by Tom Clancy
During the day, the squadron aviation could fly over the convoys and be available if a fight broke out. When convoys were not operating (there was normally one per day), the squadron was engaged in aggressive reconnaissance in troop-sized operational areas to the west of the road, where they looked for the enemy and frequently found him. The threat from ground attack at the time was so low that the cavalry troops were not involved in protecting the convoys. But artillery locations were spaced in mutually supporting positions along the road. The squadron commander or S-3 would fly over the convoy, and could deal with the enemy with fires available from the artillery along the route, or from close air support or helicopter attack aviation.
It was during this time that Franks received his baptism by fire. This is how he remembers it:
"What's that?" I asked my pilot, as there was a pop-pop sound and green tracers zinged past the OH-6 helicopter.
"We're taking fire," he said, turning the Loach quickly out of the area.
I suspected as much.
That was my first experience of being directly shot at in combat. It would not be the last. You always wonder how you will react. It got my attention. I felt the normal fear rising to take control, and I was instantly more aware. My senses were on super-alert. In an instant, though, you get on top of the fear, put it aside, and try to focus on what you know you must do. I found I could do that. That did not make me unique, but it was reassuring to pass that first test. I also did not feel as though the fire would hit us. Somehow, a sort of calm came over me, and I found I was able to think, and otherwise do my duty and hang in there. There would be many more of these on the ground and in the air. My reaction was always the same, right up until I was wounded the second time. One night in Germany, I had asked Captain Herm Winans, our squadron S-2 and a decorated Korean War veteran, "What's it like to be shot at?" He told me, "The first time is the worst, and after five seconds you are all veterans. Don't worry about it. Your training will kick in." A bit of old-soldier wisdom in a nightly chat at our border camp along the Czech-West German border. He was right.
A few days later, an ARVN infantry unit walked by mistake into an area near our firebase where our engineers had put out a field of mines and booby traps. They went off. We got them on the radio and had them freeze in place, then went to get them out via the safe lanes. I saw my first battle casualty as a leg with the boot still on it, separated from the ARVN soldier who had been killed. You never get used to seeing casualties, even though you know they are part of combat. There would be more. You feel every one.
During this period of almost three weeks, the 2nd Squadron had a number of engagements with the NVA, ranging from a single enemy rocket fired into their firebase to an NVA company-size attack against one of the cavalry troops. In the course of these operations, Franks would do all the things an S-3 of a cavalry squadron would do in combat: call in and adjust artillery fire, call in air strikes, maneuver forces on the ground, and in a battle, orchestrate all the fire and movement simultaneously over a single and tightly disciplined radio frequency. No U.S. soldiers were lost to enemy action. Although he was not yet a seasoned combat veteran, he was a changed soldier from the one of three weeks before.
In early September, Lieutenant Colonel Grail Brookshire replaced Aarstaat as squadron commander, and officially made Fred Franks the 2nd Squadron S-3 (and Gilbreath the XO). For all he had learned, however, Franks knew he had a long way to go. He also was aware that he had to execute while he grew in combat experience. He did not want his growth to be at the expense of the soldiers. Over the next nine months of combat, he would form some very definitive thoughts about how to win at least cost to his soldiers. Some were confirmations of things he'd developed from previous experience in training, education, and command. Some were a direct result of seeing what worked in combat. They were both parts of being a soldier--matters of the mind and matters of the heart. For soldiering involves much thinking and intense problem solving, but it is also an intensely passionate profession, because in command, in order to do your duty, you put in harm's way that which you have come to love so much--your soldiers (as Michael Shaara said so well in his Civil War novel, The Killer Angels).
Fred Franks knew what made units great in peacetime training. He was now to see what made a unit great in combat. And he was to learn that they were the same.
THE MIND OF A COMMANDER4
Many parts make up a commander--many attitudes, skills, experiences, and convictions. Some of these are fundamental and eternal--duty, honor, country, courage, integrity, loyalty, patriotism. Others are more particular and personal; they grow and develop over time. The particular constellation of attitudes, skills, experiences, and convictions that Fred Franks brought to 2nd Squadron, and which grew and developed during his months in Vietnam, later characterized his performance as a commander, up to and including his command of VII Corps in Desert Storm. You don't understand Fred Franks unless you understand these.
Let's start with the blindingly obvious. When you fight in combat, you don't fight halfway. Fighting is for keeps. When you play ball, you walk away from the game. You lose today, you play again tomorrow. But in combat the stakes are final. It can bring about the deaths of people you've worked with, are responsible for, and care about, or your own death. You don't get second chances. This means, as I've already indicated Fred Franks is fond of saying, when you win, you don't want to win close. You don't want drama. You want to win 100-0, not 24-23. In other words, there's no room for sloppiness. And there's no room for lapses in alertness. It means that when you're a soldier, you want not just a small edge over your enemy, but as large an edge as you can get. Thus, where you can, you want to work your units into situations where the difference between winning and losing, or between life and death, does not hang on acts of extreme courage--or on Medal of Honor-winning bravery. It may come to that and the mission might demand it, but you try to work it so those actions add to the edge. For a soldier, ordinary courage should be more than enough (and ordinary courage is not at all easy!). Ordinary courage means doing what you're supposed to be doing as well as you can; and it means not letting down those who depend on you. Acts of ordinary courage sometimes require extraordinary measures . . . but that's another story.
