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1
THE SUMMONS
Janice Williams, the youngest, brightest, and hardest-working secretary in our office, was calling me over the loudspeaker. “Major Lee! Mrs. Brown is on line three. She says it’s very, very important.” That cryptic sentence, and the phone call that followed, altered the course of my military career, my personal life, and my view of my personal worth as a man and as a Marine. It also changed the lives of many who were drawn into the chain of events it foreshadowed. The call was important because Mrs. Brown was General Nickerson’s secretary at Marine Corps headquarters, and anything the general might have to say to me would surely matter greatly.
“Herman the German” was beloved by those who performed honorably and professionally, feared by petty-minded half-steppers and tea-sippers who were unable to meet his standards. He was a hard, yet fair, officer who clearly had the power to influence our lives. No thinking Marine would ignore anything that he might say.
Arrival at a point in my life where General Nickerson might call me was the result of a convoluted set of circumstances. Planning never entered into it. Assignment in early 1960 to a dismal tour as guard officer in the California desert at a Marine barracks placed me in close proximity to some of the best scientific minds ever assembled to address military problems. The Marines in that barracks provided security at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, where the Navy undertook to meld science with operational know-how. When I agreed one day to a request that I look at some scientific ideas and comment on them from an operational viewpoint, a surprising thing happened. I was stolen from the daily grind of guard duty and assigned to a top-secret organization with a most enigmatic name—Weapons Planning Group, Code 121.
This interesting assignment would never have been possible if both of the officers senior to me in the Marine barracks had not been Marine tankers instead of infantrymen. I was an infantry officer, and the brains behind Weapons Planning Group needed a mud Marine, someone they could send out in the dark and the rain, into someone else’s country, to find out the answer to questions posed by the big bosses above them. They opened technology’s door to me, asked that I do some analytical work, and carefully examined my responses. Shortly after that, I was dropped from the muster roll at the Marine barracks, and my records for the next few years did not, in any way, accurately reflect either my whereabouts or my activities.
In 1965, after four years of seeing things from the supposed big picture level, I was fortunate enough to return to the Marine Corps to an operational Fleet Marine Force assignment in the 7th Marine Regiment. Assigned to duty in the 2d Battalion of the regiment, known as 2/7 in the shorthand of the day, I found myself taking part in a full-scale pre-deployment workup for movement of the battalion to duty in Okinawa as part of the unit-for-unit exchange known in the early 1960s as transplacement. The workup at Camp Pendleton included long days in the field and long hours on the weapons ranges. All of the training served to resharpen my infantry skills in the world of regular forces.
In the spring of 1965, 2/7 took part in a huge amphibious operation, and the rumors flew through the command that we would not land at Camp Pendleton but would steam west, instead, to Vietnam. We did not take part in a surprise deployment then, but the exercise was followed by the not-unexpected deployment, in May, of our Regimental Landing Team, RLT-7, to the Republic of Vietnam. RLT-7 sailed from San Diego with 8,008 Marines and attached naval personnel. For many standing at the rails of the gray amphibious transport ships it was their last look at the United States forever.
I learned how to be an effective combat commander from Lt. Col. Leon Utter, who led 2/7 through the long months of combat with great dignity and a devotion to teaching his subordinates everything he had learned in thirty years of service. Successful service in combat with Utter’s battalion added greatly to my already strong sense of self-confidence. The only drawback was that, in the view of many, my confidence level and my naturally aggressive nature made me a rather difficult person to deal with.
As an infantry officer, known in Marine Corps parlance as an 03, command of a rifle company, which consists of six officers and about two hundred fighting men, is a highly valued assignment. I commanded Company E—one of the four letter-designated rifle companies in infantry battalion 2/7—during combat operations for part of 1965 and took command of Company F in March 1966 during a major engagement with the NVA.
