military. It left the impression that the terrible mess that awaits us abroad can somehow be overcome by good, clean soldiering, just like in World War Two. In reality, the only reason Desert Storm worked was because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who was stupid enough to challenge us to refight World War Two — with less of everything that counted, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait. In the top-level war colleges, we still fight this type of adversary, so we always can win. I rebelled at this notion, thinking there would be nobody out there so stupid to fight us that way. But then along came Saddam Hussein, and “good soldiering” was vindicated once again.
Worse yet, the end of any conflict often brings into professional circles the heartfelt belief that “Now that the war is over, we can get back to real soldiering.” So we merrily backtrack in that direction. Scary, isn’t it? Still trying to fight our kind of war — be it World War Two, Desert Storm, or Operation Iraqi Freedom — we ignore the real war-fighting requirements of today. We want to fight the services’ conventional doctrines. We want to find a real adversarial demon — a composite of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini — so we can drive on to his capital city and crush him there. Unconditional surrender. Then we’ll put in place a Marshall Plan, embrace the long-suffering vanquished, and help them regain entry into the community of nations. Everybody wants to do that. But it ain’t gonna happen.
Today, we are stuck with the likes of a wiser Kim Jong Il and a still-elusive Osama bin Laden — just a couple of those charmers out there who will no longer take us on in a symmetric force matchup. And we’re going to be doing things like humanitarian operations, consequence management, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. Somewhere along the line, we’ll have to respond to some kind of environmental disaster. And somewhere else along the line we may get stuck with putting a U.S. battalion in place on some demarcation line between two adversaries, embedded in a weird, screwed-up chain of command. And do you know what? We’re going to bitch and moan about it. We’re going to dust off the Weinberger Doctrine and the Powell Doctrine and throw them in the face of our civilian leadership.
The truth is that military conflict has changed and we have been reluctant to recognize it. Defeating nation-state forces in conventional battle is not the task for the twenty-first century. Odd missions to defeat transnational threats or rebuild nations are the order of the day, but we haven’t as yet adapted. We all know it, but we won’t acknowledge it.
THE OBLIGATION TO SPEAK THE TRUTH
In April of 2003, I was invited by the U.S. Naval Academy to address the midshipmen in a lecture hosted by their Center for the Study of Military Ethics. I chose as my topic “The Obligation to Speak the Truth.” I told these future leaders that speaking the truth could be painful and costly, but it was a duty. Often those who need to hear it won’t like it and may even punish you for it; but you owed the truth to your country, your leaders, and your troops.
I have been amazed that men who bravely faced death on the battlefield are later, as senior officers, cowed and unwilling to stand up for what is right or to point out what is wrong. There are many reasons for this, from careerism and the hope of personal gain, to political expediency, to a false sense
of obedience, to a kind of “Charge of the Light Brigade” mentality: As long as guys are dying out there, it is morally reprehensible to criticize the flawed policies and tactics that put them in that predicament. Bullshit.
I vowed long ago to a wounded young lance corporal in Vietnam that I would never shrink from speaking out. If it required an end to my career, so be it. Later, I was blessed to serve under great leaders who allowed me to speak and welcomed and encouraged my input, even when it was contrary to their views. These men taught me more about courage than I learned on any battlefield — people like Hugh Shelton, who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, required all of us four-star commanders (CINCs and service chiefs) to read a book by H. R. McMaster, then a bright young Army major and a celebrated armor officer in Desert Storm (as a captain he commanded Eagle Troop of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment during the Battle of 73 Easting, the biggest tank clash since 1973 in the Sinai). The book, Dereliction of Duty, details the failures of the Joint Chiefs to speak out during the Vietnam War; they knew they were building a military campaign on lies, but they pressed forward anyway into the Valley of Death. At a breakfast meeting on January 29, 1998, which was led by Major McMaster, the chairman’s message was clear: He expected us to speak out. I experienced the same sort of encouragement under exceptional commanders like Generals Al Gray, Bob Barrow, Jack Galvin, Mick Trainor, Fred Haynes, Jim McCarthy, Joe Hoar, Binnie Peay, Bob Johnston, and Admiral Snuffy Smith. We need more leaders such as these.
Moral courage is often more difficult than physical courage. There are times when you disagree and you have to suck it in and say, “Yes, sir,” and go do what you’re told. There are also times when you disagree and you have to speak out, even at the cost of your career. If you’re a general, you might have to throw your stars on the table, as they say, and resign for the sake of some principle or truth from which you can’t back away.