Journey

by Norty Schwartz

  • Libya accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, and the United States responded by ending the travel ban to the nation that had been in place for twenty-three years.

  • With less than a month before their presidential election, Russian president Vladimir Putin unexpectedly fired his prime minister along with his entire cabinet.

  • A television containing eight pounds of TNT ripped apart the Superferry 14 as it sailed through the waters off the coast of the Philippines, resulting in the deadliest terrorist attack at sea. One hundred and sixteen souls were lost in the attack by the Abu Sayyaf jihadist militant group. Haiti was in a state of chaos, with rebels battling for control of the government. Execution-style killing were taking place on the streets, with bodies left as warnings of what was to come. Supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide vowed to defend their leader even if it meant a fight to the death, as masses of resistance fighters were on the brink of invading Port-au-Prince. NBC News warned travelers of the dangers. “It’s not a safe country. It is a lawless country,” said NBC reporter Kerry Sanders.

  Given the situation, while I wasn’t expecting the call, it didn’t particularly surprise me. “Sorry to wake you, sir,” said the familiar voice on the other end. “Stan McChrystal here, and I need your help. It’s Haiti.”

  It had been almost six months since Stan left the Pentagon to take over command of JSOC, where he was making great strides with his anti-terrorist initiatives, not to mention managing all manner of contingencies that the president and SECDEF deemed worthy of our nation’s most elite special operations units.

  “State needs our assistance in negotiating Aristide’s departure from the country, as well as providing him with safe transport to a yet-to-be-determined location,” he shared in a quick overview.

  A yet-to-be-determined location, I thought. I could only imagine the frantic calls that State Department must be in the midst of making as they attempted to find a country that would agree to provide the president safe haven. Fortunately, that was not my business. Facilitating Stan’s request was.

  “I’ll take care of obtaining the necessary verbal approvals,” I assured him. “But you’ve got a fluid situation on the ground that requires you to move right now. In my mind, it’s within your established mission authority to proceed as you see fit. I’ll keep you abreast of what’s going on on my end.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I’m on it.”

  My first call was to the vice chairman, Pete Pace. “My recommendation is that you verbally authorize McChrystal’s request,” I told him.

  “You got it,” he replied without delay. That was all I needed to bump it up to the SECDEF, which I did via John Craddock, the SDMA (Secretary of Defense Military Advisor) who had replaced Ed Giambastiani. “This one’s extremely time sensitive,” I reminded him.

  From that point on, Stan took the ball and ran with it—deftly orchestrating an extremely sensitive mission with virtually no advance notice. You hear so much about the battle between the military and the State Department, but here’s a great example of the two of us working hand in hand—both with the common goal of doing whatever it takes to effectively execute the president’s mission.

  In this case, Stan’s SEALs met Luis Moreno, the U.S. Embassy’s second-ranking officer, at the Aristide residence and together they negotiated the president’s departure. By the time the small convoy of heavily armed white Suburbans arrived at the airport, the unmarked white jet that Stan had secured was already waiting on the tarmac. Minutes later, the now ex-president was safely in the air, eventually to end up in the Central African Republic, where the plane would land at 1:00 a.m. (Sunday night, Monday morning).

  DIRECTOR JOINT STAFF

  So at this point we were coming up on two years in the job and the pace had not slowed down one iota. While we no longer had the official daily War Council meetings, my responsibility to keep our leadership fully informed had not diminished, and Iraq was still occupying the bulk of those discussions. On September 6, 2004, seven marines were killed outside Falluja when a car bomb exploded near a convoy of American and Iraqi soldiers. Less than a week later, nearly sixty people were killed by insurgent suicide bombers. Two days after that, another suicide bomber killed fifty men applying for jobs in Baghdad. On the final day of the month, as Iraqis celebrated the rebuilding of their infrastructure at the opening of a sewer plant, two car bombs exploded, killing forty-one people, including thirty-four children. Clearly, the nature of our Iraq mission had changed.

