ZINNI COMMANDED Company D for a little over a year, by which time he was sure they could handle any combat mission that came their way—an opinion he would soon have to prove when D Company took the division-directed company tactical test.
The test contained a series of tough challenges: The company might, for example, be asked to make an amphibious landing and then go into an armor-mechanized attack, or a night heliborne assault. The idea was to stretch the commander’s capabilities by whipping a number of missions on him and putting him under a lot of stress. He got no sleep, he had to keep moving; and all the while, the judges were looking at his ability to give orders and to successfully execute his tasks. At the same time, the judges were examining his troops’ performance, endurance, and tactical skills, and the NCOs and officers and their tactical skills.
So far, every company in the division had failed it.
Zinni and his company passed.
It was a big moment for Zinni, and (justifiably) swelled his ego. Soon came letters of congratulations and glowing calls from the regimental and the division commanders. Since the company was also excelling in its discipline statistics, reenlistment rates, and other nonoperational measures, there were further occasions for pride. Although Zinni reveled in his success, it came with a price.
He loved being a company commander; he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do except possibly to get back to the advisory unit in Vietnam.
The successes of his company ended that bliss.
TONY ZINNI continues:
Not long before the end of one of our Caribbean deployments, my battalion commander called me to his office at our camp on Vieques Island (near Puerto Rico) and handed me a message from the division commander, Major General Fred Haynes. Haynes was asking for nominees from each battalion to be his aide-de-camp. The last line of the message directed that our battalion’s nominee be me.
“Do you know anything about this?” my battalion commanding officer asked. “Why are we the only battalion with a directed nomination?”
“I’m as much in the dark about this as you are, sir,” I told him. “I definitely do not want the job.” It was a staff job, and I never wanted staff jobs.
“Okay, then. I’ll tell him that,” the CO said, and sent a message back to the commanding general stating that I declined the nomination.
I forgot all about this thing and went back to the field with my company.
Two weeks later, as our ship docked at Morehead City, North Carolina, to off-load our battalion landing team, I was greeted by an officer from the division staff who told me I was to immediately get in the staff car waiting at the bottom of the brow and proceed to the division commander’s office to report to General Haynes.
“I can’t do that,” I said to him. “I have to get my company back to Camp Lejeune and settled back into our barracks.”
“That’s an order,” he laughed.
So I let my battalion commander know where I was headed, took off for the division headquarters, and nervously entered the general’s office. Haynes was a tall, distinguished-looking Texan, an Iwo Jima veteran, who was considered one of the most brilliant men in the Marine Corps. At his invitation, I took a seat.
After asking me about the deployment and how things were going, he explained what he was looking for in the job. “I want my senior aide to be my ‘operational aide,’ ” he explained. “I’ll have the junior aide, a lieutenant, to handle all the social requirements, the proper uniforms, and all that kind of business. For my ‘operational aide’ I want an adviser, somebody who’s been in the pits whom I can trust. I want a guy that knows what the hell goes on in a division, knows about training and operations, and who’s been in combat. I want someone who the junior officers and NCOs of the division will honestly talk to, who’ll be my point of contact with them, and who can tell me what they’re thinking and their perspective on what we need to improve.
“When we go out in the field and see what’s out there, I want a guy savvy enough to say, ‘What you’re seeing there, General, is not good,’ because he knows it’s not. . . . I’m removed from that. That’s years ago, in my past. Now I get screened and filtered. If I talk to colonels and other generals, I get good information, but it doesn’t come from the ranks. I want my operational aide to give me that sense.
“I’ve already interviewed all the nominees,” he went on, “but waited to make my decision until you returned and I could interview you.” He then read to me the list of other nominees.
“Sir, I know most of them, and you couldn’t pick a finer group of captains. I’m sure you’d be satisfied with one of those guys.”
Then he looked at me. “You know, Captain, the message from your CO is very interesting. It seems that you’re the only nominee who does not want the job.”
“I don’t feel that I’m really aide material,” I told him; and I meant it. You always think of an aide as a tall, bullet-headed, poster Marine. And here I was, a short, squat Italian guy, rough around the edges, and he’s a better than six-foot-tall Texan—a golf-playing gentleman. (A little later, when I told him I didn’t play golf, I thought I’d put the final nail in the coffin.)
By then he was smiling at me . . . just playing with me. “I take it that’s just because you want to stay on as a rifle company commander,” he said. “This I can understand. You don’t have anything against being my aide, do you?”
“Certainly not,” I said, thinking, “Shit, I hope I haven’t insulted him”—the last thing on my mind.
“Well, I understand you don’t want the job. I’ve had some tremendously talented captains who are interested and who’ve interviewed for it; and I appreciate your coming by. I didn’t want to make the decision until I interviewed all the candidates.”
