All right! Franks thought. Finally!
Later, back in Stuttgart, there was a phone call from Heidelberg. Major General John Heldstab, deputy chief of staff for operations, was on the line. 'Fred, it's a go,' Heldstab told him. 'Watch CNN at 2000 tonight over Armed Forces Network.'
'What about official notification, John?'
'As soon as we get something official, I'll get a message to your headquarters.'
'Thanks, John. I've got some work to do.'
They were going!
Just before 2000, Franks and all but three of his planning team assembled at the ops center. John Landry was on leave, and Bob Browne and Paul Liebeck were not available.
At 2000, President Bush came on the screen to announce that he was sending more troops to Saudi Arabia. He was followed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who announced the units that would go: VII Corps from Germany and 1st Infantry Division from Fort Riley, Kansas.
As the President and the Secretary and the Chairman spoke, one thought flashed through every mind at the ops center:
The mood then was quiet, confident. There were a few 'Hooahs' (an old Army rallying cry) and 'Jayhawks' and 'All riiights,' a few fist pumps and excited grins. But this was a group of professionals. All of them had been working hard to prepare for this moment, and all of them knew they would soon be working even harder. The unspoken message in the air was 'Okay, let's get the job done right.'
It didn't take long for other thoughts to crowd into Fred Franks's consciousness, thoughts of the immediate challenges they all faced and of all they had to set in motion: teamwork, attitudes, training priorities, security.
Security is always a complex issue for commanders, and a particularly difficult one to get right. On the one hand, you have to be able to let staff and subordinate leaders know what they need to know to accomplish the mission. On the other hand, you want to keep your actions screened from the enemy. All other things being equal, the more public a commander can be, the easier the move becomes.
The issue is not one the commander can himself decide. Ultimately, that is determined by civilian policy makers. Up to this particular evening, Franks and his staff had kept an extremely close hold on information relating to the move, but when the announcement over CNN specifically named the major units that would be going, Franks concluded that he and the rest of the corps leaders could now be much more public about who was going (though they could not be public about their strengths, their equipment, or their schedule of deployment). Having that option made the job much easier to coordinate within the corps itself, it helped inform families about what they needed to know most, and it allowed them to make the plans they needed to make. It additionally allowed the corps to coordinate more easily with the Germans and other NATO allies on the specifics of the movement.
Soon, Franks knew, he would have to go around to check the pulse of the soldiers and NCOs. How were they handling this? What about the families?
The family question was especially important for a corps based in Germany. Many American military families were living there — most married soldiers had their spouses and children with them — and in Germany, there was no external family and neighbor support on which the spouses and children could depend. That meant the families would either have to go home to the United States, which few wanted to do, or else depend on each other and on the entire military family in Germany.
Fred Franks knew he would have to begin working on family issues along with everything else.
'Let's go,' he said to all the others, 'we have work to do.'
The TV set was in another part of the ops center, so Franks and his planners reassembled in the conference room. When they were there, he wanted to say a few words, to give the others a chance to collect their thoughts and capture the significance of the moment.
'Let all this settle in for a few minutes,' he said. 'This is part of history. You will remember this night for the rest of your lives, and well you should. It is something to tell your kids and grandkids about. There is a personal part for each of us as well. It affects our families. For some it is a first. Others will remember Vietnam. I know we have a lot to do, but I wanted to pause and reflect for a moment, because you will want to remember this night for a long time.'
And then they got down to business.
Two hours later, they had a pretty good idea of the direction their next days would take. Their major challenge was to figure out the best use of their time. Their major unknown was to answer the most important question: What would VII Corps's mission be? Franks had a pretty good idea that they would not be going down there to defend, but an attack can take many forms, and the corps had to be prepared to undertake any of them. Next, they needed to set an order of deployment quickly so that units could plan accordingly. It seemed best to lead the deployment with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment as the security force, which was one of the traditional roles of a cavalry regiment. But after that, the most immediate requirement was to get in as many engineer, transportation, and communication units as possible, so that they could build some basic infrastructure in the desert. Deploying combat units later would allow them to take advantage of the modern training facilities in Germany before they left. Franks had two other immediate tasks. First, he wanted to assemble the major unit commanders the next morning and issue guidance and listen to what they had to say. The second was to fly down to Saudi Arabia as soon as possible to make a leader's reconnaissance. The leader's recon took place from Sunday, 11 November, to Thursday the fifteenth.
At home, Denise had seen AFN, as had Margie in Bad Kissingen. This moment was hard for her — it was hard for both of them, as it was for all the families. She had seen him go away to war before, and she knew what that meant, and she knew what the separation meant for families.
'So now you know what those meetings and trips to Heidelberg have been about,' he said after they'd had a chance to sit down and catch their breath in their family room.
'Now I know,' she said. 'Fred, I thought you were working to deactivate units in the corps.'
'Look, Denise,' he answered, 'if it has to be done, VII Corps is trained and ready. We know how to do this. I know how to get it done at least cost to our troops.
'You and I have been through this before. We both know what to do. Now we have to help others. Who better to do this than you and me?' As he spoke, Franks thought again of Vietnam, the amputee ward, and the opportunities the Army had given him to come back.
As Fred spoke these words, he could see in her face two conflicting emotions. One, she wished she didn't have to hear them. And two, she was herself a veteran. In the crunch, she was a real rock. 'OK,' her face was telling him, 'you and VII Corps have to go and do what you have to do. It's your job. Just as I'll have my own job here. We'll both do our best.' She was an Army wife, and Army wives have their own kind of resolve, discipline, and duty.
The next day, she was rolling up her sleeves, getting involved with family support for the entire corps, and setting a positive example.
FRIDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 1990
Early Friday morning, Franks got two calls from Saudi Arabia. The first was from Major General William 'Gus' Pagonis in Dhahran, and the second from Lieutenant General John Yeosock in Riyadh. Yeosock was commander of ARCENT/Third Army, which had now been given the mission to command XVIII Corps and VII Corps under CENTCOM. Before VII Corps had been sent, ARCENT handled logistics and infrastructure for CENTCOM, and XVIII Corps reported to CENTCOM for operations. (This rapid transformation from an infrastructure command to also being a two-corps field command was to prove understandably difficult and take some time.) Gus Pagonis handled logistics for ARCENT, but also directly for the CINC — a job he accomplished so brilliantly that he was promoted to lieutenant general during the course of the Gulf crisis. Pagonis had a talent for making things happen, and for getting what needed to be got, no matter what it took to get it. Both Yeosock and Pagonis, it turned out, were primarily concerned with the immediate difficulties of bringing the enormous VII Corps into the already logistically strapped Gulf theater. The first problem was what to do with them and how to supply them. The mission against
