NCOs Stand Tall Again : Marine Corps Renews Its Faith in ‘Old Sarge’

‘When I joined the Corps in 1968, a sergeant was God, a corporal was Jesus, and a lance corporal was Moses.’

Robert Strawser, Gunnery Sergeant

Robert E. Haebel, a retired Marine Corps major general, remembers asking a group of Marines several years ago what was wrong with the Corps.

What he heard did not surprise him.

Haebel says one gunnery sergeant told him bluntly: “What’s wrong with this outfit is that we’re too officer-oriented. You can’t even get issued a pair of socks without an officer present, or have a formation, or do much of anything.”

Haebel agreed. And he did not forget the sergeant’s complaint when he became commanding general at Camp Pendleton in July, 1984.

He had his own frustrating personal experience of military over-management: two-star generals and colonels debating the exact routes of night patrols in Vietnam, a task designed to be left to a much lower level.

Through the efforts of Haebel and like-minded senior officers, the Marine Corps is now attempting to reverse what the Corps sees as a dangerous side effect of the Vietnam period: the undermining of the traditional leadership role of the noncommissioned officer.

In a day of high-tech weaponry and computerized battle plans, Old Sarge is making a comeback in the Marine Corps. And not a moment too soon, according to Haebel and other officers.

‘Cheated the NCOs’

“We had cheated the NCOs and staff NCOs out of being involved in the process,” said Haebel, who retired in July and now lives atop a hill in Vista. “Now everybody wants to return to that because if we don’t we won’t be successful in combat.”

Beefed Up Training

The Marine Corps has beefed up training for noncommissioned officers, the corporals and sergeants whose decisions and leadership ability may make the difference between victory and defeat if the United States ever again commits troops to combat.

The NCO is meant to be the major link between junior officers, often inexperienced and fresh from college or the Naval Academy, and the mass of rifle-toting privates, many straight from boot camp. In the business of war, the NCO is mid-management.

“A staff NCO has to be a teacher, both of the young lieutenants and the recruits,” said Sgt. Maj. Frank Riojas, a 30-year veteran and the senior enlisted man in the 1st Marine Division. “In many ways he’s teaching boys how to be men.”

Camp Pendleton last year began two new NCO training programs in the School of Infantry: a 7-week course for squad leaders and an 11-week course for platoon leaders to provide advanced instruction in weapons, tactics and leadership. Similar programs were begun this year at the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Alfred M. Gray Jr., a tobacco-chewing, straight-talking boss who has vowed to take the Corps “back to the basics,” leaves no doubt about where he stands on the issue of noncommissioned officers versus officers.

Gray enlisted in 1950 and was a sergeant before earning a commission in 1952 and serving as an infantry officer in Korea. He is the first former enlisted man to become commandant.

Gathering of 150 Officers

At a gathering of 150 senior and middle-grade officers at Camp Lejeune in late July, Gray said of sergeants, “You’re over-supervising them and you’re letting them over-supervise the young Marines.”

The next month, Gray had several paragraphs added to the Marine Corps Manual.

One was a quote from a Marine Corps captain serving in north China in 1937: “Wars and battles are not lost by (individual) soldiers. They win them but don’t lose them. They are lost by commanders, staffs and troop leaders, and they are often lost before they start.”

Another paragraph was straight from Gray: “Our leadership training is dedicated to the purpose of preparing those commanders, staffs and troop leaders to lead our Marines in combat.”

It remains to be seen whether Gray’s lecture, which he delivered to Marine commands throughout the world, will filter down to individual officers, many of whom are still leery of NCOs.

When Col. J. L. Williams, commanding officer of the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton, went to Quantico, Va., a week ago to address a group of young officers and their instructors, he stressed Gray’s message that officers should trust the NCOs. More efforts will be made, Williams said, such as the NCO and officer training programs exchanging instructors.

“It’s going to take time, but we’re going to make it happen,” Williams said. “The NCO, particularly the staff NCO, is the backbone of the Marine Corps.”

As lionized in movies from John Wayne’s “Sands of Iwo Jima” to Clint Eastwood’s “Heartbreak Ridge,” the Marine infantry sergeant is a figure of mythic proportions in some quarters.

“When I joined the Corps in 1968, a sergeant was God, a corporal was Jesus, and a lance corporal was Moses,” said Gunnery Sgt. Robert Strawser. “We never saw officers.

Things Were Different

“In 1976, when I got back in (after being out since 1970), I couldn’t believe how things had changed. I went right back to doing the things I’d always done--handling disbursements, family problems, discipline problems--but I soon learned a sergeant couldn’t even make out a roster without checking with the lieutenant.”

Several factors had conspired to alter the role of the NCOs during the Vietnam War and the post-war adjustment period.

In the rapid mobilization that was part of the deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Marine Corps suffered an officer shortage. Promotions were rapid. The most experienced noncommissioned officers were made officers, thus stripping the lower ranks of experience and leadership.

The NCOs who replaced them were, in large part, younger and less seasoned.

Standards Lowered

Many of the new NCOs were brought into the Marine Corps under lowered physical and mental standards employed to meet increased manpower quotas--derisively called by some Marines “McNamara’s 100,000,” a reference to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The new NCOs lacked the role models of older sergeants; many never earned the respect of officers.

“Many of the new NCOs had never seen anyone they could emulate, to learn the weaponry, the communications, the tactics, the night patrol techniques that are needed in combat,” Riojas said.

“We promoted into NCO ranks a whole group of people who had not yet learned the basics.”

Williams said the Vietnam experience proved an old military adage: that if slow promotion is bad, fast promotion is sometimes worse.

“The corporals and sergeants we promoted really had never had the chance to learn from experienced NCOs,” Williams said. “With rapid promotion, you can get incompetency that causes all sorts of problems. That’s what we’re trying to correct.”

