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American Soldier by Tommy Franks Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Fidelity The 600 pages of Tommy Franks’ autobiography, American Soldier, proceed at a brisk pace, never bogged down by distractions. While the chapters about the invasion of Iraq are the most timely and fascinating, stories from throughout Franks’ Army career are interesting to read, as are the memories of his early life. After a spoiled childhood, and failure in college, Franks found a home in the Army. While it seemed like a short term proposition, it lasted a lifetime, as has his marriage to Cathy, whom he mentions often throughout the book. This fidelity to family and to his Army career resonates throughout American Soldier. Franks strategic thoughts about the modern Army in a changed world make it quite understandable that Franks and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld got along so well. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 4, “A New Army,” pp. 128-137: It was one of those midwinter mornings in Nurnberg when the fog freezes to the cobblestones. Dawn on Monday, January 20, 1975. Yawning, I walked across the courtyard of the huge old Merrell Barracks kaserne to Regimental headquarters. A cup of hot coffee was definitely in order. Twelve hours earlier, Cathy and I had been in the Normandy Hotel in Paris, enjoying our first vacation in years. “The Colonel wants you back here by 0700 tomorrow,” LTC Charlie Zipp, the Regimental XO, had explained. “You’re taking command of the 84th Armored Engineer Company.” We had driven rainy autoroutes and snowy autobahns all night on the way back to Bavaria. So much for our vacation. I was being assigned to yet another job in the 2nd ACR. I’d commanded the Howitzer Battery and served as the 1st Squadron Operations Officer (S-3) in Bindlach, and Colonel John Hudachek, the 2nd ACR commander, had brought me down to be his assistant S-3 in Nurnberg five months earlier. I was learning a whole lot about Armor and Infantry, about maneuver warfare. And Cathy and I were enjoying a staff job without the pressure of command. I could even get home most nights to see Jacqy before she went to bed. But that was about to end. “I don’t know much about the Engineers, Sir,” I told Colonel Hudachek over a mug of coffee. “You know how to lead troops, Tom,” he said. “And that company sure as hell needs a leader.” The 84th Armored Engineer Company was the Regiment’s basket case. It was loaded with malcontents, most of them draftees finishing their service. “They’re about as close to a mob in uniform as I’ve seen,” Colonel Hudachek said. He had relieved the company commander and called me in to take his place. I took command at a breakfast ceremony in the company mess hail, and then walked into the orderly room. When I entered, the company clerk hardly glanced up from his Penthouse. “Get me the platoon leaders and the First Sergeant,” I ordered. “I’m your new commander.” There must have been something in my tone that got him motivated. “Yes, Sir.” He dropped the magazine and grabbed the phone. “Right away, Sir.” What followed was a long, tiring day, spent talking individually with a parade of junior officers, platoon sergeants, and other senior NCOs. There were several potential leaders among them, but they were tentative and dispirited—uncertain of their authority. The Company had already been cut to about 70 percent strength through the Expeditious Discharge program—an administration elimination procedure—and courts martial. “The ones we’ve got left just don’t give a shit, Sir,” the First Sergeant said, adding that many of the remaining troops had been restricted to the post as punishment for disciplinary infractions. “We’ll work on that, First Sergeant,” I said. It was late when I left the office. Instead of driving home, I decided to tour the Company’s corner of the kaserne. My last stop was the notorious fourth floor. The corridor’s linoleum was filthy. There was obscene graffiti on the walls. I could smell hashish. A tall, husky private in dirty fatigues walked toward me with a sour expression on his face. “Fuck you,” he said as he passed. I could not believe what I’d heard. I spun around to see who he was talking to. There was nobody else in the hallway. I suddenly pictured all those young troopers who had lost their lives serving, doing their duty in Vietnam. This malcontent punk did not deserve to wear the same uniform. I lost it. “Hey, you,” I said. The soldier turned around to face me. I grabbed his shoulders and slammed him against the wall, staring into his eyes. He stood there as if in shock as I walked away. Colonel Hudachek was still in his office, wrapping up the day’s paperwork, when I knocked on the door. “Tom,” he said. “How did the first day go?” “I have to report that I just struck