by Robert Coram
The first thing an enlisted Marine learns is how to march and how to maintain “cover” and “dress.” Cover is standing precisely behind the Marine in front of you so that when a drill instructor looks down a long column he sees only the first man in line. Dress is being lined up precisely with the man beside you so that the drill instructor can look across six or eight or ten rows of men and see only the first man. Dressed and covered, that’s the rule. And when boots of a squad or company or even a battalion of Marines strike the pavement, there must be a single click. Marines take precise thirty-inch strides and their boots make one sound. A Marine who is a split second off is more annoying than one who is completely out of step. Dressed and covered and with hundreds of feet striking the ground as one—that’s the Marine way.
Wyly was a private in the reserves when he entered Annapolis. He took his commission in the Marines, served a year on Okinawa, and then became an instructor in the guerrilla warfare school at Camp Pendleton. Instructors at Pendleton were an intellectual lot and read all they could find about any country that had known guerrilla warfare: Algeria, Indochina, Central America, Cuba, Kenya, and a dozen other. General Victor “The Brute” Krulak came to Pendleton and told the instructors that if America went to war in Vietnam it would be a long war and it would be different from other wars in which Marines had fought; it would wreak a terrible toll because the American military did not know how to fight a guerrilla war. Wyly went to jump school, to psychological-warfare school, and to special-warfare school, and he trained often with the Army. He read Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, the classic book on the French in Vietnam, and stood on a platform and told Marines passing through Pendleton, “If we go to Vietnam, we are not going to make the mistakes the French made.”
In 1965 Lieutenant Mike Wyly went to Vietnam as a psychological-warfare officer. His work was in the villages and he was pushed hard for body counts. At the end of his tour he knew the Marines were tough and disciplined and brave. But did they understand the war?
Washington was his next assignment. In 1969 he returned to Vietnam as a twenty-nine-year-old captain. Like his uncle Donald, he now was a company commander. He led Delta Company, part of the First Battalion of the 5th Marines, and operated out of An Hoa, west of Danang. Delta 1 / 5 was such a hard-luck group that it was called “Dying Delta.” Wyly found that the war in 1969 was a different war than it had been in 1965. One of his Marines said, “Skipper, everybody here is the enemy.” Delta Company was in a firefight every night. But the young Marines had learned how to survive—and not with traditional Marine Corps tactics. Marines in Delta Company knew how to disperse and how to use guerrilla tactics—how to fight like the enemy. Wyly remembered the lessons of Pendleton and saw how those lessons made sense. He sent out saturation patrols. His Marines were in the bush all the time. He kept the enemy off balance; they knew Delta Company could show up anywhere, anytime.
Senior Marine leaders had not learned the same lessons. One day Wyly flew to battalion headquarters and en route saw Marines advancing in a line across a field. The enemy let them pass and then attacked from the rear. Wyly sensed that something was fundamentally wrong with the way the Marine Corps did business.
Wyly had a platoon leader named James Webb. One day Lieutenant Webb was out leading a patrol. He waded across a shallow river and as he reached the far shore the men behind him were attacked. Webb came to their assistance so fast that a young Marine, in telling Wyly what happened, said, “Lieutenant Webb ran across the top of the water.” It became axiomatic among Marines in Delta Company that Lieutenant Webb could walk on water. Later, Wyly recommended Webb for the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor as a recognition of valor.
Wyly and Webb would cross paths again.
When Wyly left Vietnam, Delta 1/5 was known throughout the Marine Corps as a savvy and aggressive bunch of troops, real mud Marines. The greatest compliment Wyly ever received was when, as he turned over command of his company, one of his young Marines said to him, “Skipper, we ain’t the Dying Delta anymore.”
Wyly now was a decorated combat veteran, a senior captain about to be promoted to major. In return for his education at the Naval Academy, he had pledged five years of service. That obligation now was over and he had to decide if he wanted to stay in the Corps or if he wanted to join the civilian world. His two tours in Vietnam showed him that the Marine Corps had fundamental problems in the way it conducted warfare. If he stayed in, there was much he wanted to change.
