Editor’s Note: Christmas Eve and the hope for peace, and memories of The Long
War.

– Vic

24 December 2019
Mayhem, Like Meigs

I’ve written about the air war during Desert Storm, now I will bookend it with my recollections of the ground war and the almost 20-year aftermath – and how it has come back to haunt us as a job not finished. It is still a sucking chest wound for the nation.

I worked for a lot of great guys during my career, and Meigs was hands-down the best. He hooked me during a phone call when I was hesitating about accepting the Army’s offer to join the G-2 and becoming a part of JIEDDO. After 30 seconds, I knew I was fucked. The man operated at a level of genius that I still can’t comprehend, even more than a decade later. He was unconventional, and I felt honored that he had reached down to Key West and selected an obscure nobody on the road to retirement to be his Intel officer. Meigs was an intellectual and a historian – he wrote a great book about how we had applied brainpower and technology to defeat the Nazi’s U-Boats in WWII titled Slide Rules and Submarines – I have a signed copy. We had an interesting relationship, and after we really got to know each other, he would tell me things that I know he didn’t trust to tell to the rest of our senior staff, since he knew I wasn’t going to run off and tattle on him to the Army. Even before the All-State commercials, Meigs was mayhem – he just committed it in a different way.

He had a reputation and track record for brilliance and achieved four stars; a hell of a career, rising to command USAREUR, and NATO STABFOR in that difficult war in Bosnia. But he was really an academic at heart – a warrior-scholar with a PhD and cast much in the mold of Thucydides, Julius Caesar, and George S. Patton, Jr. He was named after his great-great-great grand-uncle, who as the Quartermaster of the Army of the Republic, and among other great works constructed Arlington National Cemetery on the former bounds of the Lee-Custis estate, and the iconic National Building Museum – itself a marvelous work of 19th Century engineering art. And by the way, he finished the Capitol – you can go see all three when in the Imperial City. And oh by the way, he also built Ft. Jefferson in the Keys.

The National Building Museum

Meigs was born half an orphan; his father was
a tank brigade commander who was killed in action in Alsace-Lorraine during WWII, a month before he was born. His family had a life-long record of service to the nation. His grandfather was a retired Navy Commander and surrogate father, which I think gave him a certain affinity for us salt-water types. Oddly enough, he didn’t choose to be a Jr. or the 3rd, and he never introduced himself as Doctor, although he could. Like his father before him, he chose to be an armored cavalry guy after graduation from West Point – I think he was chasing the legacy of the dead father that he never knew.

After retirement, Meigs was safely ensconced back in his academic uniform as a PhD professor of history at the Maxwell School up in Syracuse. As I wrote in my companion piece to this – Heart of Darkness and in quoting Trotsky, “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” and it got straight to him before he was even in the cradle, and pursued him relentlessly. After getting to know him, he told me the story about why he came out of retirement to take on JIEDDO. We were getting our asses kick by the Mujahedeen in Iraq at the time, and the CENTCOM Commander John had gone before Congress advocating for a “Manhattan Project” to take on the very real IED threat – it was as bad a situation as it was during the Vietnam War – pictures of bloody, maimed and dead troops were breathlessly reported upon by the MSM who hated W with a passion every fucking evening on the nightly news, and it was glaringly obvious that something had to be done. One autumn day, Monty got a phone call from then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul, who painted him nicely in a corner: “The Secretary would like you to come down to DC to discuss how we can go about saving the lives of our soldiers, Marines, and airmen” as if he had an option to say “no.” I realized after hearing this recitation that he had used the same trick on me. Then, he created mayhem that still resonates to this day.

Meigs dutifully put back on his now-symbolic but very real four stars, and went to work. We had shorthand for GOs in the Army, and his was M4. He had a few demands for returning to service – there was a time limit, he had to have unlimited budget authority, and that he could select five people detailed to him for one year to make it work (I was not one of them, just a replacement part). He then went on to surreptitiously construct a unique, forward-leaning and innovative brigade-sized operations, training, technology, and intelligence organization that, as Duke Ellington would have put it, was beyond category. The obscuration of our internal workings was deliberately intended to befuddle critics – and it worked. For example, our offices in the old Polk Building in Crystal City were not gold-plated, but furnished with battered junk furniture from DRMO – that was intentional. It was only after the Army was able to, in their own unique and doggedly determined manner, re-exert control and then the end was near and that’s when I quit – the fun and adventure were over. The last time I visited there, the offices were sleek and spiffy, and the sight of that turned my stomach. I remember from my days as the Executive Assistant for the CNO Strategic Studies Group when we worked on innovation for the Navy and about the same time the Army came out with a chilling statement “We are going to capture innovation.” Well, they did…