a soldier, Sir.” The Colonel nodded somberly. I sighed. Ten years in the Army, and it had come to this. Officers do not strike soldiers. I’d be lucky if the court martial resulted in an honorable discharge. In any event, my future in the military was over. “What happened?” I explained. Colonel Hudachek frowned. “Captain. You cannot lay hands on a trooper.” “Yes, Sir.” He pointed. “Go stand in the corner.” I went to the corner of Colonel Hudachek’s office and stared at him. “You don’t understand, Captain. Stand in the corner. Face the wall.” I turned and faced the wall. Less than a minute passed. “Go home, Tom. Get some sleep. I want you with your company early tomorrow. You’ve got a lot of work to do with those soldiers.” Standing in the corner—exceptional punishment for exceptional times. As I left the kaserne, I thought of Eric Antila among the ruined buildings along the Kinh Doi Canal. Loyalty still ran up—and down— the Army’s chain of command. The next day, I set about rebuilding this orphan unit. The troops standing in formation that morning were a sorry-looking bunch. Long hair; stained, dirty fatigues; unshined boots. Many hadn’t bothered to shave—for several days, from the look of them. Staff Sergeant Kittle would have blown a gasket. “First Sergeant,” I asked as we walked the ranks. “You see anything abnormal?” “Yes, Sir. They look like shit. But that’s not abnormal for these guys. I spotted a man in the front rank with a decent haircut, clean-shaven, spotless fatigues, and polished boots. I thought of Sam Long. When the honor guard looked especially sharp at a ceremony, he got Scag to write us a pass. I remembered Lee Alley sending his best soldiers to Saigon for long weekends. “Looking good, trooper,” I told the squared-away soldier. “Take the week off.” “Sir?” the kid asked. “You’ve got a week’s pass. Go skiing down in Garmish. Just sack out. Whatever you want.” The next day, there were three more soldiers with clean uniforms and polished boots. “You’re looking like soldiers,” I said. “Take a week off.” It wasn’t exactly a silver bullet, but the approach had a slow, steady effect. I realized I was going to need both carrots and sticks— and the sticks would be just as important as the carrots. After four courts martial, the smell of hashish disappeared from the fourth floor of the kaserne; the number of troopers restricted to post dropped to zero. But I knew getting these men to look and act like soldiers was only part of my task as a leader. They also had jobs to do. Engineers are the Army’s heavy-lifters; an armored engineer company does its job under fire, salvaging damaged tanks, knocking down roadblocks, bulldozing enemy bunkers and trenches. One of the Company’s basic tools was the Combat Engineer Vehicle (CEV), basically an M-60 tank with a wide, armored bulldozer blade in front, a retractable hydraulic boom crane, and a short-barreled 165 mm turret cannon for breaching obstacles. The Company had two of these vehicles—but neither of them had run in more than two years. I spent a lot of time with the mechanics. And I went through the Company, finding soldiers who were good with their hands. We had a little competition: The first team to get a CEV fully operable would get a three-day pass. It was a virtual tie, I gave the whole company a long weekend. To reinforce the positive momentum, I worked with the Regimental headquarters and the German police to arrange a convoy for the Company right through downtown Nurnberg to the Feucht Training Area. The freshly painted CEVs led the column. The troops looked sharp. When German school kids on the sidewalks clapped and cheered, these American soldiers grinned with pride. We were back in business. By December 1975 I was on my fourth assignment in the Regiment, once more as a captain holding down a major’s job in the Operations shop—an artilleryman responsible for tank gunnery training. One snowy night, I took a few hours off and left a local training range to go home and change into dry fatigues and boots. Jacqy was in her pajamas, curled up under a quilt on the couch. I’d promised to be back early that day. Cathy had waited till Jacqy’s bedtime, then had gone ahead and decorated the Christmas tree without me. Juggling a ham sandwich and a mug of coffee, I pulled on my wet field jacket and headed for the apartment door. “I’ll be back tomorrow early, promise.” Cathy peered out the blinds at the wet snow swirling down past the streetlights. “What a beautiful evening for a field exercise,” she said, then kissed me goodnight. “God help me,” I said, mimicking George C. Scott as George Patton. “I do love it so.” It was a shared joke. But as I brushed the slush off the Jeep windshield, I recognized the underlying truth of those words. I did love being a soldier, helping to build a new Army out of the ashes of Vietnam. It had been