by Jim Proser
Meanwhile, the endless droning and paperwork of the daily civil administration meeting is testing the patience of Mattis and his staff. Making matters worse, it soon becomes obvious that Garner and the ORHA don’t have the knowledge, money, or manpower to get their job done. The years of infighting between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the commander in chief of Central Command, General Tommy Franks, has left a gaping hole where the postwar plan and resources should be.
The ORHA doesn’t have a well-trained, coherent team of professionals, but rather an odd collection of young Republican campaign workers and other novices. It doesn’t even appear to have enough of those. As the incompetence of the ORHA becomes obvious, their replacement, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Ambassador Paul Bremer, is being readied in Washington. It will be a case of partial incompetence being replaced by complete disaster.
In Washington, DC, Rumsfeld is being interviewed on Meet the Press, revealing the lack of critical thinking and planning that is about to engulf America in its most costly guerrilla insurgency since Vietnam.4
Q: General Garner will have an interim government in place in a few weeks—would you think that’s a pretty good timetable?
Rumsfeld: At the present time the war is still going on, and it’s a little premature to be setting timetables and dates. I just don’t know. The first task is to win the war . . . , and then to get the Iraqi people to think through exactly what kind of a model they want to select for their own government.
Q: . . . What’s going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq, and it turns out the radicals win?
In Baghdad, Mattis watches as the situation quickly overwhelms the ORHA. He immediately recognizes the repeat of history. In The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920, British lieutenant general Aylmer Haldane writes, “We were hampered by having a ‘scratch and somewhat incongruous team’ of administrators, with the majority possessing ‘little exact knowledge of the people they were called upon to govern.’”5 Mattis, who has read Haldane, no doubt understands the disaster that is unfolding; he anticipated it, knowing Rumsfeld and the Pentagon as he does, and has been preparing his Marines to shoulder the burden of occupation, on their own, for over a year. He knows his battalions, reinforced with civil (C-5) teams, are keeping the lights on, the water running, and the bad guys dead, so he doesn’t complain to his superiors or interfere in what some Marines might call the “rolling clusterfuck” in front of him. Instead, he sits quietly in the meetings alert and on duty in spite of the numbing drudgery, adding fumbled item after fumbled item to his own task list.
* * *
Mattis executes his radical plan for occupation by sending home 15,000 of the 23,000 Marines he’s brought with him. For them, Operation Iraqi Freedom is over. He sends home all of his tanks, artillery, amtracs, and armored personnel carriers. He keeps only his light armored vehicles and the Third Marine Air Wing. It is a bold move, and directly counter to the “heavy footprint” policy of the US Army and the lack of policy of Ambassador Bremer and the CPA.
“Most of us were flabbergasted to be told to leave Baghdad at the end of April,” Colonel John Toolan says. “I turned over my sector, which was east Baghdad, to 2nd ACR [Armored Cavalry Regiment], which had about one-fifth the capability of my regiment.”6
Before Toolan ships out, Mattis takes him aside and tells him the situation is bad and getting worse, and the Marines will be back soon. “Don’t lose sight of what you’ve learned, because you’re going to need to get your guys ready to come back.”7
The general picks a date in the future out of the air, November 10—the Marine Corps’ birthday. This, he predicts, will be the target date for his troops to be “recocked” and ready to fight again. He misses the date by two days; the redeployment order will arrive November 7.
Even more unexpectedly, Mattis writes that the configuration of the US Army is wrong for an occupation force. They need more infantry, while the Marines need less. He says, “The lack of Army dismounts [regular infantry] is creating a void in personal contact and public perception of our civil-military ops.”
In place of the First Division, the entire Polish contingent of two hundred soldiers take over command of the remaining coalition forces in the south. General James Conway, commander of I MEF, sums up the situation and he and Mattis’s humanitarian approach after attending the transfer ceremony in Baghdad with Mattis:
As we rolled south out of Baghdad for these provinces, we did so with a certain amount of trepidation. Marines don’t traditionally do nation-building or security operations. We have no doctrine for it. We weren’t sure where the resources would come from. And we weren’t sure how we would be received by the people of southern Iraq, who had seen American troops attack up through their governates . . . [But] in some regards, a negative can become a positive. A lack of doctrine allowed us to pass some very simple rules to our Marines and soldiers. They were; treat others as you would like to be treated. Deal with the people with fairness and firmness and dignity. Among other things, we emphasized the children. They are the future of this country. It’s hard to be angry with someone when he’s doing good things for your children.8
In addition to preparing for civil affairs, Mattis spends months before the invasion working on legal affairs with I MEF’s legal office. Much of the time he works on the rules of engagement so all Marines will stay out of legal jeopardy in all situations. He twice issues detailed guidance on the law of war to his Marines and continuously uses and explains the division’s motto, “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy,” to drive home his commander’s intent. Simplifying the intent to four words, the motto of the division, ensures that every grunt will have a clear moral compass for bringing peaceful order to civilians but deadly chaos to the enemy.
