“I need you to do whatever the customer wants,” I said.
There were some stunned looks in the seats at this. Indeed, the veterans’ reaction was similar to my own when I had initially bristled at the term “customer” twenty years earlier. It had been in 1985, through the headsets of a helicopter being flown by a veteran Night Stalker named Steel. Being called a customer put me off. It felt too much like business, too transactional—not how warriors should think of their comrades. I soon came to see that the Night Stalkers’ constant use of the term was a skillful way of reminding themselves that they existed to support and enable the forces—the customers—whom they flew. The culture that formed around this word was one of the Night Stalkers’ great strengths.
In the end, I think they got my point. I sensed a serious curiosity about how I would command and where I would take TF 714. T. E. Lawrence, who himself wrangled and led tribes during World War I, wrote that they “could be swung on an idea as on a cord: for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements.” These strong-willed, opinionated operators were far from servants, but they shared a fundamental quality with Lawrence’s tribes: If there were a worthy mission—an idea they could come to believe in—they committed to it unlike anything I had yet seen in my military career.
Indeed, in time I came to see that the older faces of these Green operators and the SEALs were leathery but not grizzled. They were not hardened, cynical soldiers for pay who floated from one battlefield to the next, without regard for the cause for which they employed their skills. In fact, they were often more outwardly patriotic than many other soldiers I’d served with, quick to hang American flags on the walls of their barracks and headquarters. Believing in our cause, and in their leaders, was critically important to them.
After I answered questions, our meeting ended, and I left the conference room and walked down the long, sunlit hallway to the front of the compound. Spaced along one wall were glass-encased displays a couple feet deep and a few feet wide. Each documented one of the unit’s significant operations or missions. Dusty guns, equipment, maps, and photos rested behind blurbs about each accomplishment.
In the years ahead, they would have reason to install more displays.
* * *
Before arriving at my new command, I’d communicated to the TF 714 staff that as soon as practical I wanted to take a trip to the region where our forces were operating, a theater that included Iraq and Afghanistan and stretched from the Mediterranean to the end of the porous Durand Line. We programmed about ten days for the trip. Several key leaders accompanied me, including my J2, or intelligence officer, Colonel Brian Keller, a former Ranger whom I’d known and trusted for years. Brian was soon to move on from TF 714 to another command in a few months, and would eventually be promoted to brigadier general, so I wanted to leverage his experience and expertise before I lost him.
The other half of the key J2-J3 dynamic was my operations officer, Colonel T.T. He and I had worked together as Ranger captains in the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1987–89. I had recognized his talent, but we were both intensely focused young officers, maybe a bit too much alike, and our relationship was initially strained. As we both advanced in rank and experience, so too did my appreciation for T.T.’s qualities—his amazing vision, unwavering loyalty, and personal courage—and we developed a deep friendship. T.T. subsequently joined Green, but in 1995 he agreed to return to the Rangers as my deputy at the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Now, eight years later, I was again benefiting from his experience and unshakable values.
The TF 714 senior enlisted adviser was Command Sergeant Major C. W. Thompson, a laconic former rodeo rider turned soldier, and a trusted friend. My aide-de-camp was air force major Dave Tabor, a young, humorously sarcastic, but veteran MH-53 helicopter pilot who’d flown initial operations in Afghanistan in 2001. Also on the trip was the deputy commander of Green, then–Lieutenant Colonel Austin “Scott” Miller. Bennet, Scott’s boss, had wisely dispatched him with me on this first trip both to keep an eye on me and to begin shaping my perceptions of his unit. Scott did the latter superbly and would become a key figure in the years ahead.