Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1 Read online

  So the idea of "fair fight" had no meaning for Franks in this context. It seemed totally insane to give the enemy some sporting chance to win.

  "If you have to fight," Franks liked to say, "then 100 to nothing is about the right score for the battlefield. Twenty-four to twenty-one may be okay in the NFL on Sunday afternoon, but not on the battlefield.

  "My inclination in tactics is to maneuver our force to bring so much combat power to bear on the other force that we will get them backpedaling. I want to get them on the ropes and keep them there. Then, when we've got them down, we'll finish them. We're going to finish them.

  "If we have to fight, then we were going to go for the jugular, not the capillaries.

  "But once we are winning our battles, we've got to link those successful battles in some pattern or direction, so they add up to mean something bigger. They have to end up accomplishing your strategic aims. That is why you are fighting those battles. And that is why the troops who are risking it all to win those battles trust that the generals and Secretaries of Defense and Presidents know what they are doing, and will make all that sweat and blood count for something."

  From what Franks and his commanders had seen so far, the command climate was far different from the one in Vietnam. They could feel the steel in the will, from the President and the Secretary of Defense through General Powell, to the theater. It was solid.

  Finally he was at peace with himself, as much as any commander could be on the eve of battle. His troops and leaders were ready. They had worked like hell to get to where they were, and most units had had the minimum two weeks' training he thought necessary. Soldiers were confident in themselves, their equipment, one another, and their leaders. Franks had known that would come because of the training in Saudi Arabia and the team-building they had worked on since the start of the mission to deploy on 8 November. They had become the VII Corps team so necessary for success in combat.

  On 21 February, Sam Donaldson of ABC News came to visit VII Corps. Franks escorted him to the 2nd ACR and 1st AD. While at 1st AD, Donaldson talked to members of an M1A1 tank company commanded by Captain Dana Pittard. Franks was never more proud of his soldiers than he was when he heard them talk of the mission and of one another. Specialist Shawn Freeney, a mechanic in Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 37th Armor, said, "It lets you know that, when it comes down to it, you're around family. All of us here are family — right here is my family."

  They had prepared the way you would for a big game. They had emphasized skills in fundamentals and teamwork. They had gone through situation drills against possible game situations. They had gotten their "batting practice" under close-to-game conditions and they had had some scrimmages.

  But where Franks knew the sports analogy stopped was game time. War is different. Ground combat is physically tough, uncompromising, and final. The enemy can be as close as a few meters or thousands of meters. There you deal in the ultimate reality — life and death. There is no home-and-home scheduling. There is no next year. When it's over, it's over; the memories and results are frozen in time for a lifetime. For some soldiers, there would be no more lifetime after this. Fred Franks knew that, and so did they.

  Franks thought again of his soldiers and leaders. "Have I prepared them well enough for this mission? I think so. Did we have a workable plan? Yes. Have we thought of everything? Probably not. Have we ignored anything major? I don't think so. Are the troops ready? Yes. They know what to do, they're motivated by the right things, and they want to get this going and get it finished so they can go home. Not a complicated set of emotions. Soldiers and units go at two speeds, all-ahead full or stop. There can be no half-stepping, especially for a mounted attack. We're ready."

  He recalled then something Captain Dana Pittard had said to Sam Donaldson: "My biggest fear, of course, is making sure I don't do something wrong that would cost somebody's life or something else. There's no fear on the personal side." He also recalled the old saying that generals can lose battles and campaigns, but only the soldiers can win. He believed that. He also believed that if he got them and their commanders to the right place at the right time in the right combination, in battle after battle, they would take it from there and win.

  His thoughts turned to Denise, his wife of thirty-one years, and to their daughter, Margie, and her family. They were all a close family; they'd been through a lot together. Denise was now busy at home in Germany with family support work. For the first time in the history of the U.S. Army, they had taken units already deployed in one theater (with families), deployed to another, and left their families overseas.

