No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

by Jim Proser

  In their long history as friends since Desert Storm, Conway has learned that, as he says, “If you ask Jim Mattis a question you’re going to get the answer. If you’re not ready for tough answers, don’t ask him. Because he’ll tell you.”77

  Conway and Mattis are cut from the same cloth. He knew what Mattis meant when his friend, an avid historical scholar, spoke like a semiliterate Wild West sheriff defending the American way and a lady’s honor in another widely publicized quote: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”78

  For that one, it went all the way up to the commandant of the Marine Corps to get Mattis off the media hot seat. Commandant General Michael Hagee delicately shared with the press that Mattis “often speaks with a great deal of candor.”79

  As happened in Afghanistan, Mattis is unguarded speaking to his troops, and in his enthusiasm forgets that there are eager reporters present. Once, welcoming two hundred Marines arriving at the al-Asad airbase in Iraq, Mattis said, “The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot. There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim. It’s really a hell of a lot of fun. You’re gonna have a blast out here. I feel sorry for every son of a bitch that doesn’t get to serve with you.”80

  Once again Conway has to help tamp down the media brushfire that Mattis lights. The White House bends Conway’s ear for a long while on that particular occasion, and afterward he catches up with his friend and subordinate officer to tell him, “Jim, goddamn it. If you don’t shut up, I’ll wear your ass out!”81

  And again, a commandant of the Marine Corps also has to come to Mattis’s defense. Commandant Jim Jones gets Mattis on the phone and chews him out, particularly regarding the reaction of their European coalition partners to Mattis’s western sheriff routine. “Europeans don’t really like cowboys,”82 Jones tells his outspoken general.

  So it is no surprise to Conway that Mattis threatens the Anbar sheiks with the first thing out of his mouth. It’s exactly what any frontier town sheriff might do. He just moves the conversation forward quickly and hopes (in vain) that he won’t be reading about Mattis’s threat later.

  * * *

  CAP continues to stabilize and pacify the north and eastern parts of Iraq by providing reliable basic services, self-generated security, and elected local government. But widely, throughout much of the rest of Iraq, the insurgency is still going strong. IEDs have been supplied by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and upgraded to armor-piercing explosively shaped charges that can puncture LAVs and up-armored Humvees. Zarkawi and Muqtada al-Sadr are actively attacking coalition forces in Baghdad and Anbar.

  On Mattis’s frequent trips to the front lines in Fallujah and throughout Anbar to meet with sheiks and provincial leaders, the jump platoon is repeatedly attacked. Through the initial assault in Fallujah and then weeks of siege, the jump suffers three ambushes and three extended firefights. Mattis’s aide, Lieutenant Steven Thompson, is the first seriously injured member of the jump in late April. Then, Staff Sergeant Jorge Molina Bautista is killed by a roadside IED outside Fallujah in May on the way to Mattis’s blood-soaked meeting with local sheiks, and in June Lance Corporal Jeremy L. Bohlman is killed in Ramadi. In all, seventeen out of twenty-nine of Mattis’s jump platoon are killed or wounded. Yet, during the entire Fallujah campaign, in spite of their 59 percent casualty rate and standing offer to transfer them out at any time without shame, not one of the jump asks for a transfer out of the unit. Mattis says about Molina Bautista and Bohlman, “Staff Sergeant Molina Bautista was devoted to his family and kind towards the young men in the Jump—I trusted him totally. Bohlman was keenly attentive on patrol and high-spirited off duty. He was a lot of fun for the rest of the team to have around.”83

  In Washington, after months of increasing attacks, President Bush is desperate to stop the rebellion. He offers General Conway twenty thousand additional troops and new US Army leadership under Major General David Petraeus. Petraeus is like-minded with Conway and Mattis on winning the hearts and minds of the people. He has been very successful at it in Mosul, north of Anbar in Nineveh Province. Bush appeals to Conway and Petraeus to shut down the insurgency elsewhere in the country. Conway reassures the president that things aren’t as bleak as he may be hearing: “Sir, I support the surge but we’re winning in the west.”84

  Indeed, Conway and Mattis are winning. Their success is summed up in the cheery-sounding name the Great Sunni Awakening. For a war-weary America, this sounds hopeful, even positive—an awakening! The media jumps at the chance to bring a positive angle into the dreary procession of gruesome death they have been serving for months. President Bush and General Petraeus jump on the bandwagon by announcing the surge: they will be sending more troops to help turn the tide in Iraq. Soon they are being credited with snatching victory in Iraq from the jaws of defeat. They are heralded around the world as the great strategists and peacemakers of Anbar. Along with the troops, pallets of US cash are flown into Anbar to grease the wheels of the awakening.

  Eventually, even Fallujah itself is pacified, so much so that it becomes a safe haven for frightened refugees from other parts of Iraq. President Bush is once again seen as a hero and liberator by many Iraqis. On the idea that the surge pacified Anbar, General Conway comments, “The surge had nothing to do with it. We were winning those people over for months beforehand.”85

  But even as the awakening blossoms, and Saddam’s sadistic sons Uday and Qusay are hunted down and killed, former high-ranking Iraqi leaders are captured, and finally Saddam himself is captured in a rat hole outside Tikrit, the price of long-term occupation comes due for Mattis. In Haditha, a family of fourteen Iraqis, including young children, is wiped out in one Marine raid. Charges are brought against the Marines, and certain American media outlets promote the idea that the Marines may be guilty of war crimes. Some call it a new My Lai massacre.86

  In the small village of Mukaradeeb near the Syrian border, a wedding party of forty-two people is killed in a Marine air strike. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for the Joint Task Force in Iraq, says, “There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration. There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too.”87

  Video footage obtained by the Associated Press from an unknown source seems to contradict Kimmitt. The video shows a series of scenes of a wedding celebration and footage from the following day, showing fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans, and brightly colored bedding used for celebrations scattered around a destroyed tent. The images can’t be verified as authentic but are broadcast widely. Mattis is again in the spotlight, this time for the atrocities committed on his watch. He backhands the accusations against his Marines: “How many people go to the middle of the desert to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”88

  He later commented that it had taken him thirty seconds to deliberate on bombing the location. In both cases, Mattis was instrumental in testifying for the Marines at trial, winning acquittals or convictions on lesser charges for all of the Marines involved. With their honor tarnished by the accusations of murder, the Marines continue to cultivate the Sunni Awakening even as they suffer continuous ambushes by insurgents.

  Under orders from Washington and Baghdad, Mattis surrenders the hard-won center of Fallujah to a collection of local officials and tribal leaders who call themselves the Fallujah B
rigade. Within weeks the Fallujah Brigade transforms into an insurgent front group and begin stockpiling weapons and making fortifications throughout the city, guaranteeing a second battle for Fallujah.

  The Second Battle of Fallujah will explode in November under the command of Lieutenant General Rich Natonski. This conflict will escalate death tolls from dozens and hundreds during Mattis’s siege into the thousands. It will be the bloodiest fighting since the Pacific islands of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Tarawa during World War II.

  In spite of serious continued attacks on coalition forces, on June 28, 2004, Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer is elected president of the Iraqi interim government. The first phases of pacification have finally reached the capital of Baghdad. Mattis has beaten the enemy to a standoff in Fallujah but been stopped from driving a stake through its heart. More importantly, he has won the prize—the Desert Wolves and surrounding tribes of Anbar. On his watch, they have grown into the living proof of a possible peaceful future for all Iraqis.

  August 2004—al-Asad Airbase, Western Anbar Province, Iraq

  As the summer heat roasts the Iraqi desert, Mattis prepares notes for his farewell address in a stifling, unadorned airplane hangar. He has spent most of his career leading Marines to war on battlefields a few hundred miles from where he now sits, and now it is time to say farewell for the last time. He has been nominated for a third star and will spend the rest of his career in Quantico, Virginia, and Washington, DC, leading the charge on behalf of his beloved Marines. He will take time off to be with his mother and his lifelong friends who live almost as far from Washington, DC, as one can get—“safely west of the Rockies,” as he likes to say.

  In his off time, he’ll volunteer at the local food bank, fish in the mighty Yakima River, and catch up on his reading of history. He will ascend to one of the highest military positions in the United States, commander of US Central Command. After his military career, he will accept a fellowship and lecture at the Hoover Institution in California and become involved briefly with a private company called Theranos that will collapse into lawsuits, ending his one and only venture into the private business sector. In mid-2016 a long-shot presidential candidate named Donald Trump will call him to talk about a possible future as secretary of defense.

  But for now, as he reviews his notes, they bring to mind the people, the men and women of the Marine Corps, who had kept him returning to the barren deserts of the Middle East. It was his Marines, especially the dirty, exhausted, and unbreakable grunts, filled with their special type of spiritual power, who inspired him and kept him coming back. It was the grunts who overcame discomfort, who faced death with utter contempt, and who often suffered most deeply the heartbreak of warfare. To them, the front-line warriors, he now says goodbye:

  Today, I haven’t the words to capture what is in my heart as I look out at these beautiful grunts who represent thousands of cocky, selfless, macho young troops of our infantry division. Infantry—infant soldiers, young soldiers, young soldiers of the sea, who have given so much, and who have taught me courage as they smiled, heading out to risk their lives again, to destroy the enemy. So lacking the words, I will close with a warrior’s prayer from a man who understands:

  Give me God, what you still have.

  Give me what no one else asks for.

  I do not ask for wealth, success, or even health.

  People ask you so often, God, for all these things that you cannot have any left.

  Give me what people refuse to accept from you.

  I want insecurity and disquietude.

  I want turmoil and brawl.

  And if you should give them to me, my God, once and for all, let me be sure to have them always.

  For I will not always have the courage to ask for them.