This kind of confused me because I didn’t think I was a candidate. I thought the message from my CO had killed that. But because I thought there might have been a misunderstanding, I said, “Well, I appreciate your interest, sir. But, no, I really don’t want the job, and you have some fine officers there.”
“I do; and I also understand your position; and we’ll go ahead and make the decision.”
“Thank you, sir, for the understanding,” I said, and left.
When I got back to the battalion area, I went to my CO’s office and told him everything was okay. It all seemed to be just a formality the general needed to go through so he could say he had interviewed all the nominees. But when I arrived back at my company area, there was a call waiting as I walked in. It was my CO. He’d just received a call from General Haynes. I was selected as the aide and was ordered to report for duty the next day.
It was obvious that Major General Haynes had made up his mind before he met me. Later, I found out why:
He had prepared a list of eight or nine criteria—most of them fairly obvious, like commanding a company in Vietnam in combat, attendance at the career-level school for captains, and commanding a company in the 2nd Marine Division. As luck would have it, I came out as the only guy in the division who met every one of the criteria.
Meanwhile, his current aide (I didn’t know him well) had talked to other people who had mentioned my name; and when they matched these recommendations up with the other thing, he seems to have fixed on me.
I SPENT a year as the aide to two generals—first to General Haynes; and after he got orders to Korea, I became the aide to Brigadier General Jake Poillion, who’d been Haynes’s assistant division commander. When Haynes left, Poillion was fleeted up as the CG and told it was just an interim; a major general would be coming down the track very shortly. In fact, the interim turned out to be six or seven months. Later, when the major general did finally come down, he started making noises like he was going to keep me in place, too. So I had to really fight to get out of the job.
Though in many ways my tour as aide was a valuable experience, I never really enjoyed it; my original reasons for not wanting it remained valid. Still, I was fortunate to work for gene
rals who were interested in my views and were highly respected leaders. And the experience exposed me to a different level of perception than I was used to. Problems I’d been sure I had absolute answers to when I commanded a company got a lot less simple. I came to realize that there was a great deal I didn’t know and had to learn.
When you’re down at the company level, you see things in black and white; you don’t have a broader view. I’d see all kinds of things wrong in the weapons ranges, for instance, and it seemed obvious to me: “These ranges should be better. They’re shabby. They need serious maintenance and renovation. This is what we’re all about, and we’re letting it go to hell.”
Well, all of a sudden I was seeing things from a general’s point of view, looking at the budget he has to work with, looking at all the alternatives, realizing he has to give some things up. Now, suddenly, I was forced to realize that my “absolute answers” were not as absolute as I’d thought. And I came to appreciate that a lot of the choices generals had to make did not come out of a lack of interest or a failure to care. It was a matter of priorities. It was a matter of other realities you don’t have a sense of when you’re down at company level.
ONE THING really bothered me while I was an aide, however: The captains were more interested in war fighting than the senior officers.
The captains loved talking about operational issues—working them through, worrying over them, coming up with new ideas. We were the Vietnam guys. We’d suffered through all the lousy tactics, the poor policies, and the shitty things that went on in the field. So we had a burning desire to make sure we had the skills we hadn’t seen there. We went into the crucible right out of the blocks.
But the senior officers were another thing; and this really shocked me. I expected to learn a lot about war fighting from the horse’s mouth; but it didn’t happen that way. They certainly knew war intimately; they had all experienced it in World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam. But war fighting was pretty far down on their agenda. Operational competence was simply not valued or demanded as much as administrative competence. In those days, they were judged on their management and not their tactical skills.
It was rare, in fact, to find anyone above the rank of captain who talked tactics and war fighting.
I understood that Vietnam was ending and the big concerns presented by the war’s aftermath—race and drug problems, the critical shortage of personnel, the severe budget cuts, reorganizations, and many other issues—consumed their time and attention. Yet I expected there would be far more focus on the core of our profession—how to fight. This was my passion; I thought it would be the passion of every Marine. It wasn’t.
One day I was chatting with General Poillion.
“My God,” I said to him, “there’s something badly wrong with us. We’re losing our operational edge. We don’t hold people to task. I see senior officers—battalion or regimental commanders—that either don’t know anything about war fighting, or else they’ve forgotten it. They were in Vietnam and all, but they’ve lost it. There’s no way we hold them accountable. We run TAC tests on the company commanders and the tests are tough. But after that there’s nothing. What happens to test the others?”
He thought a moment, then he looked at me. “Have you ever heard of anybody being relieved for poor, shitty tactics?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Have you ever heard of anybody being relieved for poor administration or logistics?”
“Yes.”
That happened all the time—for badly managing money and personnel and the like.
“Well, there it is,” he said. “Officers are held accountable for poor leadership or poor administration, but not for poor operational skills. That’s the problem.”
There was one notable exception to this pattern.
