Oral History of General JH Binford Peay III

FOREWORD
This oral history transcript has been produced from an interview with General
J.H. Binford Peay III, USA, Retired, conducted by Dr. Lewis Sorley, as part of the US
Army War College/US Army Military History Institutes Senior Officer Oral History
Program.
Users of this transcript should note that the original verbatim transcription of the
recorded interview has been edited to improve coherence, continuity, and accuracy of
factual data. No statement of opinion or interpretation has been changed other than as
cited above. The views expressed in the final transcript are solely those of the
interviewee and interviewer. The US Army War College/US Army Military History
Institute assumes no responsibility for the opinions expressed, or for the general
historical accuracy of the contents of this transcript.
This transcript may be read, quoted, and cited in accordance with common
scholarly practices and the restrictions imposed by both the interviewee and interviewer.
It may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, without first
obtaining the written permission of the Director, US Army Military History Institute,
950 Soldiers Drive, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013-5021.
RESUME OF SERVICE CAREER

of
JAMES HENRY BINFORD PEAY III, General
YEARS OF ACTIVE COMMISSIONED SERVICE Over 35
RETIREMENT DATE 30 September 1997
MILITARY SCHOOLS ATTENDED
Field Artillery Officer Basic and Advanced Courses
United States Army Command and General Staff College
United States Army War College
EDUCATIONAL DEGREES
Virginia Military Institute - BS Degree - Civil Engineering
George Washington University - Master of Arts
FOREIGN LANGUAGE(S) None recorded
MAJOR DUTY ASSIGNMENTS
FROM
TO
Jan 63
Mar 64
Apr 64
Jul 64
Aug 64
Nov 64
Dec 64
Sep 66
Sep 66
May 67
May 67
Jan 68
Jan 68
Jul 68
Jul 68
May 70
Aug 70
Jun 71
Aug 71
Feb 72
Feb 72
Jun 72
Jun 72
Aug 75
ASSIGNMENT
Fire Direction Officer, later Executive Officer, Battery A, 1st Howitzer
Battalion, 83d Artillery and Battery A, 1st Battalion, 36th Field
Artillery, United States Army Europe, Germany
Assistant Communications Officer, Headquarters VII Corps Artillery,
United States Army Europe, Germany
Reconnaissance and Survey Officer, later Assistant S-3, 2d
Howitzer Battalion, 35th Artillery, 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized),
Fort Carson, Colorado
Aide-de-Camp to the Commanding General, 5th Infantry Division
(Mechanized) and Fort Carson, Fort Carson, Colorado
Student, Artillery Officer Advanced Course, United States Army
Artillery and Missile School, Fort Sill, Oklahoma
Commander, Headquarters Company, I Field Force Vietnam, United
States Army, Vietnam
Commander, Battery B, 4th Battalion, 42d Field Artillery, 4th Infantry
Division, United States Army, Vietnam
Operations Officer, Emergency Operations Center, Plans and
Operations Division, Office, Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and
Training, Fifth United States Army, Fort Sheridan, Illinois
Student, United States Army Command and General Staff College,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Assistant S-3, 3d Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, United States Army,
Vietnam
S-3, 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery, 3d Brigade, 1st Cavalry
Division, United States Army, Vietnam
Assignment Officer, Field Artillery Branch, Officer Personnel
Directorate, United States Army Military Personnel Center,
Alexandria, Virginia
ii

Oct 75
Jun 77
Aug 77
Jun 78
Jun 78
Nov 79
Nov 79
Aug 81
Sep 81
Feb 83
Mar 83
Jan 85
Jan 85
Jul 87
Jul 87
Jul 88
Jul 88
Jul 89
Aug 89
Aug 90
Aug 90
Apr 91
Apr 91
Jun 91
Jun 91
Apr 93
Apr 93
Aug 94
Aug 94
Sep 97
PROMOTIONS
2LT
1LT
CPT
MAJ
LTC
COL
BG
MG
LTG
GEN
Commander, 2d Battalion, 11th Field Artillery, 25th Infantry Division,

Hawaii
Student, United States Army War College, Carlisle Barracks,
Pennsylvania
Senior Aide to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Organization of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, DC
Chief, Army Initiatives Group, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for
Operations and Plans, United States Army, Washington, DC
Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3 Operations/Director of Plans and
Training, I Corps, Fort Lewis, Washington
Commander, 9th Infantry Division Artillery, 9th Infantry Division
(Motorized), Fort Lewis, Washington
Executive to the Chief of Staff, United States Army,
Washington, DC
Assistant Division Commander (Operations), 101st Airborne
Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Deputy Commandant, United States Army Command and General
Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and
Fort Campbell, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)
Operations DESERT SHIELD and DESERT STORM, Saudi Arabia
Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and
Fort Campbell, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, United States
Army/Army Senior Member, United Nations Military Committee
Vice Chief of Staff, Office of the Chief of Staff, United States Army,
Washington, DC
Commander in Chief, United States Central Command, MacDill Air
Force Base, Tampa, Florida
DATES OF APPOINTMENT
10 Jun 62
9 Dec 63
26 Nov 65
2 Oct 68
13 May 75
3 Aug 80
1 Nov 86
1 Oct 89
24 Jun 91
26 Mar 93
iii
US DECORATIONS AND BADGES

Defense Distinguished Service Medal
Distinguished Service Medal (with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters)
Silver Star
Defense Superior Service Medal
Legion of Merit (with Oak Leaf Cluster)
Bronze Star Medal (with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters)
Purple Heart
Meritorious Service Medal (with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters)
Air Medal (with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters)
Army Commendation Medal
Parachutist Badge
Air Assault Badge
Ranger Tab
Secretary of Defense Identification Badge
Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge
Army Staff Identification Badge
SOURCE OF COMMISSION ROTC
SUMMARY OF JOINT ASSIGNMENTS
Date
Assignment
Grade
Senior Aide to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs

of Staff, Organization of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Washington, DC
Jun 78-Nov 79
Lieutenant Colonel
** Commanding General, 101st Airborne

Division (Air Assault), Operations
DESERT SHIELD and DESERT
STORM, Saudi Arabia
Aug 90-Apr 91
Major General
Commander in Chief, United States

Central Command, MacDill Air
Force Base, Tampa, Florida
Aug 94-Sep 97
General
** Full Tour Credit
iv
Interview with General J.H. Binford Peay III, USA Retired

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Biosketch of General J.H. Binford Peay III, USA Retired
i
ii
Tape 1, Side A
Introduction and Early Years
Influence of College Football Coach
Appointment to VMI
Impressions at VMI
Faculty Advisor at VMI
1
8
12
13
14
Tape 1, Side B
Influence of LTG Smith, Commandant of Cadets
Early Career Development
First Assignment, 1/83rd Field Artillery, Germany
Ranger School in route to Germany
1/83rd Field Artillery, Germany
15
17
17
18
20
Tape 2, Side A
View of Soldiers of the Era
Transfer to Headquarters VII Corps Artillery
No-Notice Orders to Ft. Carson
Aide-de-Camp, 5th Mech
FA Advanced Course, 1966
24
26
27
29
33
Tape 2, Side B
First Tour in Vietnam
34
Tape 3, Side A
Headquarters Fifth Army, Chicago, IL
The Military as a Career
Second Tour in Vietnam 1972-1973
48
53
55
Tape 3, Side B
The Easter Offensive
First Assignment to Washington DC
RIF
Major (P); 2-11th FA; 25th ID
60
64
66
70
Tape 4, Side A
The U.S. Army War College, 1977-1978
Senior Aide to the CJCS
78
79
Tape 4, Side B
General Vessey
Movement to the Army Initiatives Group
83
85
I Corps, G-3; Ft. Lewis, WA

DIVARTY Commander, 9th ID
88
94
Tape 5, Side A
Second Assignment to Washington DC
GEN Wickhams Exec
Making the BGs List
100
101
106
Tape 5, Side B
ADC 101st Airborne
Deputy Commandant C&GSC
Commander, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile)
Project Slim Eagle
107
109
115
120
Tape 6, Side A
Desert Shield/Desert Storm
General Schwarzkopf
122
130
Tape 6, Side B
Battle Command
Cease Fire and Redeployment
Assigned to DCSOPS
First Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)
The Offsite Agreement and Downsizing the Army
No More Task Force Smiths
Army Chief of Staff, GEN Sullivan
Vice Chief of Staff of the Army
132
134
137
138
139
141
141
142
Tape 7, Side A
Reshaping the Army
Roles and Missions
CINC, U.S. Central Command, Summer 1994
Creating a Vision for the Region
146
147
154
155
Tape 7, Side B
Khobar Towers
Thoughts on Goldwater Nichols
Retirement from the Army
Return to VMI as Superintendant
Vision 2039
Focus on Leadership
Increase in Commissioning
159
162
163
164
165
167
168
Tape 8, Side A
Closing Thoughts
172
Appendix A Access Agreement

General J.H. Binford Peay III, USA, Retired
vi
U.S. Army Military History Institute

Interviewee: General J. H. Binford Peay III, US Army, Retired
Interviewer: Dr. Lewis Sorley
Dates and place of interview: Interviews conducted 18-19 August 2009 at
the Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia
[Start Tape 1, Side A]
INTERVIEWER: This is the first of a series of interviews with General J.

H. Binford Peay III, United States Army (Retired), being conducted on
behalf of the Military History Institute for its Senior Officer Oral History
Program. These interviews are being conducted at Virginia Military
Institute, where General Peay is the current Superintendent. The first
interview is taking place on the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 August 2009.
Well take the easy approach and start at the beginning, so please tell us
what youd like to about your early life, about your ancestry, your parents
and your siblings, where you were born and grew up, and well proceed
from there.
GEN PEAY: I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Early on, my father was

called up in World War II [WWII]. He was a National Guardsman, the
Virginia National Guard, Coastal Artillery.
INTERVIEWER: Your fathers name, please.
GEN PEAY: Same as mine except he is Junior, J. H. Binford Peay, Jr. I

can recall years later that we moved to Fort Monroe, Virginia, where my
father underwent gunnery training in Coastal Artillery and then was
assigned as the adjutant, and later a battery commander in the coastal
artillery battalion at Fort Story, Virginia. After several years he was
transferred to the Pentagon in Washington and worked in the personnel

1

business, and then later moved to Europe as the war enlarged in that
theater. My parents and grandparents and great- grandparents were all
from the Richmond, Virginia, area. In fact, my great-grandfather was the
superintendent of schools in Richmond. Its kind of ironic that a hundred
years later or so I end up being in the school business. But I took my
middle name, or my father and grandfather took their middle names, from
a Richmond superintendent of schools of the Civil War era who was my
great-grandfathers closest friend. He had the middle name of Binford and
that was inserted into our name and thats how we ended up with four
names in the Peay family now over, I guess, four generations. (Actually
five generations with the birth of our first grandchild, Henry V, 11 June
2010.)
I lived a structured life. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. After the war my

father came back to the Pentagon after his tour in Europe and the war
days were over. After really a lot of thought, which we can cover later, he
returned to Richmond and continued his work where he had started with
the Life Insurance Company of Virginia, which was a historic life insurance
firm in Richmond. We subsequently, in 1950, moved to Ginter Park, which
is a historic area on the north side of Richmond, and that is where our
home was throughout my early life. In fact my younger brother, who never
married, lives in that family home today and is a school teacher as well
there, in the Ginter Park area. His name is Evan Massey Peay. I attended
Ginter Park Elementary School, which is the same elementary school that
my mother went to, and had the same principal that she had. I later went
to junior high school at Chandler Junior High Schoolthat was 7th, 8th
and 9th gradesand then in grades 10-12 attended Thomas Jefferson
High School in Richmond.
INTERVIEWER: Lets back up a little bit. Where was your father
commissioned from?

2

GEN PEAY: He went to Virginia Military Institute and graduated in the
Class of 1929, and I believe he probably was commissioned in the Virginia
National Guard after graduation. He went to VMI [Virginia Military Institute]
on a state cadetship, and then part of the payback of that was to go into
construction or some other state business or the military. He did both. He
initially went to Detroit and was involved in some rather large bridgebuilding contracts there, and then simultaneously, or at the start of World
War IIwhich, its unclear to metook a commission in the Virginia
National Guard. It is interesting that he served in all components. After
World War II, with the drawdown of the Army and the drawdown of the
rank structure, he was promoted to the rank of O-6, full colonel, during
World War II, an example of the fast promotions in that particular period of
time. After the war he reverted to lieutenant colonel and was transferred to
the U.S. Army Reserve. He stayed in the United States Army Reserve
until retirement, serving a total of twenty-nine years, so its really kind of
interesting that he served in all componentsactive, Guard, and
Reservein his time. I think all of that probably had an awful lot to do with
my choices down the road as I considered my own lifes direction.
INTERVIEWER: Sure. He was an example for you, Im sure. Tell us about
your mother, please.
GEN PEAY: My mother (Audrey) was a triplet, born in West Virginia to

parents who were the forerunners of whats now a major, major coal
company in our country. It was Massey, Wood and West Coal Company,
and now is Massey Energy, a publicly traded company headquartered in
Richmond with its mines in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Her
father started out running a country store in the coal mines and then grew
that business into the massive enterprise that it is today. It was a great
joke in the Peay family that the birth certificates of the three triplets, the

3

three daughters, all show different locales, and my father used to have a
wonderful time telling people that Mrs. Massey, his mother-in-law, was
really moving around that evening and those daughters were born in
three different locations. They were identical triplets. All grew up in
Richmond and married husbands there and remained in Richmond
throughout their lives. My Mother died at 98 years, another triplet (Anna)
died at 100 and Alice passed away with cancer early in life.
My brother Evan is four years younger than I am. He went through the
same exact schools in Richmond until high school, at which time he went
to John Marshall High School, which was an across-town rival when we
were growing up. Richmond was expanding at that time and the locales
were geographically divided in different ways. He has been a school
teacher his entire life, has taught in England, New York, and California,
and for the last 15 years has been teaching at a school in the Ginter Park
area, nearing retirement, and has recently brought a number of his
classes to VMI to witness the New Market parade and visit Lexington as
part of their education.
INTERVIEWER: So whats his primary subject, then?
GEN PEAY: He teaches a series of levels of math and science and

history, attenuated to the traditional things of junior and senior high
schools.
INTERVIEWER: What were you like as a youngster? What interested

you?
GEN PEAY: I think I led a pretty simplified life. My summers were literally
spent at Boy Scout camp at Camp Shawondawsse, which at that stage
was outside Richmond. The growth of Richmond has since taken that
camp over. That camp moved to Goshen, Virginia, and is now serving

4

many troops in the state of Virginia. It incidentally is right outside of
Lexington. I spent every summer at Shawondawsse. I started off washing
dishes in the mess hall at summer camp and worked my way up, various
jobs, to where in my last year, when I was equivalent to being a junior in
college, I ran the extensive waterfront and the programs for several years
there, which I absolutely loved. Scouting was really big to me, and it still is
today. The other hobby I had was just playing athletics, and I played all
sports.
INTERVIEWER: Lets stick with Scouting just for a minute. I believe
youre an Eagle Scout.
GEN PEAY: Yes, I am.
INTERVIEWER: I believe you are a Distinguished Eagle Scout.

GEN PEAY: Im not sure how they made that decision, but I cherish that
very much.
INTERVIEWER: I understand that decision was made on a national basis,

as compared to the usual regional basis. Tell us how that happened, if you
will.
GEN PEAY: Im not sure. I was called one day and the Heart of Virginia
Council said that I was selected regionally and nationally for that award. I
went to Richmond and gave a speech as part of really an interesting
evening, and a large, large crowd. I had a chance to see friends I had not
seen since high school days, and a chance to really talk about Scouting
and its impact on my life. It was a memorable affair.

5

INTERVIEWER: Scouting is very dear to me as well. Were you Order of
the Arrow?
GEN PEAY: I was Order of the Arrow.
INTERVIEWER: And was your first leadership role as patrol leader,

perhaps?
GEN PEAY: I was a patrol leader.

INTERVIEWER: Its a great way to get started. Do you think that Scouting
had anything to do with your later interest in military service?
GEN PEAY: I think so. Fundamentals of Scouting are all the

fundamentals of ethics and values and leadership and character. Thats
exactly what the United States Armys about. And I think the outdoor life,
whether its the simple things of nature merit badge, or rowing and
canoeing and lifesaving badges and skills, are all the same things that
correspond to many of the skills that you learn in the Army.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, and theyre fun to do. You were going then to
mention athletics, and I know thats been a big part of your life as well.
Tell us about that.
GEN PEAY: Im not really sure how all that started, but I played organized
athletics from the time I was in the fourth grade at Ginter Park, the three
principal sports at that time of baseball, basketball and football. In high
school I played baseball and football through three years at Thomas
Jefferson. When I came to VMI I started off playing rat baseball, and we
were on the rat or junior varsity football team. At that time we had a junior
varsity or freshman team. They no longer have that. It was clear to me that

6

if I was going to do well in my studies, Id better stick to one sport, and I
stayed with football for the remainder of my three years at VMI.
INTERVIEWER: What was your role on the football team?
GEN PEAY: I was a quarterback on the football team. Like a lot of people
I started out on the scout team, and I was small in size. In fact, I can
distinctly remember one of the real tough chewing outs I received in my
rat year was from our trainer. He was a famous trainer by the name of
Herb Patchin who later went on to have a field named for him on our north
post here at VMI. He stayed a trainer his entire life at VMI, and took care
in his own way of hundreds of boys in need. I can recall one day in spring
practice, towards the end of my rat year, he was visibly upset with me and
directed me to get on the scales and I weighed in at 138 pounds.
Needless to say he accused me of not eating and many, many other
things, which certainly was not the case. It was the rigors of the rat line
and frankly burning the bridge in two places, playing football and studying.
I have fond memories of my time at VMI from my rat year on. We had
great football teams in those years. Many of my lifelong friends are and
were teammates on our football team.
INTERVIEWER: Did you eventually become the starting quarterback?
GEN PEAY: No. I played quite a bit my last year. We hadnot to make
an excusewe had great all-conference and state quarterbacks in my
time at VMI, and we had great teams. We were nationally ranked, this little
VMI school. We won conference championships with regularity. We beat
all the big schools with regularity here in the stateVirginia, Virginia Tech,
played tough against Penn State until losing in the last few minutes. And
maybe thats a great indication of how football has changed across the
country, because certainly we couldnt compete that way today.

7

INTERVIEWER: Were players going both ways still in those days?
GEN PEAY: In those days we played both ways. I never could

understand how Coach McKenna, who was a revered coach at VMIhe
built our national program, he is probably the most outstanding coach in
VMI's history, John McKennahe played the quarterback basically what
today is sort of an outside linebacker. He played the fullback on one side
and the quarterback on the other, and he played the two halfbacks back
as dual defensive safeties. For many days I sure wished I was playing
defensive safety and not outside linebacker. My last year, Coach
McKenna played three teams: Gold, Blue, and Green. The Green Team
was more offensive and operated with no huddle and great speed to wear
down opponents who were playing both ways. I played a lot of QB on the
Green Team. It was fun, and an interesting strategyahead of its time.
INTERVIEWER: Was McKenna an influence on his players in other ways

than just coaching the team? Was he important in values and things like
that?
GEN PEAY: He was a remarkable man, and any member of the team
would so favorably discuss his impact. And if you look back at the
reunions of the football teams over the years, and those who attended his
funeral, you clearly understand the impact he had on all of us. He was a
disciplinarian. He had tough standards. You had to meet those standards.
He cared deeply about you, but at the end of the day those were
fundamentals that he demanded just as much as football standards.
INTERVIEWER: Did you stay in touch with him in later years?

8

GEN PEAY: I stayed in close touch with Coach McKenna for many years
and exchanged letters. He came to my retirement at Fort Campbell,
Kentucky, when I retired in 1997, and we stayed in touch from that period
on until his recent passing. He is buried in the Jackson Cemetery here in
Lexington.
INTERVIEWER: Did he last long enough to see you as Superintendent at

VMI?
GEN PEAY: He did. Coach McKenna and I had a very special, special
relationship.
INTERVIEWER: I want to back up, because one of the things that you
suggested that we might talk about in terms of your early life is the impact
of World War II. Do you want to say something about that?
GEN PEAY: I know many of the discussions that we had in my life,

particularly around the dinner table or on long drives in the car; my father
would refer to World War II days, and particularly the senior leaders in
World War II, many of whom were VMI men. He would talk about their
contributions. Hed talk about their character, their different styles. My dad
clearly loved the military and I think he wanted to stay in the service after
World War II. He had that opportunity. All of the officers, as you know,
after World War II converted back in rank at the end of the war. He was
offered the chance to do that. He hadon both sides of our family parents
who were elderly and not in the best of health, and I think that had a lot to
do with the consideration and decision to come on home to Richmond. So,
I think down deep my dad always wanted me to be in the Army and, while
he would never force that decision, the conversations were always sort of
from a career decision and development standpoint and the importance of

9

the Army, the fun of the Army, that he so much enjoyed, and more so than
his very successful career in the insurance business.
INTERVIEWER: How long did your father last to see you get how far in
the Army?
GEN PEAY: He was alive through my DCSOPS [Deputy Chief of Staff for
Operations and Plans] time as a three-star. I think he knew I had been
nominated for four stars. He was dying of cancer, but I justin my heart I
think he knew that.
INTERVIEWER: You talked about a structured environment as youngster,

and I think you are referring maybe to those long talks and family life in
general.
GEN PEAY: I lived a structured life. It was a loving family environment. It

was not an unpopular kind of a thing. My mother, like a lot of mothers, was
really the dominant factor in our family. We were going to have breakfast
every day. We had dinner at this time every day. We sat around the table.
She was structured in her menus in terms of the right kinds of food. Study
time took place from seven oclock to ten-thirty at night, and you had to be
home at a certain time on the weekend. You were expected to be outside
and playing at certain hours in the afternoons, and we all had certain
chores such as cutting grass and so on. So it was done in a very, very
nice way. I dont think we knew any difference. It was just thats the way
she structurally ran our family, and it carried over as I mentioned into the
summertime when you had to do something during the summer. Summer
camp was a big piece of all of that.
INTERVIEWER: Youve mentioned some early influences, your parents of
course, the leaders in Scouting, your coach. Were there others? Other

10

relatives, teachers that you think back on as people who had a significant
influence on you as you were growing up?
GEN PEAY: In terms of teachers, I think in our elementary school (Ginter

Park), and particularly in our high school in Richmond (Thomas Jefferson)
these were just great elementary and high school facilities and educators.
The elementary school in Ginter Park provided all the basics. Thomas
Jefferson literally was a college preparatory high school. The classes were
hardphysics, economics, math and history. The teachers were great. Im
sure there was no way that this could ever be verified, but it was often said
that Thomas Jefferson High School was the tenth ranked high school in
the country. I dont know how you rank high schools, but it was in that
category.
INTERVIEWER: How large a school?
GEN PEAY: At that time it was close to four thousand students.
INTERVIEWER: So in your own class would there be?
GEN PEAY: A little less than a thousand.
INTERVIEWER: What were you good at academically?

GEN PEAY: I wouldnt say I wasI was sort of a solid B or B+ student.
INTERVIEWER: What did you like?
GEN PEAY: I liked math, and perhaps that had something to do with
majoring in civil engineering, although again the impact of my father, who
had majored in civil engineering at VMIhe felt that was a broad based

11

degree that gave you the fundamentals and required you to think in a
structured way and that would serve you whatever your discipline was that
you wished to pursue later or whatever your career choice was.
INTERVIEWER: Did they have Junior ROTC [Reserve Officer Training

Corps] at this high school?
GEN PEAY: I don't think it was Junior ROTC, but they had a military
Corps of Cadets.
INTERVIEWER: Were you involved in it?
GEN PEAY: No, I was not. I played football and baseball, so it was pretty
difficult to do any more. We had a coachmy backfield coach at Thomas
Jefferson was named Charles Cooper. He was seriously injured in Korea.
One arm was badly paralyzed. I stayed in touch with him for years and
years, and he also was a major influence on me.
INTERVIEWER: I think were ready to move on to VMI, which weve
already said a little bit about, unless theres anything else that you wanted
to add from those early days through high school.
GEN PEAY: I dont believe so.
INTERVIEWER: So, when it was time to think about colleges, what

happened in terms of where you applied and so on?
GEN PEAY: In my early years I dont think I ever pursued another
college. I know I never applied to any other school. My father sent me with
one of his close friends for a VMI visit in my junior year in high school,
along with several other classmates, and then I just applied to VMI. My

12

mother would sometimes frivolously say at the dining room table, If we
could just have one meal and not talk about VMI. So perhaps that had
a little bit to do with the outcome.
INTERVIEWER: When you got to VMI, did you know what you were
getting into? Was it what you expected, or did the rat system come as a
shock to you as Im sure it did to many?
GEN PEAY: I had no idea. We went through a very quick matriculation,

signed the matriculation book. That time was very different from today.
They would just chop the line at every seven or eight students, and a
cadet would pick you up and say, Follow me. We marched up from
Cooke Hall and walked in Jackson Memorial Arch and he took us up to
our rooms and we were in the rat line. Really, almost the next nine
months were a blur.
INTERVIEWER: What was your class at VMI?
GEN PEAY: My class was the Class of 1962. One of the men in front of
me, the way they chopped the eight or nine people in squads, was a cadet
by the name of Ware Smith. We ended up rooming together for four years
at VMI. He is one of my closest friends and a very, very successful stock
broker out of Roanoke, Virginia, and he has made enormous contributions
(financially) to the Institute.
INTERVIEWER: How about your dyke?
GEN PEAY: My dyke First Classman was Colonel Dave Goode (United
States Air Force, Retired). I met him at about nine days in the rat line
when he came up to my room one night and introduced himself. And after
a short five-minute talk he asked me to be his rat dyke. I didnt know there

13

was any answer one could say but yes. He was from Richmond, and he
later went on to be a colonel in the United States Air Force flying jets in
combat in Vietnam. We remain closest of friends today. He is retired in
Florida and we have a very fine relationship.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us something about General Morgan, who I think

influenced you during this period.
GEN PEAY: General Morgan was my faculty advisor when he was a

colonel and head of the department of civil engineering. Each faculty
member would have seven or eight cadets in each class that they
monitored and mentored throughout the four-year cadetship, and he
guided me in great detail, and I think great love, through my four years at
VMI. Weve stayed in touch ever since. Today, as Superintendent, I am in
continuous communications with him. He now resides at Kendal
retirement home in Lexington. If I had some success at VMI, General
Morgan, Coach McKenna, and Lieutenant General Jeff Smith,
Commandant of Cadets at that time, clearly imprinted and impacted my
life.
INTERVIEWER: Say something about General Smith. I have met him and
he is indeed an interesting man.
GEN PEAY: Well, General Smith had a controversial time as

Commandant of Cadets. He was brought in with General Shell when
General Shell replaced General Milton and became VMIs ninth
Superintendent. General Smith (then a lieutenant colonel) was brought in
frankly to put rigor and standards back into the Corps of Cadets, and he
operated very closely under Superintendent Shells guidance.
[Start Tape 1, Side B]

14

GEN PEAY: General Milton was brought in to put some corporation
business practices into VMI at a time when Im sure that they were
needed. General Shell was brought in to counter some of that movement
and put, frankly, the M for military back into the Virginia Military Institute,
and he very directly proceeded to do just that. General Shell had been
badly wounded in Iwo Jima in World War II. He was a highly respected
Marine who had institutional educational tours and senior operational
assignments in the United States Marine Corps, was a VMI graduate
himself, and was very popular (by my review) in his class. Ramrod straight
and tall, he cut an imposing figure at VMI and, as I mentioned, he brought
on General Jeff Smith, who had much the same appearanceslim, fit, nononsense. General Smith had just came off a very demanding tour in
Korea, where he made nationally publicized news when he slapped
binoculars out of the hands of North Koreans on the 38th parallel. He was
a tough man, and he proceeded to correct the Corps appearance, cut out
quibbling, and demanded straight answers. He was certainly respected by
me. As Commandant he and we had our tough times until progress and
standards were improved at the Institute.
INTERVIEWER: Youve already mentioned that you were very much
involved with football as a cadet. Were there other activities? Did you have
time for any other activities besides academics?
GEN PEAY: I enjoyed the military aspects of VMI. I was fortunate to be

selected to be a battalion sergeant major, which is the number two or
three rank in the Corps as a second classman. And I was selected to be
the second battalion commander my first class year, and was ranked
number three in my class militarily. I enjoyed that position. I enjoyed
learning about that. I loved my classmates. The tension required to do
your job and to still have really good classmate and teammate
relationships, looking back, was a great education for me, going through

15

all that. Probably the greatest honor I received at VMI was being selected
to be on the Honor Court. Thats a peer selection, and I was elected to
that my first class or senior year. So sports were a big part of my life at
VMI, and then serving particularly my senior year, first class year, as a
battalion commander and member of the honor court and doing your
academics made the year pass by very quickly. Colonel Smith really
leaned on me to take a Regular Army commission. I was going to take a
reserve commission, serve a shorter time, and return to Richmond. In
retrospect, Colonel Smith was absolutely right and my life would have
taken a far different direction. My thanks to that stern but wise
Commandant.
INTERVIEWER: So now youre a graduate of VMI and also youre a
lieutenant in the United States Army. What happens to you now?
GEN PEAY: Well, the day of graduation, which is also the day of
commissioning, and I think it was 10 June, as I recall, of 1962, our military
leave started. So it literally took me two to three years to get out of the
hole of using up my leave as I went home and took 15 or 20 days to
transfer out of cadet uniforms and get Army uniforms and pack and drive
across country. I know my father and I drove across country in an old
Chevrolet and had a great time, three or four days discussing the past and
the future in a more senior level of bonding. He dropped me off at what
was known as Gaffey Hall at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was an old World
War II building. Our course did not start for three months, but we had to
sign in or we were using up all of our leave, so they put us on various
duties in that period, which we soon learned would be the kinds of duties
you get as young second lieutenants, additional duties in your battery
once you reach your units. Some of that was inventorying in the
commissary. Another was completing a series of correspondence courses
to get you ahead of the gunnery problems that you would take in the basic

16

course. And of course we lived in these World War II barracks that were
cut into separate BOQ [bachelor officer quarters] rooms with community
latrines and 110 degree weather with no air conditioning, so I have
memories of my first six months at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
INTERVIEWER: What was the course like once you got to that?
GEN PEAY: The course was very demanding. I want to talk a little about
that, particularly as I get into the advance course later, because I believe
that the competency that the field artilleryman must masterall officers
should have, but particularly field artillerymen that are dealing in a
scientific subject that is dangerous from a safety perspective in an
operational environment is often not appreciated. We were blessed with a
great school system at Fort Sill and the gunnery department taught the
very scientifics of gunnery. At that time, that was the department that most
aspiring company officers desired to come back and teach in. And I had a
US Marine Corps captain, who was my gunnery officer, and (Im neglectful
in forgetting his name) he was a terrific instructor, both in appearance and
style, and he knew his business. He got us off on the exact right foot in
gunnery, forward observation, and firing battery operations that gave us
the competency to be able to go forward and hit the ground running when
we got into our units. The basic course at Fort Sillat that time the branch
consisted of air defense units and field artillery unitswas four months
long. It wasnt till the latter part of 1969-1970 that the branches split into
two components. You did have different MOSs (mine was 1193, Field
Artilleryman), and those were randomly selected based on the needs of
the service. At the completion of my basic course I was assigned to
Europe to the 1st Battalion, 83d Field Artillery. That was in Erlangen,
Germany.

