His remarks got back to the regimental commander, and he was ordered to report to him.
A most embarrassed young captain stood before the colonel’s desk the next morning. “So,” the colonel said, gazing up at him, “I heard you think you can get the guard to handle the situation.”
“I did say that, sir,” Zinni admitted.
As he started to make his apologies, the colonel interrupted: “Good, you’re now the new guard company commander.”
“Oh, shit,” Zinni told himself, cursing himself for mouthing off at the club.
“You’ve got a free rein,” the colonel continued. “You can set up the guard any way you want. Take a day to decide what you want and get back to me with what you propose.”
That got Zinni’s attention. That just might make an impossible job possible.
He spent the rest of the day thinking through what might work.
The next day he laid out his request: He wanted a hundred-man guard force—all racially mixed volunteers. Each would be over six feet tall and weigh more than two hundred pounds (Zinni would be the shorter, lighter exception); and he wanted permission to interview anyone in the command he felt would make a good guard member.
That particular number was not chosen for any special reason. Zinni wanted a larger guard force than currently existed, and one that could handle any conceivable incident without having to be augmented by poorly trained troops, but he also had practicalities that had to be dealt with, such as the number of watches, posts, and hours he had to cover.
The colonel had doubts that Zinni could get a hundred volunteers, much less a hundred who were racially mixed; and so did Zinni, but he wanted to try. “Go ahead,” the colonel told him. “See what you can do.”
The response proved overwhelming—with an especially gratifying number of African American, Hispanic, and other minority volunteers. Nobody thought that so many guys would be so fed up with the bad situation. Within two days Zinni easily had his hundred men, all good Marines.
Among those he convinced to come on board as one of his two guard chiefs was the company gunnery sergeant from H & S Company, Gunnery Sergeant Bobby Jackson, an African American and a model Marine. Gunny Jackson had spent tours of duty as a drill instructor, competitive shooter, and instructor at the Marine Corps’s Physical Fitness Academy, and would go on to achieve the grade of sergeant major. Zinni knew his outstanding leadership abilities firsthand, and felt an African American enlisted leader was critical for the guard.
For the other guard chief, he recruited Gunnery Sergeant Dick DeCosta, a big, 250-pound Marine who had been made a temporary officer during the Vietnam War but had recently reverted to his enlisted grade as the war wound down. DeCosta had spent most of his career in the Orient, had married a Chinese woman, and was an expert in Oriental martial arts. He was a third-degree black belt in judo and the Marine Corps heavyweight judo champion.26
For his two lieutenants, he chose an impressively bright and dynamic black officer and a Jewish American from New York City.
Zinni’s plan was not to create just a reaction force, but to make the guard a very visible model for unit cohesion and spirit. He wanted everyoneto see that a diverse team could work together and play together. But he also wanted all to see that they were capable of knocking heads if they had to. He wanted to show everyone the new guard’s capabilities—psyops aimed at troublemakers:
The new guard did their physical training (PT) very visibly at times when the entire camp would see them, making sure nobody lost sight of the fact that these were big, tough guys who lifted serious weights and took martial arts training. They always made their PT runs through the barracks areas at double time, chanting and making a lot of noise. They worked out their riot control formations on the camp’s big parade deck in an area that everybody could see. They’d set up barrels to stand in for rioters; then bring out the water cannon truck and hose down the barrels. Zinni would leave the barrels where they’d fallen, and afterward people would go up and stare at it. He wanted them to think: “This could be me.” And that’s what they thought.
He would also bring individual units in for “riot control training.” The guard would take a unit—say, the supply company—and explain to them that they might be called in to augment the guard and had to go through training classes to show what the guard did to rioters and how they did it.
Zinni had no real intent to use them; he wanted to let them know what the guard could do to anybody who joined a riot.
Though all this psyops worked as intended, Zinni knew that wouldn’t keep his guard from being tested.
The first weeks of the new guard were filled with demonstrations and confrontations, requiring a response by the entire guard roughly every third day. Sometimes a demonstration turned violent. During one incident, a guard trooper was stabbed; many others suffered cuts and bruises. None of these setbacks, however, prevented the guard from containing, controlling, and ending every incident quickly.
Predictably, the minority members of the guard received threats from the gangs. They didn’t waiver, even though they sometimes actually sympathized with some of the demonstrators’ complaints.
When one obviously intelligent black NCO volunteered for the guard, Zinni asked him why.
“Look,” he said, “somebody’s going to have to enforce discipline and maybe even crack their heads. That’s got to happen. What they’re doing is wrong. Still,” he continued, “even though they’re going about it the wrong way, I sympathize with a lot of their issues. I see their point. They’re my brothers, but they’re going to be dealt with. And I would like to be on the other end to ensure it isn’t excessive and that it’s handled the right way, and to try to be a force for reason.”
“You’re exactly the kind of guy I want,” Zinni told him.