Back when I commanded D Company, a fellow captain and company commander, my friend Jack Sheehan (I’d known him since my early days at Quantico; he eventually became a four-star general), had bragged a lot about his great battalion commander. Jack’s commander really knew the stuff the gung ho younger officers were living and breathing and spending every spare moment talking about—landing plans, tactics, small units, patrol formations, weapons employment, all of that stuff. He’d had a long stretch in Vietnam, five or six years, and his operational skills were legendary; and like all the best leaders, he’d read everything. Not only that, he was one of the few senior officers who actually liked to sit down and talk tactics and hold forth on his own with the junior guys. His name was Al Gray.
“Hey, how about coming to dinner?” Jack said to me. “You and I can hook up with Colonel Gray—sort of like a guys’ night at the club.”
“Sure,” I said.
I knew something about Gray; it was hard not to at Lejeune. He was a legend. The troops loved him, and he was truly great with the enlisted Marines. He himself had come up through the ranks and never lost that connection. Later, as the aide, I learned that he was held in equally high regard by the generals.
So I met Al Gray at the officers’ club at Camp Lejeune with Jack Sheehan. When he walked in, the first thing that impressed me was how down to earth he was. He talked to us, not down to us (he was not patronizing). But what really impressed me was how much he was really into the operational stuff. “He knew his shit,” as the troops would put it. He had the same sort of fire that I had. No matter what came up for discussion, he had an informed and pointed opinion about it. I had seen this kind of fascination for tactics and war fighting in only a very few senior officers. I was really impressed.
Of course, I hoped I’d have a chance to see him again and take our discussions further; but being realistic, I figured it was unlikely. Not only was I in another battalion, I was in another regiment, and probably just another captain to him. Well, it turned out that he must have seen something worth cultivating in me; and he stayed in contact—took me under his wing.
By the time I became the general’s aide, he had moved up to become regimental commander of the 2nd Marines, and I saw him frequently . . . he always had a lot of business with the general; and we grew increasingly friendly. Later, as we both rose up the ranks, the friendship continued to develop and mature—the classic mentor relationship. I’ve always considered him as my strongest mentor (and I’ve had several, starting with General Mick Trainor). It was a relationship that has stood for thirty years. Gray went on to become the commandant of the Marine Corps and significantly change the way the Corps thought and conducted combat operations.
WHEN MY tour as aide ended, I had an offer to command another company (it would have been my seventh). I jumped at the chance, but General Poillion snuffed out that idea. I’d already had six companies; it would not be well received if the general’s aide got a seventh.
I was assigned to the G-3, the operations section of the division—a disappointment. But the good news was that Al Gray, now a colonel, had just given up command of his regiment and was to be the new G-3. If I couldn’t be in an infantry unit, then the next best assignment, in my view, was in an operations or training assignment. I knew I would learn a lot from Colonel Gray.
When I checked into the section, Colonel Gray surprised me. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Something in training will be great,” I said, thinking the best I could get as a captain was to be some sort of training assistant—an administrator who kept the statistics or arranged schedules. It was a boring job, but it would at least allow me to observe training. Such was the fate of junior officers on a division staff.
“No, Captain, you didn’t hear me,” Colonel Gray said. “I didn’t ask you what job you expected to get stuck with. I asked you what you really want to do. I want you to take a few days to think about your answer.
“You and I have talked a lot about improving the infantry skills of the units in the division,” he continued. “We both think that our units lack tactical skills they should have and that company commanders have not been given the assets a
nd help they need to train their units. Since you feel so strongly about that, why don’t you think about something you can do to help that situation.”
I came back a few days later with a wild idea—a center of excellence for infantry operations and weapons skills that provided training and training support for the infantry companies and battalions, a facility that could put units and their leaders through training courses and programs, and offer training “packages” containing references, support materials, suggested schedules, ranges and training area recommendations, specialized instructor support, and unit training evaluations.
Colonel Gray liked the idea; and we drew up detailed plans. We’d get around the limited assets, personnel, and funds available in the postwar drawdown by converting an old training facility scheduled for demolition and running it with a minimum staff. It was in the most remote part of the base, and deep into the woods and swamps. Access was only through dirt roads, and many of the old firing ranges from the now-defunct Infantry Training Regiment were close by. It was perfect for what I had in mind.
After reviewing the final plans, Colonel Gray took them to the new commanding general, Major General Sam Jaskilka, a hard-as-steel old fighter whose heroism in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir under massive Chinese attack was legendary.
The general liked the idea and gave the go-ahead, with directions that the center should be austere and the training tough and realistic, with lots of live fire and fieldwork. “I’m going to spend a lot of time out there checking up on Zinni,” he told Colonel Gray. “I better not see rugs on the floor, or troops living in anything but tents.” He was a man after my own heart—a warrior general and not a business manager.