Years earlier, in the spring of 1975, Tony Zinni had been hit by a double blow. Shocked and sickened as South Vietnam crumbled, he’d followed the remnants of his Vietnamese Marines as they fought on in the hills north of Saigon until all radio transmissions ceased.
The day Saigon fell, he took off from work, and then for several hours immersed himself in what you could call “a warrior’s meditation”… thinking about all the troops — and the many friends — that had been lost, and about the fate of the many Vietnamese he had known.
As these thoughts pressed down on him, he had a sudden flash: He had been a Marine for ten years, halfway through a normal career, and he had never made a conscious decision to stay in… or even given staying or leaving much thought. It was always just a matter of not leaving because he couldn’t do that while there was a war to be fought. It was always the war — and his connection with the guys on the ground fighting it — that had given his life in the Marine Corps meaning. And now that meaning was gone. His whole purpose for being was ripped away.
Fortunately, it was not a lasting depression, and as it faded, he came to realize that an era had ended for himself, for his nation, and for the Corps. It was time to move on.
With that came a deeper realization: He was going to stay in for as long as the Corps wanted him. He could think of nothing else he could ever do.
As the years passed, Zinni’s career followed a more or less traditional pattern, considering his antipathy to staff jobs: a year at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College at Quantico; operations officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, at Camp Lejeune (beginning in August 1978); battalion executive officer, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; regimental executive officer (1979-80); and in April 1980, he took command of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (initially as a major, which was
Zinni’s promotions and command experiences were great sources of pride; but his high spirits were deflated when his father passed away in 1980. He was able to see his father one last time before he lost him.
In 1981, he went back to Quantico as an instructor at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College to teach operations and tactics (and to earn a master’s degree in management and supervision). And during the 1983-84 school year, he attended the National War College.
In October 1983, while he was at the War College, the Marine barracks in Beirut was suicide-bombed by Hezbollah terrorists — a horrific event that impacted heavily on everyone in the Corps. The growing threat of terrorism not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe and Latin America, began to increasingly occupy Zinni’s interest and attention.
The disaster in Beirut put a lot of scrutiny on the Marine Corps (many asked if they were to blame for the security failures that allowed the tragedy to happen), but it also pointed up how little understood was the terrorist threat to U.S. forces abroad. Terrorist groups were becoming more active and deadly throughout the world, and U.S. military personnel were an attractive target.
In the spring of 1984, a few months before graduation, Zinni got a call from his old Vietnam battalion commander and mentor, Mick Trainor, now a lieutenant general and the deputy chief of staff for Plans, Policies, and Operations at Marine headquarters. After the War College, Zinni had been told he would be a plans officer in the Marine Corps Headquarters dealing with European and NATO issues. “That’s not going to happen,” Trainor explained. “We have other plans for you.”
“After the Beirut bombing, there’s been enormous pressure to get our act together on the terrorist threat,” he continued. “I need you to follow through on an effort we’ve started to develop a program aimed at dealing with that threat. We want to beef up our counterterrorism and security efforts and to educate the Corps into a far greater awareness of the threat we are facing; and we also want you to work on the emerging programs and issues regarding special operations.” (By this time, the Marine Corps had begun to use the term in the now commonly understood sense — as referring to all forms of unconventional warfare.)
“So you can forget about the plans officer assignment. We’re going to make you the Special Operations and Terrorism Counteraction officer at headquarters.” This sounded like exciting and interesting business to Zinni. He knew the Marine Corps had been hit hard in Beirut and was serious about dealing with this new threat of terrorism.
“Yes, sir,” Zinni replied, his brain churning. He knew how hard it was going to be to get himself up to speed on both terrorism and special operations.
Since he had not taken any of the elective courses on terrorism offered by the War College, opting instead to study Europe and NATO (since that was the area of expertise he had expected to use next), he had to scramble to pick up anything he could on the subject from literature and faculty experts. Thus armed, he reported for duty to Marine headquarters immediately after graduation.
Soon his five-man section had built a program that aimed to make every Marine aware of the new threat. It provided realistic training and education on countering it; developed the concepts, tactics, and special equipment needed to fight terrorists; improved the Corps’ intelligence capability in this area; and improved security at Marine installations.
Meanwhile, as the Marine Corps’ special operations officer at headquarters, Zinni represented the Corps in the joint arena on all matters dealing with that ever-more-important area.
A Marine sailing into these seas knew they were infested with dragons, for the Corps had long rejected special operations forces and capabilities. The aversion to special units comes from a belief that the entire Corps is “special”; it does not need elites within elites.
Ever since the disaster at Desert One (the tragically failed special operations attempt to rescue the American hostages held in revolutionary Tehran), developing a credible joint special operations capability was a top priority. In a 1983 memo from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, all the services were directed to designate special operations forces for this capability. When Zinni put on the Marine special operations hat, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had already designated their own “special” units, and the controversial issue of organizing them into a joint force was being dealt with in Washington. This action would eventually lead to the creation of the Special Operations Command, a separate unified command with its own budget authority (making it
The Marine Corps chose to ignore the directive, and, true to its long-standing policy, refused to create or designate any “special” units or capabilities.
This policy went back to the Second World War, when the Corps had created Raider Battalions at the insistence of President Roosevelt, but had quickly disbanded them and other special units.
Later, when President Kennedy attempted to persuade the Marine Corps to form special capabilities to deal with counterinsurgency missions, General David Shoup, the commandant, countered that the Marines could handle these missions as they were currently structured; they didn’t need special units. Kennedy, not impressed with Shoup’s answer, turned to the Army and supported the development of Army Special Forces.
By 1984, it was clear that the Marine Corps could no longer avoid taking on a special operations capability… in some form. The question was: How? In what form?
When at one point a powerful congressman actually proposed putting all the special operations forces under the Marine Corps, the Marines had to scramble desperately to make a reply. A Marine study came to the (un- surprising) conclusion that there were obvious benefits to having all the special capabilities under one service, and the Marine Corps was the ideal service for that; but taking that course would be prohibitively disruptive and create
