Interview with Major General John L. Borling Interview # 9: October 27, 2014 VRV-A-L-2013-037.09 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

DePue: Today is October 27, 2014. This is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in Rockford for my ninth session with General John Borling. Good afternoon, General.

Borling: He must be a verbose SOB [son of a bitch].

DePue: I try not to be.

Borling: I was referring to me.

DePue: I was trying to be kind. Last time we talked quite a bit about your experiences at National War College. I only had one or two more questions, and it’s really more about that time in American history than anything else. One specific question is, where did your family live during the time you were there? I think I know.

Borling: We had come up from Langley and found a house at a place called Hallowing Point River Estates in Lorton, but they preferred for snooty purposes to call it Mason Neck. It was the peninsula south of Belvoir. There was a waterfront community out there on the Potomac. We got lucky, based on the fortuitous sale of a home at Langley and were able to get a modest home on a great piece of property, right on the Potomac.

John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Well, now that I’ve mentioned that, I know that you talked quite a bit about that last time. Let me apologize and then move right into the timeframe when you’re there.

You’re building up to the presidential election in 1980. What I wanted to start with, perhaps, was how you and your fellow officers viewed that particular campaign and your opinion of the job that [President Jimmy] Carter had done and your hopes for maybe a different administration.

Borling: Well, I think there was general dissatisfaction in the country, given—what was the famous term—the malaise? As colonels…The majority of National War College folks were competitive for general officer, but only a small percentage would make it, but all were competitive. This is kind of the House of Lords thing.

There was a general sense that [Ronald] Reagan ought to be the guy. You’d be surprised how apolitical the military is; it’s inbred, but there was a sense that we needed to do something about Iran and about the hostages and about the terrible shape of the economy. All this gave a general sense that Reagan would be preferable.

I think the focus of National War College was more on a geopolitical, international thing than domestic, political circumstances, especially for all of us, who were Vietnam experienced, if you will, and inclined to what I’ll call decisive warfare. We didn’t make any signs in the basement and go marching around Fort McNair or any of that stuff. I think we were much more interested in training for the marathon, which a number of us ran down the Patuxent River, after going out on noontime runs for long miles and stuff. I hope that’s not a disappointing answer.

DePue: No, not at all. The military has always had the reputation of being apolitical, at least on the—

Borling: Yeah. In fact for us, is was encouraged…not even encouraged to vote, as recently as ’80 or even ’90. It was somehow viewed as not right. You didn’t write your congressman, and you didn’t do those kinds of normal citizen things, because you were in a specialized segment of the population, and you were expected to act accordingly, especially the officer corps.

DePue: When you say, “It was viewed as not right,” in what respect?

Borling: Disloyal, that if you were to take something outside of military channels, that it would be viewed as not proper. Let me rephrase that, proper yes, disloyal. Disloyal would be the big word, that somehow it was “not fittin’.”

DePue: Now you’re a long way from the position where you might be considering doing this, but if you were a general officer, fairly high ranking, and you

369 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

disagreed strongly with the administration’s policy, would it be okay to resign and publicly make a statement after the fact?

Borling: I would say, yes. Anybody at senior ranks, colonel and above, is going to find themselves at odds with a particular policy. There’s just too many things and too big an organization, and there’s any number of short swords on which you can impale yourself. But at the end of the day…

It takes some cojones to go in, and you’re staffing a paper, and the position is one that you don’t agree with, so you tell your boss that this is a difficult issue for you to staff and that you see it from a different perspective, and you spell out that perspective. You would hope that it would be compelling and would cause the paper’s emphasis to shift. Your boss can either accept that and accept your good thinking, or he can be narrow and thin-skinned, as so many bosses are, and throw you in the hall and say, “Go do it,” at which point you have a choice. As you indicate, you can go public then…As a matter of fact, the political tides have changed. While there’s still this “keep it in-house,” there are dissent in-house, much less quit-and-dissent out of house.

The difficulty with the military is it’s an economic decision. If you’re a colonel or general, you’re at a point in your life where your economic demands are as high as they would ever be, kids entering college; you don’t make a lot of money in the military, or at least you didn’t used to make a lot of money. Now, it’s pretty lucrative, frankly, into the all-volunteer force and all the incentive things that have been factored in.

I would like to say—and they’ve talked about this—more senior officers have their careers end in tatters, because of their resistance to what they perceive to be dumb or wrong or injurious things for the country. I speak a little pridefully but believe that would benefit us as a nation. We don’t have enough of it. More generals can quit, as a matter of principle over issues that really matter, than just go along.

DePue: That that’s what we don’t have enough of?

Borling: We don’t have enough guys saying, “We need to alter course on this one, or I’m going to cut the cord and be vocal about it.”

DePue: At the end of that National War College…I’m sure in the midst of it, you were looking around—

Borling: It’s an ethical consideration, and we talked a lot about that at National War College. How many followed up on it? We all took a pretty hard line that, yeah, you had to fight for what was right. Now, again, you’ve got to pick your fights, but when you hit for something that was central, key, then it was a sense that you didn’t worry about careerism; you worried about doing what was right. Easy to say; hard to do.

370 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Were you already, at that time, at twenty or over twenty, so you could legitimately retire if that was the—

Borling: No, no. I made colonel way early. I made colonel at sixteen, so I was not eligible for retirement. I will tell you, that’s a major consideration too. Although, as I remember in that timeframe, I don’t think I was faced with any earthshaking, major deals, where it was going to go down with the ship kind of thing.

[I] had a couple jobs following the War College, the Pentagon, where I could have pretty free expression, very free expression and had the support of immediate general officer bosses, who were…I thought it was an amazingly intellectual climate that was created or a climate conducive to honest exchange of views, at the Pentagon and the Air Staff anyway, in the 1981, ’82 timeframe.

Then I went to Germany and got transferred from the job I really wanted, to a job I really didn’t want, but that’s just the way it goes. So, you go and do the best you can.

DePue: At the National War College, what was the job that you wanted to get?

Borling: Oh, I had to go to the Pentagon; I knew that. My old wing commander, General Chain, general by this time, and my old wing commander, General Welsh, were both at the Pentagon, both of the colonels. I made reference to before, amazing men.

Jack Chain took particular interest in me and had me going into one branch of the Air staff, the plan side. Then he switched and got a different job as the chief operator, if you will, for the Pentagon, so he moved me with him, down. I took a job called the chief of Checkmate Group, which was a war- fighting think tank, with responsibilities for trying to figure out how to checkmate the Russians, and in reality, trying to figure out how not to checkmate ourselves, a far harder task. And, this Checkmate organization, while it was under General Chain, XOO, it reported directly to the chief of staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

We had a very activist XO of the Air Force in those days, Jerry O’Malley, who later died in an aircraft accident; he was flying the airplane, killed him and his wife.1 Would have had a much different Air Force if Jerry

1 General Jerome Francis O'Malley was a United States Air Force four-star general who served as vice chief of staff, U.S. Air Force from 1982 to 1983; commander in chief, Pacific Air Forces from 1983 to 1984; and commander, Tactical Air Command from 1984 to 1985. He died in an airplane crash while still in command of Tactical Air Command. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_F._O%27Malley)

371 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

O’Malley hadn’t been killed, because he was odds-on favorite to be the chief, after General Gabriel2.

DePue: Chief of the Air Force?

Borling: Chief of staff of the Air Force, yeah. General O’Malley was a very activist guy. So, a couple days after I got onboard, I’m up, being briefed on a highly secret contingency operation. Remember, Checkmate had all intel access. We had access at the highest levels of CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and NSA [National Security Agency] and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] were amazing, and they came to us as well.

DePue: Was this a joint position?

Borling: This was not. This was an Air Staff position, although it had some joint tentacles. This is the outfit that nobody liked in the Pentagon, because you didn’t report up the normal chain. We were free thinkers, and we were considering, from an operational standpoint, various scenarios, some of them contingency scenarios, some of them the main line fight between Russia and…the Cold War fight between Russia and America and how that war might go down in a conventional context.

DePue: Conventional.

Borling: Conventional context. We acknowledged the nuclear, but we didn’t frolic with the nuclear. I know, it seems strange, doesn’t it?

DePue: Well, yeah, I guess it does.

Borling: There’s incentive on both sides not to use nuclear weapons, one superpower to another.

