Battle Ready

transferred to the other boats, I turned back toward the beach looming against the dark horizon. There the lights of Mogadishu silhouetted the technicals, signaling each other with their headlights.

The four-man crew led by Corporal Deskins were the last troops aboard the track.

“We have to get them aboard so we can move out,” the safety boat officer was telling me, “or else we might be swamped.”

But when I asked Corporal Deskins to abandon the track and get into the boat, he scurried away from us. “Sir, we will never abandon our track,” he said.

I looked at John. He smiled and shook his head. I turned to the boat officer. “We’re just going to hang on,” I said, “and hope a larger landing craft gets here before we hit the beach.”

It did, and so did a number of tracks racing out to rescue us. We had managed to avoid an unplanned return to Somalia.

Earlier, the other tracks had gone on to the ship, thinking we were under tow; but when they were told of our situation, the entire track platoon raced to the well deck and splashed their tracks back out to the sea to come get us.

As I was climbing from the boat to the larger craft, I was handed a hot cup of coffee from the Navy chief in command of the craft. For the first time that night, I realized I was soaking wet and cold and bone- tired. I looked at my watch. We’d left the beach five hours ago; the intensity of the events afterward made that time seem like minutes.

The craft pulled into the well deck of the Belleau Wood early in the morning. As the ramp went down, I realized I’d have to wade through waist-deep water up the ramp. At the top of the ramp was the massed press pool, with cameras snapping. I smiled at the chief. “You’re going to make me wade up to those cameras, aren’t you?”

He smiled back. “Just like MacArthur, sir.”

Later, up in the command center, a briefing confirmed that we were all accounted for. I then reported to Scott and General Peay, “Mission accomplished.”

I went to my stateroom, showered, and collapsed in my rack. When I woke the next morning, the ship was gently rocking. We were on our way to Kenya. The fifth and final phase, redeployment, was under way. Remarkably, we had suffered no casualties in this operation. The exhaustive planning had paid off. I was proud of all my forces.

We docked in Mombasa on the sixth of March; and I flew off with my staff back to Camp Pendleton.

Two weeks later, Secretary of Defense William Perry spoke at an awards ceremony at the Pentagon. “We live in an imperfect world and we can never make it perfect,” he said, “but we can attain moments of perfection. Operation United Shield was such a moment.”

Leaving Somalia was an emotional moment. We left a lot of sacrifices and dashed hopes on that beach… but learned significant lessons from the Somalia experience. I am convinced it could have been better had we run this complex undertaking with more skill and thoughtfulness.

CHAPTER SIX

CENTCOM

In August 1996, the new commandant of the Marine Corps, General Chuck Krulak, nominated Tony Zinni as deputy commander in chief (DCINC) of U.S. Central Command,[70] located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

Leaving command of I MEF was hard, yet Zinni welcomed the opportunity to continue to serve. At the higher levels of the military hierarchy, it’s either move to a new position or retire. CENTCOM was in fact a particularly welcome assignment… “It’s where the action is,” he thought. “It’s operationally oriented; and I’m already familiar with the command from my Somalia experiences and I MEF,” which was assigned to CENTCOM as a responding unit when required. He quickly supplemented his initial store of knowledge by plowing through more than fifty books on the history and culture of the region.

When Zinni arrived at CENTCOM headquarters early in September, he did not find a happy place. The command had just suffered the worst terrorist attack on U.S. facilities since the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. A suicide truck bomb had killed nearly twenty Americans at Khobar Towers, an Air Force barracks in eastern Saudi Arabia (CENTCOM had also suffered a bombing of one of its security assistance facilities in Riyadh). The tragedy weighed heavily on the command, cast a dark cloud over the remainder of General Binnie Peay’s tour as commander in chief of CENTCOM… and directly affected Zinni as DCINC when General Peay tasked him to oversee the implementation of the hundred-plus recommendations put forward by a fact-finding commission chaired by retired Army General Wayne Downing. It was clear that the terrorist threat was growing ever more dangerous and that force protection was becoming a dominant theme for America’s military leaders.

The Downing Commission recommendations ranged from the relocation of units to the establishment of more stringent security; and there was a lot of pressure to get them implemented. Some of the recommendations were straightforward, such as adding security forces, putting up barriers, and other forms of physical security. Some took more time. For example, the commission recommended reducing the number of “accompanied tours” in the region, which are tours of duty for which military personnel can bring their families. This recommendation was not well received, especially for those in assignments such as security assistance billets, which require people to stay in one place for at least two or three years to be effective. Nevertheless, a blanket decision was made to drastically reduce the number of accompanied tours. Most people would now be rotating out after a year… which was about the time it took to get up to speed. (This policy was eventually partially reversed.)

Downing had also recommended moving CENTCOM headquarters out to the region. But when the command looked hard at setting up a major headquarters in that part of the world — at all that it would take to make the move; to set up the security; to take care of the military construction, the politics, the families and schools — the expenses were so great that the issue was deferred.

Instead, CENTCOM settled on setting up a rapidly deployable forward headquarters, with forward elements of the headquarters of its subordinate commands — ground, air, naval, and special operations — in place. (For the invasion of Iraq in 2003, General Tommy Franks set up his forward headquarters in Qatar, which was one of the locations that had previously been designated for a CENTCOM forward headquarters.)

Good or bad, the Downing Commission recommendations could be dealt with in a straightforward, professional way. But the commission report went further than that; it assigned blame, which took the fact-finding process into more questionable territory. There is a fine line between assessing responsibility, assessing blame, and scapegoating. When the report was issued, blame for the “failures” that had allowed the attack to succeed was dumped primarily on CENTCOM and the commander at Khobar Towers.

This was not a completely irrational judgment: The commander has to carry ultimate responsibility for what goes on in his command. The buck has to stop somewhere.

On the other hand, the military exists to handle situations that are by definition high-risk. You want to reduce those risks as much as possible, but there is a point at which reducing risks also greatly reduces the effectiveness of the military. Total safety and total security are not conditions of the military life.

You can reduce risk to the point of absurdity: “Don’t cross streets. You’ve got lousy drivers out there.” And you can build — and cower in — impregnable bunkers.

Tony Zinni: