No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.
Marine intelligence has hacked into the email account of the Iraqi general in command of forces near the border. Mattis emailed the general, urging him to surrender, but the Iraqis continue to fire artillery intermittently and ineffectively toward I MEF positions.
Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
He wasn’t ready to discuss operational details at this time. Instead, he began his Marines’ mental preparation for this new type of warfare. As he often said, “The most important territory on the battlefield is the six inches between your ears.” His first directive was “Be able to deploy without chaos on eight days’ notice.”
Let these be the objects of your ordinary meditation: to consider what manner of men both in soul and body we ought to be, whenever death shall surprise us: the shortness of our mortal life: the immense vastness of the time that has been before, and will be after us: the frailty of every worldly material object: all these things to consider, and see clearly in themselves, all disguise being removed and taken away. Again, consider the causes of all things: the proper ends and references of all actions: what pain is in itself; what pleasure, what death: what fame or honour…
“You worrry too much about enemy resistance and thay may be your lack of battle experience,” he says. Mattis speaks from his own experience as a battalion commander in Operation Desert Storm. He knows very well about the horrible decision faced by every combat commander — whether to risk your men’s lives or risk the success of the mission.
Other classmates, like Lloyd Campbell, recalled a self-assured young man ready to stand up to bullies: “I was bullied a lot, but this was one of the guys who respected me for who I was and what my character was.” Jim Mattis was already living the model of his Western heroes, the sheriffs in white cowboy hats who stood up for truth, protected the weak, and never backed down from a fight. His small size and slender build didn’t seem to matter.
Even though the intensity of close combat is over for the moment, Mattis’ predator reflexes are still engaged, and the chatter in his head won’t stop. To quiet his mind, he may have again summoned his therapist and closest adviser, General Marcus Aurelius. Writing his meditations from the distant past, Aurelius advises the general frequently about what is outside of his control, even as a general: “What is the present state of my understanding? For here lies all indeed. As for all other things, they are outside the compass of my own will; and if outside the compass of my will, then they are as dead things to me, and as it were, mere smoke.”
But we were out to win the trust of the Iraqi people. We knew we were an American foreign force, largely Christian force, and we occupied, for example, two of the holy cities of the Shia. What we did not want to do was find ourselves in a position of creating a conflict. So I sent about 15,000 of my 23,000 men home. I got rid of all my tanks and armored personnel carriers. Marines went on dismounted patrols. We had wave tactics, waving to the people, assuming we were there as friends. Eventually that expectation paid off.
When soldiers walk into a city, and they’re foreign soldiers, the first thing people are going to look at is all that gear and the weapons hanging off them. Generally the second place people look is into people’s eyes, to see if they can trust them. So Marines removed their sunglasses and we tried to build the trust one act at a time.
Nearby, the first watch commander of the Eleventh Marines artillery battalion scans his radar and sees it has picked up the flight paths of the rockets. The radar feeds this rocket flight data into a computer that calculates the flight paths backward to the location of the rocket launchers. Within seconds, the rocket launchers and Iraqi soldiers manning them exploded into fragments under the barrage of Marine artillery.
- What do you see as the skill set and temperament that are really important for a Marine?
- Under its rather Prussian exterior, we expect people who are very curious. They have got to have a curiosity about life that will carry them beyond any kind of institutional learning.
And then there’s another aspect, whether you call it spiritual or emotional or psychological, where you actually see your attitude as a weapon when you go into tough times, that transmits down through your ranks. So it’s combination of the mental, the physical and the spiritual or as Confucius would put it, body, mind and spirit.
Pentagon war planners who expect to turn over control of Baghdad to Iraqis in sixty days are dreaming. “War is a human endeavor. It’s a social problem and we have to have rather modest expectations… no war is over until the enemy says it is. We may think it’s over, we may declare it over but in fact the enemy gets a vote.”
I’m going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for the next 10,000 years.
All new guys walk point, at the front of the patrol, because the old guys with only a short time left on their tours figure they have used up all their luck. New guys haven’t used up their luck yet, so they walk point, up front.
For a month, President Carter’s State Department attempts to negotiate with the young revolutionaries. As any student of Thucydides such as Mattis would know, this is a modern repetition of the Melian Dialogue, and destined for failure.
The Melian Dialogue was between the nearly defenseless Greek island people of Melos and the overwhelmingly powerful military emissaries of Athens who tried to appeal to the Melians’ pragmatism. Instead of fighting a costly war they were certain to lose, they suggested that the Melians should simply surrender under reasonable terms and agree to pay tribute to the Athens. The Melians appealed to the Athenians’ sense of decency: they had done nothing to Athens, asked nothing of Athens, and so felt the gods were on their side. Neither side was able to sway the other, and the negotiations failed. Today the Melian Dialogue and its inevitable result is often called political realism. It demonstrates the foolishness of using decency or fairness as a concept in political negotiation, and that selfish, pragmatic concerns drive wars. Knowing that if they did not attack, they would be seen as weak and invite an attack on themselves from rival Sparta, the Athenians attacked Melos. They killed every man on the island and took every woman into slavery. The Melian culture disappeared from the world.
My philosophy of command has several basic assumptions. First, all Marines want to do the job. Second, mission accomplishment in the Marine Corps requires the combined efforts of all hands. Last, I assume that all Marines can be trusted. While there may be individuals in my command who do not live up to my assumptions, the tone of my command group will be in step with my assumptions. Marines who fail to live up to my expectations will be dealt with directly, and on an individual basis, but the character of my command will not be affected by those who fail.
They both work fast and like things lean and efficient. Bloated staffs, gone. Extra paperwork, gone. Long meetings, gone. Rumsfeld gets into the office early and works at a stand-up desk, handwriting notes at a furious pace, often late into the night. He attacks the Pentagon bloat, cutting over a hundred thousand civilian staff jobs and saving the department hundreds of millions of dollars a year. He is aggressive, combative, and unapologetic.
But even with overwhelming US advantages, there will be a price. Black has been told that al-Qaeda does not surrender or negotiate. The great martyred Northern Alliance leader Massoud once told him, “We’ve been fighting these guys for years and I’ve never captured one of these bastards.” The reason is that any time al-Qaeda is overrun, they bunch together and detonate a hand grenade, killing themselves.
This was real leadership. No one would have questioned Mattis if he’d slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.
General Mattis asked the men if they had any complaints. “Just one, sir. We haven’t been north to kill anything yet.” Mattis patted him on the shoulder. I had learned that he was old school, that he valued raw aggression more than any other quality in his troops. “You will, young man. You will. The first time these bastards run into US Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives.”
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun. For all the “Fourth Generation of War” intellectuals running around saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new etc., I must respectfully say, “Not really.” Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, not just reading — the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort our what works and reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession.
After his lightning-fast sweep across southern Iraq earlier in the year, a friend asked him how he was able to conceive of the First Marine Division’s multiple maneuvers against Baghdad. He replied, “I visualized the battlefield.” He made everyone else visualize the battlefield as well by creating a topographical map to scale and having commanders walk through the campaign with him as he narrated each maneuver.
Abizaid makes one more attempt to buy the Marines time by appealing directly to President Bush. Bush says he appreciates the caution, but then orders the attack. Abizaid and Sanchez acknowledge the order and reaffirm tha there will be a lot of collateral damage — in both infrastructure and civilian casualties. Bush repiles, “Yes, we understand. We know it’s going to be ugly, but we are committed.”
He is the product of three decades of schooling and practice in the art of war. No one on active duty knows more about the subject. He is an infantryman, a close-combat Marine. He is one of those few who willingly practices the art of what social scientists term “intimate killing.”
Loudspeakers begin to blast young Fallujian fighters with the filthiest insults that Marines can imagine, which are then interpreted and screamed at the insurgents by Iraqi interpreters. This is followed by heavy metal music from AC/DC and Metallica to further infuriate the fighters and drown out the evening call to prayers. This psyops assault has some success in coaxing infuriated fighters to leave their positions or betray their location by firing at the noise. In both cases, these infuriated young fighters are next to die in the assault.
When he walks into the meeting with the local sheiks, a half hour late and with his men’s blood on the pants of his uniform, Mattis is in no mood for games. Mattis cuts out the small talk, looks each sheik in the eye, and with barely restrained emotion says some version of his now famous threat, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”
Today, I haven’t the words to capture what is in my heart as I look out at these beautiful grunts who represent thousands of cocky, selfless, macho young troops of our infantry division.
May God be with you, my fine young Marines, as you head out once again into the heat of the Iraqi sun, into the still of the dark night to close with the enemy. Beside you, I’d do it all again. Semper Fidelis.