My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  On the cusp of launching the second leg of the operation, one of the six helicopters was deemed inoperable. With only five helicopters, fewer than the mission minimum, the commanders aborted. Preparing to exfiltrate and blinded by kicked-up sand in the night, one of the helicopters crashed into the nose of a C-130 that was full of soldiers and fuel. The plane caught fire and the fuel bladder in the fuselage ignited, killing eight operators trapped inside.

  Eagle Claw was America’s first attempt at a new type of special operations warfare characterized by politically sensitive, complex, fast, joint operations. Its failure largely owed to insufficient bandwidth of every type. The force did not have command and decision-making processes in place: While commanders on the ground were in contact with the White House, some of the helicopter pilots later admitted they did not know who was in charge at Desert One until the operation was over. The assembled teams were not a bonded joint force, as they had not operated, or even fully rehearsed, together before crossing into Iranian airspace. The demands of operational security were understandably heavy. But the mission was too corseted. Security concerns prevented weather analysts, who knew the helicopters might encounter a haboob, from briefing the pilots; their forecasts were filtered out when the intelligence reports moved through the organization.

  The calamity of Desert One was not a failure of political or military courage. The failure occurred long beforehand when the military—faced with limited resources, talent, and focus—failed to build and maintain the force necessary to accomplish these kinds of missions.

  In response to this failure, the Holloway Commission recommended creating a “Counterterrorist Joint Task Force” that “would plan, train for, and conduct operations to counter terrorist activities directed against” the United States. Following the Commission’s report, there was born a renewed interest in special operations.

  Iranian state television looped footage of the charred aircraft and bodies at Desert One, and Iranian officials triumphantly displayed the blackened remains of the Americans at a press conference in Tehran the next day. Within special operations, “Desert One” became a synonym for failure and a powerful, if at times unspoken, rallying cry. Pictures of the wreckage, with the clearly implied message—“Never Again”—hung on office walls and were posted in barracks. Over the next two decades we rehearsed hundreds of operations to ensure we would get it right when we needed to. There were lessons learned and costs dearly paid, but the force that the nation needed would eventually emerge.

  | CHAPTER 4 |

  Renaissance

  February 1982–May 1993

  In February 1982, near the end of my tour of duty in Korea, Annie flew to Seoul, and we spent ten days touring where I had been stationed for the previous year. In early March we flew back to the United States, where I was to report for duty at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Although I did not recognize it at first, the Army I joined when we returned was already a different one than the one I’d left just a year before.

  Cold war tensions in Europe, exacerbated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, argued for strengthening the U.S. military’s capability, which had been badly weakened by Vietnam and subsequent budget constrictions. As a result, beginning in the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and continuing through Ronald Reagan’s administration, defense spending rose, peaking in 1986 and in the process transforming the peacetime capacity of the U.S. military.

  At first the change was not obvious, but a series of actions taken near the end of the Vietnam War set a course to revitalize the Army’s equipment, doctrine, training, and, most important, its leadership.

  With limited budgets in the 1970s, the Army made the decision to pursue five primary weapons systems, highlighted by the M1 Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters, which would serve to transform the force and to outclass anything fielded by our potential enemies. In 1982, based on lessons learned from the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, a new doctrine of offensive maneuver called AirLand Battle was adopted that leveraged this enhanced weaponry and technology.

  To address chronic leadership problems that had been exacerbated by the six-month command tours used in Vietnam, in 1974 the Army initiated boards, composed of senior officers, to select battalion and brigade commanders centrally, which improved quality, while command tours were lengthened, providing greater continuity.

  Better pay, better recruiting, and a difficult economy all helped improve the quality of the force. While I’d struggled as a young lieutenant in the 82nd to persuade soldiers to reenlist for a second or third tour of duty, by the early 1980s we held boards to select which soldiers in the battalion would be allowed to reenlist.

  The conditions were set for a renaissance.

  * * *

  If the Army was undergoing such a renewal, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me as I arrived at Fort Stewart in coastal Georgia. The post appeared to have at least one foot in a previous century.

  And I wasn’t joining the renaissance intentionally. I’d volunteered for Fort Stewart and its 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with the sole objective of making it easier to reach my goal of an assignment to the 1st Ranger Battalion, stationed only thirty miles away at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. To qualify for the Rangers, I still needed to command a conventional company—my reason for going to Korea, only to find myself diverted to be the operations officer in the Joint Security Area. Because Fort Stewart and the 24th Mech were not traditionally coveted assignments, I assumed I could get company command fairly quickly.

  After a short visit with her parents in South Carolina, Annie and I drove down Interstate 95 to Georgia, pulled onto Highway 144 near the small community of Richmond Hill, and passed a sign announcing we’d entered Fort Stewart. There was no gate or military police checkpoint, as became ubiquitous after 9/11, but I slowed down assuming we’d soon enter the main post.