  May God be with you, my fine young Marines, as you head out once again into the heat of the Iraqi sun, into the still of the dark night to close with the enemy. Beside you, I’d do it all again. Semper Fidelis.89

  For the last time as a Marine, he leaves the deserts of the Middle East as an invincible warrior and visionary peacemaker. Without fanfare or further ceremony, Mattis shakes a few hands and carries his own bags onto a waiting military transport plane. In his briefcase, among his important papers, he carries his most precious, personal possession. It will stay with him, always in sight, in whatever billet, hotel room, or easy chair he happens to find himself. It is a photograph of all twenty-nine fearless young grunts of his jump platoon.

  Epilogue: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

  On March 22, 2013, after forty-one years of service in the Marine Corps, Jim Mattis retires from active duty.1 He has shown that a small, focused, and ethical force can prevail against a larger, modern enemy. He has shown that this same small force can then transform a temporary military conquest into a durable peace. He has expanded decades-old, restrictive Marine Corps doctrine to create sea-based combat divisions that can meet any threat at any point on the globe. By insisting that his Marines engage their minds before they engage their weapons, he leads the Marine Corps to master the complexities of terrorism, insurgency, and asymmetrical warfare into the twenty-first century. At his retirement ceremony, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says, “General Mattis has demonstrated to the world that truly there is no worse enemy, and no better friend, than a United States Marine. He has devoted his life, his energy, his intellect, and his force of courage and personality to the US Marine Corps, our military, and our country. And our nation is forever grateful for his service.”2

  As with other indispensable, visionary men and women in the history of the United States, Mattis’s retirement doesn’t last long. America’s enemies continue to grow in strength and influence during his absence. Soon, he will be called upon to lead the fight again, against not only the nation’s but Western civilization’s bloodthirsty foes. Less than a month after his retirement, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) expands its range to include eastern Syria, and changes its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).3

  In July 2013, Mattis is invited to join the high-powered board of directors of a biomedical device company called Theranos.4 On the board are ex-Marine and Secretary of State George Schultz, former secretary of defense William Perry, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former US senator Sam Nunn, former US senator and heart-transplant surgeon Bill Frist, retired US Navy admiral Gary Roughead, former Wells Fargo CEO Richard Kovacevich, and Riley Bechtel, chairman of the board and former CEO at Bechtel Group.5

  Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes dazzles the all-male board and earns Mattis’s support. “She really does want to make a dent in the universe—one that is positive,”6 he claims. Holmes does make a dent—but unfortunately, it is in everyone’s reputation. She has used a shell company she owns to apparently conduct sham tests and falsely validate the effectiveness of her blood-testing device.7 It is an allegedly elaborate and outright fraud. To make matters worse, George Schulz’s son is the whistleblower who brings worldwide shame and suspicion down on all their heads. Mattis’s introduction to the private sector is an eye-opening display of apparent deceit even beyond the imagination of the shiftiest tribal sheik in Iraq.

  Mattis seizes the opportunity to retreat behind the citadel walls of Stanford University8 and the Hoover Institution.9 He lectures on the subjects of war, revolution, and peace. He joins the American Public Policy Think Tank and Research Institution and participates in research on Iran, the Middle East, military history and strategy, and national security. He becomes an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow and speaks to international policy makers. He gathers directorships, fellowships, and awards by the bushel. He adds General Dynamics to his portfolio as a member of the board of directors. He becomes a Davies Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow.10

  But the enemy doesn’t sleep while Mattis rests on his laurels. In May 2014 the city of Raqqa, Syria, is overtaken by ISIS and becomes the de facto capital of the caliphate.11 The dream of caliphate is now carrie
d by a new generation of leaders, a global jihadist gang of sadistic mass murderers. Fallujah12 and Ramadi are retaken by the jihadis, and strict Sharia law is instituted.13 This includes roving virtue police who beat women with canes in the street for insufficient Islamic modesty.14 Doubtless, Mattis is upset by seeing the cities won with so much bloodshed returned to the same soulless men, beasts who beat women.

  Mattis is invited on to the board of the US Naval Institute and accepts. He receives an honorary doctor of laws degree from George Washington College.15 The Marine Corps University Foundation awards him the 2014 Semper Fidelis award. In his acceptance speech, Mattis says, “On evenings like this most of us will remember the tragedy of losing comrades. Beautiful Marines whose rambunctious spirits gave us what F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘Riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.’ And we remember them, everyone, who gave their lives so our experiment called America, could live. And for us who live today. . . . We do so with a sense that each day is a bonus and a blessing.”16

  Back in his small hometown near the Yakima River, he volunteers at the Tri-Cities Food Bank that provides emergency food to the needy residents of the area. He agrees to sit on their board of directors. He joins the board of the Center for a New American Security and is called to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about global challenges and US national security. He warns against the growing threat in Iraq: “The international order, so painstakingly put together by the greatest generation coming home from mankind’s bloodiest conflict, is under increasing stress. . . . Like it or not, today we are part of this larger world and must carry out our part. We cannot wait for problems to arrive here or it will be too late; rather we must remain strongly engaged in this complex.”17