Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

  I grew up in Richland, Washington. Back in the 1940s, it was a dusty farming community of a couple hundred on the Columbia River. During World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers brought the emerging nuclear age, harnessing the Columbia’s hydroelectric power to build the Hanford reactors. It was part of the Manhattan Project, the race to build the atomic bomb. In the process, Richland became a solidly middle-class town, without enclaves of wealth or poverty. Our community of seventeen thousand engineers, technicians, construction workers, and merchants had been shaped by the trials of the Depression and World War II—hardworking, civic-minded, family-oriented, and patriotic. Nobody threw their weight around. Years later, I read the epitaph on Jackie Robinson’s tombstone: “A life is not important except in its impact on other lives.” That sentiment captured the credo of the generation that raised me.

  My dad was a seafarer, a chief engineer in the Merchant Marine who had sailed to dozens of countries in the 1930s and ’40s. My mother, valedictorian of her high school class and daughter of a Canadian immigrant family, served as a civilian in U.S. Army intelligence in Washington, D.C., and Pretoria during World War II. She met my dad aboard ship on her way to Africa. They introduced their three sons to the free competition of ideas, a world not to be feared but to be explored. Their curiosity about life guides me to this day.

  Growing up, I loved the freedom I had. Between family camping trips in the mountains and hunting rabbits with my .22, accompanied by my dog Nikki or friends, I had my family’s full permission to wander the great outdoors. How many parents would drive their teenager to the highway outside town so that he could hitchhike across the West?

  I never enjoyed sitting in classrooms. I could read on my own at a much faster rate. Instead of a television, at home we had a well-stocked home library. I devoured books—Treasure Island, Captains Courageous, The Last of the Mohicans, The Call of the Wild, The Swiss Family Robinson….Hemingway was my favorite author, followed closely by Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition, I was fascinated that they had canoed on the Columbia River and had passed through our neighborhood.

  I had started hitchhiking in 1964, when I was thirteen. I had an insatiable penchant to see what was out there. The highways provided a means of exploring far beyond the backcountry of the Cascades. My parents had no problem with my forays. It was a simpler time back then, with a stronger sense of trust in one’s fellow Americans. I wandered across a wide swath of the western United States, enjoying the rough and ready life. I was in good shape, accustomed to sleeping outdoors, and equally curious about books, people, and open country.

  Like anyone who has wandered far and wide, I got into a fair number of scrapes. In Montana, I tangled with three local boys. I was getting the worst of it when a tall sheriff wearing a silver star and a white cowboy hat showed up in a pickup—a figure right out of the movies. He gave me a jail cell and early the next morning drove me to the rail yard to hop an eastbound freight.

  “Three against one,” he said. “Tough to win against those odds.”

  At Central Washington State College in 1968, I was a mediocre student with a partying attitude. After I caroused too much one night, the local judge ordered me to spend weekends in jail—punishment for underage drinking.

  One inmate, Porter Wagner (not the famous singer), had jumped bail in Maryland. One Saturday night he saw me hoisting myself up to look out the barred window, eager to see what I was missing outside.

  “What do you see, Jimmy?” he said, lying back on his bunk.

  “A muddy parking lot.”

  “From down here, I see stars in the night sky,” he said. “It’s your choice. You can look at stars or mud.”

  He was in jail, but his spirit wasn’t. From that wayward philosopher I learned that no matter what happened, I wasn’t a victim; I made my own choices how to respond. You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response. The next day I volunteered to sweep the jail, wash police cars, and pick up food at the local restaurant for the other prisoners so I could change my circumstances as fast as possible, getting a day and a half of credit for each day served.

  I was spending summers in officer candidate training in Quantico, Virginia, and loved the challenge of that environment. We were evaluated and molded by corporals and sergeants fresh from Vietnam battlefields, determined that we aspiring lieutenants would make good officers—or be sent home. Those sergeants never accepted that we were giving our best effort; rather, they always pushed us to do more. Either you kept up with them on the steep, muddy hill trails, completed the obstacle course in the allotted time, and qualified on the rifle range or you went home. They dangled airline tickets home to entice us to quit, to take the easy way out. In Vietnam, Marines were dying while we were training. Trying didn’t count; you had to deliver. Well over half the class got screened out over the course of two sweltering summers.

  In early 1972, after a little over three years in college, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines. My first stop was seven months at Basic School in Quantico. Unique among the four services, every Marine officer is initially trained as an infantry officer. He will later attend other schools to become a pilot, a logistician, or what have you. But all officers begin their service together, learning the same set of basic skills and being shaped into one culture. Every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman and must qualify on the rifle range. Lieutenants learn that everything they will go on to do in the Corps, no matter the rank or the job, relates back to the private who is attacking the enemy. This initiation and common socialization has a strong impact on the Marine Corps, permeating every facet of its warfighting ethos.

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  Later that year I was sent to Okinawa to join my first infantry unit. I was lucky: I had joined the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, where most of the key leaders had spent years fighting in rice paddies, mountains, and jungles. They knew their stuff. Far from being standoffish because they had seen combat, they were tough and friendly, and they readily shared their combat knowledge. I didn’t have to earn their support; it was mine to lose, not to gain.

