The Vietnam War offered opportunities for military careers. A rapidly expanding army, for example, allowed many midcareer officers to step up to command of larger units, with promotion to follow. It was a different paradigm for junior officers—the lieutenants and captains who saw the war up close and personal. Army and marine captains and first lieutenants suffered the highest mortality rates of all ranks. It was close to miraculous for a junior officer in a command position to serve two combat tours and return to the States alive and intact. One of the few who did went on to join the pantheon of America’s greatest military leaders. His success in battle and personal heroism are virtually unmatched. From his first day in combat, Barry McCaffrey, son of a general and a West Pointer, led from the front.
Barry McCaffrey grew up on army posts but wanted to be a doctor. “As a kid, I lived at West Point for three years, played youth hockey, and hung around the cadets,” he recalled. “I was in Paris as a high school junior with early admission to Johns Hopkins University. I was going to be a doctor. Then my dad said, ‘You look like you’re twelve years old. You’re not going to Johns Hopkins. You’re going to a prep school.’ I got into a very special place, the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for my senior year of high school.
“I went there as the smartest boy in the history of the world. I was a scholarship boy, which was another great thing. I worked in the dining facility many hours a week, punching a time clock,” he continued. “I’d been a straight A student. President of my junior class. A letterman. When I got to Phillips, the first thing I learned was that I wasn’t as smart as I thought. I was in over my head. They were so far beyond me, it was just unbelievable. In mathematics I was lost from day one, so they placed me in a math class of one. In the evenings I went to see the math professor at his house.
“In the middle of that year, I realized I missed the army, the military posts, and my friends. By then my friends were getting into the Naval Academy and West Point. I applied to West Point, was accepted, and never looked back.”
In April 1965, civil war broke out in the Dominican Republic. With thirty-five hundred US civilians in the country and reports of Communist Cuba backing the rebels, President Johnson ordered marines and elements of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division to intervene.
Among the paratroopers of the Eighty-Second Airborne was Lieutenant McCaffrey, West Point ’64, who earned a Bronze Star for his leadership. “We were down there maybe eight months,” he recalled. “A lot of shooting, a lot of complexity. It went from an active combat mission to a peacekeeping role.
“Then a marine regiment and the 173rd Airborne went to Vietnam,” he recalled. “When we returned from Santo Domingo, we were scared we’d miss the war in Vietnam because, with the marines and an airborne brigade there, it would be over in six months. So three or four of us lieutenants raced up to the Pentagon in a car. I spoke with a major who said, ‘Lieutenant, you’ve already got the combat infantry badge. Would you rather be a platoon leader again or a battalion commander?’”
McCaffrey said, “A battalion commander.”
The major said, “Then you want to be an advisor in the Vietnamese airborne division.”
“When I went home, my dad said, ‘You stupid bastard,’” McCaffrey recalled.
He became an advisor to the ARVN Second Parachute Infantry Battalion. “These were elite soldiers, with combat-hardened NCOs and officers. Some had fought with the French airborne in their Indochina War,” he recalled. “Our role was to coordinate US artillery, air strikes, armed helicopters, medevac, logistics, and intelligence. Most of the division was stationed in Saigon. When not in the field, we advisors lived in air-conditioned officers’ quarters. We loved Saigon and thought we were the wealthiest people in the world. We got airborne pay, combat pay, and ‘separation from US military support’ pay. We sat around Saigon drinking and screwing around until we were activated and sent primarily as brigade combat teams into combat. We took horrendous casualties. Then it was back to Saigon, bury the dead, get clean uniforms, and return to our lives as rich Americans.”
There was another side to McCaffrey’s tour with the ARVN airborne. “First Corps was the most heavily contested combat area throughout the war,” McCaffrey explained. “It was close to the demilitarized zone, so we fought North Vietnamese regulars. American units, the ARVN airborne, marines, and First Infantry Division tried to break up NVA battalions on their way south. In October 1966, we went up with two parachute infantry battalions, right on the Ben Hai River separating North and South Vietnam.
“Our two battalions landed at PK17, a marine outpost just north of Dong Ha. There was supposedly an NVA division crossing the river. We came in under fire. We pushed out from PK17 under increasing fire. We had some significant fights the first day and that night. We got right below the DMZ legal boundary and started digging in. They were ranging us with heavy artillery. Then an observation plane reported thousands of NVA soldiers crossing the river ‘with wheeled heavy machine guns.’