What gives them the edge they need? Here are the ways, as Franks came to know them:
Soldiers
Franks was to confirm what he already knew: It all starts with the soldiers themselves. It is their training and courage, and the quality of their noncommissioned officer and officer small-unit leadership, that win.
In those early days of combat, Franks quickly saw that the real heroes of Vietnam were the soldiers who by and large had been drafted and who had come to Vietnam to do what our country had asked them to do. In the 2nd Squadron Franks found a tight-knit team who were fiercely proud of the unit and who looked out for one another. They lived out of their vehicles for months on end, fighting from them, living in them. Day after day they would go on their missions, looking for the enemy and on most days finding him. By late August 1969, they had been at it constantly for almost six months. Franks wanted to be part of that team.
He also began to see something else.
By this time, Vietnam had gotten personal for most in the ranks as well as for the thousands of next of kin of those killed in action, wounded, missing in action, or POWs. Many had already served there, some more than once. Some of Franks's West Point class of 1959 had been killed in action, one from his cadet company. In the spring of 1969, two friends of Franks were killed in action a week apart. (One of his pilots in the 2nd Squadron, it turned out, had been flying the helicopter the day one of those friends had been killed; he and Franks would talk about it.) And so when Franks went to Vietnam in the summer of 1969, he did so as a professional, but the war quickly became part of his soul.
Combat Power
There are four main ingredients of combat power:
* FIREPOWER: Using everything available to you
at the right place and time.
* PROTECTION: Preserving your force for use at the right time.
* COMMAND AND LEADERSHIP: The battlefield is a chaotic place. If your side is less mired in chaos than your enemy's, if your force is more agile and can respond more quickly to changing events, you have a big edge. You do that through vision and sensing. If you can see your own units and the enemy better than your enemy can see you, then he is, relatively speaking, more entangled in confusion and chaos. You also have to see in your mind's eye what you cannot see physically. You have to know where and how to get the right information to form that vision.
* MANEUVER: If you can move around the battlefield faster than your enemy in the right combination of units, you effectively increase your own numbers and increase the number of directions from which you can hit the enemy. This is how you gain and maintain the initiative and win.
Combat Discipline
Combat discipline is not the same as parade-ground discipline. The latter has its uses--though these don't figure high in the greater scheme of things. On the other hand, without combat discipline, you lose. Combat discipline means maintaining weapons and maintaining vehicles. It means doing what is right even when no one is watching. It means following orders. It means staying put and fighting if that is the mission, even though the odds may not look good. It means applying lots of violence with focused firepower on the enemy, but when the engagement is over, being able to shut it off. And it means staying alert and on edge, and looking out for one another.
Noncommissioned officers and leaders and commanders need to know how to keep the edge that comes from combat discipline, especially during lulls between combat actions. If units don't engage in a combat action at least once every three or four days, their effectiveness falls off very rapidly. Units and leaders cannot get complacent. Complacency is a fatal disease. With that in mind, Brookshire and Franks would spend much of their time going out and around, visiting units, listening to the troops, talking to the troop commanders (and the troop commanders and noncommissioned officers would, of course, be doing the same thing), making sure the troops were using battle lulls to clean their weapons, keep their ammo clean, maintain their vehicles, and attend to some personal hygiene (not easy, living out of a combat vehicle).
Focus
Focus is equal parts concentration and awareness. Ground combat is relentless, both physically and mentally. You live and fight from your vehicles, no letup, no rear areas, nothing but day after day of looking for the enemy. If you give in to exhaustion, you grow careless or overconfident, and then you become a hazard not only to yourself but, if you are a leader, even more so to your soldiers.
Before a planned battle, you get focused, no matter how tired you are. It requires every ounce of energy you can generate but you have no choice, and you must stay that way the entire action. In combat, time passes differently. Sometimes it seems like slow motion--actual combat time always seems longer than it really is--but you can't let up, ever.
When that planned battle begins, however, you sense the newness of it all, because each battle is different, and that is a help. It adds to the normal alertness, no matter how tired you are. During the battle, your senses come alive. They are supercharged. You see more, hear more, sense more. You fight to keep them under control. Your intuition lights up. Combat veterans call it a "sixth sense." Once, after midnight in War Zone C, the squadron firebase came under intense rocket and direct fire attack. Franks was asleep on a cot when it started. Rather than stand up, he rolled off his cot and crawled out. When he looked the next day at the sides of the shelter, they were riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes. Standing up would have been sure death. He could not explain why he had not stood up.