  Someone had asked Denise if she was "going home" — that is, leaving Stuttgart and returning to the United States. "I am home," she replied. Though they could have returned to the States, most families stayed right there. In doing that, they were breaking new ground, adapting to new realities. And Denise was providing leadership and moral strength in her own quiet and forceful way. She was showing her own form of courage… just as were all the other family members in Germany. They were answering the call. Their favorite song was "From a Distance."

  Franks remembered all that he, Denise, and Margie had been through during and after Vietnam. And he remembered the hospital recovery of almost twenty-one months.

  Before he'd left for the Gulf, he had promised Denise he'd come back "whole" from this operation, but with a smile, she'd reminded him that that was no longer possible. They hadn't been able to phone each other often while he was on duty in the Gulf. The one phone call they'd had to this point in January was tense and full of feeling.

  In Bad Kissingen, Germany, Margie, also now an Army spouse, had her own family of two boys and her husband, Greg. Greg was a captain in the Blackhorse. At that moment, he was S-3 of the 2nd Squadron, 11th ACR, or "Battle 3," the same job Franks had had in Vietnam. Now Margie's dad was at war again. Denise had sent him a tape recording of the family, and he would listen to it to hear the sounds of their voices. Family was real close, just like his VII Corps family. They both inspired him.

  After pulling his tanker suit pant leg over the top so he did not have to remove the boot, Franks unstrapped his prosthetic leg. He set it where he could reach it in the dark, then pulled the sleeping bag over him, said a prayer for his troops and that he would have the wisdom to do what was right, and slept soundly.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Duty

  Major Fred Franks fought in Vietnam with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the "Blackhorse," from August 1969, when he arrived, to May 1970, when he was severely wounded during the Cambodian invasion. He had previously served with the Blackhorse in Germany for almost three and a half years, from March 1960 to July 1963, and he was glad to be back in his old outfit. He was a cavalry officer; he knew cavalry; cavalry was his home. And the Blackhorse was his regiment.

  Like so many Americans before him, Franks got off the plane with his fellow soldiers at Long Binh, Vietnam, ready to do his duty. He had flown over in a stretch DC-8 out of Travis Air Force Base, just north of San Francisco. Just the day before, he had said good-bye to Denise and Margie at the Philadelphia International Airport and flown to San Francisco. His kid brother, Farrell, had driven them to the airport, and his mother and dad met them there to say good-bye. It was a quick forty-eight-hour transition from what soldiers called "the world" to a combat zone.

  The first thing that hit him getting off the plane was the unmistakable smell. It was a combination of the heat, the smoke in the air from burning wood, and who knew what else. But he would never forget it.

  Fighter aircraft were parked close by. He heard sounds of jet fighters taking off and flying overhead, as well as the unmistakable Vietnam sound of UH-1 "Huey" helicopter rotor blades slapping in the air. He was intent on taking in as much as he could, right away, as he thought back on how he'd gotten there.

  After graduating from West Point in 1959, Franks had asked for and was commissioned into armor. He was a "tanker," and yet he saw himself as m
ore than that. Though tanks are the centerpiece of cavalry — they give it its punch — cavalry goes beyond tanks. Armored cavalry is the first team; it has a command freedom, an esprit, an ethos. In the cavalry, small units operate a combination of potent weapons systems (in the Army, this is called "combined arms") that give them the capability to move fast and hit hard. On the battlefield, these units operate under decentralized leadership in missions that are out in front of everyone else.

  First, though, Franks had to go through some fundamentals: a basic armor course at Fort Knox, then Ranger and airborne schools at Fort Benning. Chest deep on patrol in the dark waters of the Florida swamps and then in the numbing cold of the Dahlonega, in the Georgia hills, Franks learned a lot about himself and combat. It was the best individual peacetime training he ever got in the Army.

