In the years ahead, Graeme and I would go on to two more wars together, and I never forgot the poem, or the Post-it.
I doubt our operations had much direct effect on Iraqi Scud operations. But in the end, Israel never intervened.
* * *
The war concluded on February 28, 1991, and I spent two more years in the task force learning the ins and outs of the special operations world. But it was the leadership of three commanders that I remember most. Where Gary Luck had demonstrated empathy by sitting on a rainy parade ground with a battalion of Rangers, and Wayne Downing had shown courage by accepting the frightening burden of responsibility for a small unit being hunted by the enemy, Major General Bill Garrison taught me trust.
In the spring of 1993, in the last months of my initial tour of duty at the task force, I worked for weeks on a long, detailed, real-world contingency plan for relief of a threatened U.S. position in Latin America. Garrison, a laconic Texan famous for once describing a dark evening as being “as black as my ex-wife’s heart,” was required to brief the U.S. Southern Command four-star. I was to prebrief Garrison and then accompany him.
When I entered Garrison’s office, one I would later occupy for almost five years, he invited me to sit in front of a coffee table. Onto it I promptly opened the large three-ring binder containing the plan and prepared to brief him. Instead of nodding for me to begin, Garrison, an unlit cigar in his mouth, leaned back and put his boots on the edge of the table.
“Stan, is it good?” he said, referring to the plan. I said I thought it was, leaning forward again to brief him on it.
“If you think it’s good, I don’t need a brief; I trust you. Let’s talk about something else before we have to go to the airplane,” Garrison said, obviously more focused on developing me than on perfecting a plan.
If he’d taken the brief and changed something, or even just scrutinized the details, it would have become his. Instead, it was mine. His willingness to trust was more powerful than anything else he could have said or done. I spent that conversation, the flight, and the time before the meeting hoping I wouldn’t let Bill Garrison down.
| CHAPTER 5 |
Preparation
May 1993–June 2000
Soldiers die on sunny days as well as gray and rainy ones: Such was the tragic lesson one pleasant spring morning in 1994. On Wednesday, March 23, after a ten-mile run on the grounds of Fort Bragg with Steve Cuffee, my command sergeant major, I headed to a quarterly training brief. The brief was conducted every ninety days in the 82nd Airborne Division. In it, a brigade commander and his subordinate battalion commanders would review recent and forthcoming training with the assistant division commander for operations (ADC-O). At thirty-nine, I was a paratroop commander, and my unit—2nd battalion, the 504th parachute infantry regiment, known as the White Devils—had just finished a challenging but successful rotation at the Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. After ten months in command of a battalion I loved, life was good.
I’d been lucky. Hoping to command in the 82nd Airborne, I had ended up in the same brigade I’d started in as a new lieutenant in 1977. I had returned to “the Division” the previous May with some trepidation. I’d been away from it for fifteen years. I knew that much had changed and that the proud unit could be insular. But I joined an organization that was well led and far healthier than the post-Vietnam 82nd I’d experienced fresh from West Point. My brigade commander, Colonel John Abizaid, had forged a close team of commanders yet led with a light touch. While he was my boss, he was also a friend.
When I had taken over ten months earlier, in May 1993, the White Devils were already a tight unit, and from the start I made teamwork a priority. In the 24th Mech, I’d learned to use technical skills like marksmanship to build confidence, expertise, and a sense of unwavering standards in our noncommissioned officers. We did the same with machine gunnery in 2/504. Likewise, the Rangers had taught me the power of shared physical challenges, so foot marching again became central to forging unit spirit. The paratroopers responded remarkably to my emphasis on cohesion. It would, that March morning, prove essential.