17

We went TDY [temporary duty] en route to our first duty assignment, and
as mentioned mine was in Erlangen, Germany. Fortunately I was placed
on orders to attend Airborne and Ranger Schools en route to this
assignment to report in January 1963.
INTERVIEWER: Did you take them in that order, Airborne and then
Ranger?
GEN PEAY: No, I went actually to Ranger first. As you know the cohort
follows you, so those of us that were in a cohort in our basic course ended
up going to Airborne and Ranger together, our three-year assignment, and
then many of us who stayed came right back to the advance course later
together. So theres a real trend of friendships that you develop in that
regard throughout all of your schooling.
INTERVIEWER: Who was your Ranger buddy?
GEN PEAY: Bill Farman. Bill was a big-size ex-football player, and I was
rather smallish in size, and we were Ranger buddies. And later Bill went
on to be a senior general in the United States Army; in fact we served
together again when we were at Fort Lewis in the early 1980s and his
daughter baby sat our sons several times, so we really had a long, close
relationship. I had a tough time in Ranger School. Im somewhat
embarrassed to tell you that I was boarded. I really knew nothing about
the skills required to be a US Army Ranger. So I went through that
training. I was in good physical shape, but I had to learn as we went along,
and inevitably you were being tested. I did not do as well as I should have
on land navigation, particularly being lost several times in the mountains of
Dahlonega, Georgia, at night. I found myself in the predicament of once I
was critiqued on the failure I knew what to do, but the grade had already
been placed on your record. I hope I am not aggrandizing, but I think I was

18

respected by my classmates in Ranger School. There were peer ratings. I
placed very, very high from a peer perspective. I suspect thats what
saved me, because I was boarded, along with four or five other
classmates. Everyone had been told they were graduating. They were in
their greens in formation after this long thirteen-week ordeal in three
different camps, and we were at Fort Benning for graduation, and five of
us had to run up a set of stairs in a World War II barracks and face a
Ranger board while our classmates were outside. I was fortunate to be
one of a few of those they awarded the Ranger Tab to.
INTERVIEWER: Means a lot to you under those circumstances.
GEN PEAY: Means an awful lot to me, and I would say again, without
making an excuse, that, while in good shape, I did have a significant injury
in the first phase at Fort Benning when I fell off the log at Victory Pond and
hit that water from great heights and really damaged an ear drum. That
was a painful piece of the remainder of my time in Ranger School. But I
learned a lot about perseverance. I suspect that I learned a lot about that
from playing football at VMI and having to draw back on some intuition
and some guts and working through tough problems throughout my
athletic earlier years.
INTERVIEWER: I am guessing that Airborne School must have been

pretty enjoyable after that ordeal.
GEN PEAY: Airborne School was and remains today the most fun school
that I had in my entire career in the United States Army. I had a great time
at Airborne School. The NCOs [noncommissioned officers] were splendid.
I dont know what happened, but I put on considerable weight. It was not
fat, but I ballooned up. Needless to say I had to take off a lot of that weight
when I was home over Christmas before reporting to Erlangen in 1963.

19

INTERVIEWER: Now youve mentioned Erlangen. Apparently you knew
where you were headed before all this schooling. Is that the case?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct. When you graduated with a Regular Army
commission the Army tried to give you your first choice of unit assignment.
Again, General Smith and others in the Field Artillery program at VMI felt
that at that time the place to serve was Germany. The Cold War was
building up. Germany had a reputation for great field duty. The restrictions
that we in later years faced in Germany that started to confine us to the
kasernes were really not there at that time. Many felt that that was where
to learn the basics of your craft.
INTERVIEWER: I believe you said that you went to the 1st Battalion, 83d
Artillery. Is that correct?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct.
INTERVIEWER: Was this a divisional artillery outfit or corps?
GEN PEAY: This was corps artillery and 83d was in the 56th Field
Artillery Group; that was in VII Corps.
INTERVIEWER: What was the weaponry?
GEN PEAY: The weaponry at that time was 8-inch towed. We then
transitioned in a year to the 8-inch self-propelled artillery weapon system.
INTERVIEWER: What were you towing them with?

20

GEN PEAY: We were towing with 10-ton trucks. I joined in January of
1963 in the coldest winter in recent memory in Germany. I was the
greenest second lieutenant in the United States Army, I am convinced. I
arrived in Erlangen, almost got off the train at the town before Erlangen
which was called Erlangen Brock. I had no idea how to pronounce these
German names at that time. When I arrived I was met by the battalion
executive officer, who told me that the battalionand I was joining A
Battery, 1st Battalion, 83d Field Artillerywas in Grafenwoehr, Germany,
training for the ATT [Army Training Test]. He took me to my room, which
was on the fifth floor of a typical German kaserne building and a BOQ, and
told me the next morning I was to report to battalion and draw my TA-50,
our field equipment, and that he would have a vehicle to transport me to
my battery. It literally was two feet of snow and freezing temperatures in
Graf, where our battalion was undergoing a battalion test. These were
tough tests that you passed or failed. Failure almost terminated a battalion
commanders career, far different from the ARTEP [Army Training and
Evaluation Program] today.
INTERVIEWER: Your duties were, on that very first assignment?
GEN PEAY: My first assignment was as a battery fire direction officer,

with additional duties as being a nuclear weapons assembly officer for the
8-inch round and battery.
INTERVIEWER: Had you received specialized training for that?
GEN PEAY: I had not at that time, but upon return from our 4-5 week
training preparation and evaluation at Graf, I moved quickly to Garmisch,
Germany, where I took the nuclear weapons assembly course. I later took
a CBR [chemical, biological, radiological] course. I came back to my
battalion, and several weeks later went back to take a motor officer

21

course, all which were taughtone at Garmisch and the latter two at
Vilseck, Germany. There was a lot of schooling once you attended your
initial assignment. In fact, all of us can recall vividly going through the CBR
[chemical, biological, and radiological] school and having the liquid
mustard placed on your arm with bubble that would come up, leaving a
small scar for life. But it was somewhat of a badge of courage as an
example of the complexity and the danger of that kind of warfare.
INTERVIEWER: Was there a senior noncommissioned officer with whom

you worked closely in that early period?
GEN PEAY: Yes. I was blessed. My chief of firing battery was Sergeant
First Class Floyd Daniels, who I still stay in touch with today, long after we
parted paths in Erlangen. He later became a first sergeant, retired and
became a policeman in Tennessee, and later, when I commanded the
101st Airborne Division, because of that geographical relationship we met
again, and today I talk to him with some frequency from my position here
as Superintendent. He really taught me a lot. He was not going to let me
fail. He was not going to let less competent noncommissioned officers
take advantage of me. We would go to the field and work the aiming circle.
We would talk how to conduct inspections and what he would inspect and
what he wanted me inspect. He was really a joy to work with.
INTERVIEWER: How long did you stay in that first outfit?
GEN PEAY: I think I stayed about 18 months to two years, closer to 18

months. It was really an interesting assignment. All assignments are
interesting, I think, but this first one was an outfit that had a real different
collection of people. There were six Regular Army lieutenants in this
battalion. The remainder of the battalion basically was a National Guard
battalion that was called up from the Fort Bragg, North Carolina, area.

22

Most were without their wives. Most of our officers above the grade of first
lieutenant were married. The battalion commander was a great leader by
the name of Wagner, and he was one of the first aviators to command an
artillery battalion. He really had great leadership, but didnt know the ins
and outs and the competencies required of a field artilleryman. Its difficult
to command an artillery battalion if that competency isnt present.
The cultures of the officers were different, and that has always been
imprinted on my psyche when you consider Army values today, the civility
and personal standards now required in 2010. But the unit had high
morale and we worked hard. We did not do well on that first test. In fact,
we were retested. And we did very well on our retest. We had a very tough
group ATT test team that came from Bamberg, headed by Colonel Hal
Dye, who was as competent a field artilleryman as any in the Group, and
he made sure we were going to go through our paces a second timeor
more if necessary.
The second memory I have of that period was just the enormous amount
of time you put into assembling nuclear weapons. And literallyit was a
zero defects environment. You could not fail a technical proficiency
inspection, a [TPI]. So every headquarters at every level inspected you.
The battalion had their inspection team, then the group team came down,
then the corps artillery team came down. Then the USAREUR team came
down, and then the DOD [Department of Defense] team came down. And
all had different levels, starting with the lowest being the hardest, of
degrees of standards that you must meet. Failure of a TPI basically
resulted in relief.
GEN PEAY: So we spent a lot of time assembling these nuclear rounds. I

felt so sorry for the battalion commander, who really had to stand to the

23

side. If any of the six or eight or nine lieutenants or the captain, who was
the special weapons officer for the battalion, failed a portion, the entire
battalion failed. So hours upon and hours, and I can remember
assembling those nuclear rounds and one time the Spaulding from the
nuclear rings spinning off of them. And then, later, I was elevatedas a
first lieutenantand was moved from the fire direction officer to be a
battery executive officer. I then in this position also became the battalion
convoy and courier officer for the nuclear rounds. We would have
USAREUR rollouts, called Quick Train exercises, that were unannounced,
and you had to form your entire battalion out in the motor pool and
outload, in our case, 18 live nuclear rounds out of the basement of our
kaserne into these -ton trucks that had been thoroughly inspected, and
incredibly so, engine Brasso-ed to meet the inspection standards,
ridiculous standards, of that time frame. But that was the growth of the
Army through a nuclear age and all of what the many really didnt know
about young officers responsibilities. However, looking back, I have
overall warm memories. We switched nomenclature to become the 1st
Battalion, 36th Field, which was nothing more than a transfer of colors,
and redesignation, before I left. And then, on very, very short notice, I was
transferred to VII Corps artillery in Stuttgart, Germany.
INTERVIEWER: Before we go on to Stuttgart, the period we have been

talking about is the Cold War, of course, and thats where you are. Its also
the very earliest days of what we now know as the Vietnam War era. What
were your general impressions of the soldiers that you were serving with,
and then the noncommissioned and junior officer leadership?
GEN PEAY: Well, it was a draft Army. In 1962-1964 in Europe we had not
at that time seen the drawdown of Europe which came a little bit later in
support of the Vietnam War. But it was a draft Army. I can recall vividly
that my chief computer in my fire direction center at Grafenwoehr when I

24

joined the unit had a Ph.D. Then another couple of the computers did not
have high school educations. And so it really required the young officer
leader to figure out how he was going to be a leader and bridge that gulf,
because at the same time you were being measured by higher
headquarters on your AWOLs [absent without leave] and on your
indiscipline marks and it was not free gratis. There were court-martials in
those time frames, and another additional duty for a company-grade
officer was that you had to represent someone at trial. Now as regards the
noncommissioned officers, I found that the top three or four in your
battery, and certainly in the battalion, were top flight. They were qualified;
they really knew how to be full spectrum leaders. They all had great
communication skills and so it was not a petty thing between units.
Everyone worked well together. As you got down into the E6 and E5 and
E4 level, it was a little bit of a mixture in terms of their competencies, but
the senior E7s, E8s, and E9s knew they had a responsibility to particularly
grow their section chiefs that were E6s. As you look at the officer spread
at that time, in our battalion you had these six Regular Army officers that
were all college graduates. In fact, one had already gotten his masters
degree. They were quality people. We had a captain fire direction officer
by the name of Al Wolfgang who was an OCS officer, but also a college
graduate, who was first rate and went on to command the 82d Airborne
Division artillery later in his career. But, other than that, I would say that
the remainder of the officers fell in the average category.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any opportunity to travel and to see

Germany? Did you speak any German or pick any up? What was your
off-duty time like?
GEN PEAY: It was a real regret. There was hardly any time off duty for
lieutenants. We were bachelors, the six of us. We pulled the
preponderance of the staff duty. We drilled all of the no-notice quick

25

taskings. We went on the fire marker drills across Europe, where we were
in support of other battalion exercises; wed be a fire marker and would
have to identify where we were geographically representing a certain unit
so a bigger command post exercise could be made. As a field artillery
officer, many times right after our own field training exercise at
Grafenwoehr, which were two to three times a year, I would turn right back
around and go back and be a safety officer on other battalion tests. So I
really had no time to travel in Europe. It was one of the factors of the time.
I have no regrets. It surely grounded me in company-grade duties, batterylevel duties, at that time in my career, and that learning and competency
from a field artillery perspective stayed with me a lifetime.
INTERVIEWER: Did you get to know any Germans, either German

military people or others?
GEN PEAY: I did not.
INTERVIEWER: How did the transfer to Headquarters VII Corps Artillery

come about?
GEN PEAY: We did terrific on a senior nuclear TPI and also on our
artillery battalion test. Thus, the VII Corps Artillery commander tasked the
1st Battalion, 36th Field Artillery, to put onrunthe VII Corps Artillery
rifle matches. We hosted them in Erlangen, Germany. And this was a
white glove thing. This was as good as anything at Camp Perry. In fact,
we brought over some of the Camp Perry instructors to help us put this on,
with all the white sidewall tents and heating tents and the ways to bore
scope your weapons, and scoring procedures down in the pits with all the
non-automation things that we had to do at that time. And it was cold and
snowy. Our battalion did that with perfection and made quite a name for
itself. Our battalion had also just done terrific on another nuclear

26

inspection. We also had VII Corps Artillery Command Maintenance
Management Inspection [CMMI], which were white glove inspections at
that time that looked at everything from the way your troops had laid out
their wall lockers to maintenance, maintenance management, to unit funds
and administration, to good order and discipline throughout the battalion
and in-ranks inspections. At that time, like a lot of units, we had been
together for a pretty good period of time. The lieutenant and senior NCO
cohort had been there for almost two years together, and we had grown
through our trials and errors and we had a pretty effective battalion. The
Headquarters, Corps Artillery, had just failed a maintenance management
inspection given by VII Corps, under Lieutenant General Truman at that
time. Brigadier General Torrey was the Corps Artillery commander, and he
was going to undergo a reinspection in six weeks of his command
headquarters, which was located on the same kaserne, Kelly Barracks, as
Headquarters, VII Corps. General Torrey reached down and took a battery
commander, a battery executive, and a battery first sergeant from three
different batteries in our 1-36th Artillery Battalion. I was the battery
executive officer. And he assigned all three of us to his Headquarters and
Headquarters Battery of VII Corps Artillery. I became the Headquarters
and Headquarters Battery executive, and that had also had a TO&E [table
of organization and equipment] assignment as the assistant
communications officer, because in the corps artillery the communications
platoon was enormous, required to reach to all of the subordinate
elements over many, many miles. So thats how we ended up in corps
artillery, and for the next six weeks we all worked and worked and worked,
seven days a week, to pass this reinspection. We had to redo our entire
supply room, an incredible amount of work among all the traditional
functions. We did pass that inspection. And at that time I received no
notice orders to return to Fort Carson, Colorado, with the 2d Battalion,
35th Field Artillery, that was redeploying from Dachau, Germany.

27

INTERVIEWER: How did you receive another short notice assignment
after a mere six weeks or so in the Stuttgart billet?
GEN PEAY: Its a little unclear, but as we tried to reconstruct the
battlefield and I must say that General Torrey and others were very
gracious and ready to go on line to turn this assignment around. It
appeared that the 35th Field redeploying to Fort Carson had to be at full
strength officer assignment when coming out of Europe, and there was a
shortfall of lieutenants in that battalion. And so there were five or six of us
(that were bachelors) that could make that move on very short notice and
were directed to meet the unit at port and come home. General Torrey and
others in my chain of command, we talked about that. And frankly I
thought maybe it was the right thing to do. It would allow me to get back
into an artillery battalion and get away from the seniority of a corps
artillery, where frankly I did not enjoy that duty as much as the love Id felt
in the 1st of the 83rd early in my career. We came home to Fort Carson,
which was the start of, like so many times, really a whole nother chapter
in my life as a young lieutenant.
INTERVIEWER: And this 2d Battalion, 35th Field Artillery was assigned

towas this a divisional artillery outfit?
GEN PEAY: It was non-divisional artillery, but it was assigned under the
operational control of the 5th Mechanized DIVARTY [division artillery],
which was commanded by Colonel, then later General, Hughes. The 5th
Mech had just changed command and organization after undergoing a
year of transforming and testing under the ROAD [Reorganization
Objective Army Division] concept, and had had extensive field maneuvers
in the southwest part of our country undergoing that validation. The 5th
was a large heavy mechanized division. We convertedthe 2d Battalion,
35th Field Artillery came back as a 155 towed unit, and we converted that

28

immediately to a 155 self-propelled, conforming to the other three direct
support battalions that were in the division artillery.
INTERVIEWER: What was your duty assignment at this point?
GEN PEAY: I was assigned as the battalion fire direction officer and the
assistant S-3.
INTERVIEWER: Are you still a first lieutenant?
GEN PEAY: Yes, first lieutenant. We spent the next almost six months,
and Ill have to verify that for you, not only transforming to a new artillery
piece, but also receiving our troops from all over the world, moving into
these World War II barracks, fixing our motor pools, going down range and
training, and then preparing to take the division artillery test given by the
5th DIVARTY to validate us so we could report certain readiness
standards. It was a great experience for us. We were a little rambunctious,
because we all came back from Europe and we were sort of the outsiders
in that DIVARTY, and our battalion bonded very quickly. Most of us had
had really two good solid years of Germany field and pressure experience,
which was the best field training experience you could have at that time.
We killed the battery test, and battalion testjust did superbly, and after a
long six months of really hard work, we did a lot of partying and had a
good time, too, and truly bonded.
INTERVIEWER: Is this the point then at which you get selected to be an

aide-de-camp?
GEN PEAY: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Tell about how that came about, please.

29

GEN PEAY: Im not so sure how that happened. I suspect someone in the
division commanders command group, or maybe General Hughes,
nominated me to go up for an interview, among other lieutenants. At that
time the division commander was authorized a senior captain aide and a
first lieutenant junior aide, and I was the junior aide, first lieutenant,
nominee. I went up for the interview. I can remember like yesterday when I
went in for the interview the first question the division CG [commanding
general] asked me was where my pad and pencil were. Embarrassingly, I
had to go out and get that pad of paper. Ive often thought how many
times today I wish officers would have their pad and paper when you are
talking to them.
INTERVIEWER: Who was this officer that was asking?
GEN PEAY: This was General Autrey Maroun, who clearly had a major
impact on my life. I stayed his aide for the next two and a half years. I was
his junior aide for, I think, approximately a year, and then when it came
time to pick a senior aide he fleeted me up to that position and I was
later, maybe a year later, promoted to captain. So I stayed with General
Maroun a long time, longer than the norm. In fact, one of the things that
General Maroun did was he canceled my orders to the FA [Field Army]
advance course. OPD had placed me on orders and had not coordinated
that assignment with him. General Maroun was not happy with that and
while I was ready to go to SillI made sure I stayed out of the middle of
that fight.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us what it was like to be his aide. Did he take you to
the field with him? Did he counsel you as you went around together? What
was the relationship between the two of you?

30

GEN PEAY: General Maroun was very demanding and had the highest,
highest of standards, whether you were in the field or whether you were
back in garrison. He took me everywhere with himthe field, brigade
headquarters visits, response to major floods, Fifth Army in Chicago, and
Washington, DC visits. Many times in between he would beat themes and
points into me. Did you understand what happened? in such and such
situation. He would make me take profuse notes to get back to him when
we got back in the headquarters. He would convert many of my notes to
taskers that would go back out throughout the division. Those standards
and understanding of the basics have stood with me throughout the rest of
my Army career, I suspect, because I was so young and being exposed to
that was very, very important. I stayed in touch with General Maroun over
the years, right up until the death of his wife, Mrs. Maroun, and later his
death in the Fort Ord area, Monterey, several years ago. I learned an
awful lot from General Maroun. He was a demanding teacher.
INTERVIEWER: I saw in your files at Carlisle Barracks a letter that youd
written to him 1991 in which you said you had the personal guts to hold
the standards high and prepare the Red Devils for combat. I thought that
was a nice comment.
GEN PEAY: Well, he did, and he was deeply, deeply disappointed that,
after putting the division back together after the extensive ROAD concept
testing, where elements of the division had been cross-attached and
moved around and placed in different organizational constructs so they
could be measuredhe then put that division back together in what was
the approved organizational structure, which took over a year to get that
properly in place. And then, with the growth of the Vietnam War now really
starting to impact, to make its mark in 1965-1966, the division was
converted to a basic combat training and Army AIT training division. The
division was also tasked for all of its senior leaders as individual fillers to

31

go to Vietnam. And then he had to take the new set of officers coming in
and put all those courses in place that would then feed the fighting force.
Clearly he wasnt happy that he had to go through that and build a whole
new team. But as a soldier he understood his orders and he was
determined to make that BCT/AIT [basic training/advanced individual
training] training the very best in the United States Army. I watched how
he did that with great personal disappointment, but yet great personal
discipline that he was going to do that to the highest of standards.
INTERVIEWER: Were there any other officers, or noncommissioned

officers for that matter, at Carson that made an impression on you, people
you may remember from there?
GEN PEAY: Well, Colonel Hughes was the DIVARTY commander, and
regretfully he was killed in SETAF [Southern European Task Force] in a
helicopter accident later as a two-star. His son would later work for me in
Vietnam. General Carl Johnson was the chief of staff. He had been
horribly hurt in Korea and had really a very deformed arm. He had been
the DISCOM [division support command] commander as an infantryman.
He was a little portly in size, but he had great maturity and communication
skills. He knew how to read General Maroun and enjoyed his confidence.
It was a perfect combination. He really took care of me, because you know
there was many a night that I was bloodied as part of being the aide.
There were times I really thought that I was going to be fired. In fact, one
time General Maroun said to me, when I got caught between a senior staff
officer and another commander, he said, One more time and I am going
to relieve you of your duties. I was really young, but somewhere there I
suspect General Maroun knew what he was doing. I can recall heloing
down from the ceremonial closure of Camp Hale, which we closed out in
1966. I was sitting in the middle of the Huey helicopter seat and General
Maroun was on one side in the jump seat and chief of staff Colonel Carl

32

Johnson was on the other side. I loved Colonel Johnson. I loved the way
he worked the division staff and the team player that he was, and how he
buffered when he had to buffer, yet maintained his loyalty to the
commanding general. I would go to Colonel Johnson a number of times
and tell him, I cant handle this problem, he was going to have to handle
it. After really a bad week, when I thought my days were numbered, we
were coming down from Camp Hale and General Maroun was still
teaching, even to his chief of staff, and he was talking about how as a
youngster he, General Maroun, was chewed out almost nightly by a
general that he was the aide to. He turned to Colonel Carl Johnson, and
he smacked me on the knee, and he said, Carl, that is what I do to my
aide every night. I knew at that time I probably was safe for awhile, but
literally, after being with General Maroun over two years, that was really
one of the first fatherly comments that he had with me, and yet the man
loved me and I knew that. He was a teacher. His standards were
incredibly high, in peace and war.
In late summer 1966 I left the 5th Mech and attended the FA Advanced
Course at Sill. Since my orders were initially cancelled, I attended later
than most of my peers, and this course was heavily attended by seasoned
company grade officers with extensive combat experience. Most had
returned from duty with the 1st Cav. I was one of the few not to have gone
to Vietnam and was now more senior. Frankly, the war stories got old and
made instructor duty challenging.
After six months at Sill, we moved TDY [temporary duty] to Fort Bliss for
three months, as this was prior to the separation into Air Defense and
Field Artillery branches, and so all officers sent to both schools. General
Maroun had worked to get me assigned to the 173d Airborne Brigade in
Vietnam, as he knew I needed battery command, and quickly, since he

33

had delayed my school assignment. General Dean had concurred in that
as the 173d commander. It was not to be.

INTERVIEWER: Now you have been Shanghaied, as it were, from the
90th Replacement Battalion and sent to I Field Force, Vietnam. Please
describe what happened there.
GEN PEAY: I arrived in Nha Trang mid-morning and reported to the chief
of staff of the I Field Force, who told me that Id been selected to be the
new Headquarters and Headquarters Company commander of I Field
Force, which was a corps equivalentI Field Force, Vietnam. General
Larsen was the commanding general, later replaced by Lieutenant
General Rosson. I never wanted this job, and I fortunately was able to
convince General Larsen and the chief of staff and the corps G-1 that I
really wanted to go to a field artillery firing battery command. Id had my
heart set on that, and I needed to get back to the field artillery. You know,
my company grade time was running short. After a pretty lengthy
discussion, General Larsenwhich I have in a memorandum of record
that I treasureagreed that after six months he would to let me go to
command a firing battery in the 4th Infantry Division under an agreement
that he had made with the commanding general of the 4th ID [Infantry
Division] General Peers, and later General Stone. I think the reason I
was Shanghaied off, to use your term, was that they just basically wanted
an Airborne Ranger to command that large Headquarters and
Headquarters Company, and I just happened to be the unfortunate fellow
that was in the slot at that time in the 90th Replacement pool.
This was really an interesting assignment. It was an enormous

headquarterstwenty-some 06-level staff sections, four dining facilities,
massive motor pools. Soldiers not only lived on the post, which was right

34

on the beach at Nha Trang, one of the most beautiful picturesque
seashore views in the world, but many lived downtown, spread throughout
the city in villas, to include myself. And every day I had a jeep that I
personally drove to work, and Im not sure where it came from. It had very,
very few recognizable U.S. military parts to it. You know, it was just very
difficult to understand how people could be in a war zone, particularly
under a conventional and counterinsurgency kind of a situation, and
operate like this. I was trying to enhance discipline and standards and do
those things that many people would not adhere to because, quote, they
were in a combat zone. Nha Trang was a beautiful French city. We had
honor guard ceremonies for visiting generals, both Vietnamese as well as
U.S., upon their arrival at the headquarters, and one day that honor
ceremony, of which I was the commander of troops, happened to be in
honor of General Dean. After it was over, General Dean came up to me
and said, Where have you been? I thought you were supposed to come
to the173d Airborne. I told him that I was pulled off in the middle of the
night and that I was just praying that I was going to get to the 4th ID
shortly after Christmas in December 1967.
Interesting to note, when you fast forward, when Tet of 1968 hit, the I Field
Forces generals driver was killed, right in front of the headquarters, shot
right through the head, and the command sergeant major of I Field Force
was killed from a bomb that was thrown in a French restaurant in
downtown Nha Trang. I might also add that at commanders conferences
there was water skiing in the South China Sea, which was right in front of
the headquarters. I found this an incredible period of time trying to
understand this picturesecurity, standards and ethics, purpose
particularly still being a relatively young officer in the midst of a war
theater. And I found the command and staff sergeants major out of control
and believing they were more important than many commissioned officers.
Their focus lacked unity of purpose and their staff bosses were focused on

35

staff principal duties, yet unengaged in the basic security and basic
elements in war. Nevertheless, we shortly had a command inspection
there and we passed that and after Christmas I was transferred, as
promised, to go to the 4th Battalion, 42nd Field Artillery, 4th Infantry
Division, and was placed in command of B Battery of that organization.
Command of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, I FFV, was an
incredible, thankful experience. I learned much.
INTERVIEWER: Where was that, B Battery, 4/42d Field?
GEN PEAY: I first reported in to Pleiku and met with General McAllister,
the division artillery commander, who was a tremendous commander. I
reported in to him in the DIVARTY headquarters at Camp Enari. The
following day, after signing in and going through the traditional
administration, and having received his guidance and McAllisters rules
and policies which must be followed, he personally put me in his Huey
helicopter and we flew to Dak To, miles to the north. I took over B Battery,
4/42, on a very, very high peak and changed the flag with First Lieutenant
Stewart, who was the battery commander at that time. He took Stewart out
and there I was. That started really a terrific assignment for me
demanding, a lot of combat over the next six months as we moved up and
down the whole Cambodia border from Dak To and even north of Dak To
back through Kontum and south to Ban Me Thuot and then back up to Dak
To again. So we were constantly moving, fighting regular North
Vietnamese regiments during that entire period of time.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember the names of any of the operations at

that point?
GEN PEAY: I do not. At the battery level we were just involved in a dayto-day tactical fight.

36

INTERVIEWER: Could you describe the mission as you understood it?
GEN PEAY: I was in a direct support field artillery battalion (105 direct
support battalion). The three operational batteries, firing batteriesand
these were with 105A1s with wheelswere under the operational control
of the supported infantry battalion. I was under the operational control of
the 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, the Red Warriors. The battalion
commander was Lieutenant Colonel Schneider. We moved literally under
their control, but our DS [direct support] battalion commander and his
staffwe were still under their command and they supported us and
helped us logistically and technically, so we really had a dual chain and it
worked perfectly in terms of the responsibilities of both organizations. I
feel very strongly about that, because were not operating in that context
today, and I think that the Army has made a tremendous error in that
regard, and we can talk about that later.
McAllister was a tall (66) wiry soldier who was basic, sensitive, but tough,
and one of the most competent field artillerymen that Ive ever known. And
he had a DIVARTY staff, particularly the DIVARTY S-3, whose name was
Godwin, Major Bobby Godwin, that had a lot of former enlisted time and
was just very imposing in terms of his knowledge and proficiency.
McAllisters Rules, from the simple things of, at night, I want your
shirtsleeves rolled down, taking your malaria pills, you will always have
two persons on the gun line, youll have a procedure when you take
incoming rounds that will have the battery within twenty some seconds on
the gun line. Youll have two powders and three shells cut at all times. He
had 15 or 16 or 17 of these very, very basic rules that he standardized
across his DIVARTY. They just made such basic sense and they gave you
the energy to be able to face soldiers and leaders when they are tired,
bored and scared and demand that this is the standard. I had a lot of time

37

for then-Colonel McAllister. He went on to wear three stars and retired as
the Chief of Staff of US Army, Europe at Patch Barracks and the Seventh
Army.
INTERVIEWER: What was the situation with respect to the strength of

your battery? Were you up to strength?
GEN PEAY: We were generally up to strength, but nowhere near in terms

of correct grade. As I mentioned, the former battery commander, a first
lieutenant, was a Special Forces officer. I had a strong first sergeant, First
Sergeant Glindeman, and a weak chief of firing battery. The section chiefs
were E4s and E5s. They should have been E6s by TO&E, and during my
tour one was advanced to the grade of E6 under the concept of what we
called shake and bake, E6s where the battalion commanders were
authorized one or two E6 promotions that they could dole out. One of my
howitzer section chiefs received one of those during my command tour. It
was a young, young group of men. The weak chief of the firing battery was
replaced by one of the gun section chiefs, an E6 by the name of Larry
Smith who was terribly overweight and did not project in any way the
correct appearance. But he was a great chief of smoke. And in tough
times, and there were many, he was always there and, more importantly,
he was incredibly proficient and competent. So I learned an awful lot in
this assignment to put place basics, of the need to train in combat all the
timeand at two and three and four levels deep.
INTERVIEWER: How would you do that?

GEN PEAY: Wed cut out time every time we had a break. We had
training, certain things we had to do. Every day we would train on
whether it was how to cut fuse time or how you shoot high angle fire or
how to shoot beehive or high angle ICM or what the layout of the firing

38

battery should be, to include specifics of ammunition, displacement by air,
so that when people were killedwhich they wereyoung E4s and young
E5s from a draft Army, while maybe lacking a lot of the leadership skills,
could technically get the job done and then grow in terms of the other
pieces of maturity and leadership over time.
INTERVIEWER: When you displaced from one fire base to another, was
that by helicopter? Did you lift the artillery pieces by helicopter or how did
you move them?
GEN PEAY: It was quite a joke in the 4th ID because the 1st Cav, that I
had the great fortune of serving for and in my second tourand Id been
with many of these officers that I had mentioned earlier at the advance
coursehad massive numbers of helicopters and different capable
helicopters. The 4th ID, thats sitting up there in the northern area of
operations fighting an entrenched tough enemy, had few helicopters. We
wouldon a displacement, theyd send the Chinooks up, pick us off the
hills of Dak To and Kontum, fly down to the valley below on the ocean side
of Vietnam. Wed then pick up our deuce-and-a-half trucks, and we would
travel 50-60-70-80 miles south and then be picked back up with
helicopters and be lifted back up on the mountain tops to get into the deep
mountain positions and valley areas.
INTERVIEWER: You go up and down the coastline by road?
GEN PEAY: Yes. It was not a case of flying from one hill to another. Yet
we still had to know and had to on several occasions, particularly when
you were inserting the infantry battalion into a tough area, you had to be
able to divert on the fly, and there have been times where we had to divert
from LZ Blue to LZ Gold and know how to do that. I really early on learned

39

to pick up a lot of the concepts of air mobility that were so well done by the
1st Cav and we used later in the first Gulf War with the 101st.
INTERVIEWER: I have a note on you here on the importance of the

advance course, because youre now getting to apply all that theoretical
knowledge.
GEN PEAY: Im a strong believer that officers have got to be competent,
and so when youre in a fight you have a fire direction officer and he has to
go down at times and immediately take over other duties, and it was not
uncommon at all thatand I lost my firing battery executive in the middle
of this one fight at Brillo Pad, west of Kontum, so we were down to two
officers, the fire direction officer and myself, in the firing position, and so at
times I had to personally go in and be the fire direction officer and
understand how to do all of that, and then at times rotate out and lay the
battery and so forth. And at times, as a competent field artilleryman, I had
to teach the E5s and E6s certain things, particularly the sophisticated
things of how to handle misfires and those kinds of things in the middle of
combat. I cant stress enough the importance of knowledge and
competency, at least two levels down.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds as though you were well prepared for all of

that.
GEN PEAY: The advance course was invaluable to me. Id had a good
upbringing in Germany, but the advance course at that time was 10
months long and when you left it you were into the details of your
business. I worry very much about where the Army today is in terms of
that competency, much more than counterinsurgency or even just garrison
command, yet Im terribly proud of the war they are fighting and the job
they and their families are doing.

