Boyd, by the sheer force of his personality, might have kept the reform movement alive. But he chose not to do so. Congressmen
and senators had other issues. The media were losing interest. Mike Wyly and Jim Burton were casualties. Spinney was a marked
man who probably would never again be promoted. Sprey was gone; tired of going home angry every day. For years he had dabbled
with amateur music recording; now he decided to open a recording studio.
In the summer of 1987, Boyd finished two new briefings. “Organic Design for Command and Control” was completed in May. Historically,
briefings about command and control dealt with the “how”—that is, who reports to whom between various levels of command in
fast-moving tactical situations. Boyd’s new briefing dealt with the “what” of command and control—the implicit connections
and bonds that form the foundation for the proper messages between levels of command. This was the first time that the
substance
of what was communicated took precedence over the hardwired connections of the past.
“The Strategic Game of? And?” Boyd finished in June. Here he deals with the themes of interaction and isolation. How do we
physically, mentally, and morally isolate our adversaries while still interacting with others and with unfolding events? Much
of the content of this briefing is a recycling of material from “Patterns of Conflict,” “Destruction and Creation,” and “Organic
Design for Command and Control.”
At the same time, Boyd was working on another briefing called “Conceptual Spiral,” a work that elaborated upon “Destruction
and
Creation” and thus more or less brought his work back to where it had begun.
Boyd often had counseled Spinney to have goals but to make sure the goals could not easily be reached. He talked of the desolation
a man faced when he grew older and all his goals were realized. And now Boyd’s work had come full circle. He had reached all
his goals.
About this time Jeff Ethell, a well-known aviation writer, wanted to write Boyd’s biography. But Boyd could never find the
time and Ethell gave up on the idea.
Then began an alarming series of incidents involving Boyd’s health. One day he was delivering a briefing at Andrews AFB when
suddenly he could not breathe. His chest felt as if it was about to burst and he broke into a cold sweat. He stopped the briefing,
sat in a chair for an hour or so, then drove home. About 3:00
A
.
M
. Mary called Mary Ellen and said, “I think your father has had a heart attack. He needs to go to the hospital. He won’t listen
to me. He will listen to you.”
“Put him on the phone,” Mary Ellen said.
“Dad, I’m taking you to the hospital. Where do you want to go?”
Boyd mumbled vaguely that he did not need to go to the hospital, then said he would go to Andrews. He did not think Mary Ellen
would want to drive into Alexandria, pick him up, and then drive out to Andrews. “Be ready,” she said.
She and her dad arrived at Andrews before dawn. A doctor administered an EKG and found only a slight anomaly of no clinical
significance. He said Boyd’s heart was strong. Nevertheless, Boyd believed he had a heart attack. Overnight he changed his
diet and stopped eating red meat.
Then he suffered a case of tinnitus, a loud ringing in the ears that is not uncommon in men of a certain age. Boyd must have
suffered a severe case because he told Burton, “It won’t quit. This buzzing is driving me crazy.” He could not sleep. Medication
did not help. He took powerful drugs that only brought on depression. Then he went to a psychiatrist who changed his medication
several times, each time bringing even worse depression. Boyd decided the medications were aggravating his problem and, against
his doctor’s advice, stopped taking drugs. Both the depression and the tinnitus disappeared.
But months later a terrible depression, this one not caused by drugs, settled over Boyd. One day he was in Spinney’s office
when suddenly he started trembling. His eyes welled with tears. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small vial, and quickly
swallowed several pills.
“John, what is the matter?” Spinney said. He had never seen Boyd in such a state.
Boyd’s voice shook and he seemed about to break into tears as he confided that at times a black-dog night descended upon him
and enveloped him in such pain and foreboding that he could not cope.
When he told Christie he was depressed, Christie said, “About what?” Boyd could only shake his head in bewilderment. He did
not know what he was worrying about or what he was depressed about. But it was real and it frightened him as nothing ever
had.