  For the prior two years, I had felt comfortable that my areas of expertise dovetailed with the needs of the mission, which afforded me the opportunity to make valuable contributions. But at this point, those needs required more ground expertise than I was able to offer. There was no one better suited for this new mission than Lieutenant General Jim Conway, former commander of I MEF (pronounced “one MEF”—Marine Expeditionary Force) in Iraq. The big, burly Marine was well read, well respected, and the perfect choice to succeed me as J-3. In the course of the next two years he excelled—doing so well, in fact, that eventually he would receive his fourth star and be sworn in by fellow Marine Pete Pace as the thirty-fourth commandant of the Marine Corps.

  Suzie and I were all set to pack up our boxes, finally get to spend some time together, and leave Washington for our next challenge, wherever that might be. I must say that by this point I considered myself to have a pretty decent strategic vision, but I certainly did not foresee things playing out the way they unfolded in Chairman Myers’s office late one afternoon. “Norty,” he began, with a grim countenance I’d come to recognize only preceded the very worst of news. “In spite of your best efforts to piss off the SECDEF, for some reason unbeknownst to me, he believes you’d make a superb DJS [Director of the Joint Staff], and I’ve been completely ineffective in talking him out of it.”

  Of course I knew that General Myers was my biggest advocate, and undoubtedly the one who approached Rumsfeld in the first place. The director is essentially the chairman’s chief of staff, generally accepted to be a first among equals both in the joint world and among the three-stars. He or she orchestrates the activities of the directors of the Joint Staff including the J-1, J-2, J-3, J-4, J-5, J-6, J-7, and J-8. He or she is a gatekeeper in a sense—those things that the four-stars prefer not to deal with, the director does. He or she also is the closer. Four-stars certainly do the “setting up,” but it’s the director and his or her counterparts at the three-star level who are expected to close the deal. It’s an important role, a great honor that I did not anticipate.

  Just as the chairman is the senior member of the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff), the director is the senior member at the Ops Deps level of the system—the Ops Deps being the counterpart “threes” in each of the services. It’s a parallel role to the chairman at one step lower down, where you try to resolve issues and settle things so that the four-stars can spend their time exclusively on the most consequential issues. You also are the interface with the deputies of the combatant commands—the fellow three-stars—working as the conduit between the chairman and the combatant commands.

  What I found interesting was how well the four-stars knew the system, and they knew how things worked in the Tank, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ private conference room, so if there were a particular top-level issue that a service chief or combatant commander did not want to take to the chairman or the vice chairman personally, they would call me and know that somehow I would get it done—or make sure that it got to the right person to get it done. I might get a call from Vern Clark or Mike Mullen (the two CNOs [Chief of Naval Operations] during my time as director) who would tell me, “Norty, the Navy’s got a problem with a particular assignment for VADM ‘X’ or an unrealistic mission assignment, so let’s try to work this out before it gets to the chairman.” And on those issues that had secretarial, or White House, or congressional interest, then clearly the director would be involved because that was multidisciplinary, and one
in which the chairman had an equity.

  It was a great job that we thoroughly enjoyed, and it was far less stressful than the J-3 job. The icing on the cake was that instead of 4:45 a.m., I wouldn’t have to get into the office until 5:45, so I was able to reestablish the rhythm and start running in the morning again.

  The DJS position gave me a view of the larger defense enterprise and the larger combatant command architecture and insight into White House landscape, because I had White House access usually reserved for those at the four-star level. I was the only three-star to attend the annual White House combatant commander/chiefs conference the president hosted every year. It was not a trivial matter to have the opportunity to engage with the president at this level. We would meet in the Cabinet Room, and the president would begin by offering some introductory comments and insights, followed by brief comments from each of the military commanders, including the chairman and Joint Chiefs. Down the road when I attended as a four-star, I brought up the need for civilian leadership to articulate the enduring relevance of nuclear deterrence, a topic that immediately caught the president’s attention and led to an extended discussion. This part of the conference was no social gathering; it was an opportunity for the commanders and Joint Chiefs to engage the chief executive directly on crucial issues surrounding national security, and for the president to do the same in the opposite direction.

