It was clear to Zinni that this was going to be a difficult company to command and in which to instill a sense of unit cohesion. Though it was a challenge he was willing to take on, his attitude was improved by some good advice from senior officers. “This is a difficult assignment for an eager young infantry officer,” they told him, “but like every other Marine, these men respond to good leadership. It’s important for you to provide that without showing how dissatisfied you are to be in a unit outside your specialty. And,” they added, “the experience will give you a unique opportunity to learn something about the various logistics functions the unit performs. It won’t hurt you at all later to know something about that.”
Zinni did his best to take this advice, and to put aside his disappointment and immerse himself in the job.
Unlike an infantry company, where unit cohesion and unit pride tend to come fairly naturally, the H & S Company was a grab bag. Nobody felt like he belonged in it. The data processors thought of themselves as data processors, the motor pool guys went off to the motor pool, the cooks went off to the mess hall, and none of them thought of the company, H & S, as anything but an administrative element.
Coming from an infantry unit, however, Zinni wanted to try to build unit cohesion and unit pride. He knew this was going to be hard. Not only did everybody go off to their very different jobs every day, but there was a lot of friction between the company and the workplace.
For example: Every Marine has to fulfill specific military skill requirements. They’ve got to shoot their rifle. They’ve got to be in good physical condition. They’ve got to be capable of actually fighting. Zinni, a captain, was responsible for making sure they were proficient in such things — which was all well and good until the head of the data processing center, a lieutenant colonel, found that such training interfered with his guys’ data processing job.
Zinni did his best to minimize this friction and work out some kind of mutual understanding; but there was really no way to eliminate it totally. There was only so much time in a week. It was a zero-sum game.
In order to build unit cohesion and pride, he engaged with his guys as much as he could, to let them know who he was and to find out what made them tick. He organized more group events with the company — cookouts and sports and the like. He did what he could to look after their welfare, showing that there was command interest and proving that he was not just the administrative guy in charge but their company commander.
He was blessed in his support team — a feisty, hard-charging first sergeant who’d come out of Vietnam; an excellent gunnery sergeant who came from the Physical Fitness Academy and had been a drill instructor and on the Marine Corps shooting team; and a fine executive officer, a young lieutenant.
Over the weeks and months Zinni had the company, the unit began to come together in a satisfying way.
There were still worries. He wasn’t so naive as to believe that none of his troops belonged to gangs or took part in demonstrations or riots. Some troops were bad actors, and some had serious drug problems. By and large, however, they were mostly just regular Marines looking for leadership and direction and somebody to care about them; and everybody tried to work with that. Eventually, everybody’s hard work began to enhance the morale, the discipline, and the sense of a unit identity within the company.
In the spring of 1971, the rising racial tensions exploded. All during the winter, confrontations had increased; and the guard unit was increasingly incapable of handling them. A major eruption was inevitable.
Zinni was in his room at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ) after a hard day when a call came: A riot had broken out near his company area. He rushed back to his company. On the way, he passed the scene of the riot. The guard was clashing with blacks wearing gang-logo jackets. It was a mess.
As soon as he reached the company quarters, he ordered the doors secured and a personnel head count. By good luck, few of his troops were away. After those on liberty returned, he stopped all further liberty for the evening. He didn’t want any of his guys anywhere near the riot. He knew some might join the confrontation; but he also did not want to add curious bystanders to the mess.
It was a tense night, made more tense as the confrontation grew worse and the camp guards lost control. Some of their own minority troops joined the rioters, or just walked away.
Inside the barracks, Zinni and his guys talked about nothing else, and listened as events got out of hand — the shouts and the physical clashes — all confirmed by phone reports. Rioters tried to enter the barracks and coax some of Zinni’s Marines to join them. They got sent away.
In the end, military police units and reaction forces had to be called in to bring back order.
The next morning revealed a scene of destruction and a sick bay full of injured people.
The following night at the officers’ club bar, some of the younger officers were talking about the riot, when Zinni — his brain lubricated by a few beers — made the mistake of offering an opinion about the breakdown of the guard. “I can build a guard unit that can handle the problems we’ve got here,” he boasted.
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:
