Authors: Steven Pressfield
The press crucified Mattoon first. Then the Marines on the ground. Then Salter. Of all the written pieces, A.D.’s was the most
even-handed in its tone and balance. It at least gave Salter credit for good intentions and articulated the moral dilemma he found himself in. But her piece was the one with the widest circulation, being published by the London mega-zine
Topix
, whose high-def version featured—and hyped sensationally—the raw, uncensored head-lopping video. And
Topix
was the first to use the phrase “Lord Jim” to describe Salter.
That did it.
The line was too good.
A.D.’s editors at
Topix
rewrote her original, scrupulously factual draft, tarted it up with unsourced allegations, rumor, and sensationalized hearsay; threw in a four-page spread of photoshopped atrocity pix; and capped it off for the magazine cover with a photo of Salter wearing his tribal
inguro
sash, which made him look like a gone-native megalomaniac out of Joseph Conrad. In the press, Salter was already the “Crawling Man” hero from Yemen, a Marine’s Marine, the kind of old-school, Chesty Puller–style jarhead that the media lionizes when he’s riding high and attacks like a pack of hyenas the instant he stumbles.
Now the Chinese entered the picture. Zamibia has oil. The Ninth Expeditionary Army was in East Africa for one reason only. It massed along “the Broomstick,” the demilitarized corridor. The pretext for invasion was humanitarian: U.S. Marines had run amok. The Chinese brought up tactical nuke artillery that could not only annihilate our land forces but also take out the support vessels at sea. Was there a connection to the crisis in Taiwan? I’ll leave that to the
Wiki Washington Post
. Bottom line: the People’s Republic had Uncle Sam down, and they were about to carve a steak out of his ass.
Salter’s response was aggressive and audacious. He struck cross-border by night with two reinforced rifle companies, seizing a high ground called the “Mons Orientale,” which compelled the
Chinese to withdraw. He ordered up his own tactical nukes. (They never actually got ashore, but the ordering was enough.)
A Chinese Jin-class nuclear submarine was reported on its way, to augment the two Song class boats already within missile-launch range. President Cole was compelled to respond. He ordered the
Abraham Lincoln
with its battle group back from the Strait of Malacca. This was at the peak of the crisis in that theater. We watched on our handhelds. Marines were Sharpie-ing “WWIII or Bust” on their helmet covers.
Salter didn’t back off for a second. Nor was he shy about inserting himself into it personally. He appeared via satellite on
Beltway Overnight
and, next week, on
Face the Nation—
both times without clearing it with higher. When the White House furiously ordered him to cease, he obeyed but he continued to blog and tweet. The public saw him on HoloTube, tramping frontier CPs in a flak jacket with no helmet, quoting Livy, Thucydides, and Hobbes as he pointed across the border at the Chinese forward positions in the Broomstick, explaining what would happen to the helpless citizens of Zamibia when “those bastards” crossed the line. His Marines loved it. Amazingly, so did vast segments of the American electorate. Pete Petrocelli told me later that his in-box crashed from the volume of traffic—favorable, nine to one—which included contribution offers totaling well into eight figures and public support from the loftiest spheres of government and commerce.
President Cole ordered Salter to withdraw all troops from forward positions, to disarm all tactical nuclear warheads, and to redeploy out of range of the Chinese all systems capable of delivering such ordnance.
Salter refused.
By this time, anchor-level news crews had arrived from Trump/CNN, WSJ/CBS, SkyNet, and al-Jazeera. Salter called the teams together, along with A.D., Ariel Caplan of Agence France-Presse, and
John Milnes of Fox/BBC who were already in-country. What he did then was not as crazy as it was later portrayed to be.
I have this account from Rob Salter, who was present front and center. The occasion was a walk-and-talk near one of the forward observation posts along the border. Salter was responding to questions about why he had refused to stand down his nukes. He answered that he was prepared to do so (in fact, orders were already in the pipeline), but first he wished to speak with the president, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; VTC—video teleconferencing—was slated to take place in two hours.
