August 23, 2004 - While the media is focused on the rhetorical contest between the men who won the medals and the men who would re-write the military history of the Vietnam War the unfinished war in Iraq goes on. The Battle of Najaf pitting the ill equipped and untrained ragtag Mehdi Militia against the United States Army, Air Force, and Marines with its Iraqi surrogates drags into its third week. It is an eerie echo of the all but forgotten Battle of Fallujah fought with bellicose rhetoric just a few weeks ago. The killing goes on, the dying goes on and the “truce talks” go on but a resolution escapes in the fog of war. Fallujah and Najaf seem destined to become this generation’s Khe San and Hamburger Hill and Hue; battles fought at great cost and then, with the spoils won, abandoned as strategically unimportant. The manhunt that started on September 11th, 2001 is dragging into its third year consigned to the margins of history.

On March 13, three young Navy Lieutenants, Junior Grade, took their Swift Boats out on patrol, their noisy diesel engines announcing their approach and inviting ambush. Standard Operating Procedure had been to firewall the throttle, escape the killing zone and when clear of the enemy, land their compliment of RVN marines to crack back at the ambush site. That was PCF doctrine, carefully worked out by staff officers far from the rivers and it had not worked. The three of them, John Kerry, Bill Rood, and Don Droz revised the SOP for this patrol. Two of them survive to speak of that patrol. The third voice that of Don Droz was stilled in another ambush just a month later.

Instead of running from the inevitable ambush as had been the norm, the three PCF boats turned into it, taking the battle directly to the enemy. The discarded SOP had failed to effectively engage the ambushing Viet Cong. The tactic worked out by these three junior officers was successful. Twice on that patrol the three boats charged the ambush sites on Kerry’s command, “Turn 90!” Twice the enemy was routed. Praise for their ability to think outside of the box drawn by standard doctrine ran up the chain of command reflected in the contemporaneous records written by Lieutenant Commander Elliot, Captain Hoffman, Admiral Zumwalt himself. Like the young officers, two of them survive.

The war in Afghanistan, the forgotten war launched to bring Bin Laden to justice is in its third year. The war in Iraq, launched to disarm Saddam Hussein, is in its second at the cost of 1,064 coalition lives and counting. The shifting missions driven by doctrines so carefully worked out by staff far removed from the killing zones have not been achieved. Tommy Franks’ outstanding successes have been trickled away. It is time for new thinking, new tactics and new doctrine.

It is time for “Turn Ninety”.