DePue: I remember at that same time, as a very junior officer—you’re quite a ways farther along—we would have war games, exercises. Sometimes it involved troops on the ground, oftentimes it did not, but it always seemed to end right at the time when somebody decided to use a tactical nuke or something.

Borling: Go nuclear, yeah. Our supposition, back in those days, was that the Warsaw Pact—and the Russians were actually postured in a defensive posture, given the fact that the disposition of troops, and the Russians are pretty big on combined arms battle—didn’t have air and ground and allied forces linked up, sometimes even on the same frequencies, couldn’t talk to one another.

2 Charles Alvin Gabriel was the 11th chief of staff of the United States Air Force. As chief of staff, Gabriel served in a dual capacity; he was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which, as a body, acts as the principal military adviser to the president, the National Security Council and the secretary of defense. In his other capacity, he was responsible to the secretary of the Air Force for managing the vast human and materiel resources of the world's most powerful aerospace force. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Gabriel)

372 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

We know, even from Desert Storm 1, the difficulty of deconflicting allies and even U.S. units. We had tank units turning ninety degrees and running into the flanks of friendlies and stuff like that, even in the Gulf War, and we still have a lot of friendly fire. When you go off to major warfare, the frictions are enormous.

But in any event, General Chain hired me to be chief of Checkmate, and I did that for a year. If we’re leaving the war college now, did I mention we won the baseball game from ICAF?

DePue: At war college?

Borling: Yes, at ICAF. That’s a big deal, the baseball game that goes between the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and National War College. Theodore Roosevelt Hall, we’ve got a Theodore Roosevelt Hall in Rockford here, the memorial hall, dedicated by the president.

In any event, stayed in the same home and made a seamless transition from National War College. [I] took a month’s leave, went back to Michigan, and then reported to the Pentagon and had a fascinating two years, the first year being chief of Checkmate, great, great staff, wonderful officers to work with. Then, [I] took a position up one level, if you will, as chief of ops initiatives for a whole number of organizations, including Checkmate. It was under me, but it didn’t report to me really any more, even though I knew what was going on, and I had all these heady clearances. So, I was in kind of an advantageous position, but I didn’t screw with the new chief of Checkmate. He’s got to cut his own eye teeth, if you will.

I was principally concerned with developing, with others, the Air Force budget and sitting on a thing called the PRC; it was the Priority Resource Council, headed up by a two-star. We were into all facets of the Air Force, in terms of monitoring the budget being executed, to some extent, working the next budget submission and then working the FYDP, or the Five Year Defense Plan.

You got convinced in a hurry, that the FYDP was just figment of imagination. It was trying to measure with micrometers, what you’re going to paint with a paintbrush and hit with an axe. You can say that about years closer than the out years. You quickly became aware that the out year fascination was nothing more than phantasm.

DePue: If I understand my timeline correctly, about the time you went to this new job, where you’re somewhat responsible for Air Force budgeting, is about the time that Reagan came into office and was—

Borling: He did, and there was a big push—we’re talking ’81 to ’82 timeframe now— there was a big push to roll back the cuts, and some things were thrown into the maw of the procurement community without a lot of finesse and thought.

373 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

B-1 was brought back from its near-death experience.3 There were some armored vehicles, the same. Space and missile modification were tackled. So there was a lot of stuff that was going on. I think black programs tended to get a kick in the tail.

DePue: Black programs, meaning the stealth?

Borling: Stealth may well have been part of that, but black programs are black projects, which are kept out of sight and off budgetary authority as well, and there’s procurement rules that surround them, which are basically dealer’s choice. [They] have a very limited number of people who have a read on those or a read into those programs.

You find that the defense budget, the much wanted defense budget, has buried items for the CIA in it or has buried items for other organizations. And certain other organizations have buried stuff from DOD. It’s kind of a “what’s under what cone.” You constantly work budget authority versus outlays. It was total budget authority versus the outlays, and you manage the process through outlays. That’s the money you’re spending in a given year. You may have outlay authority that would flop over to another year, but you managed against outlays.

DePue: I wonder if I can go back and ask you some more questions about Checkmate, because I think I’ve got an understanding of it, but I think it would help if you kind of lay out a typical exercise that you might go through.

Borling: Checkmate still exists today, in one form or another. I think it’s been de- nutted, to use an elegant phrase.