  Franks did his apprentice work in armored cavalry along the Iron Curtain between Czechoslovakia and West Germany during a time that included the 1961 Berlin crisis and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In the crucible of daily life as a young troop leader in the Blackhorse, he learned from the officers and noncommissioned officers the tough, hard skills of small-unit tactical leadership. Combat veterans of World War II and Korea drilled them on combat cavalry fundamentals and taught them tribal wisdom through war stories during the long nights at the border camps along the Czech border. Like so many others, he developed his tactical skills by doing his job day to day in the field, by listening, working hard, and by making damn-fool mistakes, and being allowed to get back up and learn from them.

  For his first fifteen months in the Blackhorse, Franks was a lieutenant leader of the smallest combined-arms unit in the U.S. Army, an armored cavalry platoon of scouts, tanks, mechanized infantry, and a self-propelled mortar. From there he was the squadron's support platoon leader, responsible for leading truck resupply of the squadron. For the next eight months, he was executive officer (second in command) of a cavalry troop. Then he commanded Troop I.

  When he headed to Vietnam, it was the Blackhorse he intended to belong to — but he almost didn't make it. By the time Franks got to Vietnam, the beginnings of the U.S. drawdown had screwed up the individual replacement system so badly that all orders were canceled, and new replacements were sequestered upon arrival to await new orders. He was instructed not to call anyone. No way, Franks thought, I've got to get to a phone. He got through to a sergeant at the Blackhorse unit at Long Binh. "Wait right there, don't go anywhere else, we'll be over to get you. We knew you were coming."

  The next morning, true to the sergeant's word, the Blackhorse sent a vehicle over and picked him up. "Major Franks? Come with me, sir. Your orders are all cut and we're ready to go." When Franks saw that rearing black horse patch on the soldier's shoulder, he felt as though he had seen a family member. Actually, he had.

  In 1969, the Blackhorse was one of four cavalry regiments on active duty in the Army. The others, 2nd, 3rd, and 14th, were in Germany. The Blackhorse had been withdrawn from Germany in the summer of 1964 and stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. When the big U.S. buildup in Vietnam began in 1965, it soon became apparent that an armored cavalry regiment would be a valuable asset in the war, and the 11th ACR was deployed to Vietnam, arriving in 1966. It immediately established itself as a tough combat regiment, successfully completing a wide variety of missions on many different terrains. Soon it had inflicted heavy punishment on the Viet Cong and the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army.

  The Army is a competitive organization, but Franks was a competitive man. When he joined the 11th ACR in Vietnam, he had not yet met a wall that could stop him. If there was a hurdle to leap — physical, psychological, or intellectual — he leapt it. If he failed the first time, he worked and trained until he made it over. He was an athlete; he was used to intense training and to hard drills. And he was used to the payoff that hard training gave him. Though at five-eight, he couldn't be called physically impressive, he was a talented baseball player who'd reached a career batting average of better than.300 on the West Point baseball team, and been team captain. There's a good chance he would have succeeded as a professional ballplayer. He was tempted. In 1961, the choice confronted him: to be a soldier or a baseball player. Franks chose soldier.

  There was also in him a finely tuned, well-developed mind, and in 1964, the Army sent him to Columbia University to study for an M.A. in English. Afterward, he was scheduled to teach at West Point. It was a two-year course at a high-ranking school, but characteristically, he pushed it. He finished the degree in a year, in the belief that he would be sent to Vietnam for the second year, and then to West Point following that. Somehow a bureaucratic foul-up put a stop to that: "If we've set you up for two years of study," he was told, "you have to put yourself through two years of study." And it turned out he couldn't go to Vietnam in 1965 after all. Daunted, yet still pushing hard, he continued at Columbia and completed most of the course work for a Ph.D. Then he went on, as planned, to West Point, where, on a teacher's schedule, he had the opportunity to finish up his days at a reasonable hour and perhaps spend real time with Denise and Margie (like most young Army officers, he'd been away more often than he was home).

  Don't count on it. He did get to spend more time with them, but he also hit the books and completed his Ph.D. orals, while carrying a full teaching load and taking on the job of assistant varsity baseball coach for the fall and spring. On top of that, he took a correspondence course from Fort Sill to keep his nuclear weapons proficiency current, a necessary skill for officers in the 1960s.