About this time Christie’s world turned upside down. His daughter reached puberty and ran away from home. Soon she was shuttling
in and out of institutions. Christie used up all the benefits of his insurance plan but there was no relief in sight. His
rank was the highest a nonappointed civilian could reach, but still he could not afford his daughter’s increasing medical
bills. He resigned his Pentagon job and went to work at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a think tank that works for the
secretary of defense. By now Boyd rarely showed up at the Pentagon. But when he did, he spent most of his time talking to
Christie about Christie’s daughter. In fact, sometimes it seemed that was the only reason he came to work. Christie was puzzled
by Boyd’s interest. What Christie did not know was that by now Boyd was wondering if one of his own daughters, Kathy, should
be institutionalized because of her severe depression. She would never be able to make her way in the world alone. And Boyd
must have wondered if his family’s history of mental disorders had fallen upon Kathy.
In late 1988, Boyd began looking for another place to live. He looked at apartments around northern Virginia but found nothing
he liked. Then he drove to south Florida, met his brother Gerry, and picked out an apartment in Delray Beach, a community
about halfway between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. The apartment had two bedrooms, one for Boyd and Mary and a second for
Kathy. Boyd returned to Washington and announced he was moving to
Florida the first of the year. His friends were astonished and wanted to know the reason.
The gist of his answer was that he was doing this for Mary. Ever since Eglin she had loved Florida. Mary had endured a lot
from him, and now he was finally doing something for her.
As usual, in matters involving his family and personal affairs, Boyd did not reveal the whole truth. He had lived in the basement
apartment on Beauregard Street for twenty-three years. Neighbors complained often about the Boyd family, first about Jeff’s
snakes, which escaped from time to time, then about Stephen’s TV repair work being done in the apartment. Boyd thought all
that was behind him, as both Jeff and Stephen had moved out. But Scott, now thirty, was in college and still lived at home.
He developed a fascination for motorcycles—loud motorcycles—and he roared in and out of the complex with the blatting of the
mufflers echoing off the buildings. Rather than park in the lot as tenants were required to do, he parked his motorcycle on
the patio behind the apartment. Sometimes he even drove it inside the apartment. Eventually management had enough of the Boyd
family. The official reason for asking them to move out was that after twenty-three years the apartment needed renovation.
But Boyd knew the real reason.
B
OYD
sat in the cramped living room of his third-floor apartment in Delray Beach. The television was on. Any news story about
the Pentagon or generals or weapons programs caused him to erupt with “Take him out” or “Cut his head off.”
Boyd was surrounded by hundreds of books and copies of his briefings and the scattered yellow legal pages of revisions for
“Patterns.” He frequently retired to the bedroom, sprawled across the bed, and called Sprad and Catton and Christie and Sprey
and Leopold and Spinney and Burton and Wyly. The apartment had two phone lines, one for Boyd and one for Kathy, but Boyd gave
both numbers to his friends. He did not want to be on his line and miss a call.
On this day, Boyd called Pierre Sprey and with an almost ironic tone said, “Tiger, the pace of life down here is different.
About all these people can handle is one project a day, like going to the supermarket.” He told Sprey how he traveled to Montgomery,
Alabama, where he lectured at the Air War College, and how he delivered his briefings all around the country. But he always
had to come back to Florida, where he said he was “rotting.” Sprey laughed and did not place too much significance on Boyd’s
comments.
The truth is that Boyd was miserable in Florida, and only Mary knew just how much. Six months after they moved to Delray Beach,
Boyd told Mary he had been forgotten—that people thought he was crazy and that his work was insignificant.
When he was not delivering his briefing or talking on the phone, his days were spent prowling through bookstores, searching
the nonfiction shelves for the growing list of books that mentioned him or his work. He leaned against a bookcase for hours
as he read a book, then returned it to the shelf. Near the beach he found a restaurant he liked, Bimini Bob’s, and he went
there one or two days a week to eat conch chowder. No more Wednesday nights, no more prowling through the Pentagon. Boyd could
sense himself deflating.