40

INTERVIEWER: We were talking about Dak To, the battle of Dak To. You
mentioned the second Battle of Dak To. Now youre in an artillery battery,
but it sounds like theres some pretty close combat going on. Could you
describe some of that, please?
GEN PEAY: Well, we were, I had not been in command of that firing
battery literally thirty minutes after Colonel McAllister dropped me off on
Hill 1001 when the 1st Battalion of the 12th Infantry became in contact to
our west. Id like to divert a minute and explain something I really learned
in that incident. I knew no ones name. The battery started firing, and all of
a sudden we got a ceasefire and supposedly our battery had hit an
infantryman that we were supporting to our west. That started a series of
investigations, because there had been many firing outs by units in the
4th in the past year, but none in the 4/42d Field. And so each one of those
had to be investigated. So the next morning in comes Major Bobby
Godwin, the S-3 of the division artillery staff, to do a full investigation, and
he really put us through it in enormous detail. I dont think they ever could
find out what happened on Hill 1001. But, nevertheless, rather than relieve
me or put a permanent letter in my file, Colonel McAllister placed a field
letter of reprimand in my file.
INTERVIEWER: Welcome to the outfit.
GEN PEAY: And I must tell you that was demoralizing. I had hardly been
in command, and yet the standards had to be what they were. I learned a
lot about that, what that meant, because in later years when young battery
commanders occasionally would fire out at Fort Lewis, Washington, and I
was the division artillery commander, I understood their morale, and yet I
understood how we could get through this incident and make it a training
exercise and not destroy a young persons career. I really have little time

41

for zero defects, yet at the same time I understand that there have to be
safety and standards in firing operations, but I think theres a way to work
through that. So I learned a lot from General McAllister, the way that he
handled my case, although at the time I was not a very happy young
officer. In fact, it hurt badly, complicating my authority in command, and I
had to build trust and respect.
INTERVIEWER: Shall we talk about close combat by the artillery?
GEN PEAY: Well, then we moved a number of times. We had a very, very
tough battle at Dak To and then we were next on a landing zone called
Brillo Pad, which was 15-20 klicks west of Kontum. Again we were
supporting our infantry battalion (1-12) in that brigade of the 4th Infantry
Division. Brillo Pad was not the highest peak. There were several peaks
above it, but it was well up there. Our infantry battalion was fighting down
in those adjacent valleys, and we were at Brillo Pad for roughly six weeks.
We literally were attacked by fire, and infantry probing, all through that sixweek period. In fact, one evening General Abrams stopped in on our
operating base, our forward operating base, and stood on this peak of this
hill and told me, he said, Captain Peayhe called it an attack by firehe
said, Youre going to be hit by an attack by fire at 2 a.m. this morning.
And at 2 a.m. that morning that world unloaded on top of our fire base. We
came under heavy 122mm mortar attack, 60mm rocket attack, and others.
I lost a lot of our howitzers and a number of our soldiers at that time. The
normal operating procedure was you tried to get up on your guns and get
the counterfire going to knock off their fires. If you couldnt, you just had to
get under these heavy ammunition bunkers and try to wait it out and hope
that supporting artillery batteries could provide the counterfire to
somewhat silence those attacks. In the Vietnam War, due to distances, it
was often improbably that massive supporting artillery was available. Of
course, the danger always is that theythe enemywere probing and

42

coming underneath our fires. I was very proud of our artillery battery that
was really under considerable heavy combat all through these periods.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any security with you other than your own
battery personnel?
GEN PEAY: Yes, we did. We would have either a platoon or company

from the 1st of the12th that most of the time secured us. We coordinated
our defense at our battery positions, had great relationships between all of
that, and the infantry battalion TOC [tactical operations center] was within
literally 20 meters of my battery fire direction center and TOC, so every
night I met with the infantry battalion commander and fire support officer. It
was a great team relationship.
INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the occasion on which you were

wounded, please?
GEN PEAY: I was hit in an attack on Brillo Pad. Not serious wounds took
shrapnel in my legs and got that cleaned up and continued on in the fight.
Lost a lot of men that night and one particular soldier has always been in
my thought process. Normally what would happen, at about five or six
oclock in the evening, the supply Chinook or supply Huey would come in
with a couple of cans of hot mermite food, maybe a case of beer, and two
or three or four replacements, drop those off and get out of there. Then we
would get into the night operations, and they may come back in the
following night the same way, or they would take a couple of soldiers off
that were PCSing and going home. This one particular nightI used to
always grab those three or four newly arriving soldiers immediately when
they came in and get the very basic business and guidance under way.
Youre going to wear your flak vest, keep your helmet on. If this happens,
do this. Were going to assign you to third howitzer. Your job is so and so.

43

Tomorrow morning we are going to get into extensive train-ups and so
forth. This one young man, named Private First Class Garapola from
ChicagoI will always remember this youngster. In this initial 1800 hour
interview process, when I tried to find out as much as I could about him
before assigning him to a particular section, he told me that his goal was
to be a professional golfer, that he was quite a golfer, and that he had
been draftedand he did not fight that particular situation and decided
that he wanted to serve his country the very best he could and upon
completing his tour that he really felt he had a very lucrative golf career
ahead of him. He was really a beautiful young man, looked like a movie
star, probably was 19-20-21 years of age. We got hit by a violent and
extensive attack by fire that night and he was killed. Ive always thought
about that young man, and his positiveness, particularly in that time, when
Vietnam was an unpopular war, and the wayhe was quite an example, I
think, for all of us, for all of America. I will never forget PFC Garapola. He
was the very best of America and our youth.
INTERVIEWER: On the occasion when you were wounded, is that the

same time at which you earned the Silver Star?
GEN PEAY: It was. We had really been under incredible heavy attack for
six weeks, and I don't think you can go to one particular incident, but that
night also, Id been hit, and wed lost a lot of people and wed fired some
beehive direct fire as they were coming through the perimeter and we
were really under heavy indirect fire. But I really think that award was
more for the whole six-week period of events. As always, there were many
heroes in our battery.
INTERVIEWER: Did you stay in this same fire support base for the whole
period of time?

44

GEN PEAY: In that six weeks we did. In fact, when we came off Brillo Pad
in May 1968, after Tet 1968, they took us back down to Plei Djereng,
which was west of Forward Operating Base Oasis, west of Pleiku. Plei
Djereng had seen some heavy battles the year before, and that was the
pattern. It just seemed like you fought the same North Vietnamese, the
66th North Vietnamese Regiment, and it just seemed like you fought them,
defeated them, and you came back and you fought the same regiment
again, and so Plei Djereng, Dak To, and Kontum all were well known
areas in fighting campaigns by the 4th Division in that period. We were
taken back off Brillo Pad, frankly back down to Plei Djereng to refit our
battery at that stage, after about four or five months of combat. I mean, we
wereour equipment was beat up, we were raggedy. We had to refit with
new people. We thought we were going to be down there for two or three
weeks. We literally were not in that fire base six or seven days. We got a
lot of refitting done in that time frame, and took some showers and had
two good meals, but they not only pulled us out, they also pulled back out
the 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, because they had another major mission
for them. I think that was characteristic of the 4th Division area of
operations. It was the largest operations area in the theater, and they
moved this division all over in the very toughest of terrain. The 4th was a
great division, building on its World War II fame.
INTERVIEWER: Who was commanding the division?
GEN PEAY: General Peers was the initial commander when I arrived;
General Stone was primarily the division commander for most of my
command tour.
INTERVIEWER: Given all that youve told me about the operations, can
you cast yourself back and recall what your outlook was at that time on the
progress in the war and how things were going more generally?

45

GEN PEAY: Yes. We won every battle, and we won them decisively. I
noticedI was proud of our forces, although they were horribly young and
they certainly werent the most proficient. I did notice in the very latter part
of May in 1968, for the first time, I noticed a little bit of the drug infusion
which was later, in my second tour, to a much greater degree. But I
learned a lot in that tour. I really learned that youve got to have standards;
there is no substitute for competency, particularly at the cutting edge of
command at company and battery levels. I think youve got to havethe
third point is you have got to have the courage to fix when bored, tired and
scared. And then I think you have got to have out-front leadership. I dont
think that means that you have always got to be physically right over the
front where the rounds are passing your head, but psychologically theyve
got to know that youve been there and youre with them and they know at
the toughest of times youre going to be there. I think those are four points
that Ive taken all the way through division command, later in my life. They
are very, very basic, but I think if it permeates your command it works.
And I learned that out of that six months on the Cambodian border in
1968, and I suspect General Maroun taught me a lot about standards in
combat.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds as though you were there during Tet 1968. Do

you remember the specifics of that?
GEN PEAY: We were on Brillo Pad in Tet 1968.
INTERVIEWER: So you were already pretty much engaged in that order

of battle, if you want to call it that. Do you know or remember whether you
or anybody in your battery had been in Vietnam before, or were you all
there together for the first time?

46

GEN PEAY: I never asked that question, but Im pretty sure we were all
first-timers in combat. I got dropped off in Dak To on Hill 1001 and we just
got into it. I had my little book of all of our people. It wasnt that hard for a
battery commander to have all 100 people on his site, and I knew about
their families and their home of records and all those things. I dont believe
I ever asked if you had had a previous tour before.
INTERVIEWER: It seems to me that you would likely have known that, so

maybe you didnt have anybody with that background. Anything else you
want to say about that tour before we move on?
INTERVIEWER: We were discussing the conclusion of your first Vietnam

tour.
GEN PEAY: Then-Colonel McAllister asked me if I wanted to extend my

year tour on to 18 or 20 months and be an S-3 in one of the artillery
battalions, and I really thought about that. I had good fortune and was
really seasoned. I thought I had some experiences that could be helpful. I
was an older captain at that stage, because I went into command very
late. But, at the end of the day, it had been a long six months in combat.
My parents were elderly in age and I thought that maybe I better go ahead
and return home. So that helicopter came in to take me out, and I was
thrilled that the fire support officer in our battalion, a captain by the name
of Hughes, was selected to take my position as the battery commander. I
thought we had great continuity, since we had been together through most
of those operations. He was later replaced by Captain Truesdale in his
position as a fire support officer, who later became my battalion executive
in the 25th Division (2d Battalion, 11th FA) and later in his career he was

47

an Assistant Secretary of the Air Force. There really have been some
long-lasting friendships from that assignment.
INTERVIEWER: So you come back to the United States. I presume you

get a little leave. Did you know where you were headed next? Had the
assignment people been in contact with you or what happened?
GEN PEAY: I really received the assignment, literally, when I was at home
on leave in Richmond, Virginia. And I was surprised by the assignment. It
was to go to headquarters Fifth Army in Chicago, Illinois. I knew very, very
little about that or how that took place. I was later to learn that General
Michaelis, who was the Fifth Army commander, had been the Fifth Army
commander toward the end of General Marouns tenure as the division
commander at Fort Carson. My name had been forwarded to Michaelis by
General Maroun or something of that nature. I learned later, when I was
assigned to field artillery branch, that Michaelis had requested my name (a
by-name assignment) to be assigned to his headquarters and thats
exactly how that happened. I reported to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in late
summer 1968. The headquarters was 25 miles north of Chicago. The
downtown Fifth Army headquarters was transferring to Fort Sheridan
when I arrived, and literally two weeks after I arrived at that headquarters
the democratic convention of 1968 took place.
INTERVIEWER: Another case of welcome to the outfit. What was your

assignment?
GEN PEAY: I was assigned to be an assistant operations officer and what

they called G3-DCSOT in the headquarters, and I was assigned to the
emergency operations center, which was in the basement underneath a
large historic water tower there at Sheridan, which in later years became
the US Army Recruiting Command headquarters. This was a real

48

interesting period of time, particularly coming back after some pretty heavy
combat and finding the regard that our populace had for the United
States Army at that time. Welcome home!
INTERVIEWER: Was that a surprise to you?
GEN PEAY: It was, because I had really had not been in touch with such
behavior. My focus was on the fight in Vietnam during that period, and the
US climate really had dramatically changed in the year I was gone in
1967-1968. This Fifth Army was a two-year assignment for me before I
went to C&GSC [Command and General Staff College] at Leavenworth.
As I mentioned, the initial commander was Lieutenant General Michaelis,
who later went on to Korea as a four-star to be the Commander-in-Chief of
US forces in Korea and Eighth Army. He was replaced by Lieutenant
General Phil Mock. Immediately upon my arrival in summer 1968, with the
democratic convention impending, active duty forces were flown into fields
around Chicago, some stationed at OHare, some at Glenview, and some
up at the Great Lakes Naval Base, literally circling the streets of Chicago.
At that same time Captain-promotable Mark Cisneros, who later went on
to wear a number of stars, was assigned to the same staff section as I
was. And we were the two youngest members in this staff section. It
mostly was made up of very senior colonels and a few lieutenant colonels.
And they assigned Cisneros to walk the streets in Chicago with a PRC-77
radio on his back, and he would call back and literally submit Intel reports
back to our operations center which I ran. And I was controlling the flow of
airplanes in and the number of sorties that had closed and which brigades
had closed and so forth. Ill never forget the headlines in the paper where
General Michaelis directed that we put our forces on the streets and they
would fix bayonets, and the emotions that that particular order caused,
and he went on to describe that maybe that was a better solution than
firing. So it was a tense time, and that started, for the next two years, the

49

whole explosion of civil disturbance operations across the country and the
learning by all active and National Guard and Reserve forces, and
relationships with civilian leaders and mayors and governors, and
understanding the legality and rights and procedures as this situation
spread across our country for the next couple of years. The CONUS
[continental United States] armies, a very, very different organization
today, not only had Reserve forces, and Adjutant Generals forces at time
underthey didnt have the Adjutant Generals under their control, but they
clearly had a very direct relationship with Adjutant Generals. They had
reserve forces, US Army Reserves, and of course they had operational
procedures with the National Guard forces. They had all the ROTC
agencies; they had all the active duty corps and active duty divisions, so
the CONUS armies had enormous responsibility, much greater than today.
And of course in later days that was broken out between Forces
Command and Training and Doctrine Command as we split out those
responsibilities after the Vietnam War, during General Abrams period
going forward. So for me it was an incredible educational period as you
learned about all that. We also had a number of heavy storms and
responsibilities to emergencies, those particular kinds of things. We had
all the summer reserve training responsibilities. Captain (P) Mark Cisneros
was directly responsible for readiness reports that had to come through
the headquarters. And, interestingly, we also buried Presidents Truman
and Eisenhower during this period. And, let me tell you, those were
significant operations. And we had an Op PlanOp Plan Truman and Op
Plan Eisenhowerthat took our Presidents across country to lay in state
and brought them back across country for burial in their home states, with
thousands and thousands of details as we put escort officers together and
planning together and the music, and always aware of family sensitivities.
I just think that was just a period of great learning for me as the head
operations officer in the Fifth Army EOC [emergency operating center].

50

INTERVIEWER: May I ask, did you attend either burial?
GEN PEAY: I did not. I ran those from the operations center and
controlled those particular movements just like you do as an S-3 in a TOC.
It was the exact same thing, except ours was in the basement of this water
tower. I stayed in constant communications with our commanders on the
ground and others that were forward and staffs and so forth. Very
sensitive, very political, very educational.
INTERVIEWER: Lets see what else we want to talk about here. It seems
to me something very; very significant in your life happens during this
period. You meet your future wife. Is that the case?
GEN PEAY: Thats right. Pamela does not like me to say this, but I kid
her, somewhat frivolously, but in fact its truthful that I used to say that she
was the only one that would ever date me in those times. The military was
very unpopular, and a number of us that were bachelors would have one
or two dates with nice ladies and girls in the area, and when they found
out that we perhaps were career Army officers, many of those
relationships were terminated or voided. Pam was an Army Brat. The only
reasonI met her. She was in college and I met her in the summer when
she was waiting tables in the Officers Club at Fifth Army. Her father had
just retired at Fifth Army. He was a Quartermaster officer. He had
commanded a battalion in Europe, and later was involved, after
retirement, in the hospital administration business in the Chicago area. I
was later to go on to C&GSC at Leavenworth (1970-1971) and Pam
graduated from college at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. We
dated long distance through my year at Leavenworth and she commenced
graduate school during that period. While I went back to my second
combat tour in Vietnam (1971-1972) she graduated from Rosary College
in River Forest (Chicago) with a Master of Science degree in library

51

science. We were married upon my return from the second Vietnam
combat tour on 16 September 1972 at Fort Sheridan. I have really
interesting memories of highs and lows in that period in Chicago. It was
complex for Captains (P) Cisneros and Peay. We were both early
promotees to major. Wed both seen some pretty heavy combat. There
were an incredible number of colonels that I am sure had very
distinguished careers in their service, but had not been assigned to
Vietnam in that war. And they were not put out to pasture, but they were
simply not on Westmorelands list among others to serve in that theater. I
learned from Michaelis and Mock that when you have those situations
youre best to really set the right goal that sort of objectives to get 85-90
percent and make it enjoyable for them and make it something they want
to attain. And if you pushed and crashed and crushed with these very
senior people you were not going to get desired results. It was a nice
touch if handled the right way. The corollary was that it put Cisneros and
Peay in a number of difficult situations, because both commanders worked
directly with us a number of times on operations and readiness reports
and it made our situations difficult back-briefing up the chain of command.
Michaelis and Mock both had a style, very much like senior officers do in
the Pentagon, of reaching down into the bowels of the Pentagon and
telling an AO [action officer] to come up here and brief me, and then its up
to the AO to back-brief their boss. In this case, many times Generals Mock
and Michaelis would call us and say come up the back steps, or they
would come down to the EOC. They had a separate entrance from their
office down to the operations center. And it at times was awkward.
INTERVIEWER: Sure. It put you in an uncomfortable situation.
GEN PEAY: So I have some mixed emotions about that, but I was happy
at the end of that two-year period to move on. I will tell you that, for being
on a non-combat tour and running that emergency operations center, I

52

was on call 24 hours, seven days a week, for two years. And it just
seemed like, whether it was putting fires out in Utah or handling floods in
wherever, it was always something. And so it was a busy, busy period. But
I learned so much about the whole relationships of Guard and Reserve, of
state regulations and how the active and reserve forces fit into that. It was
a great learning experience for me, a terrific learning and broadening
experience for me that built on what my Dad had taught me about the
reserve components, and all so helpful to me later as Army Vice Chief of
Staff.
INTERVIEWER: Perhaps I shouldve asked you this earlier, but youve
racked up several years of service now. Have you by this time thought
through whether this was going to be your profession and youre going to
stay for the long haul? Where did that decision point come for you?
GEN PEAY: It really came in this period. I thought a little bit about that
coming out of Vietnam. The battery command job I had in Vietnam was
just the best job I could have ever had. I mean, even today, other than
commanding the 101st Airborne Division, and perhaps my tour at
Leavenworth as the assistant commandant. I have such fond memories of
that tour. It was a lot of combat, but I felt good about it.
INTERVIEWER: I think, because of what you told me earlier, it must have

been an element of feeling lucky that you got that in, too, that battery
command, because as you pointed out you were getting pretty senior as a
captain.
GEN PEAY: I was very fortunate to serve in a very basic infantry division.
I learned a lot, and so when I came back to the United States, and
particularly when I saw what was going on the streets there, and even with
some of my own friends, disappointingly, my civilian friends, this sort of

53

turned my head on all of this and Imany people helped, but I felt that I
could make a difference and help the Army, just as one person among
many, and I looked forward to staying the course. The mission ahead was
significant and important.
INTERVIEWER: You had that strong background, too, that you were from
an Army family, and now youve met Pamela, who is from an Army family.
Thats an ideal background; too, I think to work your way through that.
Now youre picked up for Command and General Staff College at Fort
Leavenworth. Is that your next assignment?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct. I reported in there in the summer of 1970.
INTERVIEWER: What were they teaching at Leavenworth about Vietnam

in those days? Can you cast back to that?
GEN PEAY: I suspect it is very much whats going on in the Army today in
this long war of counterterrorism and the same challenges that instructors
are having teaching a force thats heavily seasoned. I have great empathy
for the instructors that have to face a force out there in their classes that
may have had much more experience than even some of them had had.
We were at C&GSC still teachingtwo-thirds of the course focused on the
major central fight off of World War II lessons, but yet it was great because
it was our basic final requirement in understanding the defense of the
nation at operational warfare. You had to come up with basic courses of
action, write an operational order, make the right choices on those
courses of action, a lot of briefings of why you picked a particular course.
Leavenworth was a tough course. In my time, almost every Saturday was
a four-hour exam. They would give you a problem, with a map, and you
had to go through that and lay out for your instructor the various courses
of action, weigh those courses of action, and make a decision. And I know

54

that there are some today that are critical about that rote-ness. I disagree.
I think it is a way of thinking and later in life that five paragraph field order
rolls through your head in a nanosecond and you come up with those
courses of action very quickly in your head, where it may have taken you
an hour and a half to put those thoughts on paper. So the other third of the
course, or even less than that20 percentprobably got into some of the
counterinsurgency business. I can remember the very first film in, I guess
it was Marshall Auditorium or Eisenhower Auditorium, Ive forgotten now,
the large auditorium there in the Command and General Staff College, a
film on Vietnam. And the first opening of the film, in a loud voice set to
music, said, Why Vietnam? So even at that time, in my soon-to-come
second tour of Vietnam, you are seeing the country and you are seeing
the leadership of the country and of the armed forces trying to explain not
only to the populace, but also its own service, what we were trying to do
there.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that most of your class had been to

Vietnam at least one time?
GEN PEAY: I would say that well over 90 percent of my C&GSC class
had been twice. I was, because I went late, going late into the advance
course, late into my first combat tour (although I was involved in heavy
combat in my first tour), then having that intervening tour at Fifth Army, by
the time I went back in 1972-1973 we were withdrawing forces from
Vietnam at that stage, and so there was a very small group of us, I would
bet less than ten, who were going back for their second Vietnam tours
from Leavenworth.
INTERVIEWER: When you were in the course did you know that you
were headed back to Vietnam? Or when did that come?

55

GEN PEAY: I learned that in the Christmas 1970 time frame. I can
remember Don Eckelbarger (later General Eckelbarger), who was my FA
assignment officerhe was Major Eckelbarger at that timecame out to
see us at Leavenworth, and Eckelbarger had been an S-3 of an artillery
battalion in the 4th ID; not mine, but a sister artillery battalion, and had
gotten to know me in that particular assignment. And so, I did not know
him that well, but he came out and told me that they were looking to
assign me to the field artillery branch, but that I had to go back to Vietnam
in 1971-1972 to make the numbers work. And I had absolutely no problem
with that. In fact, I dont want to sound like someone that relished combat,
but I was excited to have a chance to go back and, being more senior, I
wanted to get in my field grade time as a field artilleryman. It was my last
chance.
INTERVIEWER: You now know you are headed back to Vietnam. Pamela
is in your life now. Did you have an understanding or an arrangement at
that time? What was the situation?
GEN PEAY: No, I dont think we had any arrangement. I think we felt very
strongly about each other. I told her I was moving on my orders and that
we would work hard this year and well see what would happen upon my
return. She was busily involved in graduate school, and so I think I was
rather confident that if I didnt make some commitment immediately upon
return that probably she would be going elsewhere.
INTERVIEWER: When did you know what outfit you were going to join on
this tour?
GEN PEAY: I was placed on orders to Vietnam, and I cant recall for sure,
but Im rather confident it was for assignment to the 101st Airborne, which
had one brigade left in country. And I had met at the field artillery Vietnam

56

refresher course at Fort Sill, where they sent all of us for a two-week
course en route to Vietnam for our second assignmentsit was a course
that had been developed over the intervening years to bring us up to the
latest proficiency, the FA battalion commander.
INTERVIEWER: Thats interesting, because I dont remember hearing
about that before. Just very briefly, what did they cover?
GEN PEAY: It was a short course that went back through different
approaches to gunnery that would fit that particular combat environment,
in other words 6400 mil capability versus, say, 3200 mil capability, some
latest tactics, materiel, and doctrine kinds of discussions, and then some
of the Vietnamization business that was starting at that time. I met the
battalion commander of that particular artillery battalion in that 101st
brigade, and thought that this was greased and that I would join his team
in country a couple weeks later. Once again, when I arrived at the
replacement battalion, I was pulled off. I was met by a sedan at Bien Hoa
and was taken around the Bien Hoa Airfield. And incredulouslyI could
not believe this was happening. And I arrived therehere we go again. I
walked into the 3rd Brigade Headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Brigade
(Separate). This was the remaining parts of the 1st Cavalry Division, and it
basically was a division minus. It was half of a division, with extra-large
elements of aviation, a full brigade with four infantry battalions in it. It was
commanded by Brigadier General Jonathon Burton, who had extensive
combat experience. It was full of 1st Cavalryman who had extensive
combat tours in Vietnam, and the division was in the process of standing
down to this one brigade that would be left behind and, unbeknownst to
me, six months later they were also (perhaps) standing down. (I think it
was the 1st Brigade, or I forgotten which brigade of the 101st Airborne
Division, they were in the process of standing that brigade down in the
north.) And this, the 3d Brigade, 1st Cav, would then be the last combat

57

brigade left in theater in 1971-1972. I walked in the door of the division
headquarters and the S-1 met me. His name was Major Bob Barrett, who
later went on to be President Fords aide-de-camp. Bob was a very
gregarious guy, and he had a big smile on his face. I can remember like
yesterday, he said, I am proud to introduce you to our brigade chief of
staff, and he took me into the chief of staffs office and there was
Lieutenant Colonel Earl Spry. Earl Spry had been a former infantry
battalion commander in the division. I had met Earl when we were both
bachelors, both late getting married, at Fort Carson, Colorado, when he
was on the division staff and we both lived in the same BOQ. It was a
nurses quarters at the hospital at Fort Carson, and we literally lived next
door to each other. I am sure that Colonel Spry pulled me off orders to the
101st and assigned me to be the inspector general of that brigade, the 3d
Brigade, 1st Cav.
INTERVIEWER: Was that in fact the job you then entered on?
GEN PEAY: We had long discussions, and it very awkward for me,
because I did not in any way want to be labeled as a careerist. But I
desperately wanted and needed to go back to an artillery battalion. It was
really my last time to receive field grade qualification as an XO [executive
officer] or S-3 in the battalion, and FA Branch had programmed me to that
in the last remaining brigade in the 101st.
INTERVIEWER: Are you a major at this time?
GEN PEAY: I am a major at this time, a mid-grade major and, knowing

they were probably going to assign me to my next assignment in
Washington, I knew that this was the last time that I had a chance to be
professionally and branch qualified in the field grade ranks in my branch.
We (Spry and I) really had a long discussion, and of course there was only

58

one artillery battalion in the 3d Brigade. There was little opportunity for
that. To Colonel Sprys credit, he reluctantly agreed to reassign me to be
the brigade plans officer in the brigade. I spent the next six months, until
Christmas, shortly after Christmas of that year, working as the plans
officer. Now this is a large, large separate brigade, almost a division (-) in
size!
INTERVIEWER: Where is it at this time?
GEN PEAY: Its headquarters is literally right off the airfield at Bien Hoa.
The brigade commander was a brigadier general, the chief of staff was a
full colonel, the brigade had a lieutenant colonel G-3. So I had the plans
section and literally worked directly under two separate colonelpromotables who were the ADCs [assistant division commanders]. And
in this case I worked almost directly for Colonel Bill Louisell, who later
went on to senior responsibilities in the personnel business. He had
multiple, multiple tours in the 1st Cav, and so for the next six months I was
heavily involved in all combat operations from planning to execution. An
exciting timevery diversified as we were fighting while withdrawing.
GEN PEAY: The brigade was full of Leavenworth graduates and the 3rd
Brigade, 1st Cav was a fire brigade for all up and down the Vietnam
theater at that time in 1971-1972.
INTERVIEWER: Were deployments the whole brigade or segments of the

brigade, whatever was needed? What happened?
GEN PEAY: All of the above. Full brigade employment at times. I know
we had a major operation in which they had pulled myself and Colonel

59

Louisell to Saigon for a major meeting with the highest levels of MACV
[Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] and the CIA [Central Intelligence
Agency] and other government agencies, which resulted in full deployment
of the brigade in a major operation midway through 1971, and then some
operations were just separate operations where a Special Forces camp
was being overrun, late, and we would put a separate battalion in there
just basically to pull out that special operations team and bring it back to
safety. It was an incredibly interesting period of time, and if I had not been
to Fort Leavenworth and had the experience of writing operational
ordersgranted, they were World War II-based, but the same thought
process, and the same principals and doctrine tenets were there. I had a
great time. We built a jump operational TOC at that time that was
airmobile in its deployment.
INTERVIEWER: Were you still there at the time of the Easter Offensive?
That started about the end of March, probably.
GEN PEAY: I was there in March. That was the An Loc Easter Offensive.
We were heavily involved in that, and we still had a number of combat
operations at the time. I had been transferred to be the S-3 of the 1st
Battalion, 21st Field, shortly after the Christmas break. Initially I was to be
the battalion S-3 in Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Hodges infantry battalion,
but FA Branch strongly requested to General Hamlet that I go to the direct
support FA battalion, as they saw this as my last troop assignment before
promotion. I was very happy to go to either battalion S-3 job. Ive often
wondered what the long-range implications would have been if Id gone to
the infantry battalion S-3 assignment.
We were heavily involved in, initially, a little prior to that Easter Offensive,
but it really was the forerunner, in Fire Support Base Pace withdrawal. It
was a non-divisional artillery battery not belonging to the Cav in there.

60

They were withdrawing, too, at that time as part of the Vietnam standdown. The FSB basically had been under attack, couldnt get out. We had
a separate operation that went in there to relieve that base. Later the
Easter Offensive took place. They came right through that area and turned
into An Loc. Then-Colonel Walt Ulmerwho later was Lieutenant General
Walt Ulmer at Fort Hood and I had known at 5th Mech when he was a
major and division plans officerwas the senior army advisor with the
Vietnamese there. We werethe term was bouncing, or committing our
F Battery of the 1st Battalion, 21st Field, which was an aerial field artillery
battery with Cobra gunships, with increasing regularity at night, into the
defense of An Loc that was being overrun. It was a tough time, because a
number of those helicopters were shot down by shoulder-fired missiles
from the North Vietnamese. Youve got to remember that this is also a
period of time when it was clear to all of our forces that the war was over,
we were coming out, and the soldier dynamic that was taking place there
was incredible. So we had our three firing batteries, actually there were
four firing batteries, because we had four infantry battalions in this brigade
that were in direct support of those infantry battalions that were
responding across the entire theater.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds as though, operationally, things were going

well. But you point out that everyone knew that this was the end of the
game, and what kinds of disciplinary problems were there to be coped
with and so on at that stage of the game?
GEN PEAY: The problems were significant. It is difficult for me to describe

the enormous professionalism of the officer corps and some of the very,
very senior noncommissioned officers. And then, below that, the real
distain that many of the mid-range NCOs [noncommissioned officer] and
even younger soldiers had for the lifers, as they called us. So our
artillery battalion, just like the infantry battalions, was frankly literally

61

wracked with drugs and race problems. And so, from an operational
standpoint, we were able to hold it together and commit to the right
operations, but at night youd get back on these fire bases or get back in
these clubs, these enlisted clubs that had sprung up over the years in that
Bien Hoa area, and thats where you would have an occasional fragging of
the senior noncommissioned officers or officers. Thats where you saw the
drugsthe marijuana take over, the loud Vietnamese bands and those
kinds of things. It is really beyond me how all of this crept in. I had seen
none of that in my first combat assignment with the 4th Division, being out
on the Cambodian border fire bases and never exposed to all this.
Although I had seen that activity at Nha Trang, that was way too early in
the war (1967) to see how far that had disintegrated in terms of
indiscipline in 1972. Now, we had two things that were really going for us.
We had two great brigade commanders. One was Burton, who was an
Olympian in his own right as a horseman, and then he was replaced by an
African- American, a black general by the name of General Jim Hamlet.
Hamlet also was deeply steeped in 1st Cav operations and a great aviator.
He was firm and communicative and he would not put up with thisthere
was no nonsense in terms of discipline and he certainly demanded,
particularly on the race side, accountability. And I just loved him. He was
just basic, and he knew how to communicate. And the second point Id
make was the 1st Cav spirit. This was the 3d Brigade, 1st Cav, Garry
Owen. You know, that music, that history, that camaraderie, that pride
had a lot to do with bringing that brigade out of there. So as I look back at
my two tours, both incredibly different, both professional in their own right
in very different ways, I am indebted to the learning that those two combat
tours provided me, and I have fond memories. Ive never forgotten the
experiences and lessons learned in the 4th Division and 1st Cav.
INTERVIEWER: Were you still there when this brigade redeployed, or

had you come home?

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GEN PEAY: I came out thirty days before that brigade finally redeployed.
I think my last assignment was a very interesting operation. It came down
overnight to the brigade with about ten different missions, all different, and
the brigade commander and his staff, because it was overwhelming,
decided to parcel out various discrete missions to the brigades various
commands, none of which was their principal mission. Hamlet
decentralized. We understood his intent because he was a good
commander and we were trained, we were competent, and our artillery
battalion was given the mission to go north 150 or 200 miles, it was
northwest of Pleiku, a long haul from Bien Hoa, and relieve a Special
Forces camp that was being shelled and was clearly going to be overrun
shortly, and pull that camp out. And I can remember coming home that
night, it was now late, it was dark. We had two young aviators flying. We
had pulled out the advisors. I was in the jump seat with my battalion
commander, who fortunately in this case was an aviator, Lieutenant
Colonel Jack Keaton. He was an artillery battalion commander, but he was
also an aviator. He had commanded both an aviation battalion and an
artillery battalion. And these young aviators flying us could not get home. It
was night and they were flying bythere was no GPS [global positioning
system] and they were flying, they were lost, and from this jump seat
Lieutenant Colonel Keaton leaned over and calmly talked those pilots
home that night. It was a wonderful performance lost among many. It was
Lieutenant Colonel Jack Keaton, competent, quiet, professional, never
wanting the limelight. Trust me; this was an untold dangerous day.
INTERVIEWER: Thats a great story.
GEN PEAY: So thirty days later I had orders out. I came home, took a
short leave, and was assigned to the field artillery branch in Washington,
D.C.

63

INTERVIEWER: On that last mission you described, how did your unit
go?
GEN PEAY: We basically went up there as infantrymen. We had a pretty

good size aviation fleet with us. The job was to evacuate that fire base,
both American and ARVN [Army Republic of Vietnam]. So we did that. Im
trying to recall some of the other discrete missions that were given out that
day. They all were very, very different across the theater and were
accomplished by the brigades different commands.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, youre coming home from a second tour. As
youve already pointed out the unit that you were in was one of the last
combat outfits there. So our redeployment is nearing an end. Thinking
back to then, what did the war look like to you then? How did you think it
would evolve or end?
GEN PEAY: I have reflected on that many times. I am certainly well

aware that people felt it was not winnable. I think we left that war just as
we were in the midst of seeing the pacification program take charge,
seeing those ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] divisions mature,
seeing those ARVN leaders that were moving into the general officer
range at 38 and 41 years of age, and they were seasoned and tough. If
we justwhich was impossible, the country was coming apart at home
but if we just could have had two, two and a half more years, I think that
we could have drawn that banana belt around that country that could have
bought the time to ensure the elections, to buy the peace to stabilize the
country. There would have perhaps been a long ten to twenty year war
after that, but I think we could have withdrawn with certainly much greater
honor. I think the horrible withdrawal and the decimation, the cutting in half

64

of that country later on, and the imprisonment of our allies and friends
could have been avoided.
INTERVIEWER: Having had this very interesting second tour in Vietnam,

you are now coming back for, I think, your first Washington assignment. Is
that right, your first Washington duty? But I think theres some unfinished
business to be dealt with first.
GEN PEAY: Yes, I actually stopped in Chicago flying from San Francisco.
I stopped in Chicago and changed planes on the way back to my home in
Richmond, Virginia. Pam was just about finished her graduate work. I
spent less than an hour and a half saying hello and seeing her parents.
Her home was not far from OHare Airport, in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and
I talked to her mom and dad and Pam. Then I went on home and came
back in about ten days and asked her to marry me. We were engaged,
and then later we were married in September of 1972.
INTERVIEWER: Who was your best man?
GEN PEAY: My best man was my brother, Evan. It was a small wedding,
a family affair. Interestingly, in years since Fort Sheridan has been turned
over in the BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure Commission] process
and has been bought out today by developers. Pam and I stopped by
there a couple of years ago (2008) and the old World War II chapel we
were married in is no longer there, but Fort Sheridan is still the most
beautiful place one can imagine, although it is now a housing development
on Lake Michigan.
INTERVIEWER: And then did you have a wedding trip?

65

GEN PEAY: We did. We went to Bermuda, which we have gone back to
several times since. Colonel Wortham, the FA branch chief, was not
necessarily very happy with me, because he hadhe really wanted
several bachelors in the artillery branch so that we could travel lots and
interview field artillery captains. For insistence, we had to go to every
advance course, and so it was six trips a year to Fort Sill. And I was
assigned to the captains desk, along with Major Frank Rauch, who later
went on to command an artillery battalion in the 82nd and make full
colonel. Frank and I were both bachelors and desk partners, and so when
I reported in to Colonel Wortham at the Field Artillery Branch and told him
that I was engaged, and then Frank Rauch, a year and half later, became
married as well, Colonel Wortham thought the two bachelors he had in his
program had gone against his plan, but probably he was happy at the end
of the day. He was a great Branch Chief.
INTERVIEWER: There went his plan. What was the situation in the Field
Artillery Branch when you came back? We had drawn down some, I
presume. Did you have more officers than you needed and then that was
the problem, or what was the main issue?
GEN PEAY: First, it was one of the best assignments you could have
tremendous learning, tremendous growth, understanding people as well
understanding organizations. Regretfully, it was a time of standing down
the Army, and we had RIF after RIF after RIF [reduction in force] of our
officers. We had these supermarket carts. Nothing was automated at that
time. Everything was done in a branch file. And you would bring in a
hundred files at a time in these carts, and you would carefully go over
these files and make decisions on reductions. The field artillery branch at
that time was located at Fort McNair, right outside the wall there at Fort
McNair. I lived in the Marina Towers building in Alexandria, which is still in
existence today, and Frank Rauch lived in the same apartments, so we as

66

desk partners would car pool every morning over and get an early start, go
across the 14th Street Bridge, and long hours. I enjoyed very much
assigning captains at that stage. I assigned captains for the first two years,
my third year in branch I assigned majors. Branch was just evolving out of
its split, at the same time, between air defense and field artillery, and the
reduction of forces was starting to happen midway through my tour. Also it
was a time that a whole new personnel system came in called OPMS 1,
the [Officer Personnel Management System 1], which added additional
specialties to the principal armor, field artillery, and infantry officers. So
that option and that approach took place as the war was winding down.
INTERVIEWER: What did that do to you? Did that complicate the

assignments; make it more difficult to slot people, or what was the impact?
GEN PEAY: I think you had to be much, much more careful in terms of
the career development of an officer. It just crowded in more things that
you had to get done, but at the end of the day it probably was a fair
system that would allow some officers that were not going to go up the
command route to have greater opportunity for promotion and certainly
enjoyment of their assignments in a different specialty. I think the real the
impact of that was structure-wise. To do that you had to stand up a
personnel joint assignments branch [JASA], which not only handled joint
assignments but also handled a lot of the OPMS assignments. We went
through a series of steps that then resulted in a major bureaucracy formed
in the Officer Personnel Directorate, which to that date had been much
more decentralized, with decisions left to the full colonels, the seasoned
branch chiefs that knew their branches and really knew how to assign
qualified people. That organizational decision was the first step in really
starting to reduce the power of the branch chief. A lot of people felt that
the branch chiefs maybe had become too powerful. I dont fall into that
boat. I think good branch chiefs cared deeply about the Army, cared

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deeply about their branch, knew their branch, and really knew how to
prepare an order of merit list and line up those officers for various different
requirements for the good of the Army. Colonel Jim Wortham, FA, had a
National Guard background for many, many years, but went on to
command at the active Army O-6 missile level and really was a very
special case. He was known throughout the Army for his personnel
abilities. He knew the Army, he knew people, and he could handle that
with great adeptness. He knew the FA community and the FA Branch.
When that centralization began, it eventually (of course) led to centralized
command lists. I think one of the most significant changes was the
reorganization to the MILPERCEN [Military Personnel Center] as the
Officer Personnel Directorate moved out of Fort Myer and moved to the
Hoffman Building in Alexandria, Virginia. The process then reorganized
the branches under the control of major divisions, so you have a field
artillery branch, and then you have a majors division which had a field
artillery element in it, an infantry element in it, and so forth. And then you
had a lieutenant colonels division and a colonels division. And so, for all
practical purposes, the senior O-6 branch chief that we had had for so
many years disappeared. The branch chief would be a lieutenant colonel
or a colonel of any branch that then would understand and make the final
decision of assignments across branches. I really think that was a step
back in terms of understanding the branches. And of course even some of
that continues today, where its always discussionsis it branches or is it
Total Army? And Ive never felt that way. I always felt that the secret is to
have good competent and strong branches that can mobilize the country
in their particular specialty. I think weve got ourselves off track
strategically here a bit in terms of the greater competency, and one day
we are going to have to rebuild these branches during mobilization, and
were going to find that its very, very difficult. I think that General Marshall
today would have a very difficult time rebuilding an Army, or building an

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Army, without having the competency of branches of yesterday. Maybe
that would be a subject we would want to talk about later.
INTERVIEWER: I think you will remember when they did away with the
Chemical Corps and found that that was nonviable and they had to bring it
back again not too much later. Tell us about some of the people you
served with there besides Colonel Wortham.
GEN PEAY: Looking back, I think its an incredible compliment to Colonel
Wortham, because he selected all the officers that were coming to the
branch, and you have to look at who those officers were: Carl Vuono,
Marv Covault, Tom Jones, Denny Reimer, John Shalikashvili, Terry Henry,
Fred Stubbs, Don Jones, Herb Wassom, Fred Gorden, many moreDon
Eckelbargerall generals that came out of this branch in a short time
frame, a list frankly unparalled.
INTERVIEWER: Was it apparent to you at that time that these were men
with the potential they later demonstrated?
GEN PEAY: Yes. Denny Reimer quickly became one of my closest

friends and still is today. Denny and I talked with regularity over the next
20 years, 25 years, in the Army. I can recall coming in to FA branch, and
probably in my first month in this job, I just didnt know how this
bureaucracy worked to cut orders. Finally, one night at about seven
oclock, Reimer came back to my desk. And I was under pressure,
because I had to get the orders out on about 150 advance course
captains, and I was struggling to get the automation thing to work and
what numerical number the orders were going to be and so on. And
Denny sat there with me for about an hour and we worked that advance
course together. Ive never forgotten that. He never said a word. We just
sat there and worked those orders. I was learning. We had great

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memories of that assignment, and of course being newly married first tour
with Pam, that was a special time for us.
INTERVIEWER: Did she have opportunity to make use of her library

science degree?
GEN PEAY: She did. She worked downtown in Washington, D.C. for
American Life Insurance Association in a medical research library during
that particular period of time.
INTERVIEWER: You stayed on that assignment three years, I think.
GEN PEAY: I stayed three years. Denny Reimer was selected to be

General Abrams aide-de-camp, and I moved up and took his place on the
majors desk. And then Fred Gorden came in and took Frank Rauchs
place on the captains desk. Marv Covault was my desk partner on the
majors desk. So really it was an incredible, talented group of people that
went on to senior responsibilities in the United States Army. And Ive
always thought Colonel Wortham deserved so much credit for putting this
group together. The Field Artillery Branch team was very impressive.
INTERVIEWER: Sure, knowing who had that potential. So now it looks

like a pretty good next assignment for you and Pam.
GEN PEAY: I learned very much about the Army in this assignment, and
Ive used that experience with regularity.
INTERVIEWER: What rank are you by now?
GEN PEAY: I am a major promotable. I had been promoted early.

Command boards now centrally selected you, and then the lieutenant

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colonels division assigned you. They assigned me out to the 25th Division
in Hawaii to command the 2d Battalion, 11th Field Artillery. At this stage I
had a brand new son who had been born in May of 1975, and we
departed later that summer to go to the 25th Division. In sum, we had a
four-month-old going into command.
INTERVIEWER: What was that son named?

GEN PEAY: We called him Jim. He had the exact same full name as I
do, except he was the fourth.
INTERVIEWER: 2d Battalion, 11th Field Artillery?

GEN PEAY: Yes, 2d Battalion, 11th Field Artillery. It was called On Time
and it had the great lore and history of firing the last artillery round in
World War I, so it was special. It was a battalion of 18 howitzers of M102
105mm variant, that could very much be slung under the helicopters,
exactly like in the 1st Cav and somewhat the earlier version I had in the
4th with the M101 variant.
INTERVIEWER: This is just almost exactly at the time the war in Vietnam
reaches its unfortunate conclusion, and we had drawn the Army down
considerably over the time when youve been involved in assigning field
artillery officers. Whats the situation when you get out to the 25th
Division?
GEN PEAY: Well, it now is a volunteer force and an Army of 18 divisions

with some ARNG roundout brigades. Starting off, you saw some of those
soldiers and NCOs that were somewhat left over after the draft Army, and
an occasional college graduate, maybe an occasional soldier with a
masters degree, but very few. You also saw a real change in the training

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requirements in this period and you saw the regulations and the policies of
the Army really tighten up to eliminate those that had had crime or drug
reports in their file, or if you had some military indiscipline action take
place, those were means for elimination from the force.
INTERVIEWER: So is this both recruitment and reenlistment standards

that were talking about?
GEN PEAY: That is correct, very much tightened up.
INTERVIEWER: We were talking about the increased standards that are

being applied in this period when weve drawn down considerably. Whats
the outfit like that you joined? Up to strength?
GEN PEAY: It was up to strength. The sergeant major in our artillery

battalion was an infantry sergeant major, and he was fineolder, not
flashy, little tiny guy, but who knew soldiers. I thought he did a very fine
job for me. The section chiefs were still very young. We had a couple good
first sergeants and good chiefs of firing battery. And I thought we had a
pretty good group of young officers that we were working with, but we still
had a lot of work to do with our soldiers and those challenges that were
left from the Vietnam era. Our battalion, like others in the 25th in Hawaii at
that time, which of course being an island was very susceptible to drugs.
We had to put in extensive programs to rid drugs and to handle the race
problems that were in the battalion. Our division commander was Major
General Harry Brooks, who happened to be a field artilleryman. He
brought with him a series of very energetic programs that he learned from
General Hank Emerson in Korea, where Brooks had been an assistant
division commander, and he expounded on those. He was no nonsense.

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He tightened things up quickly in the division, and these programs not only
were training-related, but also designed to counter racial discord and
improve the climate of command throughout the entire division.
INTERVIEWER: Were there other people there working for you, in other
words more junior to you, that had also been to Vietnam, and were you
sort of like the last cohort that had had Vietnam service?
GEN PEAY: I think I was one of the last. My battalion XO had been to
Vietnam. My battalion 3 had been to Vietnam. The sergeant major, but the
battery commanders had not.
INTERVIEWER: They hadnt had time to go.
GEN PEAY: Thats right. We had a really splendid division artillery
commander who went on to wear three stars in the Army, then a colonel,
Bill Schneider. Hes deceased now, and his wifes still living, Barbara. I will
never forget that they both met Pam and me at the airport in Oahu. And
before I could hardly get off the plane, it seemed like Colonel Bill
Schneider, this great big 65 lanky fellow, had swept Jim (who was in a
basket) out of our hands. They both were role models and she particularly.
None of us could ever understand how Barbaras appearance was always
perfect. We just loved her. Family oriented, they had two sons of their own
that went on to wonderful careers in the service. And I found that both of
them were splendid mentors, particularly Barbara Schneider. She was
terrifically helpful to Pam in her own way.
INTERVIEWER: This is also Pams first assignment with you in a troop
unit, is that not so?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct.

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INTERVIEWER: So this could be very helpful.
GEN PEAY: The battalion executives wife, and the battalion S-3s wife,
were considerably older than Pam was. But that was never a problem. We
had such a good team of persons that things really worked very, very well.
And I had the same challenges of finding baby-sitters, just like the
captains and lieutenants, so we had much fun with that. Our division
artillery was busy and our battalion was busy. It was an infantry division
that was fast-moving all over the Pacific. I can remember General Fritz
Kroesen coming to the 25th from USAREUR, addressing the officer corps
in the club at lunch, and saying that the 25th Division was the European
reserve to go over the Pole from Hawaii into Europe. He made that point
very clearly, that we were in their NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] war plan. So we were stretched. We were all over the
Pacific in our training, and then we went to the big island of Hawaii twice a
year to train, and those were month-long deployments that normally
concluded with an army training test, or later an ARTEP [Army Training
and Evaluation Program]. They were great times over theretime to get
your battalion ready and then shoot forty missions for the record and see
how you do and come home. This was a pressure-packed assignment.
General Brooks deliberately put lots of functions, requirements, policies
and procedures in place that were for a reason, to test you and keep your
command busy. We had unannounced command inspections with
announced standards, not unannounced standards. He personally knew,
down to company/battery level, how you were doing. He knew the results
of all inspections, AWOLs, serious incidents. Those were in his card file on
his deskat company/battery level throughout the division. So there was
great pressure and it really stressed your command style. General Brooks
also started quarterly training briefs and you had to report out in a specific
format, so battalion and battery commands were very visible to him.

74

INTERVIEWER: One of the issues that calls to mind is the use, or
sometimes, people would say, the misuse of statistics and statistical
comparisons between units and commanders. What was your experience
with that and what were your conclusions?
GEN PEAY: I had concerns about that. I dont think that theres any
question from the division level, if you are looking at statistics down at
battery level, youre not going to know all the implications of that. So the
statistics in that time frame probably played a role in all our reports. I had
a good division artillery commander that tried to buffer that. I learned a lot
about how to push indirectly your battalion commanders with the division
CG from watching how General Schneider did that, because at the end of
the day you were going to be ranked one of 40 in the division. Your future
was there. It taught me, though, that I had to think how you could achieve
the highest of standards and not trample on your people. So we would get
together and, if C Battery was hit unannounced (and you got that call at
0600 in the morning), the whole battalion would come in and A Battery
would take care of the west side of the street and B Battery would take
care of the wheeled vehicles and so on, and we would work together, and
we had a very good successful run with the full battalion working together,
again being measured against incredibly tough standards. We did
outstanding on field exercises and in maintenance evaluations, so our
battery commanders all did well in the eyes of the DIVARTY CO who
senior-rated them.
INTERVIEWER: As a battalion commander, for the first time you had a

command sergeant major. How did you use your sergeant major and work
with him, and had you developed a concept of that before? Or did you
work one out with this sergeant major that you had assigned to you?

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GEN PEAY: No, I think we just went in and kind of grew together. There
were certain things I did ask him to work with in garrison that were not
necessarily in the pure war-fighting things. When we went to the field there
were certain basic noncommissioned officer things there, SOP [Standing
Operating Procedure] things, security and those kinds of things. But this
was again an infantry sergeant major. He really could not help in terms of
gunnery or competency on the gun line. But he knew people and he knew
soldiers. Ill never forget when we came off the big island of Hawaii after a
very successful test. We were all feeling very, very good about ourselves,
and that Monday morning when we came in for duty we were viewing the
success we had had, and he told me, he said, Sir, you better go down to
C Battery, because you are about to have one of the biggest race relations
problems youve ever had in your career. I went down there, and he was
right on target. He had a sense for all of that. He knew people. He knew
when things were starting to boil. So I found listening to him important,
and I always did that, particularly with nonjudical punishment. I tried to be
fair to people. I thought the sergeant major did a very good job for us.
INTERVIEWER: I have a note here to ask you in this assignment about

Vietnam lessons that applied. Is there something to be said about that?
GEN PEAY: I think those that I repeated earlier came back to roost one
more time, and they certainly came back to roost when I had the 101st
Airborne Division. And thats standards, ethics; training in combats a
must, courage to fix when tired, bored, and scared, and out-front
leadership. And those five tenets, I think, are key; I dont care what the
environment is, peace or war.
INTERVIEWER: So, if I may observe, those are not specifically Vietnam

lessons, they are just lessons you learned in Vietnam that apply across
your career.

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GEN PEAY: I think I developed a little bit of that under General Maroun,
but certainlyuntil we had faced the heavy combat that we faced on the
Cambodian border, and then it was much more clear to me. General
Willard Scott took over from General Brooks at the start of my second year
in command. General Scott went on to be the Superintendent at the
United States Military Academy. He and Dusty (Mrs. Scott) had a very
special impact on the division. They were class people. He was steeped in
history. He had a way to keep things light, almost somewhat jovial and
kidding at times, but he was a very competent field artilleryman and
soldier in his own right and at times, more often than not, he expected the
division artillery to have a higher standard and do better than others. I
think that was his feeling because of his own field artillery background.
Over the years and later assignments, we recalled with fondness that
assignment. General Scott had a way of always wanting to be around
young people. He and Mrs. Scott were delighted to be invited to battalion
socials. I always thought he was quite a role model.
INTERVIEWER: Weve talked in several assignments about more senior
people that you worked for and learned from. Now youre becoming
somewhat senior. Youre now a battalion commander. Are you beginning
to identify younger officers that you can mentor and whose future you
think is promising?
GEN PEAY: There is no question. Dick Trageman was my battalion 3, and

Dick had grown up in the cavalry separate battery concept as a battery
commander. Dick did a great job for the 11th Field, and I followed his
future assignments closely. At the conclusion of this command assignment
there were plans to either make me the G-1 or the G-3 of the division. I
came out on the War College list at the completion of command. After
much discussion, General Scott felt that I should go back to the War

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College. He did not believe in deferring school assignments. There are
different views of this. I had some concern about that, because we were
going to the three-year command selection process and extended
command, and I did not feel ones chances were enhanced to be picked
for colonel O6-level command with just an eighteen-month command tour
under your belt as a lieutenant colonel, regardless of the quality of your
file.
INTERVIEWER: Could you have stayed in command longer had the War
College been deferred?
GEN PEAY: No, the command tour was over. It was a case of were you
going to receive a second troop assignment at the lieutenant colonel
level? So I returned home to the War College. I left in the summer of 1977
and spent the school year of 1977-1978 at Carlisle Barracks.
INTERVIEWER: Did your family go to Carlisle Barracks with you?
GEN PEAY: Yes, they did. I think I was next to the youngest officer in my
class, which did not cause any problems, but I would have preferred to
have been in a more mid-range cohort. I had a young family, still just Jim.
We lived 15 miles off post and it was a snowy winter. It was a very good
tour, and a chance to settle down a little bit after a very fast-moving
battalion command assignment in Hawaii. I met a number of officers that
have been special friends to this day. Six or seven years ago, our class
had the largest number of four-star generals in it since World War II. There
was George Joulwan, who had NATO, Gary Luck at Eighth Army, Gordon
Sullivan became Chief of Staff of the Army, Freddie Franks was TRADOC
[Training and Doctrine Command] commander, Dave Maddox USAREUR
commander, John Shalikashvili Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I
was Vice Chief and later CINCCENT [Commander in Chief, Central

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Command]. Im sure Im missing one or two others. And we had several
foreign officers who became Chiefs of their services. General Yerks was
the War College Commandant, Bob Yerks. And I think he felt, and maybe
it was driven by the pace of coming out of the war, the pace of the
volunteer Army, getting this Army all back together, that people really
needed to settle down, reflect, and have a good time. In some cases, I
think, some of the things we did were childish, but we had a good time
and, as mentioned, these friendships went along with almost every
assignment throughout the rest of my time in service.
INTERVIEWER: What happened during the year in terms of knowing

what lay ahead of you? Did you have an idea of where you were going to
go after the War College?
GEN PEAY: No, I had no idea at all. I was notin the February-March
time frame, I was not selected for O-6 command. Id had three early
promotions. All of the gentlemen that I mentioned earlier moved on to O6
command, plus many others in our class.
INTERVIEWER: Thats a little disconcerting, isnt it?
GEN PEAY: I was disappointed, but I felt that I was still young, and I felt it
was time to continue to grow and hope that I would have better fortune in
the years ahead. I was supposed to be assigned to the Pentagon, working
for General Al Akers in what was then known as DCSRDA [Deputy Chief
of Staff for Research, Development, and Acquisition], and I was on those
orders for that assignment on graduation day out of the War College. I
was diverted from that assignment to be the senior aide to the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That particular action did not go down well with
General Akers and it took me several, several years to repair that
relationship, which frankly I had nothing to do with.

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INTERVIEWER: Who was the Chairman?
GEN PEAY: The Chairman was General David Jones, Air Force four-star,
and he had gone to General Rogers, who was Chief of Staff of the Army,
and wanted to change the setup within his office. At that time you had four
full colonels that had either a different functional area or a different
geographical area of the world, and they were within 25 meters of his
office. They went on all trips with the Chairman, and all the staff actions
and papers in the Joint Staff would at some point go through one of those
officers. General Jones wanted to have another War College graduate that
could work special projects directly for him, give him views on certain
papers, and he wanted that person positioned directly outside his office as
a senior aide. So you would have his executive, who was a brigadier, and
then you would have myself as the senior aide, and then there was a
junior aide. That comprised the CJCS personal staff.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go for an interview?
GEN PEAY: I did. I went for an interview a week after and my assignment
was changed at that time. It really was a complex assignment for me.
Probably, as I look back over my career in uniform, it was the most
dissatisfying assignment I had. But, once again, I did learn an awful lot. Its
just very difficult to provide substance in a joint environment, sitting
outside a Chairmans door, without really causing conflict, with not only
your own service, but where you are providing views or working projects
that fall in someone elses portfolio. I tried to be really balanced and open
about my work, but it was a difficult road to navigate. This was also a very
difficult time in the Defense Department, and particularly in the Joint Staff.
We had had the accident in the desert with the hostage rescueDesert
Oneand General Jones was very unhappy with the sense of jointness.

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He was out in front of the whole Goldwater-Nichols legislation, working
much of that behind the scenes, long before it became law some five
years later.
INTERVIEWER: Was that going on at this time when youre serving him?
GEN PEAY: It was. It was also a fractious time between the Chairman
and the service chiefs. Theirs was not a warm relationship in that regard.
Obviously, with the budget cutbacks and the Cold War threats growing, all
of that was in play. I had an enormous amount of travel in that time frame
where I did learn, as General Jones wore the double hat of being
Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and so once a quarter he had
to go to Europe to handle those duties. I got to really know General
Knowlton at that time, who was the four-star, his representative there in
NATO. I learned an awful lot about NATO, and spent the night most
evenings in the Knowltons quarters. In traveling worldwide I learned how
bureaucracies meshed, witnessed how operational-geographical
commands worked, and once again learned how ambassadors, senior
civilians and senior military appointees had to work together if ends were
to be achieved. I do think this assignment helped me later on when I had
more senior responsibilities.
INTERVIEWER: What was your general assessment of General Jones?

GEN PEAY: He was brilliant. Many people dont know that General Jones
only had a high school education. He learned to fly himself. He worked at
his desk and job day and night. He was mentored and brought up by
Curtis LeMay as LeMays aide. He was not profane and not as vocal as
LeMay, but he was just as black and white and cold and bureaucratic as
any senior officer Ive ever known. And he was very close to civilians in
the Defense Department.

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INTERVIEWER: Interesting assessment.
GEN PEAY: He was exacting on standards, and if you didnt have the
breadth, you maybe would be terminated and you never knew it. The Air
Force at that time had closed efficiency reports by the senior raters, and
you never knew how those reports would be written. I obviously, as the
senior aide, was witness to all of that, far different from the Army culture
and process. He also was very sensitive to operational security. And there
were many nights that I could see that always was on in his mind. On the
first night of Desert One, General Jones sent me home to his quarters in
his sedan, as if I was the Chairman, and he spent the night on the sofa in
his office. And of course, there on TV the next morning, at four or five in
the morning, I knew this operation was going down. I had the news on,
and was party to the first signs of the crash. On many of our overseas
trips, after months of planning these official trips, literally six hours before
a trip, where itineraries were locked, social arrangements were made,
passports were confirmed, he would cancel a trip or totally revise the
schedule and our staff and aides were left scrambling. I think much of that
was to show that he was Chairman, and that he was concerned for
security and would operate on short notice. I found the time as his senior
aide broadening, but one of the most difficult and one of the most
dissatisfying assignments.
INTERVIEWER: Did you see Goldwater-Nichols as movement in the right

direction, or did you have reservations about it?
GEN PEAY: I certainly didnt see it at that time in 1978, but I did see it all
coming about five, six, seven years later, when I was the executive to
General Wickham, and I look forward to talking about that when we get
into that particular period. I had another son born, Ryan, in 1979. I came in

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very early that morning, straight from the hospital, and General Jones
always came to work very early. I told him that I just had a child. Both of
our kids were born at Bethesda while we were in the service. I was
clearing off my desk to go on two or three days leave to handle our new
family situation, and General Rogers, the Army Chief of Staff, came
through to see the Chairman. I was unshaven. I was in rumpled civilian
clothes, and of course General Rogers had selected me for this job, and
he looked at me, and he was not happy. I can remember that stare. I cant
remember my exact statement, but I didnt quibble. He went in to see
General Jones. And I guess General Jones told him, Hes clearing out his
in-box, new son, et cetera, and General Rogers came out and we had a
very warm conversation. I can remember that mornings events with great
clarity. General Jones was also incredibly fit. He would run to work most
mornings and then change. He would work to eight, eight-thirty, nine
oclock at night, and then he and I would go downstairs and play handball
in the Pentagon, the POAC [Pentagon Officers Athletic Club], and then he
might run home. This approach was followed on full Saturday workdays as
well. He was competitive and took great solace in beating a number of
admirals and generals that were younger than he. I missed the O-6
command list again while in that particular assignment. It was the second
time that I had missed command; being assigned to a tough, long hours
assignment representing the service did not help my morale. So, needless
to say, I had to get over that, which I think I did and moved on.

INTERVIEWER: This is a continuation of General Peays interviews. The
date is now 19 August 2009. When we left off yesterday, we were talking
about your period of Washington duty when you were senior aide to the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I know you met many of the key
senior officers of that time, one of whom was General Vessey, then I

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believe the Armys Vice Chief of Staff. Maybe you could say something
about him.
GEN PEAY: Well, he was a very, very strong officer in the tank when he
represented the Army Chief and he had also come from recent CINC
[commander in chief] duty in Korea. He was very, very respected. I saw
him at times take strong positions that were difficult to handle by the
civilian bureaucracy. We had great, great admiration for General Vessey.
This also was a time that I met General Wickham, who was Director of the
Joint Staff, and, while I did not have many substantive conversations with
General Wickham, certainly the coordination responsibility that he had as
Director of the Joint Staff saw him in the Chairmans office with great
regularity. I had great admiration at that time for the way he worked, his
style, and the ability to do so much under pressure was quite obvious.
General Jones liked General Wickham, which was important, as these
were not the most fun times in that arena.
INTERVIEWER: I suppose your duties brought you in touch with other

people of your vintage who were doing similar work for other senior
officers?
GEN PEAY: They were, and we established relationships with the other
senior aides and executives to their particular service chiefs. All the
executives and many of the aides went to four stars later as service chiefs
or CINCs. Knowing them as lieutenant colonels and colonels and
brigadiers was helpful in collaboratively working actions later as a senior
officer.
INTERVIEWER: Youre talking to a biographer, so Im prepared to believe
that interpersonal relationships are at the heart of many things, and those

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early relationships come back to help. At some point, I believe, you move
to the Army Initiatives Group.
GEN PEAY: I did, I think after about twenty months or so working for
General Jones. The way that transpired is still not clear to me. As I
mentioned, I really found this assignmentalthough admiration for
General Jones, and understanding his brilliance, and particularly
understanding the way he was able to work with the civilian leadership in
the PentagonI still found this my most dissatisfying time in uniform. And
one night, I think it was probably about 2030-2045, the hours were long, I
was walking down the E Ring, I believe going to the DOD public affairs
office to do some final coordination on a trip that was upcoming, and I
passed General Hamlet, who at that time was one of the Assistant
Inspector Generals, or the Assistant Inspector General. I had not seen him
for several years. I always had great respect for General Hamlet as a
brigade commander in the 1st Cav. We struck up a conversation,
reviewed old times. I think he recognized that I just didnt appear to be
happy. He grabbed me by the arm and took me in to see General Yerks,
who now was the Army DCSPER [Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel]. He
said, Reassign this officer. I was embarrassed. I think part of it was that it
was late at night, and I think General Hamlet was having a good time, and
probably not having a great day either. But it really put me in an awkward
position. Several months later, less than that, I was reassigned to be Chief
of the Army Initiatives Group. In the interim I had come out on the
promotion list to O-6. I think at that time General Meyer was the new Chief
of Staff of the Army, so there were grounds to reassign me from the senior
aide job and move me to a more substantive position in the Pentagon.
And thats what happened. I was assigned to be Chief of the Army
Initiatives Group, working directly for the Army DCSOPS, General Otis,
but our entire section also simultaneously worked for the Chief of Staff of

85

the Army, so it was a dual lash-up. We were kind of the Initiatives Group
for him and General Otis at the same time.
INTERVIEWER: That is an interesting arrangement. Lets discuss how it
worked. Who came up with the things to be studied? Was that your
responsibility? Did you get them from General Otis? General Myer? Or
other places? What happened?
GEN PEAY: It was both, all of the above. General Otis had some ideas,
particularly as regards the regimental system. General Meyer wanted light
forces designed to go into Europe, where he saw increased urbanization
and felt that the mixture of infantry and armor forces there was a good way
to think about the defense of that area. The hollow forcemany of the
responses to that CSA statement came out of the Initiatives Group. I
would say it was just all of the above. Most came from the Chief, General
Meyer, and then we were to flesh those out in greater detail and made the
case for their success with implementation to be handed off to the
pertinent command or Army staff section. We also did many quick
turnaround responses and op-ed pieces, mostly strategic positioning of
the Army in terms of its utility and its missions.
INTERVIEWER: What help did you have?
GEN PEAY: I had a lieutenant colonel and a major working for us, and a
secretary. It was a very small, two offices pushed together, down in the C
or D Ring. We spent a lot of time going into the DCSOPS office for
guidance, and thenand interestingly enough, on many occasions
General Meyer, who I think liked to move around in the Pentagon, would
just appear in our office, and the same with General Otis. So the doors
were open. It was a good assignment. It was again long, long hours. And I
found that one of the things that we had to do was to carefully work

86

through the DCSOPS bureaucracy so that we didnt get in the way of the
two-star division directors that, correctly so, thought that many of these
initiatives should belong in their directorate. So what I tried to do was to let
it be theirs and see if, on the sidelines, we couldnt promote some of it, fill
in a chart here or fill in a chart there, and even work the initiative the best
as we could to get it through the bureaucracy. Colonel Ron Griffith worked
in PA&E and Colonel Pete Taylor was in War Plans in DCSOPS. Both
were special friends and the three of us worked a number of papers and
actions together. They were real pros and went on to senior rank in the
Army as the Vice Chief of Staff (Griffith) and III Corps commander (Taylor)
respectively. I remain close to both of them today.
INTERVIEWER: Would the products of your work show up in things like

congressional testimony, speeches, and articles? How would they be
used?
GEN PEAY: Absolutely. General Meyer had a speechwriter, so he took a

lot of our material and converted it to his language. And again, I dont
wanta lot of these ideas were General Meyers ideas. We just tried to
give the second or third order of detail and coordinate and move them.
INTERVIEWER: How long did that assignment last for you?
GEN PEAY: It was over a year. And again, in this same period I missed
O-6 command for now the third time.
INTERVIEWER: That must have been dismaying.
GEN PEAY: Well, we were working long hours. My second boy was born
just as I was leaving the Joint StaffRyan, in 1979. And fortunately I had
a great Army wife, and there were nights that I would get home and we

87

would sit on the stepswe had a very small home on Taylor Avenue in
Alexandria. It was close to the Pentagon, 10-15 minutes away from the
Pentagon, so I didnt have the long travel times, but many nights I would
get home at eight-thirty or nine oclock at night, and she was great. Wed
just sit down and laugh about some of this, and it never became
contentious. I must say that Pam was terribly supportive, not just in this
assignment but throughout my Army career. She deserves a lot of the
credit for raising both boys. After missing command now the third time I
must admit that I had to start thinking about the future. Because I was
married late, I had two young boys had to think through the whole cost of
college at that stage and also the satisfaction of only staff jobs in the
future. At the end of the day, staff job after staff job after staff job is not the
most fulfilling work in the world. One night I received a call from General
Sam Walker, who was the Superintendent at VMI. He asked me to come
be the Commandant of Cadets and Professor of Military Science for the
Army. I really had to think about that. It was pretty clear that I wasnt going
to go very much further in the service, and I still liked the Army, and I
thought maybe going back to VMI and, while not command, it was the
closest thing you could have to command to have a large group of cadets
in which you could influence their actions and thinking. So I considered it. I
talked to General Otis after receiving the call from General Walker, and
General Otishe listened. It was not a long meeting. And he said, You
go back there to the Army Initiatives Group and go back to work. You
should not leave the Army. I really didnt know how to respond to that
except to say, Yes, sir. I went back to my office. Several weeks later,
again on a late evening, General Otis called me to his office. He said,
Theyre forming a new corps, I Corps. They call it first corps today, but
the original nomenclature was I (pronounced eye) Corps that had earlier
stood down in Korea. He said, They are going to form I Corps at Fort
Lewis, Washington, and its going to be the Pacific corps. General
Shoemaker, then the FORSCOM [Forces Command] commander, very

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much wanted a corps put together to handle the Pacific, and also to do a
lot of integration of active component and reserve component forces and
also be a late deployer. General Otis asked me if I could be at Fort Lewis
in a matter of weeks to take a job as corps G-3. I said, Yes, sir, and went
home that night and told Pam, and within ten days to two weeks we had
wrapped the kids up, headed towards Wisconsin for a short week of
vacation where her familys farm was, her parents, and we headed on
across the northern route through Montana and on into the state of
Washington. One of the best assignments an officer could ever have.
INTERVIEWER: Who was going to command the new corps?
GEN PEAY: At that time the corps commander had not been announced.
I was the third person assigned to the corps. Brigadier General Quinn,
who had been an assistant division commander in the 9th, was moved
over as the deputy commanding general of I Corps pending the arrival of
the new corps commander. I was the third person assigned to the corps. It
was a blank sheet of paper. When we moved into the headquarters there,
which was originally the headquarters of the 9th Division and also the post
headquarters, the G-3 was located on the second floor. Over the next
several weeks officers from all across the country were pouring into the
corps, and we literally were sitting around an old first sergeants field table
with a TA-312 telephone with a blank sheet of paper discussing
organization charts and how we were going to put the corps together.
Shortly thereafter General Brandenburg, John Brandenburg, was named
as the corps commander. He had commanded the 101st, he had been the
J-3 in the RDJTF [rapid deployment joint task force] down in Tampa,
Florida, and he was to arrive shortly.
INTERVIEWER: I dont know if we said, but this is Fort Lewis.

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GEN PEAY: Fort Lewis, Washington, yes. A very interesting thing
happened that Ive often reflected on concerning my first several days at
Fort Lewis. When we pulled on post that first evening at about five oclock,
completing our travels across the country, I noticed this imposing figure
sitting on the curb with a great big black dog, a lab that he had, and I
looked at that person and I knew who he was, and finally it dawned on me
that it was Lieutenant Colonel Bill Powell, who had graduated a year
before me at VMI, and he was an outstanding guard and teammate on our
football team. Pam and I stopped the car, and I went over and tried to
catch up in short order and, unbeknownst to me, he was the current
commander of the Ranger battalion, which at that time predated the
assignment of Ranger regiments across the country. As such, he worked
directly for the G-3 at the corps. He knew I was coming. I guess that had
been announced in some form. Since I knew very little about how the
Ranger battalion and how its operations took place, he said, Binnie, why
dont you come tomorrow night, or the next night and join us? We have a
classified training regimen that we are undergoing, and you can fly with
me in the blacked-out C-130 and Ill start to introduce you to some of our
techniques that we operate under. I was thrilled to do that, to get back in
the operational business of troop duty, and so we agreed that Id meet him
at such and such a time to get underway. Then, for one of the few times
ever, our household goods were to be delivered on time the next day. I felt
that I needed to stay home that particular night and help my wife out and
get the home settled, and so I called Bill and respectfully declined with the
guarantee that I would join the exercise at another time. At three oclock in
the morning my phone rang and I was told that his plane that was running
the operation had crashed in the desert and many aboard, to include him,
were killed. So you never know how life goes forward. Ive often thought
about that incident, because I would have been seated right next to him.
The bank of radios basically blew through him and he was immediately
killed. Bill Powell was a very respected officer. We had a large, large

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turnout at the memorial service at Fort Lewis several days later. Ive often
thought about the uncanny timeliness of all of that. That was my
introduction to the G-3 job at I Corps, and we were underway.
INTERVIEWER: General Brandenburg shows up in due course. Had you

ever known him before?
GEN PEAY: I had not known General Brandenburg. He was a delight to

work for. He was a big man, and Bev, his wife, was also a large lady. They
both had a great style in terms of team-building and were fun. I thoroughly
enjoyed him. He would give you taskers, but he would not micromanage
you. He expected us to keep him informed. He went methodically about
the business of forming the corps and taking over the command of the
post from the 9th ID. Once we came up with a concept of how to put this
AC/RC corps together, we then had General Shoemaker come out. And
he blessed the concept, which Ill be happy to go into some detail on,
because I think it set a standard for how you do these kinds of things and
how you think about a deep strategic reserve and use of the reserve
components.
INTERVIEWER: Lets talk about that. Did we have roundout units at this
point?
GEN PEAY: We did. You had roundout units, and the difference here was
what we called the base unitsthe COSCOM [Corps Support Command],
the corps artillery, corps signal brigade. These were largely reserve
component units that we had to put together. We had a small coterie
well, the large part of the corps staff was active duty, but its corps base
units, those that do the work, were reserve component, so we had to put
in place RC and active cells from and in those organizations that could
help us with the war planning, that could be the initial group in all the corps

91

exercises, because you could not pull an entire COSCOM together with
regularity, because the reserve components had civilian jobs they had to
do and so forth. Reserve and National Guard divisions were in numerous
war plans, not just ours at I Corps.
INTERVIEWER: You just couldnt call them up when you wanted to have
an exercise?
GEN PEAY: Right. So we started slow with a smalllike a jump corps

TOC that we would send to the Pacific to be part of the 5027 exercises,
the Team Spirit exercises, that were out there. General Brandenburg put a
small group of usthe G-3, the G-4on a plane, a small prop plane, and
we visited each corps base unit. He was a seasoned aviator, and Im sure
he enjoyed flying all across the country. About six months into this, after
General Shoemaker had blessed the conceptand he was shortly to be
replaced by General Cavasos at Forces Command, who also came out
and blessed the organization and the approachand we gave him a
laydown of all the units and how we would organizationally integrate this
corps. Then we laid out for him a three-year training calendar in terms of
how we were going to train the corps, plus what exercises we were going
to be involved in. Cavasos was very, very enthusiastic about the approach
and had us give a similar brief to General Meyer, the Army Chief of Staff.
We then flew south to Los Angeles and met with the RC 311th COSCOM,
and then we went into Alabama and met with our signal brigade. We went
on to the east coast and worked our way up to New York and started even
meeting with a number of the reserve divisions, the 42d and others. The
42d Division of New York, for instance, was in our TPFDL [time phased
force and deployment list]. We met simultaneously with all of the Adjutant
Generals of the states to be sure we had their units lashed right, and then
met with the various commanders and explained the entire layout of I
Corps and what it was, and then began the serious business of war

92

planning. We then went to Korea and met with General Wickham, who
was the CINC at that time. A few tense moments there, because his
concept of integrating I Corps into his war plan was not ours, and he was
the CINC. His concept was to break units up and assign them where
needed in the theater. General Wickham had rationale for doing that, and
we had to really work closely together. Some of our units were pulled off to
go into other organizationsthe way he saw the war progressing. He had
a near-term fight that he had to execute immediately. We were late
deployers, and so understandably there were some differences and
disappointments there. We certainly did not look forward, after these close
relationships we had built, to have many of our units pulled off, but we
worked through that period.
INTERVIEWER: We should probably say something about who the corps

chief of staff was.
GEN PEAY: The corps chief of staff was General Quinn, and later
General Herren. But the real hero was the deputy chief of staff, and his
name was Steve Arnold. Steve had a very difficult job there. He was a real
worker in the headquarters. Steve also wasI may be wrong on this, but I
think at one time he was the G-3 in the 9th Division. This was a very
interesting period of time because I Corps came in and was placed on top
of this former division post, where the 9th ID had been the singular
element. General Bob Elton was the division commander, and had
graciously moved out of the headquarters into an adjacent building with
his entire division staff. Steve Arnold then was transferred over as the
corps deputy chief of staff with a lot of knowledge. Interestingly, he was
replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Shelton, who later went on to be the
Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff. I had known Hugh in the 25th
Division when he had been an S-3 of a battalion, and we had a splendid
relationship in Hawaii. And now he is the G-3 of the division and I am the

93

G-3 of the corps, so we had almost daily conversations on a number of
different subjects which could have been difficult were it not for our
friendship.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have other divisions assigned to the corps,

either active or reserve?
GEN PEAY: We had no active divisions other than the 9th. The 9th was
also the high-tech test bed for the Army. Interestingly, the officer that hired
me to be the G-3 of I Corps was, on no notice, reassigned to be the CAC
commander at Fort Leavenworth. General Brandenburg then came in, and
I had not known General Brandenburg, and I became his G-3. I am
indebted that General Brandenburg did not move me out and bring in his
own G-3.
INTERVIEWER: You were in on the ground floor, number three guy. How
long did you stay in that job, and what happened to you thereafter?
GEN PEAY: I stayed in that job for I think a little over a year and half.
General Meyer came out one day as Chief of Staff. I was delighted to see
him again after a long absence. I came out on the O-6 command list on
the fourth look. I certainly would not have been selected for O-6 command
if I had not been the G-3 at I Corps and simultaneously the post G-3. I
dont think there is any question about that. That assignment allowed me
to get back into the Army on the ground floor in a pressure job in terms of
troop duty. At that time I was slated, because of rules of centralized
command, to be the division artillery commander in the 4th ID, because
the slates at that time were based largely on units that you had been with
in combat. I had earlier, as I mentioned, commanded a batter in the 4th
DIVARTY, and so thats how I was slated. General Elton, then the division
commander of the 9th, who also had this complex high-tech test bed

94

mission, which the corps was also involved in, in terms of all that, and it
was sophisticated, political, involved a lot of relationships as that test bed
frankly was crushing a lot of stones that belonged to other people,
breaking through the whole acquisition business, and so General Elton
entered the net and had my assignment changed to be the division
artillery commander in the 9th and stay there at Lewis, because he
thought that would be a seamless transition involving a lot of the initiatives
that were going on in the division and in I Corps. He was right about all of
that.
GEN PEAY: The 9th Infantry Division test bed had many, many initiatives,
and many great officers assigned to not only the test bed, but also to the
division. And General Elton, as I mentioned, was the initial commander,
followed by General Riscassi, who later commanded all forces in Korea.
General Riscassi was a great division commander. He was well steeped in
acquisition matters and initiatives from his earlier assignments in the
Army. And while the test bed was terminated five, six, or seven years
later, almost all of the initiatives that were undertaken in the division during
that time found their way into the greater U.S. Army in some form in later
years.
INTERVIEWER: So the test bed concept proved itself?

GEN PEAY: I think that many of the doctrinal approachesit wasnt just
equipment, it was also operational techniques that found their way into the
Army. The division also produced an inordinate number of general officers
in later years, and we all knew each other. In many ways these officers
perpetuated much of the doctrine, techniques, and thoughts in their later
assignments. So it was a great time to be at Fort Lewis. It was the longest

95

tour I ever had in the Army at one place, four years. And while I loved all
my command tours at every level, I thoroughly enjoyed being the G-3 of
the corps and the post.
INTERVIEWER: Especially making it up from scratch. I mean, what a

privilege.
GEN PEAY: Almost all the officers initially assigned to the corps, say the
first two hundred, were passed over or had not commanded. They were
available for assignment. But they were terrific officers, and they all
worked hard. As you said, being able to take a blank sheet of paper and
put that blueprint togetherwe were able to become very cohesive, as a
family, quickly. We all had a great time in that assignment. Many of our
plans officers worked long hours, and we put them on the road worldwide
to go coordinate their plans and gave them great responsibility. So I
learned from that assignment that there are many, many officers in the
Army that dont have the great fortune of commanding or having senior
rank, and they are important to the Army and should be treated with civility
and as professionals. That was very important to my own education. I then
commanded the 9th Division artillery, and had a chance there to influence
what the organization would look like. We tested many, many different
kinds of organizations as we tried to make the division artillery and the
division more strategically deployable by cutting down the number of air
sorties and getting the division into the fight much more quickly. We did a
lot organizationally with the MLRS [multiple-launch rocket system] and
with 198 howitzers. We cut down the size of our tacfire command and
control, but at the end of the day, we continually came back to
competence and leader development on the battlefield as really the best
approach to what these organizations should look like and how they
should fight. I think, over and over again, we verified that the whole
concept of tailoring is the best approach, and you should not cut out a lot

96

of capability just to get the organization down to certain numbers of
sorties. Rather you should tailor the organization and then close the
organization into the fight over a considerably longer period of time,
whether it was with sealift versus reduced airlift. That was the best
approach. I think todayweve gone to fixed organizations with greater
modularity, thatregretfully I think that weve given up a lot of leader
development, training competency, and a lot of capability that was best
suited by the tailoring that we were doing out there in the 9th Division.
INTERVIEWER: Did the 9th Division have an end strength within which
you had to make these adjustments or tailoring?
GEN PEAY: Yes. About every three months General Riscassi would come
down and ask for a different organization with a further cut in end strength,
so the division started out at 18,000, and Ive forgotten exactly, but
somewhere around 13,500 or 14,500 when I left the division artillery, was
the end strength of the division, and I cant recall the specific end strength
of the division artillery at that time.
INTERVIEWER: Its still a pretty big division, isnt it?
GEN PEAY: I think when you get an organization where you wanted to
have the capability of a heavy division and the end strength of a light
division, thats about as far as you can push it. I had great battalion
commanders. Mark Hamilton was one of my direct support battalions in
the 2d Battalion, 4th Artillery. Mark went on to two stars in the Army and is
now the President of the University of Alaska, a very important senior
position in that state. Russ Richardson and Nick Harris were two of my
other battalion commanders. And then the general support battalion
commander was Joe De Francisco, who later went on to wear three stars
in the Army and was the deputy in PACOM [Pacific Command] in his final

97

assignment. I found commanding the division artillery to be the easiest job
Ive ever had in the Army. You had to do some initial work early on in
terms of being sure your subordinate commanders understood your intent,
and that they understood your standards, and that you knew they were
competent in their duties. And after that you had to kind of get out of their
way a lot, because they were very, very capable. I was determined not to
micromanage these battalion commanders. I found the job thoroughly
enjoyable, and I found it to be the easiest job that Ive had in my time in
service, and hope I was helpful in indirect mentoring and coaching.
INTERVIEWER: While you had that job the division was mostly
commanded bywho was that?
GEN PEAY: General Riscassi commanded most of the time. General

Riscassi would, three times a week, would unannounced either come in
one of my mess halls and sit down and have coffeehe was an early
riser, and he would invariably go to Russ Richardsons mess hall and sit
down long before that mess hall even opened in the morning and have a
cup of coffee there. The mess sergeant knew to get him his coffee and get
out of his way. Hed read the paper or think about the days work, and then
three times a week he would stop in unannounced in my office and just sit
down in the chair, and we talked about everything, in the Army or what
was going on in the division artillery or in the division. I had a lot of respect
and love, and still do, for General Riscassi.
INTERVIEWER: Were you deploying on exercises for the division artillery

at this time, or what was the operation?
GEN PEAY: We did not do a lot of distant deploying, but we had

numerous command post exercises and a few field exercises in Yakima,
Washington. We also had a simulation center on north post at Fort Lewis

98

where we tested a lot of these concepts in command post exercises. We
were at the forefront of a lot of automation at that time. The high
technology TOCs we tested out, and the flat screen TVs and all of that
business of connectivity that was later to come into the Army, we were in
the forefront of all of that in 9th ID.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have contractor support for some of that?
GEN PEAY: Had massive contractor support. The test bed was run by a
number of outstanding performance officersColonel Chuck Armstrong,
who later commanded the 9th ID, and Colonel Larry DeCunto. An
engineer, Colonel Paul Cerjan, later went on to be President of the
National Defense University. Each functional area fire support, infantry,
signal, and so on) was supported by contractors that obviously had a
vested interest in where this was going, because it was going to eventually
lead to development of new equipment. So it was an interesting dynamic,
and the colonels in the 9th (as differentiated from those assigned to the
test bed) also had interests in protecting their organization from cuts and
also keeping it trained.
INTERVIEWER: Whats your family situation by this time? How old are
the boys, and what are they doing? Are they in school yet?
GEN PEAY: Ryan is, I guess, in kindergarten. Jimmy is probably in the

4th grade or so, I suspect. We were a young family, but with schools on
post it was a great family time and a great family assignment.
INTERVIEWER: I probably shouldnt ask you this, because youve
emphasized how long the hours were and all, but I know of your
continuing interest in Scouting. Were you able to do anything with Scouts
in these years?

99

GEN PEAY: I did nothing with Scouting other than be supportive. There
was a Scout troop at Fort Lewis, but the rest of the time I was in the Army
I did not take an active role of being a Scoutmaster. When I was the
executive to the Chief of Staff of the Army at Fort Myer I did have a more
active role there as it was a senior post with few kids. I took them on
several camping overnights, but frankly the hours I was working and the
assignments as a general did not lend themselves to that.
INTERVIEWER: Youve mentioned the job with the Chief of Staff. Is there
anything else we should talk about at Fort Lewis before we move on to
that next assignment?
GEN PEAY: No. General Wickham, who replaced General Meyer as the
Chief of Staff of the Army, came up for a long visit towards the end of my
command tour in the 9th Division artillery and took detailed briefings on
the test bed. Im not so sure General Wickham was a big supporter of the
test bed concept. He had been the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. There
obviously were tensions there as you were running an organization (the
9th Division test bed) outside the normal acquisition process. And Im sure
in his time as the Vice Chief he had to deal with that challenge. He came
out and took a briefing, and he ran with a battery in the 2nd Battalion, 4th
Artillery. He would always do that when he went to our posts, he would
start his morning by running with one of the companies or batteries. I had
not seen General Wickham since my time in the Joint Staff. We basically
exchanged hellos, and that really was the end of any conversation I had
with him on that trip. He went on to view other division units and on up to
the corps for briefings and, surprisingly, four to six weeks later I received a
call that he wanted me to come to Washington to be his executive.
Frankly, I did not want to do that.

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INTERVIEWER: Because?
GEN PEAY: Well, I had been informally approached by General Riscassi

to be the next Chief of Staff of the 9th ID, and I had been the corps G-3, I
had been the division artillery commander, and I thought I could be
helpful. It had been so long that I had been away from soldiers, and to be
able to stay five years with troops, five and a half years with troop duty,
would be special. Id always wanted to be a chief of staff of a division. I
had watched, as mentioned earlier, closely Colonel Carl Johnson in, at
that time, the 5th Mechanized Division at Fort Carson. I had watched the
way that Colonel Johnson had executed his duties, and I had always
wanted that opportunity. So I really dragged my feet, and finally General
Riscassi made it very clear that he was not going to get in the middle of
that decision process, and that I should march on my orders. And General
Riscassi was correct.
INTERVIEWER: You cant say no to the Chief of Staff.
GEN PEAY: Yes. It would be unfair to even ask General Riscassi to be in

that position. General Riscassi was one of the most adept personnel
managers in the Army over the years, and he certainly recognized what
that assignment would mean. So I left Pam and the two boys, because it
was a short notice move. I changed command and left them at Fort Lewis
to finish some schooling. It was a mid-winter move. I went back and
stayed in the BOQ there at Wainwright. And I remember like yesterday
this period of time, because it was right in the middle of the Reagan
inauguration. All of the pipes burst in Wainwright, and we were without
electricity and there was water all over the floor. It was a mess. I
remember specifically reporting in to duty with General Wickham. And
General Wickhamwe had a very interesting first day. I reported to him in
the evening in my Class A uniform, and it was about 1730 or 1800 at

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night. He had me sit outside on this small bench that was outside his office
door, and General Wickham was always very punctual, but I sat awhile
there. Finally the door opened and General Wickham came out with the
person that was in on this office call, and he turned to this person, who I
do not recall who it was, and he said, Well, there is Colonel Peay. He
said, Colonel Peay did not think that I could make this assignment
happen. And I was embarrassed to tears. But Ive been indebted,
obviously, that that assignment did take place, and that started a love
affair that I had with the Wickhams that lasts to this day.
INTERVIEWER: Had he been the Chief and you replaced someone that
was his executive?
GEN PEAY: I replaced an executive that had worked for him in the Vice
Chief assignment. General Wickham wanted, I think, to have some
freshness, so when he moved over to be the Chief he brought this
gentlemen with him for a short period of time and then replaced him.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have a sance with General Wickham in which

he gave you any marching orders? Or did you sort of have to pick it up as
you went along?
GEN PEAY: Actually, he did not. He said, Welcome aboard. Lets go to
work, and well sort it out. And I could not have been more thrilled than to
have just that. I went outside and met Mr. Carl Hanson, the stenographer
and administrative warrant officer. Carl sat down with me and laid out
current processes. The aide-de-camp was Major Tom Hill, who I had
known as Captain Hill in war plans four or five years earlier, and had also
known Tom in the 25th Division. So we went to work, the three of us. Tom
stayed in that assignment for probably another six to ten months before
going to command and was replaced by Major Bob Clark, who later went

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on the wear three stars. Tom Hill went on to wear four stars and become
the SOUTHCOM [Southern Command] commander. Bob Clark became
the 101st commander, and just recently retired as the Fifth Army
commander at Fort Sam Houston. So it was a great team in that office that
stayed together, the four of us, for three plus years.
INTERVIEWER: When did your family join, and did you get quarters?
What happened there?
GEN PEAY: I did. About two to three months later quarters became
available, the traditional quarters there at Fort Myer where almost all
executives to the Chief have lived in over the years. And, when they came
open, Pam and the two boys flew in and shortly thereafter we became
settled. Fort Myer was a terrific assignment. It was first of two assignments
that we would have at Myer. We loved being on that post. Both my boys
were baptized at the Post Chapel during this particular assignment. The
Wickhams included us in everything that they did. It was a terrific time in
the Army. General Wickham brought a lot of programs to the army in that
time frame. He is known for the family programs, which he learned under
Harold K. Johnson. He had been General Johnsons senior aide, I believe.
General Wickham spoke repeatedly of his fondness for Harold K.
Johnson. I think General Johnson molded much of General Wickhams
thinking and much of General Wickhams style in office. General
Wickham, in addition to family programs, was the father of the light
division, formed the 7th ID out at Fort Ord and later the 10th Mountain at
Fort Drum. And those two divisions, over the next decade, decade and a
half, were the most deployed, most active divisions in the United States
Army, and they met the requirement of being able to move Army divisions
very, very quickly in few sorties and get them into the fight and they were
relevant for the decade of war-fighting that was ahead. He and Secretary
Marsh worked hand-in-glove. The door was always open between General

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Wickhams office and the Secretarys office, and it was not unusual,
particularly for Secretary Marsh, to come through that door in the middle of
CSA briefings and other times, and General Wickham always deferred to
him in a very deferential way. Secretary Marsh had great love for General
Wickham and so, together, they then worked the Year of the NCO as a
theme. They worked the Year of Army Values as a theme. Secretary
Marsh and General Wickham worked the Year of History and the
Constitution as a theme. So those themes were helpful in moving the
Army to the future and had a way of changing the culture in the Army that
made the institution of the Army such a respected profession at that time.
General Wickham also was a classmate and very, very close friend of
General Gabriel, who was Chief of Staff of the Air Force. The two of them
introduced the whole concept of Army-Air Force initiatives, and were at the
forefront of doing a lot of jointness kinds of things through that very special
relationship. He tried to grow the Army in terms of its end strength in that
period, and I think that General Wickham was ahead of his time in much of
the Armys and DOD thinking. He clearly was a visionary. He had an
approachable and friendly low-key style. And those things were lessons
for me in terms of how I should approach my duties. He had a way of
breaking tenseness and warding off pressure, whether it was to crack a
joke or just to laugh about some things in a funny way. He knew that that
was the way to act. He was always inclusive of young people and liked to
have young people around him.
INTERVIEWER: Would it be fair to say he didnt take himself too
seriously?
GEN PEAY: No, he never took himself seriously, yet he took the job
seriously. He was probably one of the most acclimated and competent
persons in the Pentagon. He had worked at so many levels in the
Pentagon, to include close working in earlier times with Rumsfeld and

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other tough people in the Pentagon. Schlesinger. He had been close as
an aide to Maxwell Taylor and worked in many joint jobs. So General
Wickham was astute in knowing how to make the Pentagon work, and yet
at the same time he had been injured, hurt, in Vietnam as a battalion
commander, and commanded the 101st and was operationally sound.
INTERVIEWER: Hurt very badly, I think.
GEN PEAY: He was very competent in infantry business. He had

commanded the 101st, so he knew a lot about aviation as well. He
formed the Aviation branch and Special Forces branch on his time on
watch as the Chief of Staff of the Army. If you look at the imprint of this
officer on the Army, and where the Army is today, I would say he was a
visionary and he also was an incredibly competent leader. He liked
General Abrams and understood his steadiness, toughness, and recalled
actions he had taken with regularity. These were really good years for the
United States Army.
INTERVIEWER: Resource-wise, too. Would that be correct to say?
GEN PEAY: He did. He grew the end strength of the Army in this period,
and protected the Army.
INTERVIEWER: Now, given the closeness of the relationship youve
described, I am going to assume that you have maintained that
relationship as you became more senior.
GEN PEAY: I have. There is no question General WickhamI know he

must have influenced a number of my assignments. And we stay in touch
with great frequency even today. Over the years, even today in retired life,

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I find that General Wickham is always mentoring me in a quiet way, and I
am indebted to that.
INTERVIEWER: I have a note here about General Cavezza.

