several hours, and we moved farther and farther into the brushy foothills west of the highway.
During the pursuit, we managed to capture one VC and could tell from the blood trails that we had hit others. But in our excitement and enthusiasm we failed to realize how far we were moving from our base of operations. Enemy fire was also picking up, and the terrain was becoming more rugged. Though I didn’t realize it then, it was becoming distinctly possible that we would be drawn into a trap.
Eventually, we received a radio call from the obviously angry battalion commander, ordering us to break off contact and return to the base area.
On the way back, I realized I had put my Vietnamese lieutenant buddy in a bad position. He was not looking forward to seeing the battalion CO.
And sure enough, the commander had harsh words for him, and likewise my senior adviser had harsh words for me. Though I was upset that we’d had to break contact, I kept quiet about that. Instead, I tried to take the fall for the action, and explained that I had convinced my friend to go.
Later, the battalion commander asked to speak to me privately. He was a highly decorated officer, tactically brilliant and courageous; and I had great respect for him.
“Look,” he explained to me, “my unit is not a U.S. Marine unit. It’s smaller and less capable, we don’t have a steady stream of replacements flowing into it, and I can’t rely on the formidable arsenal of firepower that U.S. units have at their disposal.[13]
“My troops,” he continued, “have fought for years; they’ll fight for many more; and the enemy will still be there tomorrow. All of this means I have to carefully choose where and when I take risks that might bring me a disadvantage on the battlefield.[14]
“This is not,” he explained, “a matter of courage, aggressiveness, or fighting spirit; and I hope you’ve seen enough of those qualities in my Marines to know that wasn’t the issue.”
In this, I totally agreed with him. And I also fully understood all of his very valid points. Yet privately the U.S. Marine in me still found it difficult to pass up an opportunity to mix it up with the enemy, regardless of the circumstances.
“Do you have any idea why the VC didn’t break contact and fade into the countryside?” he then asked me. “After all, they’re masters of that sort of tactic.”
It was a good question. As I thought back on the firefight and chase, I realized how easy it would have been for them to break off the fight. Instead, they stayed engaged. They’d take a few shots, and then withdraw, leaving easy signs to follow.
That was when it dawned on me that we’d been in danger of getting lured out into the hinterland, far from our base and support, where they had forces positioned to ambush us.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “We were brash to chase them. But please be aware that doing it was my fault. Don’t take it out on your operations officer.”
“Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “I’m satisfied that two young lieutenants learned something… without serious consequences, for a change.”
In time, Zinni became an expert in firefights and had a wealth of other experience about how to move in a fight, how to conduct a patrol, how to cross a road, how to deal with snipers in trees, how to build alert systems with bamboo and vine (the bamboo would clap). He became a collector of these techniques.
He quickly discovered that many of the techniques he had been taught were wrong — lessons learned from old wars. He had a passion to get such things right. The best fighting techniques bring an obvious advantage; they can keep you alive. But Zinni was also a committed professional. The best military leaders will play their units as the best conductors play an orchestra, blending and focusing disparate elements into a single, splendid “sound.” However this was done, Zinni wanted to practice and perfect it.
He has further thoughts on this:
Right from the beginning of my Marine Corps career, what most fascinated me as we would engage in tactical problems during field exercises is that it was all about facing an enemy, trying as hard as he could to do to us what we wanted to do to him… You didn’t just go into a patch of woods and that’s it, like a hiker. There’s an enemy somewhere in there, and here you are trying to use everything you know, have learned, and have trained for, in order to reach your aims… and stop him from reaching his.
You don’t get much more real than that.
I’ve always had a theoretical understanding of sports — offense and defense, how you organize plays, and what you’re trying to do. But, of course, the theory is one thing, and playing is another.
And in a firefight, you’re experiencing much higher levels of complication and risk — all the bullets flying, the rounds, the explosions, the confusion — and you’re trying to figure it out, trying to move quickly on a course of action that makes sense, and keeps you and your buddies alive.
What’s really going on? How do you organize yourself? How do you apply the fires? How do you move against your enemy? What are the techniques you need to use?
For example, if you’re out in the woods, and you’re trying to find your enemy, you don’t want him to find you. What techniques will best bring that outcome? What do you need to know?
I was always really interested in learning everything I could about that. I’ve always been a collector of small-unit fighting techniques. It’s always fascinated me… consumed me. I’m a Catholic. In my faith, we think of the priesthood as a calling — a “vocation,” requiring total dedication. I looked at the “call to arms” the same way. The warrior profession is a calling, and requires the same kind of dedication the priesthood does. That meant that I read books about it — history books about small unit warfare, books about Burma, Malaya, and Vietnam before our war (places where the fighting was similar to what we were experiencing).
Some of what I picked up from books, or from my instructors, turned out to be bogus. Even before I went to Vietnam, it didn’t make sense to me; it didn’t seem natural; it didn’t jive with what was really likely to happen. I don’t know where the people came up with it.
And then when I got out there in, say, the II CTZ, we were doing it for real; and a lot of what I’d been taught made even less sense.
But there I couldn’t have had better teachers. I would watch the Vietnamese, who of course had incredible battlefield experience, and I was able to see how they did things and really analyze their technique.
One great thing about being an adviser: You’re not commanding the troops. Sure, you’re busy; you have to be ready to apply fires and all the other responsibilities advisers had. But you also have a lot of opportunity just to observe, from a semidetached point of view. You could watch how the fighters moved, you could listen to what they were saying. And since you weren’t directly caught up in the action, you could think through it and analyze it.
Later, I’d ask the seasoned veterans about it: “Why did you do this?” and “What do you think about this?” And they would talk to me about their experiences.
It was from this seed in low-level tactics that my career started to grow, eventually leading to the construction of multinational strategies at CENTCOM and elsewhere where I’d be dealing with a part of the world where we were trying to develop a military relationship and a military policy.
One especially vital type of tactical knowledge is what we might call the “sense of a firefight.” That is, the sense from sound and visual cues of what is actually happening when the bullets are flying. Closely allied to that is a sense of what you have to do to respond and act. These can only be learned from experience. Tony Zinni also has further thoughts on this:
Though I had a lot of operational experiences from the beginning of my time with the Vietnamese Marines, it took about three months into my tour before I was at a level of competency where I had a real “sense of a firefight.”
At first, when there was shooting, it was a cacophony of sounds to me. I didn’t know what was going on. I had no idea whether I was in World War Three or a small firefight. At the beginning, I wasn’t even sure
