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  Every commander and chief executive officer needs tools to scan the horizon for danger or opportunities. Juliets proved invaluable to me by providing a steady stream of dispassionate information. I chose men who I was confident would maintain trust. What kept the Juliets from being seen as a spy ring by my subordinate commanders was their ability to keep confidences when those commanders shared concerns. They knew that information would be conveyed to me alone.

  KNOW YOUR STRENGTHS…AND YOUR WEAKNESSES

  In war, even the greatest victory is salted with tragedy. It’s not like business—or losing money in the market or missing a sales quota. The human and moral dimension is paramount. In combat, Napoleon once said, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. The combination of intangible qualities—confidence, trust, harmony, and affection for one another that build on each man’s physical strength, mental agility, and spiritual resilience—produces cohesive units capable of dominating the battlefield. But death is ever present.

  To risk death willingly, to venture forth knowing that in so doing you may cease to exist, is an unnatural act. To take the life of a fellow human being or to watch your closest comrades die exacts a profound emotional toll. In Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Robert E. Lee says, “To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is…a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”

  To maintain my emotional equilibrium, I knew I couldn’t be informed about casualties, let alone their names, while fighting. I instructed my staff not to report the names or the number of casualties to me unless their mission was jeopardized. The doctors and corpsmen, with the cooks as stretcher-bearers, would care for the wounded and swiftly evacuate them. I would remain focused on accomplishing the mission. On some level, I knew every one of my men, and I didn’t want to think of his face if he was hit.

  As the leader, anticipating heavy casualties, I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Otherwise I would distract myself from what had to be done. The mission comes first. Personal solace must wait for another day. I knew my limitations. Sort it all out later on the banks of the Columbia.

  INTO THE ATTACK

  Homer described the Trojan War as wild and confused, a storm of dust and smoke, hoarse screaming and bloody swords, cacophony and irrationality. Ever since then, in their imaginations commanders have searched in vain for the orderly battlefield that unfolds according to plan. It doesn’t exist.

  General Ulysses S. Grant, who knew a thing or two about war, had criteria for leaders, which boiled down to humility; toughness of character, so one is able to take shocks in stride; and the single-mindedness to remain unyielding when all is flying apart but enough mental agility to adapt when their approach is not working. This was how I pictured my Marines fighting. In doing so, they would present the enemy with a cascading series of disasters, shattering his coherence and creating a state of confusion and an inability to concentrate his mind or his forces.

  After more than a month of bombing, we launched our ground attack before dawn on February 24, 1991. The Iraqis had torched hundreds of oil wells, and ugly smog covered the landscape, shutting out the sun. After moving through the night, at dawn we closed on the first obstacle belt. The Iraqi engineers had constructed robust defenses composed of complex minefields, barbed wire, deep trenches, and flame obstacles, all covered by their dug-in troops and artillery.

  As our artillery and air support provided covering fire for us, the engineers, covered by our tanks, sprinted forward, firing rocket-propelled explosives to detonate the mines and blast lanes through the minefields. Then our tanks and armored bulldozers moved up and “proofed” the lanes, shoving aside any mines that remained. Once the lanes were proofed, tanks and infantry went through to take out the enemies in the trenches. As we hurried on to the second belt, we had opened a path for the twenty thousand Marines behind us. In training, our fastest breach had taken twenty-one minutes. In the actual fight we did it in eleven. The relentless rehearsals had paid off. Our incessant bombing had sapped the Iraqis’ will to fight. Their artillery fires were desultory and random. Direct fire from their tank cannons and machine guns was half-hearted. As cowed Iraqi soldiers were herded off the battlefield, I felt admiration for those few who continued to fight. As we moved forward, my troops knew that the tougher obstacle belt lay ahead.

  * * *

  —

  During the assault, I did not want my company commanders wasting time passing information to me that I could gain simply by staying adjacent to them. From the hatch of my command vehicle, I could see my units in the open desert around me. I’m sure it was an odd sight for our Vietnam veterans, who had been unable to see ten feet in the jungle. I monitored the assault company radio nets while occasionally talking on my battalion net or updating regiment on its net. Listening to the tone in their voices, I could sense what was going on from their perspectives. Having sliced through the enemy’s forward-most positions, we rushed on to the second, tougher obstacle belt, nine miles farther north. I knew that speed was of the essence; the Iraqis now knew the approximate location where we would strike their main line of resistance. We didn’t want to give them time to reinforce that sector of the line.

  At the second belt, a more determined enemy fought harder; mines knocked out several tanks and other vehicles, and we took casualties. Artillery fire slowed us but could not stop us. At one point I flopped into a crater; crouched down inside it, I noticed an ant trying to crawl out. When I scooped away a little dirt, the ant fell back into the hole and resumed climbing. Again, I scooped away some dirt.

  “Don’t go out there, Mr. Ant,” I told him. “You’re safer in here.”

