Gen. Ronald Griffith; Army commander during Gulf War

Retired Army Gen. Ronald Griffith, who commanded a tank division that helped rout Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in the Persian Gulf War and later served as vice chief of staff of the Army, died July 18 at his home in Arlington, Virginia. He was 82.

He had a heart attack, said his daughter, Laura Thompson.

A onetime high school track coach in Georgia, Gen. Griffith earned his Army commission in 1960 at the suggestion of his friend Forrest “Spec” Towns, an Olympic hurdler and Army veteran. “Leading soldiers is a lot like coaching,” Towns told him, “but you don’t have to deal with parents.”

Gen. Griffith went on to serve two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he was an infantry adviser to the Vietnamese army and wounded by a grenade blast. (He later invited his children and grandchildren to feel the shrapnel lodged in his head.) By 1989, when he was given command of the German-based 1st Armored Division, he was considered one of the Army’s finest battlefield tacticians.

In February 1991, he played a leading role in Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s “left hook” maneuver, when some 270,000 American, British and French soldiers outflanked the Iraqi army and liberated Kuwait. The ground offensive effectively ended the Gulf War in 100 hours. Gen. Griffith said he had initially feared it might last six months, given the purported strength of Hussein’s elite Republican Guard.

“This has never been done,” he told the Los Angeles Times after the battle. “You had a high school team playing in the Super Bowl against the New York Giants, and they got their ass whipped.”

Gen. Griffith, who directed much of the battle from aboard a Black Hawk helicopter, later said his division had destroyed 630 Iraqi tanks and lost only four of their own.

He went on to serve as Army inspector general for four years before being named vice chief of staff, the Army’s second-highest ranking position, in 1995. He served two years until retiring from the military in 1997.

The job required a deft touch, said Joe Reeder, who served alongside Gen. Griffith as undersecretary of the Army. In addition to coordinating with the other service branches and with civilian agencies, Gen. Griffith helped oversee the rise of new roles for women in the Army – an initiative that drew heated debate.

“He had uncanny diplomatic skills,” Reeder said in a phone interview. “When there was an issue that needed someone who was a facilitator, or someone who knew how to find a winwin, or to find what Ronald Reagan called ‘the pony in the manure,’ Ron could do it.”

Ronald Houston Griffith was born in LaFayette, Georgia, on March 16, 1936, and graduated from high school in nearby Lakeview. His mother was an English teacher, and his father was a car salesman.

He played baseball at the University of Georgia, where he graduated in 1960, and briefly played catcher as a semipro; years later, he would coach Army teams in Korea and at Fort Hood. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in public administration from Shippensburg State College, now Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.

Gen. Griffith received military honors including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, three awards of the Legion of Merit, seven awards of the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart, two awards of the Meritorious Service Medal and three awards of the Air Medal.