The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (3 page)

If you talk to my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m cut from the same cloth.

My military biography starts badly. I was a miserable dropout in my freshman year of college (1.2 GPA), enlisted in a delayed-entry Marine Corps program, went to work as a lifeguard at a local beach, and then came the first of several miracles: an Army ROTC scholarship. Little did I know that my rebellious activities, such as skipping class and sundry other mistakes, would lead me to playing basketball (which I was very good at) with an ROTC instructor who saw something in me. Not only that, he took surprising initiative.

He came to my father’s house in early August of 1978 and offered to get me a three-year scholarship if I would batten down and get better grades. And, he worked out something with the USMC to keep me from going to boot camp (to this day I don’t know how he managed that one). He clearly took a risk and it clearly paid off. I wish I knew where he was today.

After completing college, I entered the Army as an intelligence officer in the field of signals intelligence and electronic warfare. Why this field and not the infantry? My professor of military science (Lieutenant Colonel O’Grady), a Special Forces officer with Vietnam experience and lots of time at a place called Fort Bragg (a place where I would spend half my career), sat me down one day and said, I know you’d do well in the combat arms, but intelligence is where you need to go. Specifically, he pointed me to this relatively new field of electronic warfare that was emerging with advanced technologies in the early 1980s. I gave it a shot on my military branch assignment requests and got in. From being a college dropout to receiving this news, I felt pretty happy that I had achieved something I would never have imagined.

My first assignment after my initial intelligence training programs—at Army bases such as Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and then attending Ranger training—was the 82nd Airborne Division (America’s Guard of Honor). There, I held a variety of assignments, but the most important and longest was as a platoon leader. During those formative years, I had deployments to Panama, Honduras, and other parts of Central America. In those days the United States was fighting the Sandinistas and engaging the Somozans and all manner of other insurgents in Central and South America. The Soviet Union and its allies were still our nation’s main enemy and the proxy wars raged all around us.

One of those proxy wars was being played out on a tiny island called Grenada, the Isle of Spice. Although I had already done operational deployments to Panama and Honduras, along the Nicaragua border, Grenada would be my first combat deployment and combat experience. I deployed as platoon leader in support of 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne for operations against the Cubans who had occupied and taken over large parts of Grenada. These same forces along with the rebel militia on the island were threatening our regional neighborhood, as well as threatening a large contingent of U.S. students attending medical school on the island.

While there are differing versions of this first combat deployment, what happened was as follows:

I was 1st Platoon leader, Alpha Company, 313th Military Intelligence Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. 1st Platoon was a Signals Intelligence Collection and Electronic Warfare Jamming platoon. For that time, it was a pretty sophisticated outfit.

The 82nd had been mobilized to go into Grenada and our intelligence battalion was part of that mobilization.

We were herding all sorts of cats during the early, very chaotic days of this operation (Operation Urgent Fury), pushing members of the battalion out through the “Green Ramp” at Pope Air Force Base in support of the division’s deployment to Grenada. Once there, we had a few tasks: oust the Cubans, help the government of the now assassinated Maurice Bishop, push Communist influence out of the Caribbean, and save the American medical students who were being held against their will.

Many of those in my Collection and Jamming platoon were exceptional Spanish-speaking electronic warfare/signals collection analysts and linguists; many were from Puerto Rico, some from Los Angeles and a couple from New York City. All were tough paratroopers who you did not want fighting against you—these young men (including myself) were well trained and always ready for a fight. That was the 82nd Airborne way and still is.

We were well prepared for any such missions, but Grenada came as a surprise, like most conflicts and wars. Although Grenada had a substantial Cuban military presence, it was better known as a vacation spot with one of the most beautiful beaches in the world—but once things started to heat up, we were besieged with calls for support. Within a few hours, members from my platoon were ordered to deploy. To be blunt, there was a lot of chaos across the division, and that certainly existed at our battalion headquarters. Our command group, under Lieutenant Colonel Tom O’Connell (universally known as “OC” and a great leader), had already deployed. He took a few men forward as a command and control element to support the division’s Tactical Command Post positioned off the airfield on Grenada.

As I was being asked to deploy members of my platoon, I went to my company commander and asked for permission to deploy the remainder of my platoon, believing we could support not only current operations but any follow-on deployments that might be necessary. The reporting coming back from Grenada was a bit disjointed and the situation was confused (to be kind). And it didn’t sound like things were going well.

My commander approved and at that stage I returned to the remainder of my platoon, who were all ready to go. We then arranged transportation down to Green Ramp and proceeded to get ourselves manifested on the next tranche of forces deploying into Grenada. This all happened in about a day and we finally got on an aircraft late night/early morning and arrived in Grenada at approximately first light. When we arrived, we grabbed up all of our equipment (we brought extra SIGINT and other special collection equipment) and moved to the hill overlooking the airfield where our battalion HQ was located and where I would find Lieutenant Colonel O’Connell.

He clearly wasn’t aware that we would be arriving, but did immediately direct us to position our Low Level Voice Intercept (LLVI) teams on key locations around the airfield and he also directed our telecommunication intercept team to head into the city and position ourselves in the phone company, tap into the phone network, and see what we could learn. By late afternoon I, and my senior Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC), had moved to the phone company in downtown St. George’s. We tapped into the telecommunications network on the island and started listening for Cuban communications to those trying to escape and from those on the island trying to communicate what was happening. It was a very confusing time, but looking back this was an imaginative use of paratroopers and we were able to provide some intelligence to the division and 2nd Brigade about some Cubans trying to leave the island from a coastal location. I learned later that the Navy was able to interdict a boat that was to be used to conduct the escape.