Integrating the guard did not come naturally; it took a lot of work. In those days, it was the natural thing for young men coming into the Marine Corps to separate by race. After Zinni integrated the guard, the threats continued, and not just to minority members. It was partly for purposes of security and partly to show that this was the right way to go that Zinni’s guard had their own after-hours bars and liberty spots, the only integrated group on Okinawa hanging together on liberty. This turned a lot of heads, including some native ones. Several Okinawans commented that these were the only places where they saw whites and blacks and Hispanics and Samoans mixing together and socializing as friends.
Zinni’s policy from the start was, in his words:
To respond to every incident with one of every kind. That is, I had the guard organized so that no matter what happened, we would get a black Marine, a white Marine, an Hispanic Marine, and a Samoan Marine—a rainbow detail—going out to handle it.
When we failed to do that, we always regretted it:
One day, we had an incident at the sick bay. The Navy doctors called to say that a Marine in there was going berserk, rampaging around, breaking things, and making wild threats. It turned out that the kid who had lost it had mental problems and had gone through some really bad times. It also turned out that he was black.
On that particular day, my duty sergeant sent four white Marines out to handle the problem.
When the four guards got to the sick bay, they found the crazy Marine in a recreation area, with a pool table and some soda machines, brandishing a pool cue and threatening to beat everybody up.
The four Marines did what they would normally do to take care of him. They grabbed him, cuffed him, and wrestled him down—with him kicking and fighting all the while. Then they manhandled him out to their jeep in order to take him to a holding cell until they could get him to a hospital for treatment.
As it happened, it was noontime—chow break—so everybody was coming out of the supply areas and warehouses. When the black Marines saw the four white Marines roughing up this guy, throwing him into the jeep, and bringing him back to the guard offices, it sparked a riot.
When I came back
to the guard offices after my own lunch, I found a large number of black Marines surrounding the place. I was instantly up to my neck trying to figure out what had happened and calm it down.
The black Marines had a leader—a lance corporal and a hard worker they called “Superman,” because he was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy who looked like Hercules came up and confronted me, all fired up that we had been beating up on one of the brothers. (And of course I was still in the dark about what was going on.)
He and I talked it over for a while, and I was starting to think I could maybe calm this thing down when in walked Gunny DeCosta, who instantly decided he didn’t like the way this guy was talking. He launched into him and had him blasted in short order. This shocked everybody and brought the situation under control. We learned from incidents like these how to handle things firmly and how to quickly defuse tense situations.
Zinni studied and used riot control techniques the way he had previously studied combat. Inspired by Gunny DeCosta, he and his guards trained in kendo, stick fighting (using their batons), and other martial arts with the riot police from the city of Naha, at their dojo.
Zinni encouraged innovation and experimentation in the unit, and his guards developed creative new ways to handle rioters. One big problem: How do you identify the bad guys after a riot? When a riot is raging, the idea is to shut it down. When that starts to happen, the rioters melt away, and then the next day they show up at their jobs looking like everybody else.
The eventual solution was to fill a fuel bladder on a truck with a solution containing the indelible blue dye that’s stamped on meats (the medical supply guys provided it). During a riot, the guard would hose down everybody there with this solution. The next day they’d check the barracks and pick up anybody who was purple.
AS WEEKS PASSED, other lessons were learned.
For starters, there were too many weak commanders:
Though no units at Camp Foster escaped its problems, Zinni learned to predict where he’d find the biggest problems by identifying the weakest commanders. Not surprisingly, the worst incidents involved troops from units with the weakest leadership . . . a failure obviously stemming from the personnel imbalances resulting from the war, but amplified when officers in the more technical MOSs were suddenly confronted with major leadership crises they just weren’t equipped to handle.
ANOTHER, far more important lesson: The value of openly thrashing out the issues with the troops.
In those days, the Marine Corps was only just starting to require human relations training—trying to get the message across that just because a person’s skin was different, or he wore his clothes differently, or liked different music, he was not radically different from you or anybody else. You still shared the same basic values. The Corps tried to teach all Marines to understand and respect these differences, even as they had them looking inside for prejudices they didn’t realize they had . . . the unconscious automatic stereotyping with which they’d grown up.
This training got off to a rocky—and sometimes hokey—start (for instance, they tried Soul Food Nights at the mess hall, with fried chicken, hominy grits, and chitterlings . . . everybody thought these were a joke) and was more often than not poorly conducted; yet it did encourage dialogue and frank discussion of problems. When these discussions were well led and troops were able to talk constructively about their concerns, they paid dividends that overcame the poor initial construct of the program.
For all of its rocky beginnings, the Corps’ human relationship training had the right idea; the organization was doing its best to get at the real roots of its troubles; and it didn’t give up. The Marine Corps kept at the effort for as long as it took to make it work.
It took many years.
Needless to say, there was a lot of resistance to this process. The old tough Marines didn’t like it: “This is all touchy-feely shit we don’t need,” they said. “Forget all that race crap. There’s no black or white Marines; they’re all green. Every Marine’s green. Just put Marine discipline in the unit, that’ll solve any problems we got.” Fortunately, the leadership of the Corps combined a strict adherence and maintenance of its standards with a more open means for communications.