Salter felt certain, he told the reporters, that he could convince his superiors of the inadvisability of their directive. The United States was not vulnerable, Salter declared. It was the Chinese who had overplayed their hand. With one strike he, Gen. Salter, could topple, not only the Asian despots’ decades-long effort to control African oil, but he could “make their whole house of cards collapse.” Taiwan could be saved—and that was only the beginning.
“Isn’t such strategizing, General, a few levels above your pay grade?”
This question came from Ariel Caplan, A.D.’s friend, who was at that time the most widely watched TV journalist in Europe. Salter responded by asking the news producers if their networks would be interested in carrying him live to “address the nation.” As I said, Rob was there. He heard this. He swears his father’s tone was joking.
Perhaps this was lost in translation. Maybe the story was just too juicy to let pass. Whatever the cause, two hours later, that remark—in garbled video, shot from behind Salter so the expression on his face was not visible—was leading every news broadcast on the planet, and Salter was being portrayed as MacArthur in Korea, Caesar in Gaul, and Alcibiades in Sparta.
President Cole fired him and called him home.
Salter was pilloried in absentia while Task Force 68 was still in East Africa. We watched on our handhelds. The experience was surreal. As Salter on television was being portrayed as Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now
, Salter in real life was standing tall like Martin Luther King at Selma.
He had been relieved of command. Technically he was under arrest. Nobody in Zamibia gave a damn. To the working folk of Princeville and the provinces, Salter was the nation’s savior. The people begged him to stay. Candlelight vigils ringed his CP. The natives knew that Salter and his Marines were the only forces holding back chaos, the next tribal bloodbath, not to mention a Chinese invasion.
The task force’s orders were to embark for home. UN peacekeepers from Burundi and Zaire would take our place.
We were to leave the country to its fate.
Adm. Spence returned and took over. He instructed the commanders of both MEUs to pull out their onshore elements in darkness. He didn’t want a spectacle. The Marines refused. I had never seen anything like it. “Mechanical breakdowns” occurred; communications crashed; schedules fell behind. The troops were supposed to be transported to the harbor by 7-ton MTVR trucks. Instead they marched on foot. The hour of departure was slated for predawn; instead the march-out kicked off at eleven in the morning. The entire city lined the parade route. The Marines marched out by platoons. Women swamped them, weeping. The mamas couldn’t understand why we had to go. They knew Salter had been disgraced but they couldn’t figure out why.
Task Force 68 was not sent directly home. Taiwan was still too hot. We were sent to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, then to Jakarta and finally Osaka, Japan.
Salter had been flown home, first to Camp Lejeune, along with Col. Mattoon, to face an in-service inquiry. We got updates every
day from Pete Petrocelli—Jack Stettenpohl and me, and of course Rob. Orders came for the three of us. Jack’s remaining term of enlistment was only three months; he was given a speeded-up honorable discharge and enrolled, like all officers following their service on active duty, in the Active Reserve. Rob was granted the assignment he had been campaigning for for six months: command of a TacOps section—three twelve-man teams—in Paktia Province, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The billet came with a promotion to major. I was returned to Quantico as an instructor at TBS, The Basic School. The story of the massacre of the Brown Bombers was all over the Marine Corps by then, but the unspoken code of Loose Lips Sink Ships kept all jaws locked. If the press ever got wind of that debacle, the Corps’s image, already in tatters from Salter’s public firing, would suffer a blow from which it might never recover. Rob, Jack, and I parted with vows of silence sealed in blood.
By then, Salter was testifying before Congress.
In stress situations like that, my response is always to train. I was running seven miles a day and swimming two. Jack Stettenpohl was back in the D.C. area too. He was keeping as low a profile as I was, working privately for a friend from Dartmouth, another Marine, who was running for Congress. One night we met at a bar in Georgetown. Jack showed me a bunch of poll figures and other data about his friend. Then he leaned in closer. “But here’s the really interesting part.”
Jack riffed through a sheaf of documents. Sometimes in surveys, he said, the pollsters will throw in what they call “rogue questions.” These have nothing to do with the issue under investigation; they’re inserted just to see if the respondent is paying attention and answering honestly. The rogue question was:
If the presidential election were held today, which one of the following candidates would you vote for?
The choices, Jack showed me, were the expected ones, headed by President Murchison, the Democratic incumbent. I followed Jack’s finger down the columns. “Now,” he said, “look at the write-ins.”