Mattis lets everyone under his command know that “discipline will be severely tested by an unscrupulously led enemy who is likely to commit Law of War violations.”9 Leaving nothing to chance, he orders his staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Colonel John R. Ewers, and deputy, Major Joseph Lore, to teach classes on the rules of engagement and law of war before and throughout the invasion. The two men create a team that travels the battlefield, responding to legal issues even before the dust settles. This level of planning and preparation for occupation of the country was not even imagined in the Pentagon’s Phase IV occupation war plans.
Even now, as the division is winding down operations, Mattis posts messages nearly every day on the division website, communicating constantly with his Marines, particularly those he hasn’t met personally at and around the front lines. In this sense, Rumsfeld is correct: battle is now also about the flow of data. Posting to the website revolutionizes the chain of command, replacing the traditional top-down “command and control” structure with the horizontal and democratic “command and feedback.” Now front-line commanders are free to make quick decisions and seize opportunities without asking permission.
While First Division is washing down, packing up, and shipping equipment back to Pendleton, Mattis tours the seven governates administered by his civil-reinforced battalions for a final inspection. He pays particular deference to tribal elders and civic leaders who are unhappy for one reason or another. He sits with them to speak of the future of Iraq—privately, man to man.
Near Nasariyah, site of some of the most bitter fighting in the campaign, he calls together a gathering of local restive leaders—men hardened by years of war and dictatorship. Men with deep scars they didn’t get from being mechanics, farmers, and shopkeepers. Men whose grandfathers taught them to smile at the powerful but never trust them, to keep their knives sharpened and guns oiled. Some harbor generations-long grudges against each other, some say they hate Saddam, and some say “George Bush! Good!” They are disarmed at the meeting, their weapons held by Mattis’s security platoon. They sit in a classroom in a school the Marines are rebuilding. Water is served, introductions are made. Hard eyes scrutinize the slim, physically unimposing man in front of
them. Mattis gauges the hard looks and concealed mistrust around the room. His first thoughts, as always, go to the safety of his Marines. He addresses them in the coarse, direct language of men used to war. He is sincere and deadly calm. He says some version of his now well-known quote:
“I’m going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for the next 10,000 years.”10
5
A Girl Named Alice
A friend of Mattis’s said, “A few years after enlisting he met a girl named Alice who said that she would marry him only if he left the Corps.” Mattis began the resignation process, but his fellow Marines stopped him.
The friend continued, “Basically, a lot of the officers got together and tried to talk Alice into withdrawing her demand. They told her that his future was too bright.”
Alice agreed, and a wedding date was set.
—from Dexter Filkins, “James Mattis: A Warrior in Washington,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2017
July 1968—Columbia River, Central Washington State
For 419 million years, as North America split and drifted apart from the rest of Pangaea, volcanic eruptions poured a thick layer of molten basalt across the northwestern edge of the new continent. Rainwater pouring off the volcanoes and new mountain ranges cut a deep V channel, 1,900 miles long, through the hard, volcanic basalt toward the Pacific Ocean.
Seventeen-year-old Jim Mattis, amateur geologist and historian, sits on a sun-warmed basalt boulder watching the deep, black Columbia River roll away west to the Pacific. He ponders the sweep of a million years, then ten million years, then a hundred million, then four hundred million.
In less than two months, on his birthday, he’ll have to register for the military draft. They’ll take him, put a rifle in his hands, and send him to the front of the line, walking point, looking for a gunfight on the jungle paths of Vietnam. It’s all over the news. Ten thousand Americans just got killed in the Tet Offensive in January. They’ll take him all right and put him right up front.
All new guys walk point, at the front of the patrol, because the old guys with only a short time left on their tours figure they have used up all their luck. New guys haven’t used up their luck yet, so they walk point, up front. So is he lucky enough, brave enough, to walk point? He has swum the half-mile breadth of the river, but that’s a different kind of bravery.
The Yakama and Nez Perce people who have lived on the river for five thousand years have their own tests of bravery, the rites of passage for a young man. What will be his test? His head is still full of a boy’s questions about the world and his place in it. “I had a natural curiosity about life,” he said of himself in later years. “Eventually, that became very helpful as a military officer charged with taking people off to war.”1
By challenging himself physically, he has developed a strong core of confidence and self-control, but he still has a wild streak that continues to push him to take chances and test his luck. He reflected on his rambunctious youth along the Columbia, “I nearly missed graduation because I was drunk,” and he spent a lot of time “swimming in the Columbia River, drinking surreptitiously, and chasing the ladies.”2
This maverick trait is also vital to a warrior, according to his own estimation in later years. “Take the mavericks in your service, the ones that wear rumpled uniforms and look like a bag of mud but whose ideas are so offsetting that they actually upset the people in the bureaucracy. One of your primary jobs is to take the risk and protect these people, because if they are not nurtured in your service, the enemy will bring their contrary ideas to you.”3
10 September 1968
Jim Mattis walks onto the Central Washington College campus just days after his eighteenth birthday, having just registered for the military draft. The tree-shaded campus occupies most of the farming village of Ellensburg, an isolated river valley on the Yakima bordered by the denuded, channeled scablands a hundred miles east of the Columbia River. As a first step away from home, it barely qualifies as going away to college, since a two-hour drive puts him back on the quiet street where he grew up.