One of the five people he asked for was Maxie, who had been his G-2 in Bosnia. Maxie had sought me out, at M4’s bidding, to find for him an Intel officer who didn’t delve in group-think and succumb to the whims of the thought police. He was the one who came down to Key West to see firsthand what we were doing in fighting the drug war. For that, I will be forever grateful – for what came next I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Maxie is sadly gone, and I intend to write a paean to him one day, since no one else will do it. I’m still searching for the theme and I think I’ve found one, but it will take time to get it right.
My indoctrination into the Army was fairly innocuous. I reported to the G-1 senior officer affairs office in the basement of the Pentagon, filled out the paperwork, and was sworn in. At that point, my former comrade in arms and J-5 counterpart from Key West Jeff showed up to surprise me – it worked. He said “We’ve been expecting your arrival on board, and Terry wants to meet you, now.” I didn’t know who Terry was, but got rudely educated “He’s the deputy G-2 – get a goddamned clue Point.” Fuck, I was in the Army now.
We went upstairs to the G-2’s E-Ring office spaces, and were shepherded into Terry’s office. It was obviously a debutante moment for me, and I managed to pass muster. Terry suggested that we go grab a few minutes of the G-2’s time. We checked in with his exec, who said we had maybe 15 minutes, and were ushered in. The G-2, also named Jeff, was a gracious and great guy like Terry; we hit it off like gangbusters – that 15 minutes turned into two hours of story-telling and getting-to-know-you. In an earlier age or something out of a WEB Griffin novel, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had pulled out a bottle of Scotch to seal the deal. Really fucking great guys are just that – fucking great. They knew all about my background – that I was not an Academy grad but had a real-life college education and was an OCS product. They awarded me an Army call sign which I have never used or disclosed until now – Dark Blue. It was their rip on the Navy’s counterpart to the Air Force’s Checkmate.[1] On departing, they gave me two charges – always make your decisions based on what’s best for the soldier on the ground, and that I had to root for Army in the Army-Navy game. At his seat at the round table in his office, Jeff pointed out to me a sheet of typing paper that he had taped down on it that spelled out in bold characters “No More Marplots.” His unstated message was clear – don’t be one if you want to be in the G-2. I had no inkling of what a Marplot was but I wasn’t about to betray my ignorance there in his office while caught up in that dick-measuring contest – you only get one chance to make a good first impression. You can bet that I looked it up when I got back to my office in Crystal City. I will leave it up to you gentle readers out there to go research that term and what it means for yourselves.

This piece is ultimately about ground combat in the Gulf War and it is complicated; I’m just taking a round-about way of getting there, so let’s flashback nearly 29 years ago to the eve of the ground war in Desert Storm.

Midway was the Battle Force Flag ship, and we were plain-near exhausted after six months of deployment and six weeks of nearly non-stop combat operations. Our flight deck had been de-nuded of non-skid, planes loaded with ordnance were sliding all over the place just taxiing in the humidity of the Persian Gulf winter – it was becoming down-right dangerous; and collectively we were just plain-dog tired out from lack of meaningful sleep. To keep us in the fight, we had to take a week off at anchor at the Bahrain Bell so crews of technicians from the Puget Sound Navy Shipyard could come out and perform some emergency repairs, and ensure we could exert our weight in the ground war. For us, it was a well-needed combat pause.

We had gone from two strikes a day to four, then six, eight, twelve, and finally fourteen. The relentless metronome of war was clicking; summoning us all to do its bidding. The force was roaming the battlefield, big time. Now rejuvenated and as the fateful day of the kick-off for the ground war approached, my CVIC counterpart Van and I summoned our troops for a short meeting. Our message was simple – the ground war is coming, and will be even more demanding. We are hoping for the best, but if it goes south, then it will be all-hands on deck, so get ready to learn how to load bombs. Get out there and volunteer your services to the Gunner to get acquainted with doing that and fuck Intel, we will all be ordies.