GEN PEAY: General Cavezza was Secretary Marshs executive. General
Cavezza had worked in infantry branch when I worked in field artillery
branch years prior. He was a Citadel graduate, and was and is today one
of my closest friends. We had a special relationship as we tried to work
the offices of both the Secretary and the Chief of Staff of the Army in our
own ways to be sure that their actions were coordinated and that their
actions were reinforcing. And Ill defer to Secretary Marsh to describe how
effective we were. Both of us came out on the brigadier generals list while
we were serving in our respective positions, and for the first time the
Secretary and the Chief of Staff of the Army decided to keep us on duty in
that position as BGs for another year, so we both served three years as
executive, which was then and is unheard of today in terms of length of
service. I like to think that part of that rationale was that both of us,
Cavezza and myself, were hopefully of assistance to both the Secretary
and the Chief. In that time frame, regretfully, Pam came down with cancer.
Again General Wickham was really a father through that period. He
basically put me on leave and said you get out there and take care of
Pam, and we went through all the medical business and the operations
and the start of the chemotherapy. General Wickham was very sensitive to
the time constraints and where I should be during that period. That was
towards the end of our tour together. General Wickham was retiring. I had
the honor of working through his retirement and, with Bob Clark, moving
him to his home of residence in northern Virginia. General Carl Vuono had
been, when I started as the Chiefs exec, General Vuono had been the
DCSOPS of the Army. Later he moved to be the CG of TRADOC, and
then came back to be the Chief of Staff of the Army. I can recall fondly

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General Vuono wishing me well as I cleared out of the executive officers
desk and turned that over to his exec, who was Colonel Marv Covault from
the field artillery branch team years ago. So again the small family
continued. I had been placed on orders to the 1st Armored Division in
Bamberg, Germany. Pam and I very much wanted to go back to Germany.
She had not been since she was a dependent. I had not been since I was
a lieutenant, and really wanted to get back into the heavy side of the Army
after years on the light side.
GEN PEAY: When Pam came down with cancer, and it was clear that
Bamberg did not really have the proper care right in that locality and it
would be considerable travel to Stuttgart, Frankfurt, or Heidelberg to get
the care, General Wickham changed my assignment to the 101st Airborne
Division. He had earlier commanded that division. Campbell was always
very special to him. In fact, one of the things that happened early on when
I was his executivehe had been on a trip to Turkey. A battalion from the
101st Airborne was coming back from the Middle East, where it was doing
the Sinai observer mission there, after a long, long six month deployment,
and that plane crashed outside Gander. I called General Wickhamit was
6 a.m. in the morning his time in Turkeyand forwarded on to him that
wed had this tragedy, and asked him for advice. Did he want to come on
home, should we cancel the trip, and so forth? He was out running again,
and he said, Let me call you back in a half an hour. He called me back
and said, Im coming on home. We cancelled the remainder of his trip.
He stopped at Gander on the way home and saw the effects of that on the
ground, and then flew directly from there to Fort Campbell, Kentucky,
where he attempted to be helpful to the grieving families. Two days later
President Reagan went to Campbell, and General Wickham went back
with him. So that really was one of my first introductions to the 101st and

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how special that division was, not only to General Wickham, but also to
the United States Army. I moved that summer to the 101st as the assistant
division commander. I loved that assignment. I went through air assault
school as about a 48 or 49-year-old brigadier, along with a whole bunch of
young specialists and privates that were going through; frankly, a very
demanding school. It was a tough ten days, physically and mentally. You
were put through your paces on how to rig aircraft for air mobility and
those kinds of things, and it was physical.
INTERVIEWER: Run by the division at Campbell?
GEN PEAY: It was run by the division at Campbell.
INTERVIEWER: Who was commanding the division when you arrived

there?
GEN PEAY: The division commander was Major General Teddy Allen,
who had had multiple assignments in the division. He was an army
aviator. It was a special assignment, because I was the only brigadier. We
did not havefor the next seven, eight, or nine months we only had one
brigadier assigned to the division, so I had the great fortune of not only
being the assistant division commander for operations, but also the
assistant division commander for support. While I knew a lot about division
operations, I had not had a deep introduction to post operations and all of
the complexity of the garrison and what that meant to logistics, families,
and the readiness of the division. So again I learned a lot in that ADC
assignment. I had the fun of being able to put the division Army training
exercise test team together, execute the ARTEP, with the brigade
commanders. And we let the brigade commanders run their operations,
but yet still had a little bit of an imprint on all of that. It was a short
assignment. Again I received short notice to go to the Command &

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General Staff College as the Assistant Commandant, who ran the
C&GSC. Leavenworth was very special to General Carl Vuono. He had
been the CAC [Combined Arms Center] commander there. He had been
the TRADOC commander. He was terribly qualified in the whole business
of the doctrine and operations of the Army. So he sent me out to
Leavenworth with a lot of instruction on things that he wanted me to
accomplish.
INTERVIEWER: Before we march on to that, lets just talk about the 101st
Airborne for another minute or two. Do you know why there were only one
ADC brigadier assigned? This is a division with usually a high priority.
GEN PEAY: No, I dont know what the rationale for that was. Brigadier
General Bob Fricks, who was an aviator, was assigned late in the year
and took over the ADC(S) responsibilities. I might add this was a good
assignment for Pam as well. She finished up her chemotherapy at the post
hospital in that assignment. General Allens wife was a stewardess and
was consistently traveling abroad, and so Pam had the fortune to make
friendships not only on the post, but with the Clarksville and Hopkinsville
community.
INTERVIEWER: What about the brigade commanders that you

supervised there?
GEN PEAY: Well, at first I think the officer that had much to do with me
going to Campbell, in addition to General Wickham, was General Burt
Patrick, who had been the division commander before General Allen. And
General Allen probably arrived at Fort Campbell four or five weeks before
me, so we really came in together. The ADC(O)[Assistant division
commander operations] to General Patrick, that was a real favorite of
mine, was Brigadier General Glenn Marsh. And Glenn Marsh had been

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the chief of staff and a brigade commander in the 9th ID when I was in the
9th ID, and we were closest of friends. In fact, his brigade was four blocks
down from the division artillery on the same road. We had a great time
together at Fort Lewis. I suspect that Glenn Marsh, in the background,
was very supportive of my coming to Fort Campbell, and we had a terrific
hand-off of our jobs.
INTERVIEWER: So you succeeded him there?
GEN PEAY: As the ADC(O) and (S).
INTERVIEWER: I think things are usually pretty busy in a high profile

division like that operationally. Did it take part in exercises routinely during
that period?
GEN PEAY: No, actually there were really very few. We had one
command post exercise with XVIII Airborne Corps over at Fort Bragg, as I
recall. The 101st was not high on the deployment list at that time. The
division was also very large, with a lot of aviation, and difficult to deploy.
INTERVIEWER: I suppose when you went away from there to head

C&GSC at Fort Leavenworth you did not know that you would be back
pretty soon?
GEN PEAY: I had no idea. General Vuono put me right to work at Fort
Leavenworth. It was an interesting command relationship at Leavenworth.
INTERVIEWER: State the assignment that you had there, please.
GEN PEAY: I was the Deputy Commandant, Command & General Staff
College, but in that position the deputy commandant ran the Command &

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General Staff College school and CAS3. The CAC commander had the
title of Commandant, but he had much greater responsibilities running all
of the major schools across the country, and so I really had quite a bit of
autonomy in that position. It was a great assignment, but it was complex in
that I worked for the CAC commander. And General Thurman at this time
was the TRADOC commander, and so he would drop in with regularity
with assignments and taskers and briefings, and General Vuono would
drop in with regularity. And the reason for that was that they would come
out to brief every pre-command course, which would go on four to six
times a year. General Vuono would hold his commander conferences at
Fort Leavenworth in terms of the senior generals, as well as periodically
hold them in Washington. I think he wanted to get out of the Pentagon. He
then started a series of commander conferences with the two-star division
commanders. He would always hold those at Leavenworth. And finally he
hosted and started a joint warfighter conference with the other service
chiefs. So General Thurman and General Vuono would appear at my door
with regularity, there at Leavenworth, and they always would bring
assignments for me.
INTERVIEWER: This is the first time General Thurmans come up in our
discussions. This is General Max Thurman we are talking about here,
widely regarded as one of the colorful officers of his day. Could you say
something about him, please?
GEN PEAY: I knew him when he was the division artillery commander in
the 82d, when he would work with field artillery branch for the assignment
of officers. And for almost three years, for two and a half years when I was
the executive to the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Thurman was the
Vice Chief. He was later replaced by General Art Brown, who was the
Director of the Army Staff and fleeted up to be the Vice Chief in General
Wickhams last year as the Chief. So I was in and out of General

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Thurmans office, again with great regularity and General Thurman would
always go by my desk and I obviously never got in his way as he would go
in to see the Chief of Staff of the Army. That door was always open. I was
very fond of General Thurman. He had quite a style about him, as you
said, terribly energetic and very, very capable and smart, very dedicated
to the United States Army. And I was very fond of General Thurman, as
well.
INTERVIEWER: What did you spend the majority of your time on during
this quick year, as you described it, at Leavenworth?
GEN PEAY: General Vuono and General Thurman wanted to get leader
development out of the Pentagon, out of the personnel business, and get
it into the broader Army in a different fix. So he asked us to look at the
whole program of leader development across the Army and where officers
should serve, what kind of experiential things the officer corps should go
through. There were hundreds of initiatives that we had to put together,
and so he would come out and really micromanage that. And then he
wanted this institutionalized in TRADOC. So some of that was done at
Fort Monroe, and some of that was done at Leavenworth, and General
Thurman was heavily involved in that as well. And so every time that he
would come out he would want briefings on that. And then he had us brief
that at all the senior Army commanders conferences. He expanded that to
include civilian development. That took a lot of time. Secondly, you had to
run the school. You had close to a hundred foreign officers that were
attending Leavenworth. And they were a great joy, but they required a lot
of care. We learned a lot from each other in that regard. Probably one of
my greatest failings and greatest regrets was just not having the time to sit
in classrooms as much as I had hoped. I did bounce around, but I surely
would have loved to have done more than that. It was also a time of
budget cuts hitting the Army, and Leavenworth was subject to its fair share

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of all of those and so, lacking the money and figuring out how to take
those cuts and working with constraints was big part of how to keep the
school vibrant for the future. And our own school, Leavenworth school,
many people dont know, had a number of different colleges within it. It
had the pre-command course. It had the CAS cube course. It was in the
Harold K. Johnson Building. So there were a number of other schools that
you had to attend to. And then finally Leavenworth was inundated with
visitors. It just seemed likewhether it was foreign officers, or other
officers that spoke in the classrooms at the grade of colonel, or many,
many, general officers that came and spoke to the Command & General
Staff College. There was a SAMS [School of Advanced Military Studies]
course that was in place at that time. And many field manuals were
written. So there was an awful lot of tending, and I loved every minute of it.
General Vuono gave me a very confidential project to do during that time,
and that was that he had received some reports that the efficiency report
perhaps had some injustices in it in terms of the ratings of minorities. And
obviously that was an explosive issue. He did not want that worked in the
Pentagon. And so he came out on a trip to C&GSC one day and gave me
very specific guidance as to having me lead a full review of the efficiency
report system. And I had, at that time, Colonel Ted Stroup, who was a
close friend of mine. I knew Ted Stroup earlier as a major in the Hoffman
Building. Ive forgotten, he may have been in DCSPER, as I recall, during
this study. And then we had a special studies team that was at the Military
Academy. Ive forgotten the name of that. Perhaps you recall. It did an
incredible amount of data work and studies. Tom Fagan, a very capable
officer, and one or two other USMA action officers were assigned to work
for me on this study project. Another who helped was General Hinds, an
African-American one-star. I would fly in from Leavenworth every
Thursday night, or every other Thursday night, into the Pentagon, work all
night longcutting, shredding data (developed by Tom Fagan), looking at
thousands and thousands of efficiency reports, from lieutenant through

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general, to try to see what those trends were, what the assignments were.
And then, at nine or ten oclock in the morning, wed put a briefing
together, the next couple of hours, and then Id go in to see General
Vuono in the mid-afternoon on Friday from two to four and brief him on a
close hold basis on all of this data and what trends we were seeing.
INTERVIEWER: What an interesting task.
GEN PEAY: And then I got back on the plane and flew back to Fort
Leavenworth on the redeye, and ninety percent of the time the gentleman
that I would sit with going back on the commercial airlines, back to Fort
Leavenworth, was Ike Skelton. And Id never known Congressman
Skelton until this time, and Congressman Skelton had great love for Fort
Leavenworth because he was from Missouri, right next door, and he had
great interest in the Army school system. And, since I was the deputy
commandant, he bent my ear with great regularity, but it did start a long
relationship with Congressman Skelton that exists till this day. I continued
to go in and out of Washington until we completed this study, which took
the better part of a year. And in between, after I finished with General
Vuonos briefing, he would give me some more guidance. He wanted the
data looked at a different way, and I would get with Tom Fagan and we
would catch Ted Stroup, and wed cut that data, and Id go back to
Leavenworth and come back and theyd dump that data on me again on a
Thursday evening and we would rearrange and analyze that data a
number of ways until we could make some sense out of it. We were never
able to discern, with positive confirmation, discrimination in the system.
INTERVIEWER: Did you conclude, from that, that there probably wasnt
any, at least any significant?

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GEN PEAY: We did. Clearly a key part was the assignment patterns. If
you could get the young African-American, or any minority, into the key
jobs of S-3 and XO early you bettered, in my view, their opportunity for
success and more senior rank. That is one of the things that we tried to do
in the personnel system, again tied to the leader development project that
was out at Leavenworth, but in terms of discerning subtle or direct
discrimination, we were unable to do that. That was a very close hold
project that I dont think many in the Army know existed, then or today.
INTERVIEWER: I wouldnt think so. I mean Ted Stroup knows about it.
GEN PEAY: I was coming towards the ten or eleven month mark there at
Leavenworth, and I loved the assignment. I made it very clear to the Chief
that I was willing to stay there for three or four years and retire, that I felt
that that position as the Deputy Commandant at Fort Leavenworth had
incredible impact on the Army operationally in terms of doctrine, in terms
of tactics, in terms of mentorship. I went home brain dead every night.
Every weekend was spent reading manuals, and that wasnt a case of not
trusting your people, it was just you had to go through that process
because you were turning those manuals over to TRADOC and later to be
briefed to the Chief of Staff of the Army. And they had to be right. So I was
challenged in that particular assignment. Our kids loved Leavenworth. And
the international students gave great breadth to the learning curve and the
socials were plenty.
INTERVIEWER: But it was a relatively short assignment again, wasnt it?
GEN PEAY: It was. Im not quite sure how that next assignment
happened. I suspect in the darkness of the night that General Wickham
perhaps leaned on General Vuono and strongly encouraged that he send
me back to the 101st Airborne Division.

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INTERVIEWER: How did you find out about that?
GEN PEAY: General Vuono came out for a trip to Leavenworth, and after
a frank conversation about the work being done under my direction, said,
I think you need to go to Fort Campbell. I was thrilled to go and be a
division commander, and particularly to go to that division with its
incredible history that made it so very special. Brigadier General John
Miller replaced me, and we had been good friends in the 9th ID. Again
General Vuono gave me some very clear guidance. He felt that the 101st
Airborne Division was not relevant, and perhaps thats the reason that it
was not on a lot of war plans, or it was not heavily involved in many
exercises. There also was concern for its survivability on the battlefield.
INTERVIEWER: We should probably observe for the record that,

although its called the 101st Airborne Division, its really by now an
airmobile division, isnt it?
GEN PEAY: It is. It was the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile), and
somewhere in there changed to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). I
think the air assault was several years before, when General Berry
commanded the division. He had a lot to do with the air assault badge,
and I suspect that that was the forerunner of changing that nomenclature.
And of course all the soldiers in the division, when they saluted, would
say, Air Assault, as different from Airborne. General Vuono always
brought every new division commander to the Pentagon to sit at his table
in his office for an hour to an hour and a half of personal instruction,
incredible time on his part. Part of that was that General Vuono
understood where the center of gravity was in the Army. I think he felt very
strongly it was in the key TRADOC schools, and it was in the divisions.
General Vuono also believed in commanding two levels down, something

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that he did as a division commander, and while not in a command line as
the Chief of Staff of the Army, he still ran the organization two levels down,
which applies to business models as well as applies to the United States
Army. He wanted me to make the division more relevant, to make it more
deployable. I went to Fort Campbell and we sat down with a group of
smart action officers in the division G-3 and some smart commanders. We
had terrific commanders in the division. And we started a project that we
called Slim Eagleto take the fat eagle and slim the eagle down while
improving its war-fighting capability.
INTERVIEWER: In terms of its deployability?
GENERAL PEAY: In terms of deployability and size. And so I used almost

all the same techniques that we did in the 9th Infantry Division test bed to
think how to solve this situation. We first started withoperationally. How
do we want to fight the division over extended lengths? Major Randy
Mixon, a SAMS graduate, was our plans officer and did a superb job with
the Slim Eagle project, as well as the planning throughout the Gulf War.
He later commanded the 25th Division. Then we went from how you fight it
to what are the organizations? We started slimming the division down. We
unloaded motor pool after motor pool after motor pool of vehicles and
equipment. We became truly air assault. We learned to move at great
lengths on the battlefield and at night. We then developed a series of what
we called Battle Notes. And there were about 13 or 14 of them. They
were simple things about this is way were going to refuel the division, this
the way were going to set up a forward operating base. And everything
was standardized. This is the way we were truly going to do joint air
support. This is the way we were going to do a brigade air assault and the
way LZs will be laid out. No organization in the Army at that time was
doing a full brigade-size air assault. We had to have standards (SOPs)

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across the division for air assaults, and we did that, and then we went out
and exercised those, and we exercised battle command.
INTERVIEWER: Let me just for the record ask you to state, when youre
talking about deploying an air assault operation, how are you moving the
troops?
GEN PEAY: There is a strategic deployability piece of it, and there was
the operational level tactical part of it. The strategic deployability of itfor
the first time we went back and moved the entire division simultaneously.
They had not done so since they were at Camp Campbell in World War II.
We moved by barge to the deploying port, and we moved by rail, and we
moved by convoy, and we moved by air (C-141 and helo). And, in fact,
that is exactly the way, a year later, on no notice, we moved the division to
Desert Shield and Desert Storm through multiple routes to close very, very
quickly the entire division at port. We had exercised it time after time. We
got the division back in the [EDRE] Emergency Deployment Readiness
Exercise business. We then did the tactical piece ofwe had two, later we
built to three, we had two large full-up Black Hawk battalions that were
able to come in and, through tailoring, pick up an entire brigade, and then
right behind the insertion of the brigade follow on immediately with
Chinooks bringing in the howitzers and building up the forward logistical
operating bases tactically. We practiced that at night time and under
goggles. We had such an incredible command team. You know, I had
Hugh Shelton, who later went on to command the 82d Airborne Division,
and still later to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as my assistant
division commander for operations, and I had Ron Adams, who went on to
be a lieutenant general and later commanded Fort Rucker, as the
assistant division commander for support, two fabulous brigadiers that
were not only great leaders, but highly qualified in their craft. A series of
superb brigade commanders and battalion commanders. And Tom

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Taylors book which he titled Lightning in the StormTom Taylor, son of
Maxwell Taylor of the 101st of World War II fame, and Tom himself a
Silver Star winner in Vietnamwas written on our exploits in the Gulf, and
in his final chapter he talks about all of the officers in the division and
where they had been assigned several years after the war. And that a
number of then-to-be brigade commanders, and majors becoming
battalion commanders, and almost all of our senior leaders went on to be
senior generals. I think this is a testament to how good a team we had.
GEN PEAY: You were asking about how the officers become assigned to
the division. I think, again, most of this was under the concept of returning
the officers to where they had served. Some of it was a request by me, for
instance brigade commanders were Tom Hill and Bob Clark. These were
officers that had served as majors, captains, and lieutenant colonels in the
division, and so when the command list came out I think that some of that
was just the return of these officers. There were some first-timers as well.
It was just a joy being with them and the success the division had in the
war naturally had some impact on their future assignments.
INTERVIEWER: I think I saw a reference to what were called off-post
war-fighting discussions during this time. Is that something you can
describe?
GEN PEAY: We took the team and went off post to a retreat area on
some of the large lakes there in the Tennessee-Kentucky area and fought
the division, from deploying it to the air assault piece on the ground.
INTERVIEWER: Down through what level would you take your

commanders for that type of drill?

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GEN PEAY: We took them right on down through the execs, the majors
the S-3s and XOs in the division, so it was a large gathering of the key
division and brigade staffs, the brigade and battalion commanders, and
the command group.
INTERVIEWER: What a great learning experience.
GEN PEAY: Great learning, and then we had a fun informal social that
evening and brought the wives over. It was a good bonding experience.
INTERVIEWER: What were you doing? We talked a little earlier about

how maybe the Army didnt really know how to fight this kind of division.
What were you doing to percolate up greater knowledge of that as you
were shaping the division you described?
GEN PEAY: You are correct about that. General Vuono came and visited
me twice while I was there at the 101st, and then he made me bring the
operational concept back to the building and brief the four-star Army
commanders conference, and it was almost literally on the eve of going to
the war. I was in an awkward position there. I was on leave at Virginia
Beach when the war started. I had to run back to brief the Army
commanders conference on Slim Eagle, and then get back to the 101st
and deploy to the war. That was his way of trying to get the concept
understood as they would watch it be executed shortly in wartime at deep
operational depth on the battlefield. It was a different division organization.
INTERVIEWER: There are a couple of things I want to ask you about

before we move on to the deployment to combat. I saw a reference to
Gold Cycle training or, in another place, XYZ cycle training. Could you
explain what that means, please?

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GEN PEAY: Gold Cycle was the full field training piece, and the whole
brigade, along with a jump division TOC, would go to the field and
exercise in that period. The blue was the next level of training, and most of
that was done in close-in training areas and was not done with the full
brigade. Some of that was battalion-level or company-level training. And
then the third cycle was schooling and post support, and that is how we
lined the division up and lined the respective support behind each of
those.
INTERVIEWER: They would rotate through these roles?
GEN PEAY: They would rotate those, a month or six weeks at a time.
INTERVIEWER: I saw reference to your wish not to waste soldier time on

large field exercises. Is that an accurate representation?
GEN PEAY: Yes. I am a big believer that you train the parts. I guess I
learned that in the artillery business. If you can train your howitzer
sections individually, then you can at times figure out how to mold that into
a battery operation without wasting a large organizations time. And I
certainly believe that at the division level. If you can train the parts, then
you can pull together the C2 and staff piece of it in terms of the whole
division.
INTERVIEWER: In our discussion so far youve mentioned several of
those who commanded this division earlier. Im just wondering whether,
while you were commanding it, you had any contact with General
Westmoreland, a former commander.

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GEN PEAY: No, I did not. General Cushman came down a couple of
times, and then General Patrick came back. General Allen came back, but
I really was only at Campbell a year. It was a fast year.
INTERVIEWER: You had a succession of fast years.
GEN PEAY: And then we ran quickly to the Gulf.

INTERVIEWER: Well, lets move on to that, then. I would like to state for
the record that theres an excellent publication called History for
Operation Desert Shield/Operation Desert Storm of the 101st Airborne
Division (Air Assault), a Command Report dated 1 July 1991. So theres a
lot of good information in that for people that want to follow up on this. But
tell us how and when you found out that the division was going to take part
in this combat.
GEN PEAY: I had not had leave for a year. I took my familyagain, it
was a young family. Jim was early in high school, sophomore- junior, and
Ryan was four years younger. We went to Virginia Beach and met my
parents, because as I mentioned I had earlier lived at Fort Story. Virginia
Beach was a place thatnormally we went every summer. We were there
on the beach, and then I started getting these phone calls from Campbell
saying, Well, FORSCOM has called, or XVIII Airborne Corps has
called. Finally Major General Pete Taylor, a real favorite of mine that I
really loved working with in the buildinghe had the War Plans Division
when I was at the Army Initiatives Group. I was very fond of Pete Taylor
started calling from FORSCOM, where he was chief of staff, and finally it
was very clear to me I needed to get back to Fort Campbell. When I got
back to Campbell the division was rolling. Hugh Shelton was the ADC(O).
We had talked a couple of times and put in place the EDRE sequence that
we had fine-tuned. The boats were starting to arrive at port in Florida. I

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went straight to the division tactical operations center in the basement of a
building we had there at Fort Campbell. The staff was assembled. They
got me briefed up quickly and we were on our way.
INTERVIEWER: I know all of this is covered in the history, but how long
did it take and how satisfied were you with how things that you had
anticipated worked out when it was time to do it for real?
GEN PEAY: You know, I cant recall the specific time that it took to
deploy. It probably was in the category of probably three to four weeks to
get two brigades there. We had to get another brigade back from RC
summer training. First we flew the Apache battalion by strategic C17 into
the theater, so it got there quickly. The shipping was probably in the four
to five week category by the time wed gotten to port, you know the flow
over, the unloading, and then the movement to the desert. I kicked out
Hugh Shelton and a small ops group early, and got him on the ground at
King Fahd Air Base. We talked by satellite every night. One of the key
decisions we had to make was how we were going to lay the division out.
We didnt know how long we were going to be there. We decided to go to
this massive, massive tent city becauseyou know it was 125-130
degrees, and we had to get our soldiers under cover of some form. We put
the aviation battalion into large parking garages and got them under cover,
and then got these small Saudi tents and laid out mile after mile of tents in
battalion streets. It turned out later that was fortuitous for us, because we
didnt go to war right away. We rotated the division up into a large
covering force formation of which the 101st was the C2 and in front of
other divisions in the corps. We were the covering force, with
augmentation of the 3rd ACR. Then I was able to get the division back
you know, put a couple of brigades up, bring one brigade back, get them
refitted, cleaned up, and then put them back in the covering force mission.

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They were supported by massive artillery. There was no way that there
would ever be any breakthrough into the main battle area.
INTERVIEWER: During all this time, first of all you are setting yourself up
so you can sustain yourself, and then you are doing some training. Were
you always unsure as to how much time you had left?
GEN PEAY: Yes. Every night, when another part of the 101st closedI
went over about midway, a little before midway, I got half the division on
the way and then I went over and had Ron Adams kick out the rest of the
division until he got it all out of Campbell and departed the ports. Every
night, as a portion of our and other supporting forces closed, wed re-do
our war plan, another place to put that battalion into the fight, another
capability, and so it was continuous. Once the whole division was closed,
you know, well before Christmas, I cant recall the exact time frame now,
we were up as a full force, the covering force, and we had the tough
problem now of bringing in large ammunition tonnage, and it just seemed
it took forever to unload ammunition and get a divisions worth of
ammunition times three into the large ammunition dumps and then a lot of
that kicked out to the forward brigades. We were battle hardened. We did
a lot. We trained in that desert every day.
INTERVIEWER: Many people have talked about the huge advantage of

there being no distractions.
GEN PEAY: There were no distractions. We were really battle hardened.

Our division was as ready, by far, of any organization Ive ever been
associated with. Day and night training. Had to go through, you know
while we were very well trained before we went, flying at night in the
desert versus flying at Fort Campbell at night is a whole different thing. We
had some challenges. We cracked up some aircraft early on, and we had

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to adjust the way we were flying over there. But, by the time we crossed
the line of departure in January, we were a really good division, seasoned,
with splendid NCOs and officers. We have lived six months in the desert
and were very comfortable and confident.
INTERVIEWER: This hasnt come up before, but had you done any flying
personally?
GEN PEAY: No. I flew all the time in a Huey helicopter. In fact, my chief
of staff very much wanted me to fly in a Black Hawk for safety purposes,
but I never was comfortable being able to command and control the
division in a Black Hawk. And our Black Hawks in the 101st were outfitted
with all the latest large command and control modules, and I wanted to
give those to brigade commanders, because they were putting in the
brigade air assaults. So it just seemed to me I could still command and
control with much less radio capability, and we only had a couple of those
in the division. So I elected to stay in a Huey, and I fought through the
whole war in a Huey.
INTERVIEWER: What did you do with respect to looking out for the
families that stayed behind and so on when the division deployed?
GEN PEAY: We had a very detailed rear detachment plan. At that time,
contrary to today, the division commander was also the post commander.
So I took one of our seasoned colonels that was a Special Forces officer,
that was not deploying, and left him in command. He was the garrison
commander of the post. And then I left a rear detachment commander,
Major Dan Lynn, as the rear detachment 101st commander. And he was
an exceptionally good officer. We were determined to have a rear
detachment structure that worked. I did not want those detachments large.
I wanted forces kicked out to the fight. Yet I wanted families taken care of

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and soldiers with problems forward-supported and communications
facilitated.
INTERVIEWER: Were these coming out of your hide?
GEN PEAY: Came out of the hide. And every battalion had to leave one
or two people to do that. I was determined to keep those numbers very,
very small. They were not to be malingerers. They were to be able to
work. Pam set up a similar thing with all of the wives, and again I had a
very seasoned set of wivesthe two ADC wives, Marty Adams and
Carolyn Shelton. And I had a very good chief of staff in Joe Bolt, and his
wife Diane and Pam were very close. They kept information flowing
through their family chain of command, all the way down to the lowest
element that was left behind in the division. Pam would have pot luck
dinners at times where they could let off steam and talk. I probably talked
to Pam by phone, I dont know, every two to three weeks. I deliberately did
not do that a lot because our soldiers didnt have the capability to call
back. We did not have e-mail at that time. We had rudimentary fax. Its
interesting to see in a decade how all of that technology has changed in
the Army.
INTERVIEWER: I have often wondered whether thats a plus oryou
know the pros and cons of that. What did you do about soldiers who were
injured or wounded in terms of tracking them when they were going back
through the evacuation chain and so on?
GEN PEAY: Fortunately we didnt have a lot. We had things that I was
very, very proud about. We had very few deaths in that fight. I attribute a
lot of that to the training and readiness of the division. The injuredmost
of them were injured in training, and we kept a lot of them with us in the
desert with other duties that they could do right there at the division main.

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INTERVIEWER: So that wasnt a big problem for you?
GEN PEAY: That was not a big problem. Probably the most significant
thing that happened was that, because we didnt know how long the war
was going to go, a number of our senior noncommissioned officers that
had their retirement papers inthey deployed with us, and then their
retirement dates came up in that time before Christmas, so we were
changing them out and sending them home, and then stop loss kicked in,
and Id already elevated up a number of their replacements. Then these
senior NCOs came back to the division and I had the real dilemma of how
to properly use those leaders. The whole stop loss thing was not a good
scene.
INTERVIEWER: Was it unnecessary in your view?
GEN PEAY: Yes, I think it was unnecessary. I think once those officers
were committed to the deployment we should have stayed with them until
the operation was complete or was in some form of steadiness when the
individual replacement system kicked in.
INTERVIEWER: When you learned that ground combat was imminent,

did you have an opportunity to talk to your senior commanders before they
launched? Tell me about that, if you did.
GEN PEAY: We always, every other Friday, would bring the commanders
back to the division main, which was in a sanitary water pump station right
off the airfield there at the air base, King Fahd Air Base. We would go
through, first, the full intelligence brief, lay down in detail the war plan, go
through how wed changed the war plan, because corps also was giving
us changes as well. One of the frustrating things, although necessary, was

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the continuing change of the war plan by higher headquarters. But it had
to be done. Then after that wed go into the upcoming training. These
were very long meetings, and then wed go to dinner. That lasted until the
entire division, the entire corps, was moved west under the cover of
darkness thirty days or so before crossing the LD [line of departure] and
the war fight. So we folded that entire tent city, folded it down, dropped all
the tents, and moved the division. We had slimmed out the division TOC
at that time. And we had a great jump TOC capability. And so thats what
we took all the way west to where we actually kicked off the war. We left a
small division rear at the airfield.
INTERVIEWER: Now were these ground facilities or airmobile facilities

that you are talking about, the TOCs?
GEN PEAY: We moved the division main by ground. We moved the jump
TOC by Chinook and Black Hawk. We basically fought the whole war out
of the jump TOC. I did displace the division main on D+4, but the war was
generally over at that stage, and ended up returning the main back to
where it had really moved from the day before.
INTERVIEWER: In the preliminary period, the deployment and the

training up and all, what contact did you have with higher echelons of
commandcorps? And did you have contact with General Schwarzkopf?
GEN PEAY: Every Sunday night General Gary Luck, the corps
commander, would have the division commandersJohn Tilleli in 1st Cav,
Jim Johnson the 82d , Barry McCaffrey in the 24th and myself, along with
the COSCOM commander, and a few of his key staffto dinner at the
XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters, and again wed go through the same.
We would start and have a war plan brief, latest Intel brief-up, and then
wed go to supper. I had frequent contact with General Luck, and

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periodically General Luck would come down and see me. There alsoone
of the real downsides of the 101st being off the airfield there at King Fahd
Air Base is that we did get dropped in on by a number of visitors. And,
while I had my two brigades, and normally three brigades, in the covering
force, well forward, they would come to the division main. So the
Secretary of Defense one time was caught in a dust storm (called a
schmal), and so he and General Colin Powell diverted over to our
headquarters on no notice and I had to feed them and give them a war
plans update and that kind of thing. Congressmen also would drop in. I
wouldnt say they were detracting, but you did have to take your time in
handling these visitors. One of the more enjoyable aspects of this time
frame, though, is that probably three or four times I would go over to see
General Barry McCaffrey in the 24th on a Sunday night, and he would also
come my way, and those were always colorful sessions. I very much liked
Barry. I had known Barry in the 9th ID when he had a brigade. Barry is a
hard-charging, very competent, capable war fighter. He and I would kid
each other a lot, and there was some friendly rivalry, but down deep he
and I both had great friendship for each other. And I find in some of the
writings thats not quite displayed that way. And its not accurate to say
that Barry and I arent close friends. We are. And I think professionally
each of us has great regard for the other. I also had a strong relationship
with Ron Griffith when VII Corps deployed after Christmas. Id known Ron
Griffith when he was in War Plans, and in PA&E in the building when I was
a colonel in the Army Initiatives Group. Its funny how all of these
connections continue. I am very close friends with Ron Griffith. In fact,
hes on the Board of Visitors here at VMI today. I would go over on a
Sunday night, or a Friday night, and have dinner with Ron, and we would
exchange stories, because we had been in the desert a long time at that
stage. I hope that we were helpful to him as he arrived with VII Corps from
Germany. He didnt need a lot of help. He was a very good war fighter in
his own like right.