  At the same time, each of us was establishing an individual professional reputation. Whether you stayed in the Corps for four years or forty, that reputation would follow you: Were you physically fit? Were you tactically sound? Could you call in artillery fire? Could you adapt quickly to change? Did your platoon respond to you? Could you lead by example? You had to be as tough as your troops, who weren’t concerned with how many books you’d read. I tried to work out with the most physically fit and learn from the most tactically cunning.

  The early seventies were a disruptive time in American history, with riots, political chicanery, and a divisive war. The military wasn’t isolated from this unrest in society. As the draft ended, our unpopular military ranks included an increasing number of dropouts and petty criminals. Racial tension, disobedience, and drug use caused disruption and division in the ranks. So we had our fair share of racists and druggies. They would try to infect others. If a junior officer didn’t lead by firmly displaying force of personality, that number would grow. Due to war casualties and a barracks environment that drove too many good men out of the Corps, my platoon initially numbered only twenty-six. My platoon sergeant was twenty-one-year-old Corporal Wayne Johnson, an immigrant from British Guyana nicknamed “John Wayne.” With only three years in the Corps, all overseas, he was doing the job designated for a staff sergeant who had ten years’ training and experience. He tolerated no guff or slackness from his teenage charges.

  “Lieutenant,” Corporal Johnson told me, “you have to be harder than petrified woodpecker’s lips.” He reiterated that some in the platoon weren’t up to Marine standards and that if I wanted my troops to follow me, I had to be as tough as my toughest men. At one point, I was out in the jungle with my platoon. We had been push
ing hard for several days, sweaty, stinking, sleep-deprived, exhausted—the usual fare for grunts. One guy, the biggest malcontent in the platoon, muttered that he’d like to kill his “fucking hard-ass lieutenant.” When Corporal Johnson brought him over to me, I decided he wasn’t going to ruin the trust in our tight-knit platoon. I told him to follow me back through the jungle to the company command post. At the end of the hike, I told him that he could have shot me in the back. But he didn’t have the guts.

  I could have written up formal charges. Instead I took him to First Sergeant Mata, the senior NCO (noncommissioned officer) in our company. As a second lieutenant, I outranked him, but that was only a formality. The company first sergeant guided us young officers. He told me to return to my platoon—he would take care of the matter.

  “That shitbird,” he said a few days later, “is no longer in our Corps, Lieutenant.”

  Boom. The man was gone. Packed up and shipped out. Every lieutenant needs a First Sergeant Mata, a man with twenty-five years of experience and a hundred friends at other duty stations. Where did the malcontent go? Who cared; he was out. He was representative of the challenges junior officers faced in those days, and such summary dismissals of bad actors were necessary for dealing with the turbulent times. The Marine Corps would not lower its standards. Called “expeditious discharge,” it was a critical policy set for a time that, happily, is in our distant past.

  Thanks to first sergeants like Mata, and a young battalion commander who would one day become Commandant of the Marine Corps, in our battalion the number of bottom-feeders rapidly decreased in number and in influence. Fence-sitters quickly got the message and straightened up. Why? Because there are few fates worse than public rejection and summary dismissal. Everyone needs a friend, a purpose, and a chance to belong to something greater than themselves. No one wants to be cast aside as worthless.

  As a naval force, the Marines are organized to embark on Navy ships for landings on hostile shores. We would embark with only a forty-pound seabag and our combat gear and live out of that for months at a time. We lived a physically demanding life that created a rough good humor among us. I grew to know my 180 men as well as I knew my brothers back home. We would run countless laps on the flight deck when we weren’t practicing amphibious landings. We read everything from Starship Troopers to The Battle of Okinawa. We would blow off steam and weeks of pay during a couple of rambunctious days ashore in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Manila, and a dozen other cities, sometimes to the chagrin of our commanders. And what I learned about the complexities of amphibious operations on numerous shipboard deployments in the Pacific and Indian Oceans would pay off enormously in the future.

  In my first dozen years in the Marines, I commanded two platoons and two companies, deploying to thirteen countries on a half dozen ships. Everywhere we sailed, at every landing and every exercise in foreign countries, I was introduced to the enormous value of allies. In Korea, their marines served as my advisers and proved their toughness in the freezing hills. The New Zealand force in Malaysia demonstrated their Maori warrior spirit and taught us jungle warfare, just as the Philippine troops did on their islands. The high-spirited, competent Australians and the quietly competent Japanese Self-Defense Force troops showed us different but effective fighting styles. These and more showed me the irreplaceable benefit of learning from others.

  The Vietnam veterans taught me that you don’t win firefights by being kind. In the Vietnam jungles, the enemy tactic was to sneak as close as possible to Marine lines so that we couldn’t employ our indirect fires. In response, the Marines became skilled at registering fire sacks—identifying critical terrain features to be struck. With a simple code word, a series of shells would unleash hell on the enemy.