DePue: Well, here’s what I read as a definition; does it fit for what you were doing? This is a contemporary definition: “A highly confidential strategic planning group, tasked with fighting the next war, to provide planning inputs to warfighters that are strategically, operationally, and tactically sound, logistically supportable and politically feasible.”

Borling: Yeah, we didn’t much worry about the political feasibility. We worried a lot about chain of command and how it was going to go down. That’s a pretty good statement, remembering that it was operational war powers. This is not a bunch of games, playing random number kinds of things, letting the computers whirl and do all that stuff.

3 While development of the B-1 heavy bomber was underway, the combination of cost, introduction of the similar AGM-86 cruise missile, and early work on the stealth bomber significantly affected the need for the B- 1. The program was canceled in 1977, but restarted in 1981, largely as an interim measure until the stealth bomber entered service. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_B-1_Lancer)

374 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

This was guys sitting down looking at it, and saying “Well, if I was the opposing”…and having studied the opposing force, or having looked at things like terrain, climate, disease—so important these days with Ebola—logistic timelines, logistics, logistics, always logistics, the veracity of intelligence, and then fore-structure posturing and radii of action, but always back to command and control, “Who’s in bloody charge, and what’s the task?” What’s the task? What is the outcome you are seeking and under what timeline are you seeking it? Are we going to fight an endless war for generations? We would never have recommended anything like that.

So, we were ruthlessly operational but ruthlessly poised to win, however you define winning.

DePue: Were you examining existing war plans?

Borling: Oh, yes.

DePue: You’re not developing war plans of your own?

Borling: We wrote no war plans.

DePue: The United States just got off of a long and painful war, painful especially in a political sense, as well as militarily, with a guerilla force, essentially.

Borling: With a what force?

DePue: Well, in the Vietnam War, oftentimes you were fighting a guerilla force. It was only occasionally, the conventional—

Borling: Oh, a guerilla force.

DePue: Was that one of the things that you were examining, or was it much more about the huge Soviet horde?

Borling: The great focus was the Soviets, as I indicated. Checkmate’s prime mission was to “checkmate” the Russians, understand the Russians, understand the limits of intervention potential on either side and try to characterize that war and what ought to be done. What would trigger it; what wouldn’t trigger it; how you would combat it; how you would worry the military outcome to a point where it would be favorable to the United States.

But the real focus was really in the stuff leading up to and not fighting the war as much as it was not even having the war start. Maybe this goes back to the political thing, but that seemed to put the political thing after. We were concerned about the political and the force posturing before.

It’s mystifying to me; in the current day, you’ve got this ISIS force that everyone’s beating their brains out. Putting mass troops in the field is

375 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

expensive; it’s time consuming; it’s logistically challenging. It’s not, even when you have a developed transportation system, an easy thing. And somebody’s got to pay for it, and you’ve got to pay for it with real money.

I think we’re fighting, perhaps, in the wrong terrain. We should be able to starve these people out. We ought to be able to find where the hell they’re getting their ammunition, where they’re getting…All they caption…Jesus, they’ve been capturing ammunition in Iraq for fifteen years. You would think that somewhere the supplies would be exhausted.

DePue: To include chemical weapons, we have discovered recently.

Borling: Whether they’re real chemical weapons, or they’re just old shells sitting there with mustard gas. But the fact is, we knew Saddam had gas. But the people don’t consider gas or chemical weapons [to be] weapons of mass destruction, which they most assuredly are. In fact, the three categories, in a military context, of weapons of mass destruction, are nuclear, chemical and biological.

The civilians have a grenade as a weapon of mass destruction under police terminology. So then, the public gets confused. But when Bush went in, the argument had distilled down to that it was a nuclear threat that we were after, not necessarily a chemical or a biological threat.

Anyway, that’s what Checkmate did, and my God, it was an exciting place to be.

DePue: Was the focus on the right thing and the right place, but not a large scale, conventional war?

Borling: Yeah, I think so; although in the main, I think we concluded that the Warsaw Pact was—I think I alluded to this—a defensive arrangement, given where they were. They would send us to the hill—they being the leadership—but no one would go with us. (laughs)

DePue: Were you looking at some of the proxy scenarios, like Afghanistan or Nicaragua and Honduras or some other places?