  Every afternoon around five or five thirty, Pete Pace (VCJCS) and I would join Chairman Myers in his office for a wrap-up session where they’d track through their day and then dump on me everything that needed to be acted upon—things like who should testify at a key congressional hearing or a combatant command task directly from the secretary. If it dealt with a particular operation, the three (J-3) might be included. If it were intelligence-related, most likely the two (J-2) would be called in. They’d give their two cents’ worth and then be asked to leave, because the final half of our wrap-ups skinnied down to just the chairman, the vice, and myself. That’s when the chairman fulfilled his statutory obligation to personally vet and approve joint assignments of the three- and four-star officers—assuring that people with joint service were promoted at rates similar to those without it. There’s a whole process associated with flag officer management, and taking care of that for the chairman is the director’s job. It was such an important one that it literally took a bite out of every day; but interestingly enough, it put me in the catbird seat to observe the process of every top-level promotion, and be a part of that process. I’d talk to the combatant commanders to make sure the chairman understood their preferences and their needs. I learned a lot about general officer management: how to build the bench, and how to do so in such a way that the long-term needs of our military were best served. Once specific individuals were identified as being best suited to meet those needs, I’d see how they’d subsequently be groomed for those potential positions. It was quite strategic, and a process that I found fascinating.

  Ultimately the secretary of defense had to approve these selections, and at times he’d drop in and attend the meetings in person. On those occasions, once the topic of three-star assignments was about to be broached, I might be asked to leave the room; after all, being a three-star myself, it was feasible that my own selection might be a topic of their discussion. On the flip side, those times when it was only the chairman and the vice (which was usually the case), they didn’t feel the need to exclude me from the discussion—even if I happened to be the topic of that discussion. They made no secret of the fact that I was a part of the larger plan that the secretary and the chairman had in mind, and that included Suzie and me being nominated for our fourth star. If confirmed, we would be one of only a dozen four-star generals in the entire Air Force.

  In 2005 I pinned on my fourth star, and I had the incredible honor of being appointed a combatant commander—one of only nine in the entire United States armed forces at the time. But it was not to take over the command I had always hoped for. Rather than Special Operations Command, I was assigned to lead the US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), which provides mobility support to all the service branches and defense agencies. In simple terms, I’d be leading an organization which ran the entire Department of Defense transportation network. Aircraft, ships, trucks, trains, you name it: if there was cargo or personnel to be moved for any of our military branches, it would be my responsibility (along with what I soon found to be one of the most driven, dedicated workforces one could ever imagine) to make sure that it arrived at the right time and in the right place.

  Suzie and I loaded up our two cars and we headed west toward our new home at Scott Air Force Base, about twenty-five miles east of downtown St. Louis, just outside of Belleville, Illinois. As with the dozens of prior road trips we made together traveling from one assignment to the next, I was in the lead vehicle (in this case our red 1995 Ford Explorer), with Suzie following closely behind in our gold 2002 Explorer. No doubt we could have made the 850-mile trip in one very long day behind the wheel (over twelve hours of driving, plus stops), but instead of pushing it we decided to take our time and split it up, spending an uneventful night at the Holiday Inn in Louisville. I had picked up a pair of walkie-talkies so that Suzie and I had fairly decent comm for most of the way, and between the “How are you doing?” check-ins and the periodic requests for restroom breaks, I believe we got our money’s worth out of them. Day two would be an easy hop with an anticipated arrival by early afternoon, certainly early enough that we wouldn’t be driving directly into the setting sun. We were looking forward to taking in what friends had told us was a spectacular display of foliage as we drove through the Hoosier National Forest—with the hickories and oaks exploding into brilliant shades of autumn reds, browns, and yellows.