In early 1989, a group of Boyd’s old comrades began talking about his ideas on maneuver conflict and how those ideas might
presage a new form of war. They sat down and wrote a piece saying the first generation of war was the era of muskets and massed
troops, the second was when massed firepower replaced massed troops, and the third was time driven, as exemplified by the
blitzkrieg. And then they wrote of something new, something they called “fourth-generation warfare.”
Marine Corps Colonel G. I. Wilson was one of the five authors. During his research he talked almost daily with Boyd about
using strength against weakness, about how an enemy might use a low-technology or even no-technology offense to defeat a high-tech
adversary, and how an enemy might win without a major battle. The piece was titled “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth
Generation” and was published in the October 1989 issue of both the Marine Corps
Gazette
and the Army’s
Military Review
. It may have been the only instance in military history in which two service publications ran the same article at the same
time.
The article said fourth-generation warfare might emerge from “Islamic traditions” and that the “distinction between war and
peace will be blurred to the vanishing point.” It talked of terrorists moving freely within American society “while actively
seeking to subvert it.”
The piece was so futuristic, so against the grain of military thinking, that the Pentagon ignored it. But it elicited great
interest and caused much debate with the Marine Corps and the Army’s special-operations community.
Chet Reichert, Boyd’s boyhood friend from Erie, spent the winters in Delray Beach and Boyd took him to various bookstores,
where he pulled out book after book and opened them to the proper page and pointed with a triumphant finger at references
praising his work. And he told Reichert about other books being written, books that would be published in a year or so, one
of which would be dedicated to him. Reichert remembers that he and his wife occasionally invited Boyd and Mary out for dinner
and that Reichert always paid. Boyd never reciprocated and never invited the Reicherts to his apartment. Reichert did not
know how little money Boyd had in retirement, and since Boyd still lectured and gave his briefings around the country, Reichert
assumed he was being paid well. But Boyd accepted only expenses, and when the expense checks arrived, he tossed them into
a drawer and forgot about them. After he died, his children found a stack of several thousand dollars’ worth of uncashed checks.
Boyd looked ahead and saw little about the twilight of his life that pleased him.
Then, on August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Less than a week later, American troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield.
Now began a phase of Boyd’s life that for years was only whispered about.
Until Dick Cheney later spoke of that period, all the evidence was anecdotal and pieced together after the fact. The anecdotes
pointed inexorably toward the idea that Boyd played a crucial role in the top-secret planning of what would become America’s
strategy for prosecuting the Gulf War.
Several weeks after Desert Shield began, Boyd suddenly was flying back and forth to Washington. He told Mary he had been summoned
by then–Secretary of Defense Cheney. While in Washington, Boyd called none of the Acolytes, none of the men he spent hours
every week talking to on the telephone—none, that is, save Jim Burton. When Burton asked, “What are you doing in town?” all
Boyd said was, “I’m here to see Cheney.” Burton waited but Boyd added nothing. Burton understood. He knew enough about classified
operations and the “need to know” that he did not press for details. But he could put things together. The SecDef was working
eighteen-hour days directing
the buildup of Desert Shield and planning the coming war. He did not have a lot of free time. The only thing Boyd and Cheney
had in common was “Patterns” and their numerous talks about war-fighting strategy. Therefore, Burton reasoned, if Cheney had
summoned Boyd to Washington, the only possible reason was to talk about waging war.
Still another bit of anecdotal evidence involved Spinney. After the Iraqi invasion, he drew upon his encyclopedic knowledge
of military tactics and spent weeks working on invasion plans, determining what he would do if he were in charge. When Spinney
finished he was so excited that he called Boyd. Once he told Boyd what he wanted to talk about, Boyd grew strangely silent.
Spinney hardly noticed at the time. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “And there are only two options.” Still Boyd
did not respond. Spinney told Boyd of his first plan, which drew only a noncommital grunt. Then Spinney told him of his second
idea, which he thought was best: have the Marines feint an amphibious assault at Kuwait and then, while the attention of the
Iraqi Army was diverted, make a gigantic left hook far into the desert, then swing north, envelop the Iraqi Army, and annihilate
them. “It’s a classic single envelopment,” he said. “Almost a version of the von Schlieffen Plan.”