THIS MUSTANG MIGHT TAME THE WHITE HOUSE
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly was suddenly brought in Friday by President Donald Trump to take on a seemingly impossible mission.
The president has asked the retired U.S. Marine Corps four-star general to save his White House from itself by becoming his new chief of staff.
Almost everyone with an opinion on Trump regarded Kelly’s appointment as the president’s right-hand man as a poisoned chalice. They are skeptical about whether Kelly can work any miracles in the inner sanctum of the president’s highly dysfunctional administration.
But on Monday, Trump removed the controversial Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director after only 10 days on the job. According to the Washington Post, his removal came at the request of Kelly.
The odds are long, to be sure. But it would be foolhardy to discount the plainspoken but genial New Englander’s chances.
The physically imposing Kelly is what American soldiers call a mustang. That is because he first served as a lance corporal and a sergeant before becoming an officer. From what I saw of him when I was embedded with the U.S. Marines during the Iraq War, he was a highly intelligent and inspiring field commander much loved and respected by the men he led into battle.
I slept in the dirt an arm’s length away from the general for two nights in April, 2003. We dossed down with our bed rolls among dozens of marines between the entrance to one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces and a steep cliff with a spectacular view of the Tigris River. Then a one-star general, Kelly had only weeks earlier been given an extremely rare battlefield promotion from colonel and handed command of Task Force Tripoli, which regarded itself as the “tip of the tip of the spear” because it was designed to fight well ahead of most other U.S. ground forces.
When the marines toppled that iconic statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, most Americans celebrated that as the symbolic end of the war. But it wasn’t. Not quite yet.
About 24 hours later, Kelly received rush orders from then-major general Jim Mattis, boss of the 1st Marine Division, now secretary of defence, to get north as fast as possible to take the only spot on the map still held by Saddam loyalists. That spot was Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit.
Kelly quickly gathered together three marine reconnaissance battalions equipped with nearly 300 Canadian-built amphibious LAVs (Light Armoured Vehicles) and a swarm of Cobra attack helicopters and ordered them to head north at high speed to seize Saddam’s last redoubt.
I met Kelly where thousands of marines were marshalling in a dusty field on Baghdad’s northern outskirts. The general was in the middle of a rousing speech about how proud he was of what they had achieved so far and how he had one last thing to ask of them. His troops had been accorded the high honour of ending the war and what was already the longest field march in the corps’ illustrious history.
When Kelly finished his “halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” pep talk, his marines screamed, “Oohrah.” Seizing the moment, a colonel who I was travelling with at the time asked the general if I might join his troops for the final push on Tikrit. Kelly immediately said “yes,” but only if I could find a vehicle of my own as he had no spare seats in his convoy.
I rushed back to the centre of Baghdad to ask an old friend, John Burns, a Canadian two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was then chief of correspondents for the New York Times, if his newspaper was interested in witnessing the last battle of the war and whether he might have a vehicle to spare. A few hours later I was riding with another Pulitzer winner, Dexter Filkins, now with the New Yorker, in a silver Yukon.
Kelly’s dramatic assault on Tikrit began at dawn. Cobras flew close cover above the attacking armoured personnel carriers, which fanned out on a front several kilometres wide, each of them sending up plumes of sand that looked like mini-contrails.
The Cobras quickly eliminated five Iraqi tanks that were trying to engage the armoured column. A brief, but fierce ground engagement ensued in which 15 Iraqi soldiers were killed.
The capper was that just before Tikrit was captured, a company from the 3rd Light Armoured Reconnaissance battalion that I had been embedded with between Kuwait and Baghdad had found and freed seven U.S. army prisoners nearby.
Reaching Saddam’s palace as Tikrit was “liberated” was an exhilarating experience for the marines and for me.
John Kelly confirmed his status as a brilliant field commander with Task Force Tripoli. With little notice, the general had devised a battle plan to move several thousand exhausted troops forward 200 kilometres under the cover of darkness without the usual support of tanks and artillery or a thorough intelligence assessment.
It was a marvellous gamble somewhat akin to the gamble that Kelly has now taken in signing on as Donald Trump’s chief of staff. His task is to establish a chain of command in a White House populated by wild cards and riven with competing interests.
Leading ferociously disciplined marines, who famously do what they are told, is a lot different than trying to herd belled cats. We should all wish General Kelly Godspeed on his latest journey.