He chose the latter, and his next assignment was as a student at Quantico, where he went through the Amphibious Warfare School (AWS). The school is located in Geiger Hall, a two-story brick building atop a high hill overlooking a tributary of the Potomac. Amphibious warfare is unique to the Marine Corps; it is all that keeps the Marines from being swallowed by the Army or Navy. Amphibious warfare is what the Marine Corps is supposed to do better than any other military organization in the world. Yet, Wyly found the Marines were still teaching long linear attacks on beachheads, a tactic that produced the terrible casualties of World War II.
After graduating from the AWS, Wyly was assigned as an instructor at the Basic School, where young lieutenants are taught company-level tactics. The instructors were Vietnam vets, but they were ordered not to talk about Vietnam; why rehash that war when the next war would be against hordes of Soviets in Europe? The Marine Corps still taught the concept of advancing on line, just as Wyly’s uncle Donald had done in World War I and just as Marines had done in World War II—the same suicidal tactics used in Vietnam. In fact, the worst criticism that could be leveled against a student during field exercises was that he did not advance his troops on line.
Saigon fell and no senior Marine Corps officer at Quantico realized that Marine tactics had not worked. One of them even said to Wyly, “We killed more of them than they killed of us.” Officially, the Marine Corps won in Vietnam. But Mike Wyly and a host of other hard young officers, men who had been there and seen their friends die and who believed they were living on borrowed time, knew that was utter nonsense.
While the Marine Corps prided itself on being different, now the Corps was having the same problems as other services: race riots and discipline problems. Commandant Robert Cushman was so over-weight that young lieutenants joked that the Marine Corps fitness test was “three laps around Bobby Cushman.”
After his tour as an instructor, Wyly was promoted to major. But he considered his tour at Quantico a failure. He had changed nothing. He went to Command and Staff College and was assigned to do a strategic study of a country. He picked Finland and studied the Winter War of 1939–1940. Wyly thought it was a good war to study because the Finns had prevailed over vastly superior Russian forces. His professor told him to return to college and study history. He entered the masters program at George Washington but soon was assigned to Okinawa. Then came another assignment to Quantico. Wyly had written a paper about the Battle of Tarawa in World War II, a battle dear to the heart of every Marine, and thus had come under the protective eye of Major General Bernard Trainor, the director of education in the Marine Corps. General Trainor placed Wyly in charge of tactics at the Amphibious Warfare School. “Tactics is the flat tire. It’s your job to fix it,” Trainor said. “And I don’t want you to hide behind doctrine. Be out on the fringes. Use your mind.” The assignment was a gem. The AWS is important to the Marines not just for doctrinal reasons but because only the brightest and most promising young officers are assigned there; it is where future leaders of the Marine Corps are first identified. Wyly was exactly where he wanted to be.
The lesson plans at the AWS dated back to the 1930s, to the very beginning of amphibious warfare. Wyly scrapped all the old lesson plans and began teaching famous battles from history. One of his favorites was the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. Sometimes called the “Battle of the Three Emperors,” this is one of the most significant battles in military history. Not only did Napoléon prevail against a numerically superior force,
his victory was so decisive that it forced the Austrians and Russians to withdraw from the war. Napoléon was so successful at knowing what opposing generals were thinking that he wrote Josephine that there were times when he felt he was leading both armies.
Students at the AWS were captains and majors, not all of whom had decided to make a career out of the Marine Corps. They had lots of field experience and they were not reluctant to speak their minds. Under Wyly, for the first time in years, the tactics course received rave reviews. But Wyly wanted to do more than teach about ancient battles and how to deal with Soviet tanks on the plains of Europe. He was fascinated by the theme of armies winning against superior forces, of generals who controlled the thinking of their opposition. Somewhere there was a glue to bind all of this together into a different kind of warfare—but where?
Wyly turned to Bill Lind, the man who first called Boyd’s followers “Reformers,” and asked him to recommend someone with new ideas about warfare.
“Colonel John Boyd is your man,” Lind said. Wyly looked at his khaki-covered Marine Corps manuals and he knew that whatever it was that Boyd offered, it had to be better. He called Boyd and said, “I hear you have a theory about warfare.”
