Waters gauged Cunningham to be even more a cold-blooded bastard than he’d suspected, too willing to sacrifice a C-130 against using the capabilities of his reconnaissance platform. No question, he had done the right thing by downlinking.
Cunningham stood now and headed toward the door. As he went through the opening he turned and looked at Waters standing at the podium. “You, Gomez and Blevins. My office.”
The three colonels instantly followed Cunningham into his office and stood at attention, while he settled behind his large oak desk, lit his cigar and waved the men to seats.
“Waters,” he began, “downlinking was the correct thing to do. But I wanted to know if it was merely dumb luck or a deliberate, calculated risk on your part. I like the way you analyzed the situation. We’re going to get heavily involved in that part of the world and there are some definite lessons to be learned from what happened. I want you” — Cunningham nodded at Waters — “to work up a detailed after-action report. I want it circulated through Command and Control, Operations and Intelligence.”
Cunningham folded his hands together and leaned forward over his desk, an unfamiliar look on his face, concern in his voice. “We’ve got to have our act together, but I’m worried. To give you an example, the Phantoms launched without missiles. We made a major commitment when those birds were retrofitted to handle the AIM-9L, the best Sidewinder in our inventory. I want to know what happened. Start your report by taking a look at the 45th. Also, I want you to have the 45th develop a plan for deployment into the Persian Gulf. I’ll send more down in a memo outlining what I want before you leave tomorrow. Blevins, you go with Waters. Take along one of those whiz kids who works in the Watch Center. Good experience for him. Gomez, you stay here and find out how quickly the Priority Three warning was handled when it was sent out. I want that in the after-action report. That’s all for now, gentlemen.”
The three colonels left the room in a state of shock.
“I’ll be damned,” Tom said as they walked back to the Watch Center. “I didn’t expect anything like that, I was sure we’d get the get-the-hell-out-of-here-by-sundown routine. I always thought he was in the tertiary stage of syphilis, and here he goes acting like a human being.” Waters shook his head and smiled.
Blevins walked with the two men in silence, an inner anger boiling… I should have given that briefing; I know more about what went on than anyone and I made the critical decisions. If anything had gone wrong, Sundown would have crucified me, not him. And now this jet-jockey gets all the attention…
Actually Cunningham had given Blevins high marks for what he saw in the battle cab of the Watch Center. To the general’s way of thinking, making decisions was what colonels were hired to do, and Blevins had done better under pressure than many other colonels he had seen. He had missed Tom Gomez’s prodding Blevins into action. After the three had left his office, Cunningham hit a button on the intercom, summoning his aide. The colonel who had escorted Cunningham into the briefing room immediately appeared. “Dick,” the general began, “have you gotten any feedback from State about what’s got the Egyptians upset over the Grain King affair?”
“My contacts over at Foggy Bottom are working under the assumption that the Egyptians think we set up the Libyans with the C-130 and forced an engagement. So far our ambassador hasn’t been able to convince them otherwise.”
“What do you think?” the general asked.
Dick Stevens shook his head. “Sorry, General, I can’t offer any better explanation right now. But I’ll keep working it.”
Cunningham grunted, accepting his aide’s answer.
The relationship between the two would have left most of the Air Force staff in the Pentagon dumbfounded, for Stevens knew Cunningham as a thoughtful, even polite, commander. As a young up-and-coming officer, Cunningham had developed a philosophy of leadership he had practiced and refined as he moved through the ranks of command. He believed most officers in the Air Force possessed the necessary intelligence to do the job but were uneducated. To him, the majority of officers hadn’t been taught to think under pressure or respond to rapidly changing circumstances. The men he valued had neither of these faults, and Dick Stevens was one of them. Once a promising candidate passed through the crucible of Cunningham’s scrutiny, he was admitted into the general’s inner circle, promoted and respected.
Stevens had been a junior major when he came to Cunningham’s attention, the commander of an airlift command element in Africa during the first Grain King relief operation. The corruption he had witnessed in the distribution of food supplies had deeply angered him, and his rage had built when his reports describing the situation were ignored. During the final days of the operation he received a belated message from Headquarters Military Airlift Command requesting information on any problems he had encountered in the distribution of relief supplies. In six short paragraphs he summarized the situation and fired off his reply.
Which hit the bull’s-eye. Two days later he was briefing Sundown Cunningham. During that briefing a colonel criticized the junior major for not telling higher headquarters sooner. A mistake. In answer Stevens read one of his earlier messages detailing the corruption he had witnessed, a message that had been sent to the colonel’s office. The colonel, understanding it was over for him, stood and excused himself, to start packing. Shortly thereafter, Stevens was assigned to the general’s staff, where he had been ever since.
Whenever Cunningham detected an “uneducated officer,” he personally completed the man’s schooling, and being an egoist he believed he could do it with the force of his personality and well-tested bag of tricks. Valuing efficiency, he always did it quickly. For those who got the message, no harm was done to their career. For the slow learners, civilian life was the only refuge. The back of Lawrence Cunningham’s mind was not a pretty place, but it was an extremely efficient locale, and filled with a blood lust toward the enemy that he fought to control.
The general drew on his cigar, wishing the flight surgeon would let him smoke more of them, and considered the two problems before him: why were the Egyptians so upset, and was the 45th ready for a combat role in the Middle East? Normally he could have found an answer to the second problem by sending in an Inspector General team to conduct an Operational Readiness Inspection. But the cantankerous Egyptians would not give an IG team diplomatic permission to enter their country. He hoped Waters, the latest candidate for his inner circle, would find some answers to both questions.
“Dick, I’m sending a team to Alexandria South to write an after-action report. Am I getting too involved with the nuts and bolts of the Air Force again?” Cunningham was aware of his difficulty in controlling his urge to tinker with small details and relied on his aide to keep him on track, dealing with policy.
“Don’t think so, sir. An after-action report should furnish some answers.”
“I’m taking a good look at Waters. Make sure word gets out that I’m doing detailed after-action reports now. Should liven up a few dead asses… How long has Shaw been at Alexandria South?”
“Fifteen months, sir.”
“That’s about the average tour of duty for a wing commander. Maybe a new wing commander would be a bone to the Egyptians. Let’s be ready to try that. Tell General Percival at Third Air Force to start looking for a replacement for Shaw. Get a list of possibilities from him.”
The 45th fell under the operational command of Third Air Force, headquartered at RAF Mildenhall in England. Cunningham wanted to keep the 45th in the Middle East as a counterforce to the increasing destabilization he saw developing in that area, especially in the Persian Gulf. Too many hotheads were trying to increase their power base at the expense of their neighbors and by controlling the flow of oil out of the Gulf. Experience had made clear that any disruption in that flow was a threat to the U.S. and its NATO allies.