“We thought we were cooked. Fortunately, we had a few reinforcements and a fifteen-man navy team to direct gunfire from a cruiser,” he recalled. “They all wore fancy Australian bush hats. I grabbed the navy lieutenant in charge and said, ‘There’s a lot of enemy artillery around here. Make sure you dig deep tonight.’
“We began digging in. In the middle of the night came a series of massive artillery bombardments that went on throughout the night and much of the next day. We knew we were in trouble, so Maj. Keith Barlow, our brigade advisor, put out an emergency call. The whole system mobilized to save us. Although it was monsoon season and there were thick clouds, two B-57 Canberra bombers came down under the clouds. Both were shot down. Our medevac and armed helicopters were getting shot down, so they turned off medevac. Although we were barely in range of the marine four-deuce mortars, they did us a lot of good. Then marines started out from Dong Ha with tanks. They were stopped. By the morning of the third day, of our brigade’s 1,400 troops, maybe 350 were killed or wounded. Capt. Bill Duell, my team’s senior advisor, had been killed about two weeks earlier. The new senior battalion advisor, Capt. Brux, was mortally wounded during the night bombardment. Our senior advisor, Sgt. First Class Rudy Ortiz, was absolutely riddled by mortar fragments.
“When I crawled over to him, he said, ‘Load my M-16. I want to die fighting with the rest of you.’ I was hit twice and my left arm wasn’t working, so I couldn’t load an M-16. I took a .357 pistol from Captain Brux’s dead body. We were not going to be taken prisoner.
“I called across to coordinate with a brigade advisor, 1st Lt. Bill Bannon, a tremendously brave, taciturn, handsome guy. We were both prone and talking about what was likely to happen. He said something like, ‘We’re never going to get out of here. We’re all going to get killed.’ Which I thought was believable.
“Then my Vietnamese battalion commander, Major Nguyen, was completely incapacitated. The battalion XO came to my foxhole, sat on his helmet, put on his red beret, and said, ‘It’s time to die now.’
“He rallied the remnants of the battalion, and with bugles blowing, we attacked. Our navy cruiser, maybe it was USS Newport News, had done incredible work all night long with its eight-inch guns. Then came word they had to withdraw to get ammo. We said, ‘If you withdraw, we’re all dead.’ So they called for an emergency ammo resupply.
“Just as we started the attack, two incredibly brave pilots dropped their birds below the cloud cover at about a thousand feet, sitting ducks silhouetted against the low clouds. One was an AC-47 Spooky, which usually flies at night. It caught an entire battalion of NVA in the open just as they started their assault. The AC-47’s miniguns hosed down their assault line from one end to the other.
“The other bird was an unarmed observation plane, which adjusted our artillery fire.
“The battle went on for the remainder of the day. Then this wonderful World War II veteran, Col. Jim Bartholomews, pulled in wearing a soft hat and smoking. He walked around the perimeter and talked to us all and sorted it out. Medevacs showed up and the cloud cover lifted, and lots of US aircraft started coming in. Marine air. Navy air. Replacement advisors came in, and there was another huge battle. I was medevaced on the third day. We blunted the NVA crossing for the day, but I don’t think it had any long-term significance to the war.”
It’s a wonderful tale, but McCaffrey omits any mention of his own heroics. The following comes from his award of the Distinguished Service Cross:
At 0315 hours the camp received intense mortar fire which severely wounded McCaffrey in the shoulder. With complete disregard for his safety, he unhesitatingly ran through the intense automatic weapons and mortar fire to estimate the severity of the attack. He . . . discovered that the senior American advisor had been killed, and all but one of the company commanders were seriously wounded. After rendering aid to the casualties, McCaffrey took command and dauntlessly proceeded around the perimeter to direct the defense against . . . human wave assaults. Again he was wounded by mortar fragments, but ignored his own condition and quickly organized a counterattack which successfully repelled another . . . attack. During the remainder of the 12-hour battle, McCaffrey repeatedly exposed himself to hostile fire and directed artillery and air strikes against the insurgent forces. Through his unremitting courage and personal example, he inspired the besieged Vietnamese unit to defeat four determined attacks and inflict heavy casualties on a numerically superior hostile force. Only after assuring that all the wounded had been extracted and that a replacement advisor was with the battalion, did he permit himself to be evacuated.