  Serious American involvement in the Vietnam War began in 1962. By the late 1960s, U.S. forces had grown to over half a million, and with that increase came a number of plans and programs for victory. Though not all of them were ill conceived, even the best needed time for successful completion, and some came too late. The United States was out of time. By the late summer of 1969, strong antiwar feelings in the States, brought about primarily by the ever-increasing American casualties, had caused President Nixon to begin a general withdrawal. At the same time, he hoped to give the South Vietnamese government some chance at survival. The program was called Vietnamization. Its aim was to turn more and more of the ground war over to the South Vietnamese, while the United States simultaneously provided air and logistics assistance and began to withdraw its own combat troops. Operations were launched to attempt to buy time for the South Vietnamese, such as the continuation of the "secret" bombings of Cambodia, then the invasion of Cambodia in May 1970. Others would follow.

  In August 1969, the regimental command post of the Blackhorse was at the village of Quan Loi. Quan Loi was just east of the market town of An Loc, forty kilometers from the Cambodian border and about a forty-five-minute helicopter ride or a four-hour armed convoy trip from Long Binh. A C-130-capable airstrip was also at Quan Loi, and the regiment's air cavalry troop operated out of there. The 11th Cavalry rear base was at Long Binh, near Saigon, the largest U.S. Army logistics facility in Vietnam.

  The regiment was commanded at the time by Colonel Jimmie Leach, an experienced and aggressive cavalry commander. A World War II tanker, Leach had commanded a tank company in General Creighton Abrams's 37th Tank Battalion in the 4th Armored Division.

  One of the regiment's missions was to keep open the major road from Lai Khe, in the south, through An Loc, to Loc Ninh to the north. To do this required a daily mine sweep of the road, plus active reconnaissance of the area to either side of it. All three of the regiment's squadrons and the air cavalry troop were engaged in this operation. The Blackhorse at the time was under the operational control of the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division, whose headquarters were at Lai Khe. Other missions involved direct attack on NVA units when they were found and fixed, and area reconnaissance of the entire area to keep the NVA out. Meanwhile, as part of the consolidation that was one of the first consequences of Vietnamization, the 1st Infantry had been given orders to begin to redeploy back to the United States. As part of that redeployment, they would give up some o
f their rear base camps around Long Binh and Di An, and the Blackhorse rear base was moved from Xuan Loc, their home from the time they came to Vietnam, to Long Binh. Some residual 2nd Squadron elements were to move to Di An.

  When Franks reported for duty, Leach assigned him to 2nd Squadron, but ordered him back south to Xuan Loc to help clear up some problems and to plan the rear base move to Di An. Franks knew he had a lot to learn in a short period of time.

  Franks was what the troops called a "fanoogie," abbreviated as FNG and standing for "f 'ing new guy." It was a way for veterans to set themselves apart from the newcomers and to tell the new guys that they had lots to learn and some rites of passage to go through. There was an official way to do it, too — the Army sent all newcomers through a five-day course in-country to indoctrinate them in the ways of the unit and combat techniques and the enemy. Unfortunately, those courses were at Long Binh and Franks was at Xuan Loc, some distance away. He needed a substitute crash course fast.

  The course he needed was right under his nose at Xuan Loc. Franks had always felt new leaders and commanders should spend a lot of time listening, and not a lot of time sounding off: When you join a new unit, you find mostly soldiers and leaders who want to belong to a great outfit. They want you to succeed. They want you to be able to lead and command them well. Give them a chance to tell you early on how they think they can help you do that. It had worked for him in the Blackhorse before. Gain the soldiers' confidence and respect by treating them the same way you want to be treated. Earn your way on the team in a hurry and learn while you are doing it. The first few weeks are when you learn the ropes and you also make a first impression, and, like it or not, as soon as you get there, you are being sized up by the soldiers, your peers, and your superiors. They will put you through both formal and informal rites of passage to see what you are made of. You just have to be ready to rise to the challenge.