Improved Communications

Along with a decline in NCO competency, officers also began to exercise more authority in Vietnam because of improved communications and the static nature of the war, where patrols often ventured out at night and returned to fortified positions in the day.

Brigade and division commanders were able to circle high above battlegrounds in helicopters with state-of-the-art radio gear, giving detailed orders and usurping the authority of officers on the ground.

“Everybody was working two or three ranks down,” Haebel said. “The general was doing the colonel’s job, the colonel was doing the lieutenant colonel’s job. Everybody was in the other guy’s business.

“And where were the NCOs? We’d put them out of work. They didn’t have anything to do. We had lieutenants and captains doing the NCOs’ job.”

Unprecedented Strife

The racial and drug problems that ripped through the Marine Corps--both in Vietnam and stateside--brought heavy officer involvement among the enlisted ranks as they struggled to stamp out unprecedented strife.

Battlefield micro-management of the sort seen in Vietnam contradicted Marines Corps’ tradition, which holds small-unit leadership as the ideal. It was also seen later by military analysts as inefficient and potentially ineffective.

Defense Department studies have shown that officers are inviting targets and therefore are more likely to be killed in the early stages of combat.

Even if an officer survives, his leadership is stretched to the breaking point as the conflict spreads out and becomes enveloped in noise, confusion and terror--the “fog of war” mentioned in training manuals. If enlisted men cannot step into the breach, the result can be chaos.

NCO Top Commander

“When the bullets fly, the highest level of command is often the noncommissioned officer,” said Master Sgt. Edward Brundage, staff NCO in charge of the advanced infantry training section at Camp Pendleton.

“Those guys will determine whether we win or lose. We got kind of sidetracked during the wartime buildup, but thankfully somebody finally woke up and said: ‘Hey, we’ve got to get these guys back on track.’ ”

Classic Marine infantry strategy calls for a corporal to lead a four-man fire team, a corporal or sergeant to lead a 13-man squad composed of three fire teams, and a staff sergeant, under the command of a second lieutenant, to lead a 40- to 45-man platoon.

Each Marine is supposed to be ready to assume the next highest level of command.

Erosion Didn’t Slow

The American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1974 did not slow the erosion of NCO authority.

As the Corps cut back from a high of 315,000 troops in 1969 to a low of 188,000 in 1981 (the current figure is 200,000), promotions became harder to attain.

Indeed, many junior-grade officers were mustered out even though they were perfectly fit and eager to make the Marine Corps a career.

The tendency by some officers to distrust lower ranks was exacerbated out of a fear that even a minor training foul-up could lead to a negative fitness report, ending or severely crimping an officer’s career.

‘Learn From Mistakes’

“The Marine Corps runs best when NCOs are allowed to run the show,” said Staff Sgt. David Scharnhorst. “But the only way that can happen is if enlisted men are allowed to learn from mistakes. You learn from your mistakes in peacetime so you don’t repeat them in wartime.

“The problem is that with the ‘zero defect’ idea we had . . . nobody wanted to make even a minor tactical error in training.”

With these sorts of things in mind, Marine Commandant Gen. P.X. Kelley, Gray’s predecessor, convened a meeting of senior officers from Marine commands worldwide at Quantico, Va., the Marine Corps development and education command, on Sept. 25, 1984.

“The problem they were trying to solve was that the infantry, the cornerstone of the Marine Corps, had no formal skill progression training, as did the more technical fields such as aviation, electronics and administration,” explained Lt. Col. John Shotwell, spokesman at Marine Corps Headquarters adjacent to the Pentagon.

Development Plan Approved

Within a month--a lightning-fast pace in military establishment terms--Kelley had approved a plan to develop squad leader and platoon leader programs, first at Camp Pendleton, the largest base west of the Mississippi, and then at Camp Lejeune, its East Coast equivalent.

The high-level commitment to revitalizing the NCO ranks did not translate into cash, however.

Pendleton and Lejeune have essentially established the programs with existing facilities and personnel. A plan to add $5 million in new facilities at each base is still unfunded.

There are eight ranks of noncommissioned officers: corporal, sergeant, staff sergeant, gunnery sergeant, master sergeant, first sergeant, master gunnery sergeant, and sergeant major.

Coveted Rank

The master sergeant and master gunnery sergeant are for more technical fields, the first sergeant and sergeant major are for more administrative and command posts. Staff sergeant is a particularly coveted rank because it marks a sizeable jump in responsibility.

When Chief Warrant Officer Charles Russell, the Corps’ last World War II veteran, was asked when he retired last week to describe the proudest moment in his 36-year career, he didn’t hesitate.

“Being promoted from sergeant to staff sergeant meant more me to me than anything. Even being promoted to warrant officer didn’t mean as much,” said Russell, who made combat landings at Okinawa and Peleliu. “Becoming a staff sergeant was something everybody dreamed about.”

Above the level of sergeant major are the commissioned officer ranks, starting with second lieutenant. Unlike an NCO, an officer, technically, receives his commission--rank and authority--directly from the President, under the 200-year-old system of the American military.

Several Years

It is slated to take several years before all current NCOs are sent through the NCO training programs at Camps Pendleton and Lejeune. It could take longer, however, for officers to accept the commandant’s dictum to give more responsibility to enlisted personnel.

Promotions are still at a premium, and officers whose experiences in the past with NCOs have been bad are not likely to take career chances.

“In any big organization, there will be pockets of resistance to anything that seems new and potentially threatening,” Haebel said. “But if we don’t get back into letting these young guys be in charge, to keeping them informed, what are they going to do when they get into the second Iwo Jima, the third Iwo Jima? They’ve got to be prepared.”