I went to my stateroom, showered, and collapsed in my rack. When I woke the next morning, the ship was gently rocking. We were on our way to Kenya. The fifth and final phase, redeployment, was under way. Remarkably, we had suffered no casualties in this operation. The exhaustive planning had paid off. I was proud of all my forces.

We docked in Mombasa on the sixth of March; and I flew off with my staff back to Camp Pendleton.

Two weeks later, Secretary of Defense William Perry spoke at an awards ceremony at the Pentagon. “We live in an imperfect world and we can never make it perfect,” he said, “but we can attain moments of perfection. Operation United Shield was such a moment.”

LEAVING SOMALIA was an emotional moment. We left a lot of sacrifices and dashed hopes on that beach . . . but learned significant lessons from the Somalia experience. I am convinced it could have been better had we run this complex undertaking with more skill and thoughtfulness.

CHAPTER SIX - CENTCOM

CHAPTER SIX

CENTCOM

IN AUGUST 1996, the new commandant of the Marine Corps, General Chuck Krulak, nominated Tony Zinni as deputy commander in chief (DCINC) of U.S. Central Command,70 located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

Leaving command of I MEF was hard, yet Zinni welcomed the opportunity to continue to serve. At the higher levels of the military hierarchy, it’s either move to a new position or retire. CENTCOM was in fact a particularly welcome assignment. . . . “It’s where the action is,” he thought. “It’s operationally oriented; and I’m already familiar with the command from my Somalia experiences and I MEF,” which was assigned to CENTCOM as a responding unit when required. He quickly supplemented his initial store of knowledge by plowing through more than fifty books on the history and culture of the region.

When Zinni arrived at CENTCOM headquarters early in September, he did not find a happy place. The command had just suffered the worst terrorist attack on U.S. facilities since the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. A suicide truck bomb had killed nearly twenty Americans at Khobar Towers, an Air Force barracks in eastern Saudi Arabia (CENTCOM had also suffered a bombing of one of its security assistance facilities in Riyadh). The tragedy weighed heavily on the command, cast a dark cloud over the remainder of General Binnie Peay’s tour as commander in chief of CENTCOM . . . and directly affected Zinni as DCINC when General Peay tasked him to oversee the implementation of the hundred-plus recommendations put forward by a fact-finding commission chaired by retired Army General Wayne Downing. It was clear that the terrorist threat was growing ever more dangerous and that force protection was becoming a dominant theme for America’s military leaders.