“It’s not a theory. It’s a briefing. I call it ‘Patterns of Conflict.’ It’s five hours long.”
Wyly laughed. “My class has only two hours.”
“I can’t do it in two. It takes five hours.”
“We don’t have five hours.”
“Then you get zero.”
Wyly relented. If his mandate allowed him to operate on the fringes of doctrine, why couldn’t he stretch a class to five hours? Wyly opened the briefing not just to his class, but to all AWS students.
Boyd arrived in January 1980. Wyly had not heard Boyd’s briefing, so he had no idea what to expect. But if there were no substance, if the no-nonsense students thought this retired Air Force colonel was wasting their time, the class could turn nasty. The more Wyly thought about it the more worried he became. What had he done? A retired pilot—and not even a Marine pilot but an Air Force pilot—lecturing mud Marines on how to fight a war, how to apply ideas that are relevant on the modern battlefield? The idea is ludicrous. These aggressive young captains and majors will make mincemeat out of this guy.
Wyly introduced Boyd. Boyd stood up and his eyes locked on the Marines and he took charge. His deep voice boomed out. The Plum began to weave his magic. He told them of Sun Tzu and the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. and of Arbela in 331 B.C. and of Cannae in 216 B.C. He told them of Genghis Khan and Belisarius and Napoléon, of Heinz Guderian and of what made great commanders. He defogged von Clausewitz and told them how to build snowmobiles. He told them the Army, despite its new AirLand Doctrine, still believed in “high diddle diddle, straight up the middle,” and followed a doctrine that was a “piece of shit.” He told them of OODA Loops and Schwerpunkt and Fingerspitzengefuhl and surfaces and gaps and mission orders and water going downhill.
The five hours came and went, but the Marines stayed. Now a half dozen Marines were on their feet, fighting for Boyd’s attention, asking hard and thoughtful questions, but questions asked in respect. Their faces revealed their thoughts: this old man may be an Air Force puke, but he knows warfare better than anyone I’ve ever heard. The air crackled with excitement. Mike Wyly knew, as did the students, they were witnessing the beginning of something new and powerful and wonderful.
Six hours passed and the shadows lengthened across Quantico and a few Marines drifted away. Seven hours passed and the remaining Marines had forgotten Boyd was an Air Force colonel; they looked upon him as if he were the reincarnation of an ancient warrior. They were young and not saddled with the institutional memory of senior officers. They wanted ideas that would work and that’s what Boyd gave them. Eight hours passed and now Boyd was sitting in a chair surrounded by eager young Marines. They leaned toward Boyd as if they could not get enough of what he had to say. And when the session finally broke up, night had long since fallen on the rolling hills of Quantico. But the young officers still were bright and eager. They wanted to know when Boyd would return.
Mike Wyly would remember this day for the rest of his life. Boyd had given him new ideas that validated the vague theories floating around in his head. And Boyd had given the young students ideas that could be translated into tactics that worked on the modern battlefield.
Mike Wyly had become the sixth Acolyte. He and John Boyd were about to take on the U.S. Marine Corps.
Chapter Twenty - Eight
Semper Fi
A FEW days later Wyly was introduced to the “pain,” the long late-night phone calls from Boyd. He was immensely flattered. He was a lieutenant colonel being called by a man who had retired as a senior colonel. In the highly structured Marine Corps that is a big gulf.
Then Boyd returned to Quantico to talk with Wyly about his class. They met in Wyly’s office under the picture of his uncle Donald leading the charge at Belleau Wood. “What should I be teaching?” Wyly asked. He showed Boyd the official khaki-clad Marine Corps lesson plans for the AWS. “You can’t read these without going to sleep,” he said. “We have the most exciting subject in the world: warfare. And we make it boring.”
Boyd and Wyly decided the AWS was fundamentally an educational institution, and educational institutions are places where students consider all ideas. One of the best ways to do that is to have students read. So Wyly and Boyd put together a reading list. This was a radical step for the Marine Corps, the least-intellectual branch of the U.S. military. But General Trainor, by now widely recognized as Wyly’s protector, blessed the concept and soon the young captains were reading Victory at High Tide and Guerrilla and White Death and Strategy and even books by World War II German officers such as Attacks by Rommel and Panzer Battles by von Mellenthin. Boyd and Wyly were both combat veterans, so when they claimed there was a connection between books and the ability to lead men into battle, students listened. In fact, students began coming to class early so they could debate the ideas they had been reading. Soon students were recommending additional books for the reading list.
