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 generals 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