  We didn’t. After driving nineteen miles through dark marshy pine forests, we finally pulled into the small center of the installation and found the welcome center that most army posts have for arriving personnel to complete administrative processing and coordinate details like housing—for military families, always a troubling concern. Fort Stewart’s center was in an old wooden World War II–era building, the kind built to be temporary. Now, forty years after FDR’s presidency, it remained in use. In 1982, even the nearby post headquarters was the same construction.

  At the welcome center, we checked into the availability of military quarters—small but convenient 1950s-era duplexes. A sergeant working the desk assured Annie and me we’d wait at least twenty months. We ended up renting a small apartment for seven months before the housing office called, and a friend and I moved several pickup truck loads of belongings into a set of two-bedroom quarters.

  I’d never been to Fort Stewart but had assumed life there would be much like bustling Fort Bragg. It wasn’t. Established in 1940 and sprawling across a huge expanse of swampy terrain that once held a patchwork of rice plantations, Stewart was used during the war to train soldiers in antiaircraft skills, first on wooden replicas until the accelerating defense production could produce the real metal ones. In subsequent decades, Fort Stewart had experienced a roller-coaster ride of booms and busts. The limited development of the post’s facilities and the neighboring town of Hinesville seemed to anticipate the next bust more than a possible boom.

  I reported to the personnel assignment officer, anticipating immediate posting to an infantry battalion. Instead I was told that I had been promised to the Directorate of Plans and Training. The DPT was an installation-level staff responsible for coordinating military schools, ammunition management, and a host of things I wanted no part of. I wanted to lead soldiers, command a company, and then go to the Rangers. I asked the personnel officer to understand. He was sympathetic and said he would try to work something out.

  After days of uncertainty while I waited at home, he told me he
couldn’t work any alternative to DPT. I was deeply disappointed—first in Korea and now in Fort Stewart, I felt deprived of a chance to command. While my peers from West Point were commanding units, I would sit in a wooden building for who knew how long, working with civilians and a few soldiers—whom most people assumed had been rejected by regular units. At home that night, I talked with Annie about resigning from the Army.

  I decided not to, but that meant the next morning I had to report to the officer who knew I had sought to avoid his directorate. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lyons was a short, intense officer who’d hoped to command an infantry battalion but had not. Wounded five times in combat in Vietnam and completely dedicated to the Army, he had reason to be disappointed, even bitter—more so than I. As I entered his office, I knew that with my first words and demeanor I would define myself to him.

  He was professional but guarded. He said he’d heard I had hoped for a troop assignment, but he needed an officer, and I was it. He looked for my reaction. Part of me wanted to erupt in complaint about the unfairness of the system. But in thinking it through and talking with Annie, I had realized that responsibility for being the soldier I hoped to be lay with me.

  “Sir, I very much want to command an infantry company,” I started carefully. “But I’m assigned here to you and intend to work as hard and enthusiastically for you as I’m capable.” I paused. “If, after I do, you’ll help me get command of a company, I’d be grateful.”

  He broke into a smile. We were both disappointed to be assigned staff jobs, but I realized that if he could serve without whining or complaint, his was an example worth emulating. Not surprisingly, he turned out to be a great boss.

  The next seven months were busy. I got to know then–Major General John Galvin, our division commander, and was befriended by his aide-de-camp, Captain Dave Petraeus. Dave’s position on the post was unique. Division commanders normally select their aides with great care, and the position bestows special credibility on a young officer. In addition, Dave had been a Battalion operations officer as a captain, normally a major’s job, and was headed off to Princeton before going to teach in West Point’s prestigious social sciences department.

  Two years behind Dave at West Point, I’d known who he was. Now at Fort Stewart we periodically ran together and he helped introduce me to leaders around the post. For me, a newly arrived officer with no prior mechanized experience hoping for command of an infantry company, Dave’s endorsement was invaluable. We began a friendship that intersected intermittently for many years before aligning often after 9/11.

  * * *

  During the summer of 1982, units from the 24th Mech conducted the division’s first rotation to the Army’s new National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California. Sprawled across an area the size of Rhode Island in the California desert it was where George Patton’s 2nd Armored Division had trained before deploying to North Africa, and where I’d parachuted into with the 82nd as a lieutenant in 1977. Now, two 24th Mech battalions fought a two-week “war” against an army unit called the opposing force (OPFOR) that employed Soviet tactics using U.S. vehicles modified to look like Soviet tanks and personnel carriers.

  The NTC represented the inauguration of a new era in army training, and was the brainchild of General William DePuy, who had been my father’s division commander in Vietnam. As commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, DePuy stressed the idea that training must include measurements that would add both realism and accountability. The NTC, approved in 1977, was crafted to allow units to train as they would fight.