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INTERVIEWER: Any contact with General Schwarzkopf?
GEN PEAY: Yes, General Schwarzkopf came to our headquarters off the
air base there. He flew in from Riyadh. The first time I met General
Schwarzkopf was when he was a major general at Fort Myer and his
daughters baby sat our kids, when I was the exec to the Chief of Staff of
the Army. I had never known General Schwarzkopf before. Fort Myer is a
small post, and all of us got to know each other, and General Schwarzkopf
and I were also both involved in the Scout troop in terms of trying to be
supportive of the Scoutmaster. So I met him again when we first arrived in
the desert. We briefed him at the airfield (in a parking garage) on the
status of our deployment early in August. We later met at the Officers
Club in Dhahran. He brought in all the component commandersat that
time just the XVIII Airborne Corps division commanders. The VII Corps
was not yet part of the war plan. He brought in the Air Force and Navy and
USMC [U.S. Marine Corps] component commanders. And it was a
remarkable performance by General Schwarzkopf. I have laid that out, I
think, in a couple of interviews that Ive done since the war. For about two
and a half hourshe opened with an intelligence lay down, and then for
about two and a half hours he laid his concept out of how he wanted to
fight the war, and this was basically with a one-corps fight, a Marine
division, and the Air Force. This was not a deep swing or anything. That
part never existed then, because we didnt have but one corps in the fight.
Had a big air component piece in that fight, and a lot of deception
associated with it. But the more important part was that he laid out the
whole business of understanding the Arab mind, the relationships with the
host country, and I think he was ahead of his time in understanding all
about the culture. I didnt see him again for several months. He then came
and visited one of our brigades that was way forward deployed, 90 days
before the fight. He came out one Sunday afternoon, as I recall, and saw

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the brigade training that was going on up in the covering force. It was a
long flight for him. He had back trouble from an earlier incident in his
career. To get in a Huey, which is what I put him in, and fly out that great
distance was painful for him. He had a lot of pressures on him at that time.
He then came out again right before Christmas and I back briefed him on
our 101st part of the emerging war plan that now had two corps. VII Corps
had been put into the fight. We had, as displayed in Taylors book, a
sequel to go to Baghdad which was part of our plan. I just cant tell you
how confident I was in our division. We were fighting at operational depth.
We were training. We in the desert would turn around and fight backwards
in training at operational depth of hundreds of milesat night. I knew the
capabilities of this division, knew the capabilities of the leaders, and so I
briefed him on this Baghdad sequel. And I must tell you that General
Schwarzkopf was not happy with that frag off the basic war plan. Now we
had the basic plan, and we laid that out, but I wanted to be sure that we
were prepared to go a different direction. In no uncertain terms he made it
very clear, That is not part of the war plan. We are not going to go in that
direction. We are going to cut this guy off north of Kuwait and that is the
end of the war. I continued to have our staff refine that war plan, just in
case. He then came out and saw me the night before the 101st moved far
to the west. We were the farthest west division, along with the French
division that had a guard mission on the flank. That was the last time Id
see him until after the war. We gave him a final back brief on our plan. He
felt good about the nuances that we had built into the plan. It was in detail.
This was a detailed briefing, to include all of the logistics and so forth, the
command and control, the fight. Ive got a proud picture that I have in my
office as I put him on the plane to fly him back to Riyadh, where he was
going to C2 the war. You could tell he was under pressure, and he
grabbed me and he basically said, You know, in no uncertain terms, if
these guys wont go, you be sure you change out command. I almost
started laughing. There was no way. We were lucky to hold them back.

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Our leadership knew that the way home was to get this fight behind us.
They had been in this desert now for eight or nine months. Lets get this
going. They were confident. It was a terrific group of leaders in the 101st.
INTERVIEWER: At division command level, did you have contact with the
Saudis during this period?
GEN PEAY: In the covering force, the Saudis were in front of us. They
were mingled in the covering force, and one of the things we had to do
was to deconflict that and move them, frankly, to the ocean and then fight
that covering force back. We also had the Marines on the eastern flank,
requiring coordination.
INTERVIEWER: This turned out to be a very short war. Given that, how
did you exercise battle command, and in your judgment how did it go?
GEN PEAY: It was pretty basic. I had the ADC(O), General Shelton, that
most of the time was in the jump TOC. Wed move the jump TOC out at
the right time, then wed close the main on the jump and we would kick the
jump again. He principally was handling the jump TOC. The ADC(S). Ron
Adams, had the rear. He operated out of a TOC in the DISCOM [Division
Support Command] rear and had the whole rear part of the battle. The
Chief of Staff was at the main. I roved and moved around in a Huey,
obviously kept touch by radio and stopped in the jump and stopped in the
main and moved back and forth. It was, as you said, a quick war, so there
wasnt a lot of time back in the main CP. Most of it was forward.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have face-to-face contact with your principal

subordinates during the course of that?

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GEN PEAY: I stopped in all the time, the brigade commanders and
occasionally a battalion commander. Most of the time I was at the brigade
CP [command post] area, or frankly communicating by secure radio from
the helicopter.
INTERVIEWER: When you needed to resupply, would you do that

forward?
GEN PEAY: Yeah, we just stopped in wherever we could. It was pretty

basic.
INTERVIEWER: Did you sleep any?
GEN PEAY: We slept very little. I know the first night of the war I had
been out all day and I did come back to the main that night. I remember
that, because we really got fogged in. We literally were going 100 yards at
a time and setting down all the way back. It took hours. In retrospect, I
shouldnt even have tried to come back, I just should have stayed out. But
I wanted to clear some things with my chief. In a fast moving situation, a
lot of this is logistics, how you get that moved forward. And then on day
three of the war clearly the enemy was breaking up. He was retreating
quickly and we had to cut him off. And I got this real quick frag order to
move far to the east. We took the ADC(O) and the jump TOC, cut an AO
[area of operations] out there and committed our three Apache battalions,
committed to that AO, while we tried to move a brigade under their air fight
into a FOB called Viper. The war went quick, it went very quick. Again, we
were trained, and the war was easier than the training.
INTERVIEWER: Soldiers all said that.

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GEN PEAY: The war was easier than the training.
INTERVIEWER: Lots of them referred to the NTC [National Training

Center]. They said that the NTC and JRTC [Joint Readiness Training
Center] were a lot harder than this, and of course the training you put
them through out there Im sure was very challenging. When you look
back on this brief war, did anything strike you in particular that, had you
known what you knew at the end, you would have done a little differently,
or were you pretty satisfied with the arrangements?
GEN PEAY: I was pretty satisfied. I would have liked to have gone to
Baghdad.
INTERVIEWER: A lot of people would have liked for you to have gone to
Baghdad.
GEN PEAY: I guess I would say, and of course it was played on

television, a lot of the scenes, and later when I was the CINCCENT and I
flew over a large part of that road that they were fleeing back north on, I
saw all of that equipment still stacked up in northern Kuwait years later. A
lot of it is still there. What was on the ground was not as horrific as it
seemed on TV. We were there. Wed moved into Viper, and the next
morning we were going to commit a reinforced brigade north and
northeast of Viper until we closed the retreat and roads down. Of course
CINCCENT called the war off early that morning. Actually, they called it off
at midnight or so that night, or one oclock in the morning to be as of.
The downside of that, then, a lot of people killed on their side, but you
know maybe you wouldnt have had the same situation youve got today,
either. I always thought we should have destroyed their divisions. They
called it off too early. And we had an Army in the desert that was perhaps
the finest in our history.

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INTERVIEWER: After that ceasefire, or whatever we should call it, just tell
us a little bit about taking the division back home again and how you did
that.
GEN PEAY: One of the things I really did disagree about is that they
ordered one of our brigades home immediately, and it was all for publicity.
They wanted to showcase the brigade coming home, and so we literally
pulled our second brigade off line, took them down to Raffa and C-130d
out of there back to King Fahd and put them on contract commercial
planes. And they came home really ragged looking, uniforms were still
dirty, that kind of thing. We had to then, across the division, assimilate
their equipments, their personal baggage that was in CONEXs back at the
airfield, and get that on home. I dont know, I just thought that was kind of
an unnecessary way to do things. We just should have methodically come
on out. The rest of the division cleaned up. Of course you had all the
environmental control problems of washing down equipment with very,
very strict standards, to come back to the States. I thought that was a little
overdone, too. But we had to adhere to that, and so we had a lot of white
glove inspections to get out of there. It just takes a long time to bring a
division home. I dont know the exact time, but probably at least a good
two months to get the division home. I came back about two-thirds of the
way and then I let Ron Adams bring the remaining division back home, the
last hundred sorties or so.
INTERVIEWER: At some point the stop loss was canceled. I guess you
lost a number of people then because of that?
GEN PEAY: I just dont recall.

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INTERVIEWER: You had to sort of reconstitute the division, though, I
guess.
GEN PEAY: Oh, you mean when we got back to the States. Oh, yeah.
Many orders, many changes of commands. I changed command. I
probably was back in the division less than a month, and then I was
assigned to the DCSOPS. General John Miller came in and took my place.
John Miller had been in the 9th ID with us. Seems like all of these units
continue to cross. He was the right guy to take the 101st, a splendid
soldier and smart.
INTERVIEWER: Well, when you reach that level, people who have
continued to progress probably do mostly know one another.
GEN PEAY: I came back and went to Leavenworth, as you mentioned

last evening, and gave a briefing there. It seems to me that I had a couple
other briefings that I had to give.
INTERVIEWER: Did you do one if those specialized oral history

interviews on division command for Carlisle?
GEN PEAY: I did not. Not that I recall.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else that youd like to say about the
division?
GEN PEAY: I think there is another oral history that was done in the
101st, but I dont recall the title or the date of it. But I am sure its on
record in the Center of Military History or at Fort Campbell.

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INTERVIEWER: Ready to move on, then? When did you find out that
your next assignment was going to be the key position in the Army Staff,
the DCSOPS?
GEN PEAY: It was after I returned to Campbell in April-May of 1991. I

dont know if General Denny Reimer called or Gordon Sullivan. I dont
recall who called.
INTERVIEWER: Who were you replacing?
GEN PEAY: I was replacing General Reimer. He fleeted up to be the Vice

Chief. And then a year or year and half later Denny went out to Forces
Command and I fleeted up and took his place.
INTERVIEWER: I think just about everybody thinks that the DCSOPS of

the Army has got probably the toughest job of any soldier. Certainly the
Chief and the Vice Chief have plenty on their plates, but the DCSOPS is
the key guy. Tell me how you approached that job and what your
expectations were.
GEN PEAY: I had watched very closely that job from the time I was in
DCSOPS. I watched it very closely when I was the executive to the Chief
of Staff of the Army. I thought it was a great job. Now those were long
hours. What I loved about the job was the two parts to it. You had the
Army part of it, and then you had your joint hat as an ops dep in the tank.
I found preparing for those operational deputies meetings a very, very
important part of the job. Thats where you can make a lot of money for
your service, and its also a place where you have to protect your service.
I enjoyed that, and there were some big decisions that I think we made,
correct recommendations for the service chiefs in terms of their
deliberations. I was always briefed up before going to the tank, and the

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day that the Chief went to the tank I would also go and sit in with him, with
the action officers, and wed brief him up. That was an enjoyable part of
the job. Of course, doing the Army service part of the job was just hard,
hard work. I thinkI mentioned the tankthere is a collegial style that the
ops deps play in that tank, but you needed to have your head in the game.
JCS [Joint Chief of Staff] later brought in the Joint Requirements Oversight
Committee [JROC]. Actually, that first came in right near the end of my
time as the ops and when I was moving to the Vice. Thats the Joint
Requirement Process, designed to get at reducing redundancies and cost
and ensuring integration. Bill Owens was the JCS Vice Chairman. He was
very energetic in that regard. I felt I had to protect the Army in that
particular period. There was a lot of time that the Air Force and the Navy
felt they could do our job, particularly in times of declining budgets, and if
they could get into the operational concept early in the front end, and
eventually it gets to dominating the acquisition piece, and of course its
just different cultures between the services. The first QDR [quality
deficiency report] was in my time, the Quadrennial Review. Again, the
Armyone of the downsides of the first Gulf War is we made it look too
easy. Now youve got the Clinton administration in, you are starting to see
the resources come down in the Army. I played a very active role in the
first QDR and hopefully helped our Chief in that regard as we put a lot of
studies together. You had to influence those studies, both at the DOD as
well as JCS. I think, in the Army, because of the war and a lot going on, I
think we walked away from a number of the processes, frankly, that
General Thurman had put in when he was the Vice. So I tried to put some
of that back in the Army process, some of the studies, put the process
back in so you could make a case for the Army in a more statistical and a
more financial way than what had been done in the past. And then that all
supported our fight in the QDR, so a lot of that worked together. We had
Somalia also in that time, and we had Hurricane Andrew. Hurricane
Andrew was very interesting. We flew down to the Miami area, General

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Sullivan and I did. We met General Ed Burba, the FORSCOM [US Army
Forces Command] commander, down there, and it looked like a nuclear
round had hit in that part of Florida. It was incredible the damage that was
done. It was very clear that this thing was much bigger than the National
Guard could handle. General Sullivan, to his credit, took a very proactive
stance, got the 10th Mountain in to Miami overnight, that light division,
againan active outfit, and got it down there. Innovatively, Major General
Steve Arnold, who was the division commander at this time, used his fire
support structure to C2 and lined his fire support structure to control the
city square blocks in terms of trying to put a command and control piece in
place. It was very innovative the way he did that. We were down there at
Andrew for a considerable period of time, bringing order to that place and
trying to just get water and hygiene back in place and reduce crime and
pillaging. We also had the Offsite Agreement during that period, where
we tried to build on some work that General Abrams had done in terms of
the integration of Guard, Reserve, and active. And we tried to put the
Guard and Reserve in those particular organizations that they could best
do. Of course, history says no one envisioned we were going to have this
long second Gulf War. We had so much of that combat service support
there that was not in the active. Of course, the other way to look at is that,
if youre going to go to war, the country needs to go to war, and that
integration worked very well. We spent a lot of time, almost like in a labor
union effort, negotiating that particular agreement. And finally, after
several, several months, we got agreement with that, and then the tough
part in front of us was, even though we had agreement, when then we had
to work through the Guard and the Reserve and the state Adjutant
Generals to make those tradeoffs. That became very difficult. Congress
got involvedthey always do, and the state governors. Trying to make the
argument to the Congress of why we needed to do that was interesting.
But we did get that offsite accomplished during my time and put Guard
and Reserve forces in units and MOSs that were reasonable.

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INTERVIEWER: How would you summarize the overall result, or what it
was that was agreed to?
GEN PEAY: Fair. Some of the aviation units we were able to put in the
Guard, and a lot of the combat service support. And the USAR picked up
a number of small MOSs and the training divisions.
INTERVIEWER: Allocations of various missions and roles to the various

components, was that basically it?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct. Then we traded off space numbers, so if you
took out a combat unit you tried to replace it with about the same
numbers. All of that had to be tied in with the downsizing that was going
on in the Army. I think we slowed the Armys downsizing a little bit in my
time as the DCSOPS, but we couldnt stop it.
INTERVIEWER: Where was the pressure for that coming from?
GEN PEAY: It was all financial. End of the day it was all financial.
INTERVIEWER: Were the other services under similar pressure?

GEN PEAY: Not to the degree that the Army was. Wed been out there,
18 or 19 divisions, and we were headed towards 10. I dont think we saw
the similar kinds of war-fighting capability taken out of the other services.
They had some, but they didnt have that amount.
INTERVIEWER: Did the Army leadership, civilian and military, appeal to

the Congress to help them?

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GEN PEAY: We all testified. The DCSOPS had to testify. The Vice had to
testify, as well as the Chief. In this time frame General Sullivan came up
with this idea called No More Task Force Smiths. He was trying to make
a case that youre cutting too far and the Armys unready, that you are
going to get yourself caught just like General Brad Smith in Korea.
Incidentally, General Brad Smith was an assistant division commander in
the 5th Mech when I was the aide-de-camp to the commanding general. I
always thought he was a wonderful, wonderful gentleman.
INTERVIEWER: Its clear from what youre saying that the competition for
resources was the most difficult challenge at this time. Nothing else seems
to come close to it. It affects downsizing, it affects op tempo. What was the
effect on our longer-term interests like research, development, and
acquisition?
GEN PEAY: One of the real downsides to these cuts was that you ended
up taking out and really cutting back on a number of large echelons above
corps organizations in the Army. So the large signal brigades, the vast
intelligence MACOM [major command] that you had in place, those kinds
of organizations that are difficult to put back together took a number of
cuts. People always concentrate on divisions, but there are many other
parts of the United States Army that are important.
INTERVIEWER: This is a time, too, when the role of women in the Army
is probably growing, and there are various elements that want to remove
restrictions on where women can be assigned and how they can be
important. Did you get involved in that at all?
GEN PEAY: We did. That staff action took place all through this period,
as various MOSs [military occupational specialty] were looked at to open
up. We did show some flexibility there, but we never opened up the

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combat arms to women. At the same time our Chief, General Sullivan,
was heavily involved in the difficult issue of dont ask, dont tell. He spent
hours working with our staff judge advocate and other action officers in
terms of his position on that issue.
INTERVIEWER: Did you advise him on that issue?

GEN PEAY: Not really. We were so busy, and its interesting that that
really was a dominating piece of his action for several months as he and
the other chiefs collectedly worked through that. I must say General
Sullivan became quite an expert as he looked hard at that issue.
INTERVIEWER: You are going to work for him again as the Vice, I
believe, so as long as his names come up now, perhaps you could say a
little about General Sullivan, how you regarded his performance as Chief
of Staff and what relationship you and he had?
GEN PEAY: I thought we had a long, close relationship, and again it went
back to the War College when we were classmates there. He was at
Leavenworth as the deputy commandant. I took that job from him, so
weve had a close relationship over many, many years. He was always
someone I could talk to. I was not concerned about taking positions that
may have been opposite his, but I think I fairly stated things when I should
and hopefully that was helpful to him, and I think he wanted me to do that.
I tried to present many of my views to him in private. I must say he also
worked very hard. We talked every day. We both worked most Saturdays
all day. This was a time that we were trying to save the Army. We tried
every way we could to think through strategies to do it. We worked the Hill.
We did war games to try to make the case of force size. He started
something called Louisiana Maneuvers, and we did that to not only try to
demonstrate innovative different organizations and that kind of thing, but it

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also was a way to try to demonstrate why the Army was important to the
security of the nation. I enjoyed my relationship very much with the chief. I
went to Somalia with him one time. We didnt travel that much together. I
was more the inside person. General Sullivan very much wanted to be
outside, so he would do most of the traveling and we would talk daily by
the phone when he was on the road.
INTERVIEWER: Three years as DCSOPS, and I note that you said that
involved the longest hours of any assignment. I am losing a little
confidence, because I dont see you with any extra time on any of these
assignments that weve been discussing in the last few. Two years in that
job, and now you are going to be Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, and this
is going to be serving General Sullivan in that role. Is that correct?
GEN PEAY: Thats right.
INTERVIEWER: So you replaced General Reimer. How did you learn

about that?
GEN PEAY: I dont clearly recollect. I think General Sullivan called me in
one day and said these are the next set of moves that he was going to
make, and he elevated General Tilelli, who had been the ADCSOPS
[Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Operation and Plans] for me, and he
became the DCSOPS, and then I took General Reimers place. I dont
want to say it was matter of fact, but I think this was a natural progression
that General Sullivan had in his mind.
INTERVIEWER: Did you and General Sullivan reach any kind of semiformal agreement as to the division of responsibilities, or did you backstop
him across the board, or how did work together?

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GEN PEAY: There was no division of responsibilities. I did the JROC and
worked closely with the Secretariat, particularly Joe Reeder, Under
Secretary of the Army. General Sullivan was the Chief. I would certainly
make some decisions at various points in the business, but by and large
the big issues that were decided in this particular time frame were Chief of
Staff decisions. I tried to give him the best staff work that we could and the
best recommendations. For instance, financial recommendations on the
budget, relocation of units or which units were going to be reflagged or
what units were going to come out of Europe, we did the staff work on
that, staff views on various weapon systems, but let him make those
particular decisions. Again, he really liked to be outside. I dont think
General Sullivan relished the Pentagon. So I was the Mister Inside
during that period of time. And he had a lot of Congressional hearings in
this particular period, too, and I know it was because the budget pieces
were so difficult. He was over on the Hill in the 1993-1994 time frame
more frequently than he was in the previous year.
INTERVIEWER: One issue that cuts across both your DCSOPS

assignment, and now your Vice Chief of Staff assignment, that I would like
you to address is reserve component readiness. What was your outlook
on that matter?
GEN PEAY: The roundout brigade issue was a public issue. It came out
of the concern that the roundout brigade was not immediately ready to go
with the 24th Mech on its emergency deployment. That ended up with
special hearings. I think its unfair to our great reservists to think that they
should be at the level of readiness that the active forces are. Thats why
theyre reserve forces. But, by and large, once you can get them trained
up theyre pretty good. There are some fitness problems, and there are
some age problems, associated with our reserve forces, and there were
some spotty equipment issues. But Ive always, as I mentioned much

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earlier in this oral history, during my time in Fifth Army, Ive just always
had a broad strategic feel for our reserve forces and I am somewhat
sympathetic to their duty. They are patriots.
INTERVIEWER: I think you might say something useful about quality of

life issues during this time. You are now at the very top level of
responsibility for the Army and its the soldiers and their families.
GEN PEAY: Well, we did. We were building on, frankly, a lot of the work
that General Wickham had done years before on the family issues. We
had a new MACOM that was organized to handle family issues. Even
though we were downsizing we were still very cognizant of MCA
construction. And trying to keep the Army in balance is what we were
trying to do, and not let it get out of balance in the sense of what the
broader readiness issues were.
INTERVIEWER: Regarding the quality of life issues, were you able to

fund those in a way that you felt was pretty adequate?
GEN PEAY: I think adequate. Did we have some deferred maintenance

building up on our posts? Yes, but again, in the terms of the full balance of
soldier readiness, family readiness, equipment readiness, modernization,
those kinds of things, General Sullivan and I both were very concerned
that we stay in balance as we came down. We addressed that each year
in the budget process.
INTERVIEWER: You have said in some materials I have looked at that

we were really, in this same period, trying to build a much different Army
than the Army that had fought the Cold War and the first Gulf War. Please
describe in what ways it needed to be different, as you viewed it, and what
we did about that.

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GEN PEAY: We continued, as we were drawing divisions out of Europe
and restationing, we tried to continue to have a proportional number of
light and heavy divisions. We looked at some medium business, but
frankly we didnt have the financing to go a long way towards some kind of
a medium structure, so it was more a task organization between light and
heavy forces. Studies were done, again in terms of building on some of
the 9th ID business conceptually, but by and large this period was marked
by just trying to stop the downside of dollars and end strength and hold on
to flags without becoming hollow.
INTERVIEWER: Were now going to go, over a relatively short time as I
view it, from a forward-deployed Army to a CONUS-based contingency
force Army?
GEN PEAY: It was very difficult for General Sullivan, because General
Sullivan had spent most of his career in Germany. I can recall vividly when
he had to make decisions to cut those German divisions and bring the
corps home. A lot of memories and proud performances over the years in
Germany.
INTERVIEWER: We are going to talk now, if you will, please, about some
of the major initiatives that you initiated when you were Vice Chief of Staff,
largely I presume in response to General Sullivans vision.
GEN PEAY: Correct, and I worked these closely with the Chief, but the
one thing that we tried to do was to identify a clear Army end state in
terms of numbers and modernization and structure. We felt in this period
that training and leader development were now more key than anything.

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The Army had just gotten so small. I developed what we called muscle
movements in terms of trying to bring attention to some key programs
and have a ready Army. We reshaped the MACOMs in this period. We
worked command and control at echelons above divisions, and tried to
collapseflattenand yet have the needed operational commands. We
spent a lot of time on power projection logistics and strategic sealift,
working with the other services, and then working internal to the Army in
terms of our ability to project logistics. I spent considerable time on force
modernization, and specifically at that time we were trying to bring onor
savethe RAH64 Comanche, the advanced gun system, some brilliant
antitank munitions, theater air defense, corps SAM for the lower level air
defense, and the advanced field artillery system. Those were the principal
major systems that we were trying to work and, as I mentioned, at the
same time we were trying to modernize our logistics systems and work an
awful lot on total asset visibility. I think those were some of the key
modernization initiatives, and then we had reserve initiatives. We were
trying to look to the specific RC structure in terms of a strategy, because
we thought they would be needed early in the future, and then we spent a
lot of time on quality people programs. And, finally, trying to find ways to
enhance the Army image that would have impact on the budget and make
the Army fell good about its profession. So those were some of the
thrusts, and I used to call them, when we worked within the Army Staff, I
used to call them muscle movements and develop a number of smaller
initiatives to back up each one of those particular movements.
INTERVIEWER: Since we have been in the process, youve described it,
of bringing a lot of the Army home from overseas deployment, it seems to
me that strategic mobility is even more crucial to the Army than it has
been in the past, and yet the ability to acquire that is largely outside the
Army. It resides in the other services. Were we able to deal with that with
any success during these years?

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GEN PEAY: I think we were. We certainly got the attention in the building,
and it was not uncommon to see in the Navy Department, or down in the
Joint Staff, large six-foot-long modules of sealift ships, a lot of contractors
dealing in the business of roll-on/roll-off logistics, and those kinds of
things. We did have some procurement. It was not large numbers, but
certainly the whole strategic sealift action was one of common talk in the
building in those time frames. We also commenced the pre-positioning of
units on large roll-on/roll-off ships.
INTERVIEWER: While everything else seems to be in a state of flux, the

perennial issues of roles and missions are back on the table at this time.
Tell us a little about that.
GEN PEAY: Well, on the war-fighting side, you really had about seven or
eight issues. It was an issue of forward presence, and it was an issue of
battlefield depth. Control of space, who would provide theater air defense,
what was the aviation mix, what was the active component-reserve
component mix, and which forces were contingency and expeditionary in
nature. So you had all the services making cases for elements of each of
those, and then there was the whole business on the management side
ofI know as the Vice, all of the vices, we went around the country on two
lengthy trips in that time frame, going to all the test activities to see where
we could consolidate those test activities and save monies. So all of those
had great tensionwhich services would give up which capabilities,
should you have a common JAG [Judge Advocate General] Corps across
all services, a common chaplaincy and medical across all services, could
many of the training programs in the schools be combined? These are
pressures that DOD was putting on all of the services in an attempt to
save money.

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INTERVIEWER: Were any significant changes directed as a result these
inquiries?
GEN PEAY: There were some dollar push-arounds to put more dollars
into sealift and more centralization of the medical. The bottom line was
that the dollars would continue to be cut out of the Army at the end of the
day, and thats the historic piece that happens between every war in our
country.
INTERVIEWER: This faces the Army with another perennial question

which Id like your view on, and that is the issue of maintaining structure at
the expense of under manning or going to full manning of a smaller
structure. What is your take on that, basically? In periods of reduced
resources, whats the best way to go?
GEN PEAY: We made a conscious decision. It was so clear, after working

this issue for almost four years, that we had to hold the Army at ten
divisions, and we had to try to hold the school system together and try to
weather out the next five years and then rebuild off of that structure. That
was the final holding line. I know my position is a little contrary to most in
the Army, and I dont mean in any way to say that we wanted to go back to
a hollow Army. We did not want to get back in the General Meyer time
frame of that issue, but would rather have more structure and have it
slightly less manned than to have full-up structure and fewer
organizations. I am a little more on that side of that argument.
INTERVIEWER: I could see that in this time as being the more

appropriate course of action, because structure once lost is really hard to
regain. One of the related issues, I would say, thats always been difficult
for us, and in which I would like your assessment, of is measurement of

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readiness and how we go about doing that and whether there are better
ways to do it in your judgment. What do you feel about that issue?
GEN PEAY: Its really hard at the department level, as you look at
whether its stop lights as a concept of colors or just reading readiness
reports after readiness reports. We used to do this once a month, and
then once a quarter we would brief General Sullivan and the Secretary of
the Army in the large operations room in the basement, and bring up an
incredible amount of data describing the readiness of the Army. I dont
have an easy answer to that. You pore over the readiness reports, you cut
the data as many ways as you can, and you do the best job in terms of
trying to estimate what the readiness is. I dont think there is any quick
answer to that.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think we did a good enough job in comparing

readiness in absolute terms with the resources that were provided to the
units being rated so if it was our fault, lets say, that they werent ready
because we didnt give them the assets, that that was recognized and
taken into account?
GEN PEAY: I think at the basic cutting edge of the Army the forces were
generally ready. The problem you get into is less modernization, stretching
out modernization, less war reserves, deferred maintenance, particularly a
lot of backlog on installations.
INTERVIEWER: So readiness writ large, lets say?
GEN PEAY: Yeah.