  Once our air and artillery had silenced the enemy’s guns, we pushed on. At an agricultural station called Emir’s Farm, a dug-in Iraqi battalion was holding its ground, firing mortars. Bravo Company dropped ramps at six hundred fifty yards from the entrenched enemy. The Marines were rushing forward, and the Iraqis, having recovered their courage, were shooting back. Then an F-18 roared over our heads and dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb. That was it. The survivors streamed toward my Marines with their hands in the air.

  Across the entire southern front, the coalition attack was accelerating. The basic building blocks of planning and rehearsals, the iterative discussions, the generals’ sharing of the overall strategy, the heavy bombing, the simultaneous breaching of multiple lanes through the minefields—all had come together in violent harmony. By afternoon, the Marines were far ahead of schedule. The high command had assumed that poison gas, land mines, and direct fire would inflict heavy casualties on the assault battalions, so my battalion didn’t have an assigned follow-on mission. I had to rein in my lead elements because we were so far ahead of expectations.

  On the third day, we picked up even more momentum, charging toward Kuwait International Airport. With dozens of oil rigs ablaze, the smoke was so thick that we could see only a few hundred yards. At midday, I had to turn on a flashlight to read my map. By employing my focused telescopes and listening to the radio nets and my staff, I could keep abreast of events without calling a halt for meetings. We were not slowing down. I gave few orders, letting the assault leaders make the decisions.

  It was a rout. When any enemy combustion engine was turned on, it emitted a heat signature that glowed in our thermal sights. Every vehicle and piece of armor became a target. We advanced in dense, oily smoke reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, Cobra gunship helicopters flying low overhead. Iraqi tanks and armor were scattered, crushed, pulverized, or ripped apart as though a tornado had swept through, casting aside broken vehicles and dismembering bodies. Few of the corpses resembled human beings. Most were scorched black and shrunken to half their size.

  I was with my f
orward elements as we drew abreast of a large quarry, squeezing us tightly on our right flank. We moved toward high-tension power lines still standing in the middle of a desolate, featureless desert. I’d had little rest in three days, and nothing out of the ordinary clicked in my fatigued mind as we moved past the quarry. Suddenly the horizon ahead of us lit up with flashes, plus streams of green tracers. The power lines had served as the waiting enemy’s perfect target reference point, their tanks and machine guns locked on and ready to fire. At that same moment, an Iraqi mechanized company hidden inside the quarry we had passed rushed out to attack my logistics elements, following to my rear. There are happier times than being ambushed, and nothing was a better reminder that I was not von Clausewitz than having my battalion surrounded in the open desert.

  In the midst of the enemy attack, I saw Lieutenant Chris Woodbridge maneuvering to my front, standing in the turret of his Humvee. A burly rugby player with a perpetual grin, Woody was leading an antitank platoon. As I watched, his Humvee disappeared in a column of sand and smoke—a direct hit from a tank round. The concussion rolled past me as sand and smoke enveloped Woody’s vehicle.

  I looked away, shoving the direct hit out of my mind. I ordered units to shift farther right to gain maneuver room, bringing our tanks into the fight. When I glanced to the rear, I saw red star flares. Our logistics train, commanded by Lieutenant Jeff Hooks, was signaling that it was under attack. Fortunately, every third day for six months, Jeff and Gunnery Sergeant Kendall Haff had trained their corpsmen, cooks, drivers, engineers, clerks, and mechanics to fight as infantry. Their training paid off as they tore into the enemy.

  They were now knocking out enemy vehicles while our mortars were firing both south and north, on the enemy in the quarry and to our front. As the Iraqis emerged, cooks and engineers energetically responded with machine-gun fire and anti-armor rockets that knocked out the Iraqi vehicles. The fight was over in twelve minutes, and grinning corpsmen and mechanics welcomed the reinforcing infantry. I had rushed back to join them. My men had gotten me out of a jam. But because they had the muscle memory and the nerve, they had also smashed the enemy, turning inside the enemy’s decision loop.

  As we continued our attack, some Iraqis offered resistance, but most quickly surrendered. In midafternoon, Colonel Fulford called his commanders together: we were to continue the attack and break through to Kuwait City before dark, days ahead of schedule. After a quick order, I turned back toward my Humvee.

  “Learn anything today, Jim?” Fulford asked quietly.

  We both knew my Marines had bailed me out at the quarry.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good,” he said as he walked away. He didn’t belabor the point.

  When I arrived back at my battalion, I called together the combat leaders for a quick order brief. Woody joined us, disheveled, covered in grime, but intact and still smiling hugely.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  “So did I, sir.” Woody grinned. “That shell threw a ton of dirt on us.”

  After the explosion, I had forced Woody and his men out of my mind. The human mind, though, is a wonderful mystery. As I write about Woody a quarter of a century later, the sense of relief is as strong now as it was when he grinned at me all those years ago.

  * * *

  —

  After a month of bombing and one hundred hours of ground attack, the Iraqi Army was thoroughly beaten and thrown out of Kuwait. I learned not to put much stock in estimates about an enemy until we’ve fought him. Although my battalion had a dozen wounded, I felt a huge relief that not one Marine, sailor, or Kuwaiti had been killed. I would not be so fortunate in the future. Seeing the Kuwaiti people’s relief and joy showed us all what victory looks like. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, the capabilities, morale, and confidence of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, provided me with a measuring stick to apply when training units in future wars. I knew what confident men looked like when they went into the assault.