In battle, thought processes that might usually take longer take place in your head in nanoseconds. Your senses and brain are working overtime, stimulated by the action and your own sense of responsibility to the mission and your troops. But if you are tired going in, once that battle stimulus is removed, leaders and units crash. Breaking the momentum of an attack and then starting tired units back again is almost impossible.
If you are a senior commander, you are intensely focused on the present--on the immediate fight in front of you. But at the same time you try to remain detached enough that you can forecast and anticipate the next fight, and the one after that. The more senior you are, the more future you have to create.
If you constantly stay focused, you usually can outthink the enemy. You can run him out of options as you simultaneously outfight him. That's how you win.
Loyalty to Friends
Our friend W. E. B. Griffin has called this attitude, correctly, the Brotherhood of War. Yes, soldiers fight for their country. Yes, love of country is right in there among their own deepest-held beliefs--along with love of family and love of God. But when it comes down to it, soldiers in combat actually fight for their friends who are side by side with them in the fight . . . for the other members of their tank crew, for the rest of their squad. In a good unit, each soldier feels a boundless, unquestioned loyalty to the others. He does his best not to bring bad things to the others. He feels enormous peer pressure to pull his own weight in a fight. And he will sometimes reach impossible heights of bravery looking out for the others. In January 1970, near Bu Dop, for example, Captain Carl Marshall landed his Cobra amid enemy fire one morning at the beginning of a huge battle in order to rescue a fellow pilot who had been shot down in his scout Loach and was about to be captured by the NVA. Franks was in his own Loach adjusting artillery fire into the trees to keep the NVA away while beginning to maneuver ground troops, and he saw it all. He saw Marshall land, open the canopy of his Cobra, and with his cannon firing into the trees lift off and rescue his fellow aviator.
The commander's goal, not always achieved, is to create the conditions that will endow the whole unit with that feeling, and the behavior that follows from it. If the brotherhood feeling is working at a high level--in, say, a regiment--then you really have the power that can give you the decisive edge over your enemy.
Loyalty to troops--the Brotherhood of Warriors--has always been a powerful force in Fred Franks's own life and in his deepest convictions as a commander. He has always identified more directly with the soldiers than with the institutional hierarchy.
"To lead is to serve," he likes to say. "The spotlight should be on the led and not the leader.
"In battle, character counts in leaders and soldiers as much as brains. Stuff like courage, mental and physical toughness, and integrity really count. Yet competence is also important for leaders, because I believe soldiers have every right to expect their leaders to know what they are doing. Leaders must also share the danger, the pain, and also the pride that the troops feel. Leaders need to be up front in combat. They need to be where the soldiers are."
To Franks there is always unimaginable nobility about young Americans who are willing to risk it all for the sake of accomplishing what their country has asked them to do. That implies an almost blind trust on their part that their leaders have the stomach to see it through and will do that at the least cost to those inside the actual flames of combat. It implies that before the commitment to battle is made, the leaders have reached the reasonable conclusion that the objectives are worth the cost. It also implies that the tactical methods to be used will accomplish the strategic objectives. And it implies, finally, that after the battle is over, no matter what the outcome, they will acknowledge and recognize the sacrifice of those who carry in their bodies and their souls the living record of battle, a record that lasts far longer than the individual lives of soldiers or leaders. If leaders trust that soldiers are willing to give up their lives, or parts of their bodies, in order to accomplish their aims, then soldiers have a right to expect that their sacrifice will be worth it and remembered.
When, not long before the attack into Iraq, that soldier came up to General Franks and said, "Don't worry, General, we trust you," that remark touched d
eep within Fred Franks's inner core; it captured exactly what he had hoped the soldiers felt, and exactly what he had hoped that he himself was providing for them. And the highest praise that came to him after the victory was from a sergeant in the 2nd ACR. "You generals didn't do too bad this time," he said.
The question of loyalty affected Franks in another way.
Many of his professional generation were affected personally by Vietnam but kept it to themselves, and it perhaps did not affect their performance of duties later. Some might even say after Desert Storm and Provide Comfort that Vietnam had not affected them in the Gulf. That was not to be so for Franks. There was not a single day during Desert Shield and Desert Storm that he did not remember Vietnam and the fellow soldiers of his generation. Vietnam and the broken trust. Vietnam and the courage of the soldiers taking fire both on the battlefield and at home in America. It was a national tragedy of the 1970s. Being in the hospital with those soldiers hurt badly by war and seeing the pain caused them by those who linked them to the cause of the war left Franks identifying more with these young soldiers than perhaps with some of his own generation of professionals who were untouched by that personal experience. It was to make a difference the rest of his life.