  * * *

  Suzie takes it from there: Brilliant shades of reds and yellows? Hello! This was early September and it was over ninety degrees out there. Those trees had no intention of changing for at least another month! What we saw were shades of green. For miles and miles. Then cows. And more cows. And at one point, rows of these long buildings with huge fans mounted on their sides. Painted across the side of one of them in thick, red block letters was Southern Indiana Poultry. I reached across to the passenger seat and grabbed the compact gray walkie-talkie. “Hey Nort, did you see that?” I asked, knowing full well that his mind would be deeply preoccupied with something work-related and certainly not on sightseeing.

  Fortunately I had removed the unit from my ear or the loud blast of static that preceded his response might very well have punctured my eardrum. His voice crackled from the tiny speaker: “See what, Suz?” I could see through his rear window that he was searching to see what he had missed.

  “We just passed a chicken farm,” I said into the device. “Might be a good idea for you to turn around and leave them your ‘egg sorting’ resume, just in case this whole Air Force thing doesn’t work out.”

  “You’re always a step ahead of me, let’s do it,” he shot back in jest as we continued on our way.

  Within an hour we passed over a river, then I spotted a green sign that said Welcome to Illinois, the Land of Lincoln. Thank God. At least we were in the right state. But boy, was it flat out there. And suddenly no more cows, or chicken farms, or anything else to speak of except for corn. Everywhere you looked, giant cornstalks blanketed the sprawling fields for as far as the eye could see. Norty described the crops as “robust,” but I prefer the word … boring.

  I so felt like picking up the walkie-talkie and mimicking the kid who whined to his parents every five minutes, “Are we there yet?” But good sense prevailed and I let it go.

  In what felt like years later, the radio came alive with the great news: “This is it, next exit,” Norty announced as he activated his right turn signal—a good half mile too early, but he was always very considerate of me in that way—just making sure to give me plenty of notice before any turn or change in course.

  Once off the highway, he made a left tu
rn at the bottom of the exit ramp, which took us under the highway overpass, then a right at the second stop sign. Still, all I could see was cornstalks. Wasn’t this base supposed to be by St. Louis? I grabbed the radio and shared my enthusiasm. “My God, where are you taking me?” I moaned. “I’m not seeing any Gateway Friggin’ Arch!”

  “Stand by,” was all he said as he crept along at a pace well under the posted speed limit. I could see through his rear windshield that he was looking down at a map or some sort of printed directions.

  “Norty, this is ridiculous!” I complained. “How can you lose a whole air force base? Believe me, we didn’t pass it. Obviously you got off the highway too soon!”

  “I agree,” screeched his unruffled voice as he signaled a turn that would take us back to Interstate 64. Ultimately we did find the base, and just as Norty was about to be faced with the challenges that come with coordinating the entire transportation needs of our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps; our arrival was the embarkation of a new chapter in my life: I was about to learn that being the spouse of unified command’s commander was light-years more challenging than anything I had been faced with to date.

  * * *

  We made it to the base in time to enjoy a nice dinner with the outgoing commander (and fellow Herc pilot), General John Handy and his wife Mickey, with a few days to spare before the change of command on September 7.

  But first, just a little bit about the politics of how this was playing out: For more than ten years I had been a joint officer and while most of my contemporaries were supportive of my success, in the eyes of many, all these joint assignments meant that I’d become more distant from the Air Force. This was the lane that I had fallen into and I was proud to serve in each and every one of those joint assignments. And let’s face it, in the process I was rising to the four-star level. And now, being combatant commander—it’s ten times, a hundred thousand times more than anything that we ever expected. But what the naysayers didn’t realize was that those ten years in joint positions gave me the opportunity to observe the Air Force from a unique vantage point; it gave me some insights into how people perceive the Air Force in a way that few other of my contemporaries enjoyed. Add to the mix the Special Ops fingerprints and you have a progression that’s not what I would call typical for Air Force officers. But it got me noticed, and it gave me insights that allowed me to be far more effective in helping to guide our Air Force into the future. But none of this in any way diminished the affection that I’ve always had for my service. Every day of my career it was with a great deal of pride that I donned my Air Force blue uniform, and I could not be more grateful for where it eventually led.