Gen. James Salter 23.7%
“The figure for write-ins typically doubles in an election when the candidate’s name is actually on the ballot—meaning when voters don’t have to go to the trouble of thinking, remembering, and actually writing it in.”
“In other words …”
Jack indicated Murchison’s figure of 26.4 percent and that of Senator Dodd, his Republican challenger, at 29.4 percent. “In other words, our ex-boss is roughly twice as popular as the president of the United States.”
Jack ordered another round.
“But the significance of these figures,” he said, “goes way beyond Salter. It’s the American people and their state of rage and fear. Our fellow citizens are pretty fucking pissed off. Think about it, Gent. A maverick jarhead who has just risked nuclear Armageddon—and Mom and Pop in Peoria are standing by, unprompted, to make him Man of the Year. This is some shit, bro!”
The spectacle of Salter’s congressional testimony set new records for television and Web viewership. The general had never cultivated political partisans or put himself forward for office, yet thousands of placard-wielding supporters demonstrated on his behalf outside Congress, with adherents including two senators and half a dozen congressmen urging that he be taken seriously as a candidate for president.
Salter was the kind of warrior-statesman, Senator Groomes of Montana declared, that this country had once possessed in Patton and MacArthur—and whose fearless leadership it desperately needed
right now. Salter’s partisans revered him because he wasn’t afraid to speak the truth or to kick our enemies in the ass. Salter would have nuked Tehran after 11/11, or Islamabad or both, they believed (I didn’t share their opinion)—and that was all right with them.
Against these campaigners marched equally rabid prosecutors who declared Salter the updated counterpart of the Burt Lancaster character in
Seven Days in May
and who swore that hip-shooting buckaroos like him were the reason the world had come to fear and despise the United States in the first place.
There was never any doubt, legally speaking, that Salter in East Africa had ignored protocols, violated rules of engagement, and disobeyed direct orders.
On the stand he would not back down. “If you’re asking me to recant, Senator,” he told Avery Drummond of Colorado, “you and this committee can go straight to hell.”
The story consumed the air, the Web, and the satfeeds for weeks. Salter was depicted by his admirers as a twenty-first-century Caesar, dwarfing his contemporaries. His enemies called him “a wannabe Caligula” and “Napoleon in a Crackerjack box.” Throughout this fortnight of folly (Ariel Caplan’s phrase), Salter refused to pander or apologize. The online
New York Post
ran a cartoon of him crucified with spikes made of his own quotes: “I was obeying a more ancient law” and “Name the price and I’ll pay it.”
His most notorious quote, which was replayed endlessly on TV and the Web and handhelds everywhere, was his call for universal service. A draft.
“If you don’t want men like me taking affairs into our own hands, then step up and put this country’s youth in harm’s way—not 1 percent as the case stands now, but 100 percent. No exceptions. Blind. Paraplegic. Everybody. Does the nation have vital overseas interests? Then, godammit, defend them! When you do, I’ll shut up and you’ll never hear from me again.”
Before the Senate committee Salter asked rhetorically how many infantry lieutenants and captains from Ivy League schools were currently serving in the Marine Corps. “Seven,” he said. “We should have seventy. We should have seven hundred.”
How many sons and daughters of congressmen are serving now in combat billets? “Four—and three of those are from one family. I call that a national disgrace. Don’t stick me and my warriors alone on an island, then pillory us for acting like warriors.”
The usual hawks and red-staters rallied to Salter’s cause. But those in shades of pink found something to like too. Even along the Hudson, Trotskyite Westsiders were lining up behind the general.
John Milnes, in a piece for Fox/BBC, wrote this:
What has been lost amidst the histrionics of this Beltway lynching is the fact that General Salter’s actions in East Africa, while they may have been unorthodox, even brutal, when judged by the parlor-room standards of Georgetown or the East Side of Manhattan, were in fact measured, practical and above all effective. They worked. They saved lives. They brought order out of chaos. Salter demonstrated no personal agenda and no private ambitions for himself, the Marine Corps, or the United States. He was trying to help the people and, in my opinion, doing a damn outstanding job.