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INTERVIEWER: With the size of the forces diminishing over the period
were talking, about we still have a number of recruiting issues and assets
for recruiting, I think, were a key. Tell us something about that, please.
GEN PEAY: My memory is a little vague on the recruiting issue. Again,

quarterly reports on recruiting. They always went to the Secretary of the
Army as well.
INTERVIEWER: My information is that, during this period, both the

number of recruiters and the dollar amounts in the ad budgets were on the
decline. Of course those were the key determinants, I think, of the ability
to recruit.
GEN PEAY: I just dont have great recollection of that particular issue.
INTERVIEWER: Perhaps you could say something about the Armys role
in the development of joint doctrine during this time.
GEN PEAY: I dont think this is a parochial answer, but we played a major
role in the writing, developing, and staffing of JCS Pub 3. We did some of
that work at TRADOC, but clearly the DCSOPS team led that action in the
building. We were ahead of our time in terms of the other services. I can
specifically remember one day General Mc Peak coming and meeting with
General Sullivan and myself around General Sullivans table. He had a
graph paper, and he tried to get us to commit to a box of so many
kilometers high and so many kilometers long, and that the Army would
stay in that box in terms of its fight and the Air Force would fight above
and outside that box. And of course we fundamentally objected and did
not concur with that approach at all. These were contentious times in the
whole roles and mission pieces. We had the fire support coordination line
discussion all through this period; the Air Force wanted to limit our

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advance and control where we could fire at depth. Two services just saw
the battlefield conceptually differently. In that day the doctrinal fight was
the front end of how you were going to get resources. You had to have
your head in the game all the time in that regard. That was really the
forerunner to all of the roles and missions discussions. I think the USMC
felt they were the expeditionary force, and of course the Army has
deployed frequently with speed to many operational requirements.
INTERVIEWER: Obviously the Army Secretariat had some big roles to

play in all of these matters. We havent talked about that yet. I believe the
Secretary of the Army at that time was Togo West. Is this correct?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct. I would go in periodically and brief Secretary
West. Discussions in the tank at that time were generally considered the
privilege of the operational deputies and the Chief of Staff. These were
uniformed meetings and decisions. And then at times those discussions
went directly to the Secretary of Defense. There was a period when
Secretary West wanted to know more about particular discussions in the
tank. Understanding the concept of civilian control, I tried to be very
careful about those kinds of national security discussions outside the JCS
[Joint Chiefs of Staff] uniformed body. I also met with him a number of
times as the Vice in terms of Secretary of the Army instructions to
promotion boards. This is one issue that we really did have a
disagreement on in terms of process and allowing in open session a
discussion of various general officers in terms of the selection. I had to
make a strong case that these discussions were vital in the closed board
room. The Secretary really wanted these votes done mathematically, with
no discussion and that would be the decision. I had to get General Ron
Griffith, who was the Inspector General and who had a great way of
working with the Secretary, as well as working with the manpower and
reserve component assistant secretary, to help run some interference to

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take that language out of the instructions to the promotion board. That was
pretty contentious at time. I had to work my way through that carefully.
INTERVIEWER: During that time you wrote to an old and trusted friend
that you recognized the significance of being in a position opposite your
secretary. I have not enjoyed that, you said, but I truly had no choice.
Were there other issues that contributed to that stance on your part?
GEN PEAY: I dont think it was just one issue. I think, again, these were a
tough four years. I felt as the DCSOPS and the Vice I had to work well
with people, but I had to make strong decisions or recommendations, and
many times fundamentally they would go against the direction many in the
civilian appointed staff wished to go, whether it was the priority of various
modernization issues or whether it was what the end strength should be. I
just felt that, as always, many of their positions naturally had a political
nature to it. The closing down of various bases versus the closing down of
posts that I thought were more important to the Army. I dont think it was
one issue. At the end of the day Secretary West and I got along fine, as
well as Joe Reeder and a number of others. It was just a tough period
resources, roles and missions, et cetera.
INTERVIEWER: Here is one final thing, unless there are others that you
want to address, that I would like to ask you about in this Vice Chief of
Staff period. I came across a reference to a paper or speech by you that
was entitled Thoughts on Army in which you said the rifleman in the
army is distorted by oversimplification. Im not sure I know what that
means, but it sounds very interesting. Can you say something to that?
GEN PEAY: I really believe that. You know, the Army business just
somehow or other doesnt appear sexy. Yet, at the end of the day, hes
the most complex thing that we havefrom training to his readiness to his

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morale. Its a far, far different thing from an airplane. So thats what I
meant by that particular comment, and I still believe that today.
INTERVIEWER: Anything else you want to say about the Vice Chiefs
assignment? Here is the bottom line to your Vice Chief of Staff
assignment.
GEN PEAY: Well, in an interview I gave earlier I said the bottom line is
that the dollars for the United States Army were never clearly identified,
and therefore you could never finalize the organizational look and manage
it. I think weve come down way too small, ten divisions. Our
modernization program has basically been decimated, and the only
answer now is to really dig in and hold on to the ten divisions and try to
hold the school system together. Weather the next five years, and then try
to rebuild off the structure when defense is reallocated to higher priority by
the national command authority.
INTERVIEWER: Thats a good summation. Now, after a very short period
of time in the job, and Im not sure why that turbulence, youre headed off
to yet another extremely challenging assignment. When did you find out
that that was going to happen, and what was the reason for the
reassignment at that time?
GEN PEAY: The commander-in-chiefthey called them CINCs at that

time, I believe, today they are calling them combatant commandersthe
CINC US Central Command job came open in the summer of 1994. Thats
a selection process normally started by the service chiefs, working in the
tank with each other, and providing their recommendations to the
Secretary of Defense. Similarly, the chiefs of service and service
secretaries provide their recommendations. I was selected to go to Tampa

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to take on that job from General Joe Hoar, a Marine Corps four-star, so we
moved in the summer of 1994 to Tampa.
INTERVIEWER: How did you feel about that?
GEN PEAY: I was excited about it, perhaps with some bias. I thought
U.S. Central Command was one of the best theaters to be involved in. It
was complex, it was interesting, it was a war-fighting theater as well as an
engagement theater, so I was excited to have the honor and opportunity. I
went to Georgetown University where, interestingly, an instructor by the
name of Dr. John Anthony, who was one of the ten top Arabists in our
country, instructed Pam and me in a two-week course on the region and
its peoples.
INTERVIEWER: Like a tutorial?
GEN PEAY: A tutorial, and by coincidence he also was the president of

my class at VMI and had been a high school classmate. I had not seen
him for years. It was interesting, as I went down there to Tampa. He was
very, very helpful in that regard and I was able to call on him over the next
three years for advice.
INTERVIEWER: Now, when you went down there, did you go with some
idea of what you would be encountering and what youd like to
accomplish, or how did you get started in this much different job?
GEN PEAY: Secretary Perry talked to me briefly about the job, but he did
nothe or the Pentagon, give me any advice, so I did what most Army
officers do. I went to Tampa and started my assessment, had some
exceptional briefings by the staff, and immediately went to the area of
operations, going to Saudi Arabia first and then throughout the Gulf

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Cooperation Countries, [GCC] the six GCC countries, came back and then
shortly went back over to Egypt, Kenya, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia,
came back for a few weeks and then went back to Pakistan. That turned
out to be almost the norm of the way the trips would flow for the next three
years. I was determined to build on General Hoars work. I thought he had
really done a good job of opening back up the theater after the Gulf War.
During that time, understandably, General Schwarzkopf spent most of his
time fighting the war. When General Hoar took his place, he had to go
back and start to put an engagement strategy in place and start to make
friends and open up the theater again. Then I came in and tried to build on
that by putting in operational war plans and tried to build a logistical
structure and a forward command and control capability from which the
theater could actually operationalize. We put a vision in place and a
strategic plan I and two years later II. We really wrote three or four good
war plans, I thought.
INTERVIEWER: Say a little more about putting a vision in place, because

that sounds like a pretty challenging thing to do.
GEN PEAY: We had a general idea of what we wanted to do. We went to

a long offsite over at the USAA Building in Tampa. They were gracious to
host us. I took a hundred and fifty people. I broke them in three groups,
and gave each of them a homework assignment in which to come up with
approaches to the region in terms of a vision. One of them I gave the
eastern part of Africa, another I gave the central region, and the other the
far east. Each of those groups was headed by a two-star on the staff.
They reported out to us (the entire group of 150) and had a great dialogue.
This was a two-night, three-day kind of affair. Ike Skelton came down and
talked to us at one of the dinner meetings about all of that. The entire
team then put together a solid document that was helpful in executing the
strategy for the region in the form of a strategic plan that depicted the

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vision, guiding principles, a strategy, major muscle movements, and
objectives-goals.
INTERVIEWER: Now youre working, of course, with the people of all the
different services?
GEN PEAY: Thats correct. I had a terrific deputy in Lieutenant General
Butch Neal, who was a Marine Corps officer. Later, after this job, he
became the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps as a four-star. He
was broad and kept the staff on their toes. Hed had a lot of [Central
Command] experience in the first Gulf War. He was just a joy to work with.
Again we used the term muscle movements and had thirteen of those
that we put in place, such things as developing specific war plans, shaping
the forward presence to support our theater strategy, shaping the security
assistance program to support the strategy. We did an awful lot on
integrating joint coalition in a combined exercise program, had a muscle
movement on enhancing the power projection means to the theater and in
the theater, and shaping the command and control communications piece
of the theater. We wanted to forge effective relationships with the political
leaders, those kinds of things that would shape the theater and keep the
lines of communications open and protect our interests, and so from that
we wrote a CENTCOM mission, and we took the mission back to the
Pentagon and had it approved there by the Department of Defense. That
was all coordinated with the National Security Council, and basically it was
to promote and protect our interests and ensure our uninterrupted access
to the regional resources, and to assist our friendly countries and states in
their own collective security, and finally provide deterrence in terms of any
hostile takeover by regional states. Thats what we tried do, and then put it
all together in a very flexible command structure that was trained in that
regard.

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INTERVIEWER: Was building those relationships with the leaders in the
region primarily your own personal responsibility?
GEN PEAY: No, but in the central region the relationships are largely
military to civilian. We had wonderful ambassadors in the region and they
certainly had relationships with the emirs and the kings, but at the end of
the day it was the military relationships that were key. In my view, Saudi
Arabia was and is still today the linchpin to the region. So thats where I
went on my first visit, immediately after I took command, and went to
Riyadh to see King Fahd and Prince Sultan and Prince Abdullah. And for
the first time I met Ambassador Ray Mabus, former governor of
Mississippi, a close personal friend today. He and I bonded immediately
because, perhaps both of us arrived at the same time. Ray Mabus today is
Secretary of the Navy, as we speak. We finally got in to see King Fahd at
about three in the morning, and for the next two and a half or three hours
we sat there while King Fahd talked to us from with his experience with
Roosevelt forward. It was a long, long, long early morning, particularly
after a long trip into the region. We had other relationshipsa special
relationship in Jordan with King Hussein, and also with his son, who now
is King Abdullah and was at that time head of their special operating
forces. I had those kinds of relationships throughout the Gulf. General
Tantawi in Egypt, their minister of defense, was a special friend. Hes still
the minister of defense there. I could name all of those across our 15-20
countries, but it really was U.S. Central Command being able to bring
something to the tabletraining readiness through exercises, modernized
equipment, a security assistance program, and provide deterrence. All that
was worked closely with the country team and the ambassadors, but at
the end of the day I think it was the military piece of that was the dominant
factor in deterrence and in securing access to vital resources.
In 1995 we did some significant work focusing on east Africa, building
deep bases and friendships in Djibouti and Kenya, and tried to provide

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balance and facilitate stability with Ethiopia and Eritrea. And in 1995 we
saw Afghanistan unraveling and worked hard in further cementing our ties
with Pakistan. General Waheed, the Army Chief of Staff in Pakistan, was a
clear friend. He had the tough job of trying to ensure stability, reduce
government graft, and work the Kashmir problem. Prime Minister Bhutto
and her team were difficult for him to work. The U.S. Congressional
sanctions on Pakistan left a sour note with our military friends and we
worked hard to repair that situation. As a result of sanctions, Pakistan
today has many senior leaders that did not attend our schools, whereas
we had key senior leaders before that who knew us well. It will take years
to fill this void. My POLAD from the State Department, Mr. Ed Fugitt, was
a major player on our staff and provided solid advice continuously to all of
us at CENTCOM while keeping the right people at State and the NSC
informed. His trip reports were invaluable to all in the Defense and State
community. Bruce Reidel at the NSC was a great help and provided timely
advice.
INTERVIEWER: It was during this time that the Khobar Towers bombing
took place?
GEN PEAY: We had really done some good work at Central Command.
As I mentioned, putting a vision in place, establishing some good war
plans that could be used to flex off of according to the situation. We built a
theater structure. We had a bare bones structure, less Kuwait; for
instance, in Qatar, and we got in there and built a major logistic structure,
and thats where the second Gulf War was C2fought from. We had to
deter Saddam in 1994 when he moved a division south in terms of
threatening Kuwait again and deployed forces quickly to the region in
Operation Vigilant Warrior. We knew that we could not have a large

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footprint in the theater, and so we tried to have minimal in-theater forces,
but be ready to fight Iraqi forces and prepare for the next war with the
correct forward component headquarters (minus). The theater footprint
that we had gave us access, and that certainly kept the peace and kept
the oil lines open as we were going to build for the future. Obviously we
were also planning for the Iranian factor. We built and exercised a war
plan for Iraq. It was fully coordinated with all entities, was in detail as to
the C2 locations and logistical bases, and it entailed approximately
500,000 troops, as we knew we had to stabilize and put the country
quickly back on an appropriate footing. Finally we exercised the plan at
Camp Blanding, Florida, with all components involved. We further wargamed and discussed Stage 4, the stability period. General Zinni, my
successor, did not change the war plan and was comfortable with it. One
can only speculate that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld directed major
changes in the approach and end strength.
I think that the CENTCOM staff and component commanders did some
good work in this period from 1994 to 1997. Late in 1996 we had the OPM
SANG bombing and that was followed a little bit later by the bombing at
Khobar Towers. We knew throughout 1997, the last part of 1996 and
1997, we saw that the terrorist threat was building up in the theater. And
we were working very hard on force protection. We knew that Khobar was
vulnerable, but we were hit before all the defenses were finished. It
became a very political thing at that time, with the Republicans taking on
the Clinton administration, and they called me back to testify. I must say I
found it rather disgusting, the professionalism of that particular hearing.
Wed had some soldiers and sailors and airmen killed in this particular
affair. It was the forerunner, as now we know, for many, many more
terrorist activities, to include 9/11 that would follow. In that region and
culture, and in the middle of a major shopping area, the Saudis were not
going to block off the shops and those kinds of things in that area. And so,

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to the enemy, or terrorists credit, they found a weak point in the defense
before we could get that coordinated with the host government and they
hit us. The terrorists could have hit any of hundreds of facilities in
CENTCOM. Terry Schwalier was an Air Force brigadier who was on the
two-star list. He was the commander of Khobar Towers. I found him
working the problem, as I mentioned, very hard. His head was in the
game. And he became the sacrificial lamb, if I may say so, in this whole
event. General Ron Fogelman, the Air Force Chief, resigned his post and
retired during this period. Schwalier (along with several other Air Force
issues) was one of several incidents that led to Fogelmans desire to step
down. Interestingly, Secretary Perry supported CENTCOM and my
actions. He was not able, though, to save Terry Schwalier. Schwalier
retired as a one-star, but a decade later, as a result of a number of Air
Force and DOD reviews of this whole incident, they upheld Schwalier, and
eventually the Air Force Board of Review overturned that decision and
promoted him in retirement to two stars. I must say that the whole
business of Congressional politics associated with the Khobar Towers
event was discouraging and lacked professionalism. A response was
increased attack of targets and increased no-fly-zone patrolling by us. At
times this wore on the GCC countries.
INTERVIEWER: Anything else you want to say specifically about the

Central Command assignment before we talk to sort of end of active
service kinds of perspectives?
GEN PEAY: It was a great command, a busy command. I think we kept

the peace in my three years there. I think we built an engagement plan
that allowed our country to get back into various countries in which they
could prosecute the next war, which they did simultaneously from a
number of those countries. We had a lot of friends in the region. I think the
staff at U.S. Central Command did the kind of work that you would like a

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large joint regional command to do. I am very, very proud of their work. I
would encourage researchers to examine my end of tour report submitted
3 November 1997 for the period August 1994 - August 1997.
INTERVIEWER: Earlier we talked some about Goldwater-Nichols with the

thought that wed come back to that later from your subsequent
perspective. And Central Command probably gave you a good opportunity
to evaluate that. How do you come down on it? Was it a net plus?
GEN PEAY: Im sort of flat on the issue. I do think that, a decade ago, we
needed to do somehave some increased education in jointness and try
to get the services to be less parochial. I dont think that its rocket
science. Talented officers figure it out. I think its a business you can learn
in joint commands and in the region. If youve been exposed in your
service to your doctrine and had a number of different assignments
throughout your career, by the time you become a senior officer I think you
adapt very, very easily to these kinds of requirements. The cultural
business and language is overstated. I do believe today that we are over
schooling in the jointness business, and I am concerned that there are just
too many gates that you have to go through to be qualified to be
promoted to general officer, and I think that some of that cuts at readiness.
I think its time to back off a little bit of that now, and Im very confident,
based on the joint commands that are in the defense establishment today,
and the number of assignments that officers have had, particularly in
wartime, that Goldwater-Nichols has been helpful, but perhaps its time for
some modification and relaxation.
INTERVIEWER: In what way would you modify it if you had the magic
wand?

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GEN PEAY: I would reduce the amount of joint schooling. All of the war
colleges today are filled with officers of other services. We also have
CAPSTONE for brigadier generals. Theres plenty of jointness there. And
certainly an exposure to one or two joint jobs or positions is enough to
qualify you for senior level responsibilities. I do think we need to be
careful. You must be a master of your own service. Its important that our
services be very, very strong. Its important that staff officers serve in their
own departments as well as understand the joint business. Weve been at
war now a long time. Some of the joint mid-level schooling can be deleted.
INTERVIEWER: Ill ask you some end of career questions at the end of
the interviews, but perhaps now we can go to your initial civilian business
pursuits after you retire following 35 years in uniform. Can we talk to that a
little now?
GEN PEAY: I stayed in Tampa for a year to let my youngest son Ryan
graduate from Tampa High School. I did some consulting during that time
period. I participated as a senior service mentor in the Capstone program
for the National Defense University. I did those kinds of things for a year,
and then we moved to Clifton, Virginia, for what I certainly thought was
going to be my final move in retirement. I was sitting on some boards at
that timethe United Defense board. I was Chairman of the Board of
Trustees of the National Defense University. I was president of a historical
foundation at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to build a $50 million museum,
and so those are some of the things I was doing. And I was on the Allied
Defense Group board in northern Virginia. Within about a year, the Allied
Defense board removed the presidentactually I believe it was called
Allied Research at that timeremoved the president of the company and
they came and asked if I would be the Chairman and CEO. It was a small
public defense company that specialized in munitions. I did accept that. I
brought in Major General Gil Meyer, who was a military police officer and

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had really made his name in the Army in the public affairs business, as
well as the family and community support business, a very, very qualified
leader. We spent the next two years working closely together, buying a
few more companies, changed the name of the corporation to the Allied
Defense Group, and diversified it in terms of its entities by adding
electronic security businesses to get greater diversification.
INTERVIEWER: Where was it headquartered?
GEN PEAY: It was headquartered in Tysons Corner in northern Virginia,

with subsidiaries in Belgium, California, and Texas. I stayed in that job for
two years, and then the Virginia Military Institute approached me about
being the Superintendent, actually wanted me to take that job in 2002.
After considerable deliberation, Pam and I decided that we would take on
that responsibility. I think we felt it was payback time, frankly, for the
wonderful things that VMI did for us.
INTERVIEWER: It was also, it seems to me, also just absolutely ideal

ideal for them, ideal for you.
GEN PEAY: We were excited and we took on the job. I stayed as the
Chairman of Allied Defense Group and gave up the day-to-day running of
the business as its CEO. UDLP was sold to BAE, Inc. and BAE, Inc. took
two of the directors of UDLP, Admiral Bob Natter and myself, to be part of
their board. And Im still running the historical foundation at Fort Campbell,
Kentucky. I did remain as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the
National Defense University for a little over three or four years. Ive just
recently come off that board. That sort of brings you up to date as to how I
got to VMI.

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INTERVIEWER: And now we have the great pleasure of talking about
your tenure so far at VMI. You are certainly on familiar ground here. Your
father is a graduate, youre a graduate. They were lucky to get you. How
did you approach this new responsibility? Had you stayed in close enough
touch with VMI that you had some ideas about things that you needed and
wanted to accomplish, or did you size it up when you got on the ground?
GEN PEAY: Both. I had, even though being in the services and moving
around, I had generally kept my head in what was going on at VMI. I had
two sons that had just gone through back-to-back four-year periods (19942002) at VMI, and I visited them a number of times on parents weekends
and football games and those kinds of things.
INTERVIEWER: They were both graduates by the time you came, is that
correct?
GEN PEAY: That is correct. My youngest boy graduated in 2002 and,

while I agreed to take the job in 2002, I did not report to duty until 1 July of
2003. In that July 2003 time frame I walked every square foot of the
Institute. I looked all over, thought in great depth about where we should
go. Actually, I think that had something to do with the selection to hire me
for the job, because in the interview I gave them a number of thoughts that
we actually did put in place once I arrived in July.
INTERVIEWER: Who did you succeed in the job?
GEN PEAY: I succeeded Si Bunting. We put in place a Vision we called

2039 which2039 being VMIs 200th Anniversary. It was founded in
1839. I thought it was a little bit of a catchy marketing way to try to give
some energy to the direction, and then put in place 14 muscle
movements, what really are 14 simplified descriptors in terms of going to

165

the future. And they could easily be boxed in the traditional areas of the
military, academic, athletic, and a fourth area that I called the cultural and
physical environment. I felt our society, over many years, was less civil. I
think you see that in many people today in our country, and I thought we
should put together a series of initiatives that get at the culture today in
our country. The physical piece of that was simply the physical
environment at VMI that frankly needed quite a bit of work. Those four
areas were backed with 191 initiatives that we put in place that enabled
the Vision accomplishment.
INTERVIEWER: Was development of Vision 2039 a collaborative effort?

Who did you bring in on that, if anybody?
GEN PEAY: Honestly, I brought most of that with me. And after I walked
the ground and did my assessment I put it out there. I did know that it had
to be collaborative, and so I formed study groups of many different
members of the staff, faculty, and Corps in each of those four areas. I
downloaded to them these fourteen major initiativessuch things as
growing the corps to 1500; increasing commissioning to 70 percent;
developing very special relationships with 25 of the best graduate schools
in the country; graduating a Corps that was greater than 50 percent in
math, science, and engineering; changing the makeup of the in-state and
out of state proportions. Those are some examples of the fourteen major
initiatives. I asked these study groups to examine them and give us some
initiatives that would make them come to life, and thats how the 190
supporting-enabling initiatives came together. So it was collaborative, but I
also felt like we didnt have a lot of time. I wanted to get some energy. I
wanted to get some excitement going, and at the end of the day all of that
has a major impact on fundraising and moving your school upwards in
terms of its reputation in the country. I spent a lot of time walking the halls
of Richmond, and still do today. We were very fortunate, because the

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State of Virginia has been very gracious to us. We have been able to
obtain some $235 million of construction, and it allowed us to put in a very
exciting and large construction program that continues today.
INTERVIEWER: Your influence is evident in every part of the campus

new barracks, the new Center for Leadership and Ethics (Marshall Hall),
beautiful, beautiful structures, as well as the rehabilitation of the existing
structures. I have a particular interest in the Center for Leadership and
Ethics. Tell us little bit about how that came to be part of the enterprise.
GEN PEAY: At the end of the day, the thematic behind Vision 2039 is a
focus on leadership. Thats what were trying to do, trying to develop
leaders for an uncertain world, so we built Marshall Hall, the Center for
Leadership and Ethics, as the place to give us a foundation in which we
could put in the very best supporting leader programs, an integrating staff
of a director and small staff, 500-seat auditorium, a 1000-seat dining
capability, with the highest technology in the world, and provide some
oversight and integration of leadership. We want to be renowned in
leadership in ten years, in a decade, with a $25 million endowment that
would put the very best programs in place. It used to be said that all
youve got to do is to point over to barracks and thats where youll learn
leadershipand you certainly do. But its much more sophisticated than
that today. I felt that in addition to what our cadets receive in their splendid
ROTC training, what they learn from operating in the regiment and on the
athletic playing fields, that they needed to also have a very tough
mandatory theory course in leadership. And we needed to have the very
best symposia, and a few chairs in ethics and leadership filled by leaders
in these fields. (I break here to say how thrilled we were to have you, Bob,
as our first chair in that regard. Your semester with us was very, very
impressive and helpful to the Corps of Cadets, and I thank you for that.)

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So thats where were trying to go, a very exciting time at VMI. If we can
just win a few football games and fix the parking, well be in good shape.
INTERVIEWER: One of the things that I am impressed with is the

increase in number of cadets being commissioned upon graduation.
Thats a hard thing to influence. How have you been able to do as well as
you have in that?
GEN PEAY: I think one of the greatest strategic errors in VMIs long
history was walking away from mandatory commissioning. First,
mandatory commissioning required service to nation, and I think thats
something all young people should do. By nature of VMI being a senior
military college, it seems to me thats appropriate. It also imbues a greater
commonality of purpose in the Corps when everybody is marching to a
common drumbeat. So, when VMI walked away from that, for many
reasons, I think it caused challenges in the common direction we were
going and in the way we were operating. We came in and stressed
commissioning, talked about the great leadership you learn from wearing
the uniform, the travel opportunities, meeting with people from all across
the country as well as foreign nations, and the responsibility that you
would get so early as a young officer would pay off in business. So we
really tried to attack it that you dont have to stay in for a career, but I want
you to serve for a short period of time as a citizen-soldier before you go to
graduate school or before you go on to your chosen profession. That
seems to somewhat have resonated with the young people at the Institute.
So we were at 33 percent in 2003 and we are at 56 percent today. I am
very impressed, as thats in a time of war, which I think says something
about the great patriotism of our young people. So we are going to
continue to press that. I dont know if we will ever meet the 70 percent
objective. Someone asked me the other day, How did you come up with

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70 percent? Literally we just pulled that number out of the hat. It had no
scientific study behind it, and maybe it should have.
INTERVIEWER: But if you reach that, that then would be the typical
graduate, and the ones that didnt would be atypical, so that is a good
number. I know that fundraising is a huge part of any university or college
head these days, difficult. Youve obviously been very successful. Other
than the need to continue raising money to support the initiatives in Vision
2039, if you look ahead to the next lets say two or three years, what are
the major things that you hope to accomplish in that time?
GEN PEAY: Again, Id like to see us endow that Leadership Center at
about $25 million. As you said, we have modernized all of our buildings,
less one, with state of the art classrooms, highest of technology. We are
blessed with wonderful professors. Ninety-seven percent of our faculty
have Ph.D.s. They all teach. Class size is one instructor per 12 students
on the average. We have a splendid single sanction honor system. The
major academic building that has not been modernized is our new science
building, which houses our chemistry and biology and a large part of our
undergraduate research program. So we would hope, in the next 24
months, to have that building gutted and modernized. Thats probably
about an $18 million requirement. And then, to close out the major building
structures of Vision 2039, we want to expand our south post and put a
VMI Center for Physical Fitness and an Olympic-sized field house and a
new P.E. Department along Route 11. This September we will commence
construction on a $15 million project on north post that will add a series of
drill fields and athletic fields for both NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic
Association] and club sports, a modernized baffled rifle range, and a huge
number of confidence courses and those kinds of things for the Corps of
Cadets. I think weve got an exciting couple of years ahead of us.

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INTERVIEWER: Theres a lot of energy, thanks to your leadership, here.
Anything else you want to say about VMI before I ask you a couple of
wrap-up questions? How about Pams role here?
GEN PEAY: Well, shes been key to me in all assignments, and certainly
here at VMI. Fortunately its a passion and a love, I think, by both of us.
We started an initiative to bring every first classmen to our home for
dinner, and so we have a number of dinners, usually on Tuesday and
Thursday nights, where we bring in 20 to 25 first classmen or seniors.
Thats a lot of chicken. But its a great time for Pam and me to have a
dialogue with the first class cadets and give them a chance to see the
Superintendents quarters before they graduate.
INTERVIEWER: They will never forget that opportunity. I am grateful to

you for all the interesting information youve provided and put into the
historical record, which I know will be valuable to those who come to it in
the future. You are still serving, you are going to continue to serve but, as
you look back over the long years that we have been talking about, I
would like to ask you just to reflect on two or three aspects. The first is,
say something about the soldier, if thats not too general or vague.
GEN PEAY: Well, I think the soldier is the heart and soul of our business.
Im very proud of the American fighting man, and particularly proud of the
soldiers that are serving today. I find them savvy and generally fit. They
want the challenges. Its incredible, particularly in this ongoing global war
on terrorism, the sacrifices that they are making, and going to war two,
three, or four times with little time at home, impact on their families, impact
on themselves both physically and mentally, and yet they do that, really
never asking for a reward. I have great memories, as I think I mentioned
much earlier, about my time in battery command in Vietnam. These were
largely draftee soldiers. Despite everything that was written about that

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particular era, I was extremely proud of their service. Also I feel very good
about the young officers in the services. I find them bright. They multitask.
Theyre loyal and dedicated. They care about their country. They, like all
new officers, require training and oversight, but I think we should feel
pretty good about the armed services today.
INTERVIEWER: I know youd like to say something about the wives and
families.
GEN PEAY: They are great. I take my hat off to my own wife, who herded
two sons through the many diversified assignments and many moves that
we had over the years. She did a very good job with them, and Im proud
of their performance. My older son Jim as of this date is a Major of Field
Artillery in the Army, is currently serving as an exchange officer with the
Royal Artillery in Larkhill, U.K., and has had three tours in Iraq. My
younger son, Ryan, is at the Darden School, University of Virginia, getting
his MBA. He resigned from the Army in the grade of Captain after serving
two tours in Iraq. Both attended VMI, and Im proud of their service to our
country.
INTERVIEWER: And, finally, would you say something about the privilege
of service?
GEN PEAY: Well, thats the best decision I ever made. As I look back at
the very start of this interview, and we talked about now-retired Lieutenant
General Jeff Smith, who was really tough on me to take a Regular Army
commission, I am just so glad in retrospect that he was.

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INTERVIEWER: Concluding these interviews, General Peay is
addressing the topic of the privilege of service.
GEN PEAY: I have found nothing in civilian life that gave me the great joy
of service, the opportunity of travel, the reward of having young men and
women that you are responsible for, particularly in time of war. It was a
great thrill and a great honor to be able to walk in their paths. Im just
exceedingly thankful for the opportunity the Army gave me, and the
opportunity to serve.
INTERVIEWER: I want to thank you for the valuable contribution you

have made to the historical record. Its been a privilege to talk to you about
your remarkable career. Thank you.
GEN PEAY: Thank you.

172

Oral History of General JH Binford Peay III

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Oral History of General JH Binford Peay III

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FOREWORD

RESUME OF SERVICE CAREER

JAMES HENRY BINFORD PEAY III, General

Commander, 2d Battalion, 11th Field Artillery, 25th Infantry Division,

JAMES HENRY BINFORD PEAY III, General

US DECORATIONS AND BADGES

Senior Aide to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs

** Commanding General, 101st Airborne

Commander in Chief, United States

** Full Tour Credit

Interview with General J.H. Binford Peay III, USA Retired

I Corps, G-3; Ft. Lewis, WA

Appendix A Access Agreement

U.S. Army Military History Institute

[Start Tape 1, Side A]

INTERVIEWER: This is the first of a series of interviews with General J.

GEN PEAY: I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Early on, my father was

GEN PEAY: Same as mine except he is Junior, J. H. Binford Peay, Jr. I

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

I lived a structured life. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. After the war my

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

GEN PEAY: My mother (Audrey) was a triplet, born in West Virginia to

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

GEN PEAY: He teaches a series of levels of math and science and

INTERVIEWER: What were you like as a youngster? What interested

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

GEN PEAY: Yes, I am.

INTERVIEWER: I believe you are a Distinguished Eagle Scout.

INTERVIEWER: I understand that decision was made on a national basis,

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

GEN PEAY: I was Order of the Arrow.

INTERVIEWER: And was your first leadership role as patrol leader,

GEN PEAY: I was a patrol leader.

GEN PEAY: I think so. Fundamentals of Scouting are all the

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

INTERVIEWER: What was your role on the football team?

INTERVIEWER: Did you eventually become the starting quarterback?

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

GEN PEAY: In those days we played both ways. I never could

INTERVIEWER: Was McKenna an influence on his players in other ways

INTERVIEWER: Did you stay in touch with him in later years?

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

INTERVIEWER: Did he last long enough to see you as Superintendent at

GEN PEAY: I know many of the discussions that we had in my life,

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

INTERVIEWER: You talked about a structured environment as youngster,

GEN PEAY: I lived a structured life. It was a loving family environment. It

U.S. Army Military History Institute

U.S. Army Military History Institute

GEN PEAY: In terms of teachers, I think in our elementary school (Ginter

INTERVIEWER: How large a school?

GEN PEAY: At that time it was close to four thousand students.

INTERVIEWER: So in your own class would there be?

GEN PEAY: A little less than a thousand.

INTERVIEWER: What were you good at academically?