Battle Ready

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