McCaffrey was treated for his wounds and recovered on the USS Repose, a navy hospital ship. When he thought he was ready to fight again, he discharged himself and hitched rides to get back to Saigon. “I had heard there was a big parachute assault coming up, and I didn’t want to miss it,” he said.
But his wounds were badly infected, so McCaffrey was confined to a Saigon hospital. Weeks later he was discharged and returned to duty. Altogether, McCaffrey was awarded three Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in Vietnam.
After home leave and a promotion to captain, McCaffrey spent what he called a “glorious” year in Panama as an aide to Maj. Gen. Chet Johnson. “He treated me like his son,” McCaffrey recalled. “I was with him constantly; we went to every Latin American country. We had extensive dealings with all Latin American militaries, the CIA, the State Department—a very educational tour. My wife and I had two little kids at the time, and they loved being in Panama and we loved Panamanians.”
Then it was back to the meat grinder.
In mid-1968, McCaffrey took command of Bravo Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry. It was one of four companies in the 2/7 Cavalry and the unit that had been battered and bludgeoned at LZ Albany in 1965. He joined them at Camp Evans in I Corps.
Soon after that, the First Cavalry Division flew south to III Corps on an emergency basis to counter an expected attack out of Cambodia. “The division spread out along about 150 miles of frontier. We were the covering force with a reconnaissance-in-force mission to pick up NVA divisions as they crossed the frontier, then fall back ahead of them until we reached several other US divisions arrayed in an arc around Saigon.”
For a few months Bravo Company was two or three kilometers from the Cambodian frontier. Then, using air assault tactics, they began falling back toward Saigon. “It was a series of running engagements,” McCaffrey recalled. “Very bitter fights, heavy jungle, some scrub brush, open plains, and lots of casualties. My people got banged up or wounded, mostly from small-arms fire or grenades at very close ranges. We found logistics bases beneath triple-canopy jungle and corduroy roads made from logs twelve feet wide with woven overhead camouflage cover and giant bunkers every fifty feet. We did that for about five months until we hit the outskirts of Long Binh.
“The First Cavalry Division was an incredibly effective organization, optimized for that kind of combat. We had everything going in our favor, starting with the armed helicopters and the lift helicopters. The air force forward air controllers brought us incredible support from fighter-bombers. But the absolute key to our survival was our artillery. As a general rule, I would never be outside 105mm artillery range.”
One day his radio operator asked McCaffrey why he seemed so serene as he went on each air assault. “It’s simple,” he replied. “There’s nothing I can do about anything until we’re on the ground—so when we fly, I’m saying an endless loop of Catholic prayers from grade school.”
By this time, the 2/7 Cav was within ten kilometers of Long Binh, then the biggest military post on earth, a giant, sprawling logistics complex with a C-130 airstrip. “We were at the last line of defense,” McCaffrey recalled. “Behind us was the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment. Only one NVA battalion finally got through us and was killed almost to the last man on the outskirts of Long Binh by that regiment.”
During this second Vietnam tour, McCaffrey was awarded two Silver Stars and a second Distinguished Service Cross for valor. One of his platoon sergeants recalled seeing him being evacuated in March 1969 with serious wounds. “I had most of my left arm shot off,” McCaffrey recalled. The platoon sergeant said, “I wondered how we could get along without his leadership. It then occurred to me that he had done his job of preparing us to take care of ourselves.”
Looking back on his years in Vietnam, McCaffrey said, “The combat we saw in the Vietnamese airborne was brutal. I didn’t really expect that I would survive my next combat tour. After three combat tours at the infantry company level, I understood only too well the reality of combat.”
Decades later, having retired with four stars on his collar, McCaffrey refined his perspective on the war in Vietnam. “By 1968, our military and political leaders had lost their way,” he said. “They could not see a path to victory. They also could not bear the political costs of throwing in the towel. The war ended up on tragic autopilot. . . . The American people finally concluded that our national leaders had no strategy to succeed. The army and marines were bleeding to achieve no sensible purpose.”
