night trying to answer questions like these… and at the same time getting the CAT back up and running.
About halfway through all this scrambling, Snuffy said, “We’ve gotta call Galvin and tell him what we’re doing.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Then Snuffy looked hard at me. “Talk to me,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Go ahead, talk to me.”
So I tossed him a few words.
“I think you’re sober,” he laughed. “You call Galvin.”
I called General Galvin and told him what was going on.
The next day, Saturday, the sixth of April, after a rapid coordination effort with the Turkish government, Jim Jamerson moved his USAFE forces into bases in Turkey. On Sunday, U.S. Air Force transport planes, with air cover from our fighters, airdropped thirty-seven tons of supplies into the snow-covered mountain tent camps.
No one really believed that it could be done in thirty-six hours. But we got fired up, beat the thirty-six, and put the first airdrops on the ground, thanks to Jim Jamerson and his USAFE team.
By Monday, we were able to start looking at the longer-term needs of the mission. At first, it looked like the original mission would require about ten days’ worth of airdrops; but we realized very rapidly that the problem was going to be much bigger than that.
We initially concluded that given the force we had, we could extend the immediate mission to provide thirty days of support, while we worked to get a better handle on the situation and came up with a longer- term solution. Parachute riggers from all the services were ordered to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to set up a massive operation to package relief supplies for airdrops. The two CH-53 Navy helos that had carried Baker were ordered to remain to support the movement of the supplies.
Meanwhile, Dick Potter was sent to Turkey with his staff to form a Special Operations component. Potter had commanded the joint Special Operations task force under Proven Force. Now his mission was to get up in the mountains, make an assessment, and then get his SF (Special Forces) troops into the refugee camps, where they could do a great deal of good.
Once this emergency operation was under way, we began planning a more robust response.
What do we do? What do we need? We had no experience with refugees and humanitarian problems. They were all totally new to us. How do we craft a humanitarian operation? Already NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) were starting to head into the area. How do we deal with them? Obviously, somebody senior would have to go down to Turkey to handle that end. Who’d go? We knew we had to send more people down to Jim Jamerson. We also knew this wasn’t strictly an air operation. It would grow. But Jamerson’s organization was solely designed for air operations. It wasn’t going to be able to handle everything else we’d need down there. We’d need a full-blown joint operations center capable of dealing with ground troops, a humanitarian effort, the logistics, the UN, the NGOs, the Turks, and God only knows what else. We knew how to put together a Joint Operations Center, but we’d never done anything like the one this was shaping into.
We were doing all this planning fast and furious, trying to improvise with this unusual mission, when somebody came in and announced, “Sir, there are two Army captains out here. They say they need to see you.”
We were too wrapped up in the battle to make sense of the humanitarian task to listen to a couple of Army captains. “I can’t deal with them right now,” I said. “Maybe later.”
Finally, a few hours later, I took a break and went out to where they were waiting. They looked bright, eager, and enthusiastic. A good sign.
“Sir, we’re Captain Hess and Captain Elmo,” they said, introducing themselves. “We’re the EUCOM staff’s Civil Affairs guys.”
“Okay,” I said. “What have you got?”
“Sir, we know what to do in this humanitarian relief situation.”
“Oh, great,” I said to myself. I didn’t think anybody in the world could help with this thing. It was all just totally new. But I didn’t want to send them away, either, just in case. And I did like their enthusiasm. “Well, I don’t have time for any long discussions,” I said.
“Sir, we really ought to brief you,” they said. “You need to hear what we have.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling I’d taken enough of a break and needed to get back into the Op Center, “but give me a minute.”
Later, I found a few extra minutes and was able to give the captains a listen. But after they started throwing at me what they could provide, I suddenly realized that they did have something — most of the answers to the questions we’d been breaking our heads over. They had practical solutions for all the operations we were trying to design out of our brains from scratch. They knew what was required in terms of food, shelter, housing; they knew how to set up health-care facilities; they knew how to set up combined civil-military operations centers; they knew how to deal with NGOs and the UN; they knew how to process refugees; and they knew how to organize and staff all this.
“You’ve got to brief Admiral Smith,” I told them.
But when I went to Snuffy, he pushed me off: “I just don’t have time for these guys… later. I’ll deal with them later.”
“No, sir,” I said. “You’ve got to hear them now. These guys have got the answer.”
“Okay, bring them in,” he said, with visible skepticism. But his hesitation didn’t last long. “Where the hell have you guys been all day?” he told them when they’d finished.
We took them on then and there, and by the end of the day (Monday) we had a plan. Later, we brought them with us into Turkey, and they were indispensable in getting the operation going and moving it forward.
With the help of Captains Hess and Elmo, we designed a joint task force to fill out Jim Jamerson’s operation. Its initial priority was to stabilize the refugees in the mountain camps. Late Monday afternoon, the decision was made to send me to Turkey to function as Jamerson’s deputy. Since I’d been in on the planning, I’d be better able than anybody else to get the JTF off the ground and then to make an assessment of how all of it was working.
“You’re just going down there for a week to ten days,” Snuffy told me. “That’s all. You’ll stand up these things, make an assessment, see what’s needed, and come back.”
I left for Turkey the next day.
Seven months later, I came back.
The operation was named “Provide Comfort.”
My first order of business as Jim Jamerson’s deputy was to set up a Joint Operations Center at Incirlik that turned his predominantly Air Force command into a joint task force.
I brought with me a few key people from the J-3 staff who physically set up the Joint Operations Center. They took care of all the necessary nuts and bolts — the communications, the internal systems, the planning; and they began to make the assessment of what else we needed.
My next order of business was to connect with Dick Potter, who was just getting out in the field, and see what was going on out there.
My first visit to the camps via one of Potter’s MH-53 helos was a shock. In fact, to call the forty-three locations where the refugees had massed “camps” was a real stretch. We had over 500,000 refugees strewn over freezing, desolate hilltops, all with desperate looks on their faces. Most had come with little to help them survive in the snow. Many were city or town dwellers with no experience living in the wild. Nobody had enough clothes to keep warm; everybody was shivering and shaking, not only from the cold but from hunger.