I went out a couple of times and participating in the back-breaking chore of loading bombs. Thank God it was the winter in the Gulf – I can’t imagine how excruciating that would have been in the sweltering summer conditions we enjoyed there on my next cruise in that garden spot.

The night before the ground war started, the Marines sent a delegation out to the flagship to brief us on their scheme of maneuver, and implored us to do-all to support them. They had been “honored” to be the first across the line – mainly I think to see if Saddam would use chemical weapons against them – they were going in MOP-4. The Marines had developed a brilliant scheme of maneuver. They had an Army brigade of M-1A1s backing them up called the Tiger Brigade, who would swing out right or left to flank any forward resistance encountered during their advance – the Marines would fix the enemy up front, and the Army would come in and obliterate them. They delineated their Fire Support Coordination Lines (FSCL) so we would know where not to bomb. Their mantra was “Speed and Violence.”

I can still see the haunted looks in their eyes – they were going to roar into the Valley of the Shadow of Death in less than 24 hours from then. For once, the flight deck above us was eerily quiet – we were frantically servicing aircraft and taking the forward landing gear doors off of the A-6s off so they could carry more bombs. The ordies had amassed pallets and carts of built-up MK82 500-pounders on the hangar deck below us – the real fury of Desert Storm was getting ready to be unleashed.

The rest is heroic and historic. The Marines cut through the Iraqis like shit through a goose, and constantly exceeded their self-designated FSCLs – it was hard to keep up with their speed of advance. They detonated the barbed wire, and used combat vehicles with plows to bury alive the Iraqi front-line martyrs on either side of their salient. Unlike us on the carrier, they were allowed to use napalm and Fuel-Air-Explosives (FAE) to “soften up” the enemy. The Air Force did them one better and pulled some BLU-82 Vietnam War-era Daisy Cutters out of the ammunition depots and dumped several on the heads of the bad guys, and also provided AC-130 Spectre gunships working with the Marine FACs, who killed everything in the backfield. They also had their own Intruders and Hornets dealing death from above alongside the weight of ordnance our four Gulf carriers could deliver. The hardest part was sorting out the mega death. I begged for a night KA-6 tanker hop so as to watch the mayhem being delivered from a vantage point on high, but safely offshore – yeah, right.

Out to the west, the great engine of the Army VII Corps was revving up, and delivered their left-hook hammer blows to the bad guys. It was a route, and my future boss M4 was there in command of the 2ndBrigade of the 1stArmored, committing mayhem of his own. His intelligence officer at that time was a guy who later as A4 became a good friend and willing co-conspirator. He told me that they had a run where they destroyed 100 tanks in less than ten minutes – that’s got to be a record. Then, there was the Highway of Death.

The Highway of Death

Figuring out that they were fucked six ways to Friday, the Iraqi Army decided to bug out, and retreated en masse up Highway 80 to Basra, as if that was going to be a sanctuary. Our J-STARS friends quickly discerned the movement of a large body of armored vehicles heading north from Kuwait City; the order came out from General Schwarzkopf – which was basically to Unleash Hell.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night, and I pity the fools in the Iraqi Army who died doing what they believed was their duty – ours was the Heart of Darkness personified. The weather was terrible; flight ops were tough since we were caught up in the maelstrom of a Shamal – a living metaphor for a perfect Desert Storm. It was raining like hell on the ground, and the bad guys had hell reigning on top of them from above. We had B-52s and F-111s and F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16s and Brit Tornados and Intruders and Hornets, oh my; bombing the fucking shit out of those assholes. Note in the picture that there are no craters – we all used contact fuses for max frag effect. It must have been a nightmare for the bad guys – as if we gave a shit.
Imagine if you will – there you are an Iraqi conscript in miserable conditions, scared shitless from what you have already witnessed from American and Allied firepower and feeling guilty and fearful for the retribution coming for what you had done to the civilians of Kuwait as an occupying force. Now you have fire and fury reigning down upon you like divine vengeance delivered from on high for raping and brutalizing Kuwaiti civilians and abusing our POWs – it sucks to be you so cry me a fucking river.

Of course, some political staffer ass-kisser came up with the bumper sticker for GHWB and sold him on “The 100 Hours War” so we were stopped just short of total victory – just one more day, one more fucking day to completely annihilate the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. We were on the cusp of ending that shit over there and it would have saved us from what is now almost 20 years of future trouble. Still, we departed theater to return to Japan thinking it was over – we’ve learned the hard way that nothing is over. Now let’s get back to JIEDDO.