By now Boyd had collected all his briefings, along with “Destruction and Creation,” and assembled them into a one-inch-thick document titled “A Discourse on Winning and Losing.” Christie had printed several hundred copies. Because the document had a green cover it was referred to as the “Green Book.” Wyly wanted copies for his classes but Boyd had only a few left. Wyly took a copy to the Field Print Plant at Quantico and said, “I want four hundred copies.” He passed them out to Marine officers.
Boyd became a regular lecturer and took an active part in tactics classes. When the classes did amphibious exercises Boyd walked from group to group, studying their plans. Once, while the groups wrestled with how to put a landing force on the shores of Iran, Boyd realized the Marines were placing inordinate emphasis on how to establish a beachhead. “That beachhead is looming bigger and bigger,” he said. “You guys are paying too much attention to terrain. The focus should be on the enemy. Fight the enemy, not the terrain.”
The words echoed in Wyly’s brain.
That beachhead is looming bigger and bigger.… Fight the enemy, not the terrain.
The fundamental content of the classes changed. Wyly now advocated fluid and fast-moving tactics that disrupted enemy thinking. During tactical exercises he told his students he did not want anyone to report that they had seized and were holding an objective. He wanted them to bypass resistance. Don’t worry about your flanks, he said. Let the enemy worry about his. He gave them mission orders, Schwerpunkt exercises, and taught them how to lead from the front like Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. They should be everywhere on the battlefield so they could have an intuitive grasp of the ebb and flow of battle, Fingerspitzengefuhl.
“This stuff has got to be implicit,” Boyd said. “If it is explicit, you can’t do it fast enough.” Boyd’s teaching methods were different from those of a university. He abhorred guide
lines or lists or rules or deductive thinking; everything was intuitive. “You must have inductive thinking,” he said again and again to the Marines. “There is not just one solution to a problem,” he said. “There are two or three or five ways to solve a problem. Never commit to a single solution.”
Boyd never said, “This is how Marines should fight” or “This is how you should conduct an amphibious landing.” Instead he taught a new way to think about combat. His new way turned conventional military wisdom on its head. The military believes most of all in hardware. But Boyd said, “People should come first. Then ideas. And then hardware.”
On Sunday afternoons a group of young captains gathered at Wyly’s house, sat around a big mahogany table, drank wine, and talked of maneuver warfare. They met for additional seminars at Bill Lind’s home in Alexandria. The cadre of Marines now known as “maneuverists” continued to grow. Those men were proud of the title. But at the Quantico Officers Club, senior officers turned their backs on maneuverists and laughed about Marines more interested in OODA Loops than in lifting weights, more interested in reading of ancient battles than in running five miles. Wyly was leading a guerrilla movement within the Corps, and sometimes he recalled a line from his lectures: “Guerrillas win wars but they don’t march home to victory parades.”
Trainor asked Wyly to write a new tactics manual for the Marine Corps, but Wyly’s direct supervisor looked at the first three chapters and rejected them, saying with anguish, “It’s all new.” During the summer of 1981, Trainor transferred from Quantico and Wyly no longer had a protector. It would not be long before predators began circling.
About this time a story within the story, a story of crucial importance, and a story that would have a significant payoff in a few short years was beginning down in Camp Lejeune, the sprawling Marine Corps base in North Carolina. That summer, General Al Gray, who had heard Boyd’s briefing as a colonel, was ordered to Lejeune as commander of the 2nd Marine Division. Gray was the son of a railroad conductor. He chewed tobacco and walked around in the fatigues Marines called “utilities” and, like Patton and Rommel, wore goggles across the front of his helmet. He was a warrior: a forceful, decisive, and highly unconventional Marine. He also was a devoted student of Boyd’s and a man who believed in maneuver warfare.