  That summer, the 24th Mech’s two battalions were beaten badly by the OPFOR. For the 24th, as for several other posts that were getting similar wake-up calls, success at the NTC became the new objective.

  The NTC wasn’t actual combat, but in 1982 it was the closest analog the Army had. The new Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES) allowed for relatively realistic battles in which there was a winner and a loser. Vehicles and soldiers were “killed” or “wounded” if hit with an enemy laser. An advanced system evaluated the battle, in which each vehicle’s location and actions were tracked and recorded and could be played back to provide analysis to the forces being trained.

  Like war, the entire experience could be brutally unforgiving. During a December 1983 rotation in which I commanded a mechanized infantry company, our battalion spent forty-eight hours of feverish activity preparing the deliberate defense of a desert pass. I barely slept as we dug fighting positions; erected kilometers of complex obstacles with tank ditches, minefields, and seemingly endless rolls of concertina wire; and positioned key weapons. We left small gaps in our obstacles as we worked to speed our movement, yet cleverly piled the necessary material next to the gaps so we could close them easily before the enemy attacked.

  At the critical moment we failed to close the gaps. Under cover of a smoke screen, the opposing force made them freeways through our defense. Clausewitz’s 1832 maxim “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult” proved timelessly correct.

  NTC rotations were revealing. For the first time in peacetime, the effectiveness of a unit and its leader was starkly transparent. Lengthy critiques called After Action Reviews, which displayed shortcomings in planning, coordination, and execution, seared the experience into the psyche of the force.

  The scar tissue wasn’t all bad. “Disasters” on the desert battlefield became shared memories and lessons learned together. Without war, we recounted NTC stories. Funny tales bound soldiers, and even spouses, as they were told and retold around backyard grills. The NTC created a common experience across much of the force and served, as much as anything in peacetime can, to build wartimelike relationships.

  * * *

  On November 20, 1982, I ran the John F. Kennedy fifty-mile race near the Antietam battlefield in Maryland. Despite the pain, I was excited because the previous Thursday, the 24th Mech’s chief of staff, then-Colonel Pete Taylor, had informed me that I would take command of a mechanized infantry company the following week. A company commander was going to be relieved of command, and I would replace him.

  On Tuesday morning I reported to the headquarters of the 3rd Battalion, 19th Infantry. My first stop was to report to the battalion commander for guidance. I knew him slightly and hoped he had personally requested my assignment to his battalion.

  But his office was empty. The plain army-issue furniture remained; everything else was gone. I soon found that in addition to the company commander I would replace, the battalion’s commander, sergeant major, and personnel officer had all been removed.

  Four leaders had been fired at once. I was stunned. I would never see anything like that happen in all my years thereafter. But their removal was, ironically, a sign of the Army’s growing improvement. Four years earlier, my company commander in Special Forces had been fired for mooning someone inside an officers’ club bar. Now, as I understood it, the Army had fired the leadership of our battalion because they struggled in the core skills of our profession. That was progress.

  I was also told that a new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pierce T. Graney, would arrive in several weeks. I had no idea of the impact “Tom” Graney would ultimately have on me as a leader, or how his wife LaJuana’s example would instruct Annie.

  * * *

  My first few weeks as company commander were dominated by a single concern: property. I signed a document accepting personal responsibility for all the equipment assigned to the company, millions of dollars in value. Complete inventories of everything from barracks furniture to huge tool sets involved identifying and counting everything. Whatever was missing, someone typically paid for. A command inventory was a grueling task, made hellish if the unit’s accountability had been shoddy. My company’s property was in bad shape, and I spent countless hours counting tools, gas masks, weapons, and typewriters and then preparing docume
ntation to determine responsibility for the losses, which I remember as having been over thirty thousand dollars.

  Before Christmas, Graney arrived. He was a slightly paunchy, thirty-six-year-old soldier with sandy-colored hair and a bottomless mine of sarcastic comments. He soon showed he could be disarmingly informal in demeanor but was unwavering in his expectations. Taking command of a unit still in shock from its horrendous NTC performance in the summer, he forwent lofty motivational speeches. He simply told everyone that he knew how a good mechanized infantry battalion should run. In short order, he said, we’d be one.

  I wasn’t sure how to take Graney. A chain smoker who avoided strenuous exercise as most soldiers do snakes, he held training and staff meetings that would stretch on for hours. He seemed to ignore most of the popularly accepted practies of an infantry commander. “I want you all in physical training at 0630 every day,” he once deadpanned, “because when I roll over and go back to sleep, I want to know where you are.”

  Graney violated most leadership traits except two, and they counted more than the rest. He cared deeply, and he knew his business. He wasted no time pontificating about the merits of being a great unit, he simply began to deconstruct almost every component of the battalion and put it back together again, patiently teaching us how things should be done.