Borling: We looked at certain contingencies, as the planners chose to share them with us, or as the leadership wanted to get a gut check, kind of like bringing in McKinsey & Company to say, “Hey, does this make sense?”4 For example under Carter, before my time, they were looking at some of the aspects of the rescue attempt and things and…but didn’t let them see it beforehand. We would have shot it down, I’m quite sure, because of the command and control imbroglio and the insistence of everybody had to have a piece of the pie,

4 McKinsey & Company is an American worldwide, management consulting firm. It conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate management decisions across the public and private sectors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company)

376 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Marine helicopter guys flying a helicopter that they really weren’t familiar with, nor the mission. Anyway, it goes on and on. No hit on the Marines; it’s just…

Every organization ought to have a Checkmate organization embedded within it, every major corporation, certainly every military. But I will tell you, there was broad reluctance by the other services, and certainly within the Air Force, to [review by] the wild-thinking guys in Checkmate.

DePue: That’s why I asked the question early on, if this is joint, because it seems to me—

Borling: Later it got to be joint, but joint…Remember, joint is good, if joint is good. If joint is not good, and the Army can go do it, or the Navy can go do it, let them go do it. If, on the other hand, the Air Force and Air Power can go do it, let them go do it. But when I say let them go do it, I mean let them go do it, say, “We want you to create the conditions whereby that town, Khomeini, or whatever they call it, does not fall.” Or “We want you to generate, over a swath of territory, absolute air superiority, air supremacy, and then we want you to engage in interdiction and close air support kind of activities to abet offensive operations.” …something along those lines. Let the theater commander then [direct the forces], which is, “Go beat them to death, and then occupy the land, and set up a military government; have a shot.”

Then the guys says, “Okay, I can do that,” and he goes to his air component commander, his naval commander and Marine commander, who will always be put on the flanks, because no one can figure out how to use the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps, fine, if it’s their-size war; let them go fight their-size war, and the Air Force. Then you just go beat the hell out of everybody.

But you don’t send the Army in first. You go with artillery and Air Force prep and some Special Forces and some targeting stuff, so that you’re not sending your people into a Cold Harbor frontal assault kind of thing.5 If you can starve people out, or you can do other things to them…A lot of it goes down to the essence of strategy and the essence of tactics, which is a test question: What is the essence of strategy?

DePue: The essence of strategy—putting me on the spot here again—is to use the elements of national strength to achieve the political goal.

5 The Battle of Cold Harbor was fought during the American Civil War in 1864. It was one of the final battles of Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign and is remembered as one of American history's bloodiest, most lopsided battles. Thousands of Union soldiers were killed or wounded in a hopeless frontal assault against the fortified positions of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cold_Harbor)

377 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Okay. I break it down just a little more finitely perhaps, certainly complimentary to what you said, Mark, but the essence of strategy is the process of targeting. Now, targeting across a number of disciplines, which are interrelated and should be supporting, but in the end, it’s the essence of knowing what you want to hit and to what effect. This is certainly bombs on target, but it can be psychological; it can be physical; it can be financial; it can be…It’s an integrated philosophy, where in every case, you ought to know what you’re targeting.

The essence of tactics then is?

DePue: Tactics is a much more doctrinaire approach. There are tactics about how various weapons systems should be used and how units maneuver on the battlefield to support their strategic goal.

Borling: That is so doctrinaire, I would throw up. (DePue laughs) The essence of tactics is violent execution, or if you want to be more proper, rigorous execution. I prefer violent execution.

Absent a plan with a good strategy, you better have violent execution to cover up for the gaps in your process of targeting. You kill a lot more people on your side. But if you think it through, it’s all about targeting and then execution, according to Borling anyway, according to Checkmate.

DePue: I’m not going to challenge you on any of that, General.

Borling: Well, you can’t. (both laugh)

DePue: Well, from an Army perspective, I’d throw a maneuver in there.

Borling: Why the hell would we ever invade a town and go door-to-door, fighting, unless we wanted to preserve some kind of national shrine, like Paris, even though Hitler wanted to burn it. And we didn’t have to fight for Paris, as it turned out.

I keep going back to these no-name, little shit-ass towns in places and provinces that no one ever heard of and no one will ever hear of again, that go back and forth. We ask our infantrymen to go in there and kick down doors in the middle of the night. Why don’t you just put a squadron of B-52s across, with conventional weapons, reduce the thing to bricks, and then let the private, with his rifle, go kick bricks. Oh, by the way, don’t let them know you’re coming.