Already marked for greatness, McCaffrey’s post-Vietnam career followed a path typical of the few officers whose outstanding performance under the harshest conditions of military service meant they were destined for stars. Instead of attending the ten-month Infantry Officer Career Course at Fort Benning, McCaffrey went to Fort Knox for the Armor Officer Career Course. Between attending several military and civilian schools, McCaffrey served as a Military Academy instructor, assistant commandant of the Infantry School, deputy US representative to NATO, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and director of strategic plans and policy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.1
In August 1990, the Iraqi army occupied Kuwait, intent on annexing the oil-rich country. This was met by international condemnation and economic sanctions against Iraq by the United Nations. Together with UK forces, US forces were deployed to Saudi Arabia. Several other nations joined the coalition, the largest military alliance since World War II. The great majority of coalition fighting forces were Americans, however.
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, a Vietnam veteran, was the overall commander of Operation Desert Storm. While air force and navy aircraft and missiles destroyed most of the Iraqi air force, Schwarzkopf had the navy station amphibious assault vessels and supporting ships off the Kuwait coast to give the Iraqis the impression that US Marines would be coming ashore in Kuwait. He sent marines into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia to probe Iraqi defenses and to reinforce that idea in Iraqi minds.
Meanwhile, he planned a massive attack through the Iraqi desert to strike the Iraqis from the rear. The coalition’s goal was to force the Iraqis to move hundreds of thousands of deeply dug-in troops so they could be picked off by Allied air and ground fire. That assault began on February 24, 1991.
Schwarzkopf gave the most critical role to the Twenty-Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division, commanded by McCaffrey, then a major general. McCaffrey was to lead an army corps deep into Iraqi territory to seize control of some five thousand square miles. The other corps was arrayed around Kuwait to force the Iraqis to tie down most of their forces there. This was known as the “Two Corps” concept. No army in history had ever moved a force that size over three hundred miles on Schwarzkopf’s schedule. If McCaffrey succeeded, he would flank the elite Republican Guard divisions in Kuwait and cut off all their avenues of retreat.
The briefing jolted McCaffrey. As he began to think over the complex logistics his attack would rely on, he realized with a little shock this was not the way our generals had fought in Vietnam. This was not to be a long, costly war of attrition. Schwarzkopf’s army would put its strengths against Iraqi weaknesses. He was thrilled to realize that the US Army had learned from the Vietnam debacle. This time, things would be different.
But only if he could pull off his assigned role. “Iraq had the fourth-biggest army on the face of the earth,” McCaffrey recalled. “A giant, modern air force. They had modern tanks, antitank missiles, obsolete but still deadly surface-to-surface missiles, poison gas, and perhaps a nuclear capability.”
McCaffrey’s command sergeant major, his chief of staff, and both assistant division commanders were Vietnam veterans. An hour before sundown and kickoff time, McCaffrey met with his command group in a circle. “I thought we would take light casualties, meaning two thousand killed and wounded, and there was a possibility I’d be among them,” McCaffrey said. “I told them in normal, lighthearted infantry humor, ‘Good luck to all of you. I guess this is the last time we’ll all be together alive.’”
Between McCaffrey’s men and their objective were hundreds of miles of presumably empty desert. But surely there were minefields. Perhaps there were Iraqis with shortwave radios scattered across the desert. How many tanks? How many personnel carriers? How many men would a few SCUD missiles with high explosive or nerve gas warheads kill?
There was the matter of fuel. McCaffrey brought along a fleet of armored tank trucks, but the trucks themselves burned a lot of fuel and were vulnerable. He ordered his men not to destroy enemy fuel dumps, tankers, or service stations.
Perhaps there was then another major general in the US Army who could have done what McCaffrey did over those next few days. Schwarzkopf was in charge. But the war, McCaffrey understood, was his to win or lose. He never considered losing.
Ever since February 27, 1991, McCaffrey’s “left hook” maneuver across the Iraqi desert has been the subject of books and military college lectures. Suffice it to say that he succeeded in moving tens of thousands of men and thousands of vehicles across a rocky desert at an average speed of 30 mph to flank Iraq’s best troops and destroy them. The Gulf War ended three days after McCaffrey’s troops rolled into the desert.
His division’s casualties: eight killed and thirty-six wounded.