almost five years since I’d earned my bachelor’s degree. On January 1, my official service obligation would be over. But the thought of being a civilian was uncomfortable. “Let’s wait and see what happens,” I had suggested to Cathy when we’d talked about it earlier that week. Cathy had agreed. “We’ll just see what happens.” Those words would become yet another shared joke. Six and a half years later, my boots were deep in the springtime mud of another West German training range. I was a lieutenant colonel, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 78th Field Artillery, a self-propelled 155 mm howitzer unit of the 1st Armored Division. Our kaserne was in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, but we spent much of the year out on field exercises. After leaving the 2nd ACR in 1976, I’d attended the Armed Forces Staff College—a graduate school for professional officers— and served in the Pentagon. My assignments in “the Building” had given me a real education in Army and Washington politics. As a major serving in the office of the Army Inspector General as an “investigator,” I’d learned that even senior officers weren’t immune to moral turpitude and corruption. I’d investigated one general who’d get drunk every afternoon on Officers’ Club gin, then order MPs to salute his dog. Another had a clever kickback scheme worked out with a corrupt defense contractor, and had hidden a fortune in offshore bank accounts. Then there was the general who chose secretaries based on their looks rather than their office skills. For a young major, this was interesting work: It was in this job that I learned to recognize that hopeless look in a guilty man’s eyes when he realizes he’s been caught. After eighteen months as an inspector general, I’d worked for Army Chiefs of Staff General Bernie Rogers and General Shy Meyer, helping prepare them for congressional testimony. I’d discovered that some members of Congress, confronted with a choice between the nation’s interests and those of their constituents—when it came to a pork-barrel weapons contract, for example, or beefing up a base back in the district—were all too eager to vote for the folks back home. Tommy Franks matured as a bureaucrat during those four years. The idealism of youth was augmented by the pragmatism of politics. By the time I returned to West Germany in 1981, I was glad to get back to the troops. Commanding a battalion is one of the most demanding, but most rewarding, jobs in the Army. And I was fortunate to have the 2-78 for three years instead of the usual two. My 565 troops had proven to me that the all-volunteer Army was a success. Drug use in the ranks was no longer a problem; a service-wide program of random testing identified the dopers, who were quickly discharged. Open hostility between the races had disappeared, as black and Hispanic sergeants and officers took their rightful places in the service. In this critical area, the Army was leading the evolution of American society. The troops recognized once again that wearing a military uniform was something they could take pride in. If they were led well, these soldiers would spend nights and weekends in the field on dangerous live-fire exercises, in any weather, eating cold C-rations and snatching sleep under dripping ponchos when they could, performing up to exacting standards. Just as the quality of the troops had improved, our battlefield technology was now dramatically superior to the weapons and equipment I had mastered as a young officer. The Division’s M-60 tanks had been “stabilized” to fire while rolling over rough terrain, and we were beginning to field night-vision sights. Within two years, several American armored divisions would be equipped with the new M-1 Abrams main battle tank, a quantum leap over anything in the Soviet inventory. Not only could the Abrams fire while jolting across broken ground; its thermal sight and computerized fire control could accurately track enemy armor day or night, in any weather, at long range. Wire-guided TOW anti-tank missiles were now standard weapons, mounted on Jeeps, APCs, and helicopters. And the Artillery was about to introduce the revolutionary 155mm Copperhead projectile, which followed a laser beam to a target ten miles away. Computers were showing up all over the Army. My battalion was equipped with the Field Artillery Digital Analog Computer (FADAC), a green fiberglass footlocker with a keyboard atop its case. With its blinking colored lights and beeping, it looked like one of the friendly robots in sci-fi movies; we called it “Freddy FADAC.” The device revolutionized the way firing solutions were determined for the artillery: When the Fire Direction Center typed in target coordinates, the computer spat out the required tube elevations and azimuths for the guns. No more paper firing tables or charts