In class, he pursues his interests in history, geology, and native North American tribes but is frequently distracted by a growing dilemma: Is his patriotic duty to protest the Vietnam War or help fight it by following his older brother, Tom, into the Marine Corps? If his problem fades for a moment, there is always someone burning their draft card in a TV news report or yelling through a loudspeaker about it on campus. Away from the political isolation of Richland and its defense industry citizens, the “Free Love,” “Ban the Bomb” counterculture is loud and getting louder as the body counts escalate. For the moment, as a full-time student, he is safe to ponder his decision. But the question of honor begins to weigh more heavily.
If, as the protestors scream, the war is immoral, then Mattis is honor-bound to oppose it. If, as his older brother, Tom, believes, the Marine Corps is the patriotic course, then he must support it. There is no help for the decision from his family upbringing. Military service, while a clear duty for his parents and their generation, has never been valued over other career paths in their home. He might be happiest just being a history professor and fishing in the Yakima and Columbia. Why should he risk getting shot in a war on the other side of the world?
If he refuses to make a decision, the Selective Service Bureau, commonly known as the draft board, is waiting to make it for him. In fact, they already have. Out of the 365 days in his birth year, his birth date of September 8 is selected as seventh in line to be inducted. They are taking everyone up to number 165 of that year, so it seems the draft board has already put him at the front of the line. The day his studies end, he will be ordered to report to the nearest induction center. There, he will be assigned a number and sent wherever the military needs him most. Unless he enlists. Then he will have a choice of service branch and possibly an area of specialty.
Then there is the nagging question of his luck. Is he lucky? If he is going to be a warrior and not a professor, he will need to be lucky. As he would know from his wide-ranging reading of history and native peoples, the warriors of the local Nez Perce, Sioux, and Crow tribes covered themselves and their horses with lucky talismans before going to war. Napoleon’s most important question about possible new commanders was “Is he known to be lucky?”4 In Vietnam, Tom’s buddies carry the ace of spades playing card in their helmet or a pocket-size Bible over their heart for luck. Unfortunately, going by his first encounter with the military, in which he is one of the first in line for induction, it seems that he is not lucky.
And his luck will definitely not improve with the ladies if he joins up. Short hair and a possible reputation as a “baby killer” after the recent news reports of civilian massacres are not going to help him or his fellow soldiers with the long-haired, free-love hippie chicks who occupy a significant portion of his brain space. Walking point in a steaming, booby-trapped jungle may be about even with being rejected by young women on his list of downsides of military service.
Months fly by in a happy blur of intense study, skirt-chasing, and drinking contests. When the thought does occasionally push its way to the front of his mind, it still seems there is no upside to military service. It is a fun-wrecking, dangerous, maybe even fatal decision to join the United States military in 1969, particularly for those who are unlucky. Even so, the idea of being a tough Marine has always appealed to him.
He writes letters to his brother, Tom, who has been in the Marines for two years and is now in Vietnam. It’s true that now more than ever, military service, especially in the Marines, is the ultimate test of courage. And he has never and would never shrink from a test of courage. It is a point of personal honor and pride.5
Finally, in his sophomore year, he makes his decision. Luck or no luck, ladies or no ladies, Jim Mattis walks into a Marine Corps recruitment office and signs up for the Marine’s Platoon Leaders Course (PLC). He says to an interviewer years later ab
out this decision, “I don’t think I had the intention of making it a career at that point. I wasn’t closed-minded about it. . . . In those days we had the draft, so there was little choice.”6
But the decision is not as casual as he will later imply. In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive has just killed ten thousand American soldiers and Marines, so the American military is aggressively seeking new blood to refill the ranks. Does he really want to be walking point in a jungle, looking for a gunfight?
Reinforcing his possible unluckiness, just weeks after he enlists, President Richard Nixon launches his “madman theory” by sending bombers armed with nuclear weapons jetting toward the Soviet border for three days in a row. As Nixon tells his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”7
Apparently Nixon’s bluff works. The military term for this maneuver is a feint; “an offensive action involving contact with the adversary conducted for the purpose of deceiving the adversary as to the location and/or time of the actual main offensive action.” In this case, the main offensive action is taking place at the negotiating table.