Here is an account by Joseph L. Galloway, then a US News correspondent, who accompanied McCaffrey:
The 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) was the heaviest division the USA ever fielded in wartime: over 30,000 troops. Thousands of M1A1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles and over a dozen battalions of howitzers and rocket launchers. McCaffrey commanded from his Bradley for the first 24-hour dash across the trackless Iraq desert with only two brief stops for refueling vehicles and a comfort break. Then we paused for a few hours’ sleep before launching onto the main highway from Kuwait to Baghdad. McCaffrey switched from his Bradley to a Blackhawk helicopter loaded with communications gear. I joined him in the chopper and we dropped in on each of the three brigades for McCaffrey to receive reports and give orders for the next move. Then the brigade saddled up and moved out, sometimes leaving the Blackhawk sitting alone in a stretch of desert through which thousands of Iraqi troops waving white flags drifted.
On the final 18-hour drive to the gates of Basra, McCaffrey returned to his Bradley and I moved into another Bradley. We rejoined at his Blackhawk for a few hours’ sleep before a scheduled 0300 hours attack down the last highway out of Kuwait. McCaffrey woke me around 0200 yelling “They called it off!!!” A ceasefire was scheduled for 0700 hours; our attack was canceled. McCaffrey ordered his artillery and rocket battalions to simultaneously fire one final barrage at 0330 hours. It lit up the desert sky for 180 degrees, the biggest lightning storm ever seen.2
McCaffrey received his fourth star in 1994 to become the army’s youngest and most-decorated full general. Many of his peers felt he was destined for the top army job: army chief of staff.
In 1996, while he was the commanding general of the US Southern Command, Secretary of Defense William Perry asked McCaffrey if he would like to be the director of national drug policy. It would mean leaving the army. “No,” he replied. McCaffrey still harbored ambitions. He wasn’t ready for civvies.
“So I wrote a policy paper and told them how to better organize the counterdrug effort,” McCaffrey said. “I included the names of three people who would be appropriate drug policy directors and sent it to the White House. Perry, one of the best people I’ve met in a life in public service, called me in. ‘Barry,’ he said, ‘when you wrote this paper for the president, you sealed your fate. I told the president that you ought to be his drug policy director.’
“When I told my dad how I got to see the president and told him who he ought to get for the job and how to organize it, my father said, ‘The president asked you to do something. Shut up and do what you were told.’”
McCaffrey sacrificed the balance of his promising army career and retired from active duty. Confirmed unanimously by the Senate as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), McCaffrey came with experience from interdicting drug smugglers from South America as head of the Southern Command.
McCaffrey’s policy paper was a surprise to civilian leadership, but he actually knew a lot about drug abuse. “During the Vietnam era, we had a military with zero drug use,” he said. “By the war’s end, it was a nightmare. After Vietnam, we launched a campaign to deal with drug issues. We had very expensive treatment programs at post and theater level, an active prevention program, interdiction, and law-enforcement operations.”
McCaffrey came to the job with the conviction that any counterdrug strategy must be primarily prevention and education programs aimed at adolescents. “The centerpiece was dealing with children between the eighth and twelfth grade with a variety of tools to convince them to not become habitual drug and alcohol users,” he said. A $1 billion budget went largely for prevention education and a national health campaign. An additional component was research into addiction.
The interdiction component was aimed at keeping drugs off the streets by intercepting them at ports of entry and on the high seas and by ending their manufacture. In 1999, McCaffrey led an initiative to begin eliminating coca farming in Colombia.
Another McCaffrey initiative was asking the entertainment industry to change the depiction of drug use in movies and television, including paying television producers to embed antidrug messages into programs.
The last component was treatment, largely paid for with individual health insurance. It was nevertheless costly, long-term, difficult, and poorly supported because of the stigma. “Nobody likes drug addicts,” McCaffrey explained.
When he took office, about 7 percent of the population regularly abused drugs. Through interdiction, education, and long-term treatment programs, by the time he left office in 2001, the number of habitual users had fallen to 5 percent—a nationwide reduction of more than 25 percent.
“General McCaffrey made ONDCP a force to be reckoned with,” said New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly. “He brought a fierce intellect, compassion, and vision to the job. In short, he brought leadership.”