and darts. I enjoyed showing off the system to my Armor and Infantry friends, who still thought of the Artillery as an old-fashioned branch. With the hunger for tinkering and innovation I’d inherited from my father, I set out to put Freddy FADAC to the best possible use in maneuver warfare. My savvy Command Sergeant Major, Don Mann, and my new operations officer, Captain Michael Hayes, did some scrounging in motor pools all across Germany and found a spare maintenance truck. We stripped the boxy interior of its workbenches and tool chests, and built a mobile Tactical Operations Center (TOC) around the computer. Naturally we called the vehicle the TOC-ATOY, after the chunky Tonka Toy moving vans so dear to the children in our housing area. With the TOC-A-TOY, the battalion could move much more quickly than had been possible just a year earlier. More than ever, I was fascinated by the combination of speed and firepower. American military doctrine was evolving; in its latest incarnation, it was developing a rapid, nontraditional response to the prospect of a Soviet-led invasion of West Germany. In this “Air Land” battle, American forces would abandon fixed defensive positions and strike the enemy’s flanks, and then, supported by attack helicopters and air power, penetrate to the rear and attack enemy command and control centers and supply lines. Colonel Wayne Downing, my infantry brigade commander, had years of service in the Special Forces and Rangers; together we spent long hours discussing the battlefields of the future. He convinced me that small teams of highly skilled Special Operations Forces, inserted deep behind enemy lines, would play an important role. Reading military journals late at night in my command track, I pictured those battlefields: seemingly chaotic, they would actually be tightly focused, and devastatingly effective. I wanted a place in this new Army. The Division’s senior officers thought highly of my battalion, but that was no guarantee I’d be promoted to full colonel and offered a chance at brigade command. The structure of fighting units was changing. Missiles and the new precision-guided munitions would soon augment cannon artillery. And there was a glut of majors and lieutenant colonels remaining from the Vietnam buildup. The “up-or-out” rule applied: Most lieutenant colonels would retire after serving twenty years. Cathy and I had another of our familiar discussions about the future. “We’ll have to . . .“ I began. “. . . wait and see,” she said, finishing my thought. Attending a Senior Service College was the key to advancement. Like many of my peers, I had my eye on the Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Gettysburg. A board had selected next year’s attendees, but the list of those chosen was a closely guarded secret until the official roster was announced by the Pentagon. The spring of 1984 was a time of anticipation and uncertainty for the Franks family. Did we or didn’t we have a future in the Army? “. . . wait and see.” Then one afternoon during a driving rainstorm, as the Battalion was training in Grafenwöhr, Major General Tom Healy, the Division commander, skidded up in his Jeep and came into the TOC-A-TOY for a briefing. I offered him coffee and some of Cathy’s fudge-iced brownies, then described the training we were conducting. General Healy seemed pleased. He grinned as he climbed back into his Jeep to leave. “Great brownies, Tom. Be sure Cathy brings the recipe to Carlisle.” I’d been selected for the War College. I smiled, even as I almost wept. It looked like the Franks family was about to make the Army a career. This second tour in Germany had often kept me away from home, and once again Cathy managed our family life. Jacqy had started competitive swimming at age seven when we lived in Fairfax, Virginia, and had continued to excel in the sport with a local German swim team. She also became fluent in the language while attending a German girls’ school for two years. I went to her swim meets and school activities when I could, but Cathy had done the heavy lifting for the past three years. Despite the fact that her father died during this time, she had given herself to Army families and had served as president of the Bamberg wives club. When we left the Battalion, she received an award from the VII Corps Commander for her service. I could not have been more proud. Any autobiography flatters the subject, recalling the best stories, and skipping over others. American Soldier stands tall for presenting a mix of stories in an engaging manner. An interesting addition comes in the form of several poems Franks wrote over the years. While he’ll never become our poet laureate, that aspect of a modern general made the autobiography all the more engaging. Steve Hopkins, September 25, 2004
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