DePue: Well, much of what we’re talking about here today is very much in reference to what’s going on in the world today as well. (laughs)

378 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Well, this was part of Checkmate and this whole thing that airpower can’t win wars. Airpower can win wars. You just have to be willing to accept a lot of death and destruction. But what the hell is war?

DePue: Is that the Curtis LeMay approach to war?

Borling: Well, yeah, in some respect. Curtis LeMay, and I’ve used his phrase before, “War’s about killing people.6 Kill enough of them, and they quit fighting.” That’s a direct quote.

Airpower is very good, especially if you’re going to operate from an area of exclusivity. I’m hoping the space plane that’s been up there for two years—it just landed or whatever it was—is kind of a precursor Battlestar Galactica that can be up there with some kind of laser weapon or directed- energy weapon.7 You do your close air support from space. Not a lot of guys are going to be able to shoot you down, and in the end, airpower is best if it can operate from an area of exclusivity and provide presence, presence.

It’s beyond me, why we have these little…Oh, I throw up when I see it, “Well, we got an armored personnel carrier, and we think we hit a command post and an armed camp”—which means some guy with a slingshot or some guy with a machinegun or something—“and we killed forty-two people.” This is a finiteness that makes you scream. I’m almost embarrassed that it’s reported. Why the hell don’t you go in and bomb and bomb and bomb and kill and kill and kill, until you can’t even sort it out; it’s just rubble and dismembered bodies, and let the people go and kick bricks and dig a grave or burn them, or whatever they do.

DePue: Well, the phrase we keep hearing from a lot of military people is that, what the United States is trying to do with ISIS right now cannot be done—here’s one of those phrases that probably drives you crazy—without boots on the ground.

Borling: We can get into the debate of this thing, but if you could get a sufficient mass of ISIS somehow identified, you don’t have to take them out in hand-to-hand combat; just go ahead and take them out. But if you can go in and prepare the

6 Curtis LeMay was a general in the United States Air Force and the vice presidential running mate of American Independent Party candidate George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. LeMay is credited with designing and implementing an effective, but also controversial, systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. He served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force from 1961 to 1965. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay) 7 Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction media franchise. All of the productions share the premise that, in a distant part of the universe, a human civilization has migrated to a group of planets and are engaged in a lengthy war with a cybernetic race, whose goal is the extermination of the human race. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica)

379 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

battlefield, where the boots on the…What is the purpose of the boots on the ground? We talked about it, but what is the purpose?

DePue: To occupy terrain eventually.

Borling: Occupy and…Occupy and…Change the regime. Why the hell do you want to go fight somebody if it’s not worthwhile taking over? Now, why the hell we want that part of the world…We ought not to be afraid of going to conquer, getting unconditional surrenders, getting all kinds of reparations, and then, when the next war comes, we’ll let them fight again, but it will be a few years. Boots on the ground are meant to be an occupying force, and there’s problems there, political problems.

I also worry about the germs, which are different in the Mid-East—up in north Iranian plain and over in Syria—that our soldiers are not sufficiently immunized, just because of their immune systems, where people have been up there for generations, thousands of years, and armies have lost their coherence and cohesion, starting with Alexander [the Great]—that was on the northern Iranian plain—because of these viruses. You hear about these Mid-Eastern diseases and these respiratory circumstances; that’s very real.

DePue: I want to switch gears on you, but it’s still very much in the framework that you’re looking, and you’re thinking about things at a very high level.

Borling: At the Pentagon?

DePue: At the Pentagon and while you’re in Checkmate.

Borling: Yeah.

DePue: The questions are right down your bailiwick, I think. One is about force structure and the expectation the military had to use the Reserve component in a much more specific way.

Borling: You’re asking me to now ruminate on matters, rather than talk from a memoir standpoint. Hey, I’ve never seen a crowded battlefield. There’s always room for another airplane or another crew or another platoon or another company.