After the positioning of this element in the city, we did some rummaging around a couple of the locations that had seen fighting, and looked through some of the documents and photos that were literally strewn around the inside of these buildings and villas. We didn’t find anything of real value, but it taught me how much we lost when we disregarded the kind of information that could be discovered in some of the documents, had we thought to capture them and organize them in some fashion to be of at least tactical value.

After a period of four to five days, I went back to the airfield and checked on my other Signals Intelligence Collection teams. I then positioned myself with one of my teams at the western end of the airfield—a superb location offering line of sight into the city, and along the southern and western part of the island. We could, in essence, electronically “see” and “hear” any communications.

While at this location, which was positioned along a high cliff, I was told there were men in trouble out at sea just off the coastline. I went to the cliff and saw two soldiers, who had taken a raft off the beach for a swim, but the strong currents pulled them out to sea and they were starting to panic. It was about 1700 and we had only a few hours of daylight left.

I grew up as a lifeguard and competitive swimmer from the time I could remember, and had surfed my whole life. While I always respected the ocean, I had experienced strong currents in some of the hurricanes I surfed in. Also, I had done some cliff diving as well as jumping off of a couple of pretty high bridges. One time, in my wayward days as a young radical, a Rhode Island state trooper came down to the bottom of the bridge I had just leapt from. As I swam in to shore, the trooper told me that a driver passing by said someone had just jumped off the bridge, thinking I was committing suicide. No wonder: that bridge was pretty high—probably above seventy-five feet. The trooper told me to knock it off and go home. I did, but on that day in Grenada it turned out to be a useful skill.

Meanwhile, I saw that the two soldiers were in serious trouble and one was clearly not a good swimmer, so I told my team leader to get word to the battalion that I was going to help them, and to summon additional help.

I jumped off the cliff—about a forty-foot jump into the swirling waters off the southern tip of the airfield—and swam to the two soldiers. I told them to hold on to the raft, which was deflated and no longer providing the necessary flotation to support them.

I told them I would bring each of them to the side of the cliff and place them on a ledge that we could see from the water. I decided to take one at a time and started with the weaker swimmer first. I swam each about fifty meters to the base of the cliff and, using the tide and the waves breaking up on the cliffs, pushed them to a place where they could sit and wait for more help.

There was no way that either of these guys could have made it back to shore on their own; they didn’t have the swimming capability, both were very tired, and the currents were powerfully churning around the back side of the island.

I had managed to get both of them on a ledge where they were out of the water and able to get themselves composed. I stayed in the water the whole time and treaded water until more help came, while darkness was closing in.

At about sunset, a helicopter arrived to rescue the three of us. Appropriately enough, both of the soldiers were from the helicopter unit that pulled all of us out of that spot.

Since I was in the water, I was pulled up first, then the incredibly brave pararescue crewman went back down two more times to pull up the other two soldiers. This process took about thirty minutes. Once we were all on board safely, they took us over to the airfield and we then went into a medical tent and were tended to.

I had a couple of black sea urchin needles taken out of my feet, was given some vinegar to reduce the pain, bandaged them up, put my boots back on, walked over to the two soldiers I had just helped pull out of the ocean, and asked if they were okay. They both thanked me and I then headed back down to my LLVI team’s position at the end of the airfield. I arrived there about 22/2300 hours; it had been a long day.

OC showed up early the next morning and asked me to walk him through what had happened (he apparently tracked it on one of the division’s nets). Good to know our guys were keeping track of us!

We continued to operate for the next few days until, as quickly as the division was deployed, and in a far more orderly fashion, we flew home.

My entire time on the island lasted about a month. The operation itself was a mess, but demonstrated how badly our military needed to get better at joint operations.

I learned a lot:

•
  How little intelligence was paid attention to during this type of operation;

•
  If you’re going to do this sort of operation, you either have to be overwhelming or stay home;

•
  Joint operations are very messy. We even had our own command and control problems within the 82nd Airborne, one of our best;

•
  Soldiers will rely on themselves and their leaders if they trust them. We were fortunate to have strong trust within our platoon.

I also learned to try to be patient and understanding with my colleagues. It’s not so easy, but whenever I’m tempted to come down hard on someone who seems to have screwed up, I take a deep breath and think back to Lieutenant Colonel O’Connell in 1983. When I heard from OC about how my deployment was reported to him (that I had just jumped on the plane with no orders to do so), he could have relieved me on the spot. Blessedly, he looked again, and saw something he liked.

Had it not been for his patience and vision and extraordinary leadership under some difficult pressure, I’d probably be renting surfboards at Second Beach in Middletown, Rhode Island. He is where I get the quote I use routinely when I counsel young people. “A leader is responsible for helping others see something in themselves and then helping them maximize their potential.” He did that in spades for me.

That said, and lest you get the impression that he’s a softie, I received many a tongue-lashing from OC, and it was invariably as tough as anything I got at home. Maybe it’s something about Rhode Islanders—is there an independence and toughness in the people that come from that state?

As most stories do, the Grenada story grew legs over time. Some said that I violated orders; I never did. That I jumped on an airplane to go to war; I did. That if it wasn’t for the rescue of the paratroopers, I might have been court-martialed; I doubt it.… Believe me, an ass-chewing from O’Connell was worse than any court-martial, and he gave me many. However, our platoon performed well on Grenada. We were there for only a few weeks, and the Cubans weren’t that effective at anything.

Overall, the mythology of the Flynn Deployment to Grenada would live with me for my entire career, but when I look back it was what you would expect and want of a young platoon leader. Not only were the results successful, but the experience showed me that it’s vital to give your mid- and junior-level officers and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) plenty of running room. They are the keys to winning modern war, as was later proven in Iraq and Afghanistan.