  To give an example of the mentoring I received as a young officer, one of our company commanders, Andy Finlayson, tutored me in the fine art of fire support. On a live-fire range in the Philippines, he rehearsed with me how to employ a series of artillery strikes, bringing them ever closer to our position. I tried to reciprocate Andy’s faith in me by reading the books he recommended, including Lee’s Lieutenants, by Douglas Freeman, and Liddell Hart’s Strategy. He urged me to expand my horizons, and I adopted that same mentoring technique throughout my career.

  On the final day of our training, I expected Andy to control the artillery fires. Nope. He left me alone to control the artillery, mortar, and machine guns as the troops advanced. I had one mortar series plotted to land two hundred yards to the front of the troops. I was sure the coordinates and timing were correct, so I spoke the code word and the shells slammed in. The earth shook as a parallel sheaf of 81mm shells impacted and the troops continued advancing. Andy nodded and walked away. I got the message: Have faith in your subordinates after you have trained them.

  Ever since, I’ve tried to ingrain in generations of Marines the effective employment of supporting arms. You don’t send a grunt with a rifle when a five-hundred-pound bomb will do the job. Firepower brings to bear America’s awesome technologies, giving our grunts a decided edge. Coupled with the power of the junior officers’ expectations, confidence that their leader knows his job and won’t waste their lives is key to gaining full commitment from our troops. The resulting attitude of confidence is the strongest weapon available to us.

  Six years later, Andy and I were serving together in a battalion out of Hawaii. We were on board amphibious ships in the Indian Ocean, sent there by President Carter after the Soviets moved into Afghanistan. At the same time, Iran was holding captive fifty-two members of the American embassy staff in Tehran. A commando team was about to launch a rescue attempt, and our mission was to distract the Iranians and react to any other contingency. We could divert the attention of the Iranian military by seizing something critical to them.

  Our battalion designed an amphibious assault to seize a large Iranian facility. This was supposed to be a feint. But after we refined and rehearsed the plan, we were confident that we would defeat the several thousand Iranian soldiers guarding the facility. Although we’d be outnumbered, we were trained shock troops with the advantage of surprise. Our carrier-based fighters and naval guns would stun the defenders, and then we would overrun them. That may sound presumptuous, but history is filled with examples—like Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley—where audacity coupled with sound planning has prevailed over numbers. The rescue mission ultimately failed to reach Tehran, and we were never given the signal to launch, which I regret—the Iranian zealots needed a lesson in humility.

  I chose to find a home among warriors because I was drawn in by the cocky, exuberant, devil-may-care spirit of grunts. I loved being with the troops, gaining energy from their infectious, often sardonic enthusiasms. We were all volunteers, and patriotism was found more in our DNA than in our words; most of us hadn’t signed up because of a national cause. We seldom felt our country was united behind us on a war footing, and we identified principally with one another. We shared what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” I never committed for the long term. My aims were modest. I thought, Maybe I’ll make captain. It freed me up to not worry about my next command and focus instead on doing the best job I could in the one I had. Each week in the Fleet Marine Force was considered the last week of peace. As a gunnery sergeant put it, “Be ready. Next week we’ll be in a fight.”

  My early years with my Marines taught me leadership fundamentals, summed up in the three Cs.

  The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it. That applies at every level as you advance. Analyze yourself. Identify weaknesses and improve yourself. If you’re not running three miles in eighteen minutes, work out more; if you’re not a good listener, discipline yourself; if you’re not swift at calling in artillery fire, rehearse. Your troops are counting on you. Of course you’ll screw up sometimes; don’t dwell on that. Th
e last perfect man on earth died on a cross long ago—just be honest and move on, smarter for what your mistake taught you.

  Battles, conventional or irregular, turn on the basics of gaining fire superiority and maneuvering against the enemy. Fire and maneuver—block and tackle—decide battle. The Corps exists to win battles. That is inseparable from making Marines who stand for its values in tough times. Anything that doesn’t contribute to winning battles or winning Marines is of secondary importance. Regrettably, too many of the men I’ve seen killed or wounded failed to perform the basics. War is fraught with random dangers and careless missteps. Clear orders and relentless rehearsals based on intelligence and repetitive training build muscle—not once or twice, but hundreds of times. Read history, but study a few battles in depth. Learning from others’ mistakes is far smarter than putting your own lads in body bags.

  Physical strength, endurance, calling in fire, map reading, verbal clarity, tactical cunning, use of micro-terrain—all are necessary. You must master and integrate them to gain the confidence of your troops. A good map-reading lieutenant is worthless if he can’t do pull-ups.

  Second, caring. To quote Teddy Roosevelt, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” In a family, you watch out for your younger brother. You’re interested in him—how he grows, how he learns, who he wants to be. When your Marines know you care about them, then you can speak bluntly when they disappoint you. They are young, but they did volunteer for the Marines, so don’t patronize them. They know they’re not in a life insurance company. Be honest in your criticism, but blow away the bad behavior while leaving their manhood intact.