Meanwhile, we’re living through the fall of Saddam Hussein, and my concerns have come true. Since nobody in Washington had seriously planned for the consequences of the fall, the military—by default—got stuck with the nation building that followed it.

On February 11, 2003, a month before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Zinni was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of post-Saddam reconstruction planning. He followed a panel of Defense and State Department officials who’d just been heavily criticized by the committee for their obvious lack of serious attention to that critical phase.

In his own testimony, Zinni recounted the lessons learned from Desert Crossing, and continued by relating from his own numerous past experiences that defeating hostile forces militarily does not necessarily mean victory. In Zinni’s view, victory only comes when the defeated people see that they have a livable future and that they have some say in it.

He first learned this lesson as a young lieutenant in Vietnam.

Chapter TWO - 12,000 MILES FROM PHILADELPHIA

Chapter TWO

12,000 MILES FROM PHILADELPHIA

TONY ZINNI NEVER FORGOT the first time somebody shot at him.

It was at the end of April, in 1967. He was a green U.S. Marine first lieutenant, barely a month in Vietnam, where he was assigned as an adviser to the elite South Vietnamese Marines, that nation’s most effective fighting force.

The advisers’ job was not to give the Vietnamese Marines tactical advice (they had more fighting experience than most Americans, and it was their country). Rather, the obligation of the advisers was to apply American air and artillery firepower when that became necessary (which was frequently), and to provide American logistics, coordination with American units, and American intelligence. The Vietnamese were weakest in these areas. The job of the advisers, in other words, was to make the Vietnamese system work.

As the most junior adviser, Zinni was not assigned to one unit, the usual practice, but sent wherever he was needed. In his words, he was “the utility infielder.” He bounced around from unit to unit.

In his eyes, this was not at all a bad thing. He got a chance to see all kinds of different people and places, and soak up a wealth of varied experiences.

In his first advisory assignment, he’d spent a couple of weeks in the tidal swamps of the Rung Sat—“the Forest of Death”—near the Mekong Delta. Now he had been ordered to Binh Dinh Province in the northern part of the II CTZ (Corps Tactical Zone), where he was to take up duties with the Vietnamese Marines 5th Battalion, replacing an adviser returning home on emergency leave.