Combat command at the company level was an extremely rare opportunity for my particular age group, as we were very senior captains in 1965, and few from my year group got a combat assignment in Vietnam until after they had been promoted to major in the fall of 1966. I had, by good fortune and the blind chance of timing, been able to serve in those two combat commands, with a short interval as a battalion operations officer in the middle of my tour. This provided me with a great deal more hands-on experience and was a surefire winner when it came to bragging rights at the club bar. (My contemporaries from our year group were, in 1966, of similar age and experience but they reached the promotion zone for major before being sent to the war and served their tours in the Republic of Vietnam, in the main, as staff officers.)
Getting to be the recon guy at the Landing Force Development Center, beginning in August 1966, was not easy. I was not specially selected, nor did my orders to the Quantico complex tab me for anything in particular. I was simply to report for duty. Receiving those orders was a great disappointment, one that dashed hope of an assignment to what we called in the 1960s Junior School, a course for the professional education of captains and majors. Since school was not in my future, I was expecting the worst. It came to pass immediately.
Taking my records and orders in to the headquarters building two days early, I spoke with the adjutant, Maj. Gene Bratt, an outstanding officer I had known in Hawaii in 1957/58 while I served in the 2d Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, which was, prior to the Vietnam War, the ground element of the 1st Marine Brigade. Major Bratt had extremely bad news for me. He examined his desk and avoided making eye contact as he said, “A. Lee, you won’t like your assignment, but you are the first 03 captain to come in without a tag on him and I have been ordered to take the first 03 I can find and assign him as commanding officer, Casual Company.”
While the words commanding officer sound acceptable to the uninitiated, any professional knows that a casual company is a dumping ground, serving mainly as a holding tank for those who are heading out of the Marine Corps—either by their own choice or as the result of courts-martial. Appealing to Major Bratt on the basis of effective personnel assignment, I pressed my luck and quite forcefully pointed out that I had recently—it had been only twenty-six days since I was last under fire—had combat experience. I suggested an assignment to The Basic School, where second lieutenants are prepared for duty in the Fleet Marine Force.
Major Bratt laughed and told me that I was “too senior,” and that a number of officers from my year group, albeit none who had been to Vietnam, were already teaching at that school. The crowning blow was leveled on me when the major admitted that the next job open was athletic officer for the base. Not being in any mood either to counsel short-timers leaving the Corps or count jocks in the gymnasium, I took my papers and orders and left Major Bratt’s office. I decided to use up the last two days of my leave seeking employment.
Quantico is a huge facility that offers many challenging assignments for officers of any rank. What I needed was a real job for a brand-new major, which the promotion board said I was going to be in a matter of three or four weeks. Behind me I had four years of classified work, much of it devoted to the application of modern technology to military requirements, so I felt qualified to hunt for a home in the Landing Force Development Center.
I went to visit that center and sought an appointment with the chief of the Ground Combat Division. That gentleman turned out to be Col. Milton Hull, a Navy Cross recipient for his heroism in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir. More important, I had known him in Hawaii with the 1st Marine Brigade in 1958. He greeted me cordially and asked how he could help. I laid out my tale of woe and asked if he could find me a place in his outfit. Colonel Hull was a big, imposingly strong, and bulky man, and he began to roar with laughter at the thought of my being in charge of the brig-rats and short-timers in Casual Company.
Once he had settled down he told me that he had slots for more than twenty officers, only eleven of which were filled. He asked if I had any reconnaissance experience, and I outlined briefly the diverse assignments I had survived during my time with the Weapons Planning Group. That real-world operational experience—combined with the fact that I had attended the Army’s Ranger course and Special Forces School, the Marine Corps Amphibious Reconnaissance School, the Navy’s Test Parachute School, a portion of the British SAS training, and several classified courses of instruction provided by civilian agencies of the government—gave me a strong case.
After considering the matter for a few minutes, Colonel Hull decided to offer me the reconnaissance desk in the intelligence branch. It was a great feeling; I was going to get a real job. I was going to be the development center’s recon guy.