  In the months following my return to the United States, I grew increasingly displeased with the lack of individual recognition my men were receiving. Frontline service in the military brings with it the dignity of danger, and recognizing valor is critical. Against the advice of a senior officer who told me that protesting the actions of seniors would end my career, and determined to gain appropriate awards for my troops, I wrote to the MEF commander, Lieutenant General Robert Johnston, with my concerns. I immediately received a lesson in the power of a general officer: General Johnston personally called me, assuring me that he would correct the situation. Within a week I was receiving welcome news of appropriate recognition. There would come a time when that general’s responsive example would guide me in similar situations that were brought to my attention. Delays or parsimonious award action for frontline troops must be overcome if we’re going to pay respects to those who go toe-to-toe with our enemies. (See Appendix A.)

  The ultimate auditor of military competence is war. The campaign was victorious. Our casualties were far fewer than anyone had projected. Much credit must be given to the astonishing improvements in air-to-ground target detection and destruction. More broadly, the American military, in the two decades since Vietnam, had developed a doctrine for fighting mechanized warfare that maximized our advantages in maneuver and mobility. At the geopolitical level, President George H. W. Bush had demonstrated a trifecta of statesmanship. On the diplomatic front, he had pulled together a coalition of Western and Arab states; on the military front, he had provided his generals with the forces and policy direction they needed; and on the political front, he had avoided overreach once he achieved his objective of freeing Kuwait.

  “This will not stand,” he had said.

  With impressive resolve, America backed up those words, throwing Saddam out of Kuwait.

  In my military judgment, President George H. W. Bush knew how to end a war on our terms. When he said America would take action, we did. He approved of deploying overwhelming forces to compel the enemy’s withdrawal or swiftly end the war. He avoided sophomoric decisions like imposing a ceiling on the number of troops or setting a date when we would have to stop fighting and leave.

  He systematically gathered public support, congressional approval, and UN agreement. He set a clear, limited end state and used diplomacy to pull together a military coalition that included allies we’d never fought alongside. He listened to opposing points of view and guided the preparations, without offending or excluding any stakeholder, while also holding firm to his strategic goal.

  Under his wise leadership, there was no mission creep. We wouldn’t discipline ourselves to be so strategically sound in the future.

  AFTER MY EIGHT MONTHS IN THE GULF WAR, I returned to a new global setting. To many, it seemed the “end of history” was at hand. There would be no more wars between major powers. Liberal democracy had defeated communism. Saddam was back in his cage, and our troops enjoyed a massive ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City, an event that has not been repeated in the quarter century since. The Warsaw Pact fell apart, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1992, President Bush and Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin declared that the Cold War was over. America and NATO had held the line as internal contradictions rotted the Soviet Union from the inside out and Afghanistan bled the Soviet Army. The U.S. Senate ratified significant mutual reductions in the numbers of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads.

  The next few years were more mixed. On the positive side, twelve states in Western Europe pulled closer together and formed the European Union. Eastern Europe pulled toward the West, and a military coup in Russia failed. On the negative side, Yugoslavia collapsed into a civil war and China conducted nuclear tests to upgrade its strategic weaponry. The newly elected President Bill Clinton pulled U.S. peacekeeping forces from Somalia after eighteen American soldiers were kille
d. Reality was giving rude hints of the disorder to come.

  Inside the U.S. military, our national assessment of the global situation had a major impact. No major wars were looming on the horizon, and pressure for a “peace dividend” resulted in a severe cut in the Pentagon budget as we came home from the Gulf War. Having relinquished command of my battalion, I was assigned to Headquarters Marine Corps, in the Pentagon. This was the normal rotation in an officer’s career, with tours split between the supporting establishment and the operating forces, with a year of school thrown in every four or five years. I was responsible for assigning specific jobs to all active-duty and enlisted Marines. My branch had to approve the retention of every enlisted Marine who wanted to stay in the Corps. That was tough duty. The Marine Corps was in the act of swiftly reducing our forces, from more than 189,000 to 172,000. Nine percent of all serving Marines had to retire or leave, whether they wanted to or not.

  People join us to be part of a small, elite tribe, “the few, the proud.” Within the Pentagon, the Marine budget was less than 10 percent of the total. We do with little, because for centuries we’ve sailed around the world limited by what we can carry on ships. We deploy in all oceans, guard all our embassies—and we are eager to be first to fight, anytime, anywhere. We’re the service youngest in age, with two-thirds of our forces serving only one tour, while our longer-serving officer and NCO corps are kept lean. We improvise to overcome operational obstacles and aging equipment. But improvisation cannot overcome serious budget cuts, and I had to cut thousands of veterans fresh home from war from our ranks. I had to decide which NCOs were assigned to what posts, who would be promoted, and who would be told to retire.