As a result, the quality of the training picked up, and it came to be more and more accepted. Not always, but every once in a while, troops would really let loose, air out what really bothered them, and begin to connect.
Eventually, as the good changes became the norm, the need for the training went away. For many, it got to be seen as a pain in the butt.
That was not a sign of failure but of success.
THE OTHER SIDE to the process involved weeding out real troublemakers—the thugs, the radicalized, the violent. The best place for such people was the brig, followed by an aircraft back to the states and jail. But the Corps also found ways to get rid of lesser troublemakers without having to go through a long legal process, by issuing what were called “expeditious discharges.” That is, people were given the opportunity to choose to leave with general discharges, and so avoid legal procedures and a worse discharge. It was easier for everybody.
Throughout the 1970s, as the size of the post-Vietnam Corps came down, the Corps was increasingly successful at weeding out those who’d come in under Project 100,000 and others who didn’t fit or had chronic qualification problems.
Meanwhile, a few weeks of firm and effective guard work stopped riots and demonstrations at Camp Foster, and Zinni’s guard became very popular. Many in the command now wanted to join it. It was the elite unit, the best place to be at the camp.
ZINNI’S EIGHT months in 3rd FSR, he later realized, were the most difficult of his Marine career. He’d never imagined he’d face Marine-on-Marine confrontations; at Camp Foster, he had to deal with them almost daily . . . not to mention levels of violence that made a logistics base feel like a combat tour. These were hard realities for an eager and dedicated young Marine to accept. On the other hand, he was able to leave Camp Foster with some confidence. He had encountered the worst of the problems facing the Corps, and the rest of the military, and knew that they could be handled.
He left 3rd FSR in August 1971 and one month later reported in to the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He was back in his original command.
BACK TO THE INFANTRY
When Zinni checked in to the 2nd Marine Division, he fought off the personnel officer’s kindly attempt to give him a break after his two tough Vietnam tours and life-threatening wounds. He didn’t want an undemanding staff job; he wanted to go to a rifle company, where the action was—the heart of the Marine Corps. You don’t get more central to Marine identity.
“Okay, then, you got it,” the personnel officer told him, “if that’s what you want.” And he sent Zinni down to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. There the battalion commander offered him command of Company D, which was in cadre status27 at that time. It was to be remanned in the coming weeks.
Zinni was delighted. He was to get command of his sixth company; and it was a rifle company.
A Marine rifle company is usually made up of three infantry platoons—called “rifle platoons”—and a weapons platoon, which has the company’s crew-served weapons: in those days, 60-millimeter mortars, M-60 machine guns, and perhaps an antitank capability. The number of men in a company varied based on a number of organizational changes at that time and the fluctuations in manning levels. Zinni found himself with a 120-man company, a far cry from the 250 he had in Vietnam, and a sign of the times.
He now had an opportunity to gain further command experience with a rifle company as well as to put into practice the many new training ideas that had come out of his time in Vietnam and his constant reading in matters military, from technical manuals to history and biography. Like most company commanders, he wanted to produce the best, most tactically proficient company in the division, but he also enjoyed actually teaching the skills he’d come by through trial and error, study, and
observation.
Training a company takes many forms: There’s weapons and tactics, obviously, but also more specialized training for cold weather,28 desert, or mountain operations; for working with tanks and armor; for amphibious operations (especially before a deployment). Some kinds of training were standardized, some were unique to whatever specialized mission or deployment was on the schedule.
Zinni’s company did it all—below-zero training in sixty inches of snow in upstate New York, training for jungle operations in Panama, and for amphibious operations in the Caribbean. The latter was Zinni’s first serious experience with the Marine Corps’ bread-and-butter mission, which was also the most complex of all military operations: the transfer of elements from a ship onto some form of transport (surface or air), and then moving them in a closely timed and synchronized way to a landing under fire on a hostile beach, followed by a continued buildup ashore. The entire process—from coming out of the ships through what’s called “the ship-to-shore movement” and into combat operations—must be accomplished in one smooth, continuous flow. Using air strikes and naval gunfire to support the units going ashore, passing control of the operation ashore from the ships, getting in the logistics and supplies, and matching it all up is an undertaking of tremendous complexity, requiring equally complex planning (landing sequence tables, assault schedules, helicopter deployment schedules), very close coordination, and a great degree of communication ... while facing an enemy doing its best to disrupt and destroy it all.
As his career developed, Zinni made many sea deployments and amphibious ops—missions he came to love. He enjoyed life at sea, and the traditional image of the Marine Corps storming ashore and rushing up the beaches always excited him. In time, he became fascinated by these operations because of their enormous complexity—putting all the myriad pieces together in a synchronous yet dynamic way. The mission grew to be one of his passions. Later, he taught courses in amphibious ops at Marine Corps schools; and in Somalia, he was to command a force in an actual amphibious operation—the largest since the Inchon Landing during the Korean War.