M4 had that battlefield quality like you see in the movies about Patton and MacArthur – he knew the bad guys couldn’t even put so much as a scratch upon him. We used to chuckle at how avidly he would put on his pot and body armor, and then could hardly wait to stride effortlessly and confidently into a war zone – unafraid. It was a great thing to see a supreme warrior in his element. I realized then and there that he hated DC and the BS we had to endure there even more than I did.

On our theater visit, we had a WaPo media imbed alongside us for the ride, Rick, who I later learned was a Pulitzer and Pritzker prize winning author and reporter. He was the guy standing next to Dave (later known as P4) on the cusp of Desert Storm and captured his immortal question “Tell me how this ends?” We still don’t know.

Rick got an appointment to West Point, but turned it down since he wanted to pursue a literary career, but one spent chronicling the military. Some aficionados of Ayn Rand would call him a “second hander” but I didn’t see that in his character. He just chose a different way of serving by telling the story of our brave heroes.

I style myself as a Finnish redneck since my father was a pure Finn whose parents had emigrated from the old, cold country to Massachusetts. My mother on the other hand was pure DAR, and her mother’s mother’s last name was the same as Rick’s – her ancestry went back to George Washington. Rick and I figured out that we were probably cousins, since there weren’t that many of that ilk in the country, much less us Pt. Lomas. In an ironic twist of fate, one of my distant family relatives and forbears on my mother’s side, Frank Hatton, used to own the WaPo once upon a time back before the turn of the 20thCentury, so go figure. Rick met up with us at the airport in Kuwait City, and was a great guy – smart, witty, and humble. He could be opinionated, but it was never about him. I liked him immediately.

After our first meeting with Rick, M4 called me aside and told me that he wanted to include him in all of our meetings, and asked me if I had a problem with that. I told him that since he was the head of an independent DoD organization, he had the authority to determine who was in, and who was out for all things GENSER. We agreed that if we got into anything SCI or SAP, then Rick was going to be asked to vacate the room, since we didn’t control those accesses. Rick attended all of our meetings, and M4 made sure to tell our hosts who he was and why he was included as part of our team. Some gave us dirty looks, but went along with it – fuck, he was a four-star and unafraid, after-all. Rick later went on to write an award-winning multi-part series in the WaPo called “Left-of-Boom” – you can look it up.

I don’t appear in it, so don’t think I am blowing myself. JIEDDO had been suffering a lot of bad press about being a waste of taxpayer dollars and subject to corruption and abuse by defense contractors – and it was partly deserved. One of my first charges was to get rid of that shit. But we did some great things that will never be recorded in history – things that I can never talk or write about ever. I realized around day-three of the trip that this was M4’s way of getting ahead of history and he was using our visit to do just that, with Rick as his witness. He may have been a tanker, but he was a fighter pilot at heart – he who gets to the chalkboard first after the dogfight wins. He had a touch of Navy inherited from his grandfather and caused mayhem, indeed; now, back to the narrative.

Since M4 was a four-star, even retired, CENTCOM gave us our own private C-17 to jet around theater. We staged out of Ali al Salem Airfield in Kuwait, which ironically was one of our targets on night one of Desert Storm – I did check for any trace of our BDA. On boarding the aircraft, I knew from past experience from MAC flights in the Navy that there was a great, comfortable jump seat in the C-17’s cockpit, which afforded a panoramic view, and beat the shit out of the otherwise uncomfortable paratrooper seats in the cargo hold. I asked the ground crew if it was available, and it was. Ordinarily, I would have just taken it, but as a courtesy, I told M4 about it and asked him if he wanted that seat for the ride to Afghanistan. I had only been onboard for about a month, so we didn’t really know each other that well yet. He gave me a very interesting look since he had no idea that it was an option for him, and why I was offering him a gift ride. He thought for a moment and said “I never knew about that and yes, thanks.” I think that sealed our deal.

Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan
We flew south and out of the Gulf to go around Iran, and then hugged the border heading north over Pakistan to arrive in Bagram, where we made an extreme combat descent for landing.
Afghanistan is a god-forsaken place. It’s said that it is where empires go to die – like the Brits, Soviets, and now us. From what I could see, there ain’t a there there – God knows I never want to go back. But it’s important somehow. My best memory of it was when we were flying in an SH-60 back to Bagram from scary Kabul, executing evasive counter-SAM maneuvers and popping flares over every ridgeline of a brown, featureless landscape dotted by an endless series of mud-brick compounds with their brick-firing kilns. I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of that Dodge.

But before we get back to the fun, here’s a literary hold-short; we should examine why Afghanistan might be important. Let’s see, it is three times the size of Iraq, with a population of 34 million, and most of them males under the age of 18 – and most of them have now grown up hating America. There still are remains of ancient cultural artifacts and places that haven’t been totally destroyed by the Taliban. It also produces something like 90% of the world’s heroin supply and was the once and probably future home of Al Quaida. Yeah, we should probably pay attention to that place, as much as we may hate that thought.

When we departed for our return flight to Kuwait, I once again asked M4 if he wanted the cat-bird seat. He acceded to me since he wanted to concentrate on his notes, so I took it. From my vantage point in the cockpit, it was a pretty interesting, high-G departure. Since we were light-loaded, the Air Force pilots pulled our Globemaster nearly vertical upon clearing the runway and soared into the wild blue yonder above the Hindu Kush – off we went. As a quasi-trained A-6 B/N, I was intent on watching the flight instruments as much as looking at the awe-inspiring terrain surrounding us. We attained a 50-degree up angle, maintaining 220kts indicated air speed in the climb out, and the altimeter was winding pretty quick. At 17,500 ft ASL, I glanced out of the cockpit and saw that we were almost nearly co-altitude with the mountain peaks – fuck.

Once leveling off at FL360, the rest of the hop was uneventful; I even got invited to sit in the right seat as co-pilot for about an hour after we banked south of Iran over the Strait of Hormuz to head back northwest over the Persian Gulf.

We recovered in Kuwait to rest up overnight for our next destination, Baghdad. There, we got to meet with P4 and O3, and I got to go to the Perfume Palace to see my former SOUTHCOM overseer and good friend L2 who had lured a few compadres out of Miami to accompany him – a homecoming of sorts. The troop surge was coming, and they asked that we re-double our efforts as if you can work more than 15 hours per day without going insane – we did. The pace we endured in DC after we got back for a while afterwards was merciless, but we were in DC, and got to go home every night. Baghdad was excruciatingly hot, something like 135 degrees in the shade and dangerous as all get-out, so who were we to deny those engaged in combat our utmost when back at home? To this day, I still marvel at how our troops endured and still endure it. That’s why they deserve our best efforts, respect, and why we should continue applying all of the lessons learned from M4 on how to employ cutting edge technology to enact all of the mayhem we can to hammer down on the heads of bad guys who desperately deserve it. Bang Bang – you’re fucking dead.

I was crushed when I found out M4 was leaving – I came to work for him, not the Army or DoD per se. In his characteristic low-key fashion, he eschewed any big departing extravaganza, but did agree to a small, quiet award ceremony at the Pentagon in the SECDEF’s offices – I was one of the few invitees.

Senator John Warner, R. VA

While M4 was the honored guest, the real star of the show was John Warner, former SECNAV, five-term Senator, and sixth husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor – that’s a pretty impressive resumé. Before SECDEF Gates got there, Senator Warner’s charisma entered the room 10 seconds before he physically arrived, and everyone turned to the door in expectation. Even though he was nearly blind, with the aid of a human seeing-eye dog he determinedly sought out every one of us in attendance to introduce himself and shake our hands. Like his lefty-leaning politics at the time or not, he knew how to work a room – a consummate politician. The man had presence so you can see what Liz saw in him. Shortly thereafter, Bob Gates was able to disengage himself from whatever crisis-of-the-day he was dealing with, and entered the conference room to execute the short award ceremony. He started out by thanking everyone there, and then turned to the Senator – I will never forget his simple words:
“Senator Warner, we are honored by your presence and your dedication to taking care of our troops, as you always have.” Wow.

The ceremony was brief, and M4 departed. I did get to see him a few times after that, but not recently. That man changed my life. Mayhem – I’m still dealing with it.
I remain your faithful servant.
_____
Copyright 2019 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com

[1]After 9/11, the Navy created a think-tank group called Deep Blue, named after the IBM computer who defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasporov – Checkmate.