The active force tends to hold the reservist and the Guard in an appreciative but somewhat diminished status. This varies according to need. (laughs) The integration of active and Reserve, especially in the Air Force and Guard, has been marked with success, but it’s awfully confusing. People think you save money, and in some cases you get better logistics and maintenance, because you’ve got a guy working on an airplane, for example. He’s been working on that airplane for fifteen years. He knows it cold, rather than some guy who’s just out of high school, and he spent a couple of years getting his five level degree in aircraft maintenance.

380 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I guess this is really a case of Borling batting his gums. The cost/benefit ratios need to be examined. I don’t think we should try to get the same bang for a buck out of the Reserves and Guards that we’re supposed to get out of the active. What I think we should have is a large body of conscripts, draftees if you will, but conscripts who volunteer a year—I may have held forth on this—and provide you that person power pool, highly variegated, again, to use a term, in terms of age, location, capability, socioeconomic, educational levels.

That large pool, although they would be confined to companies of 100, would augment all the services, including Guard and Reserve, in order to give that personnel weight, that person power position, where lots of tasks could be taken on that required boots on the ground. It may well be in Colorado, fighting forest fires, on the East Coast, fighting a typhoon, or it could be in theater, providing essential logistics and even some combat roles, guarding bases and things of that nature.

DePue: I know this is very much one of your causes today, but what did Colonel Borling think when you were chief of the Checkmate division, about—

Borling: I thought the all-volunteer force was a tremendous mistake.

DePue: At that time as well?

Borling: At that time, because it outsources and makes distant from the body populace, or the body politic, the whole notion that you have a responsibility to serve in the military. At least you should be at risk of that when there’s a draft. I take it a step further and make it almost a rite of citizenship passage, that you need to spend a year in the military, believing that would make us a better country.

DePue: One other question while we’re still on Checkmate.

Borling: You don’t want to opine on that?

DePue: (laughs) Well, it’s your job to opine. I just ask the questions.

Borling: Well, wait a minute, you were talking about all matter of things. All right, well…You haven’t joined yet; I’ll have to see if you join SOS America.

DePue: One of the comments you made earlier today was, “We have to be careful that we don’t checkmate ourselves.”

Borling: Oh, that’s always the hardest thing. Always the hardest task is to not delude yourself into actions that are inappropriate. An action that is appropriate now is for me to take a brief break.

(pause in recording)

381 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: General, you talked about the second half of your time when you were at the Pentagon. Which one of those parts did you find most rewarding?

Borling: From a professional illumination as to the nuts and bolts of the Air Force, probably when I was assistant director of Ops Initiatives and Joint Matters. I got to understand a lot more about my Air Force, from the standpoint of knife in the teeth stuff and reinforcing operational instincts. Then Checkmate would have won out; they were both expansive in nature.

You and I are looking at a couple of Jet Skis scooting down the river here, on October 27, on a seventy degree day, but I bet the water’s a little cooler than that. (DePue laughs)

All right, so the water was warm in both instances, and to make a qualitative judgment would be inappropriate. It was very much, after National War College, mind stretching. Both of those things were mind stretching, because I’d not really had a “Pentagon tour.” I’d been in and out of the Pentagon but never a stranger as to the processes that make that large organization run and the bifurcations. By bi, I mean two, between Army and Air Force, Air Force and Navy, Navy and Army, Navy and Marine Corps. It was civilian agencies; it was fascinating.

The Pentagon, in those days, was a rough and tumble place. It was still a place where political correctness had not totally wiped out kind of a warrior mentality. There was still rough talk and rough action. And secretaries had a good sense of humor and were often in the middle of things with you that today would probably get you strung up on the nearest lamppost.

This is an observation, and it goes back, and it goes back through the generations, that you always want the military to be a little rough around the edges. You want it to be earthy; you want it to be hard. Then those who assume or take on those values—notwithstanding the needs of a peacetime military on the management of large systems—but you’ve got to have respect for and appreciation for and desire for the warrior class, and understand it’s going to be—again, to use the term—rough around the edges. It can be very cultured on one hand, but boy, when the battle’s joined or when the issues are there, you want the guy to be able to—in best fighter pilot parlance—rip off your head and shit down your neck, kind of thing.

DePue: You’d spent your career, up to this point—other than that little hiatus in the Hanoi Hilton—as a fighter pilot and going to school.

Borling: And school and the White House Fellowship and—

DePue: Was this your first real exposure to the strategic arm of the Air Force, to the missiles and the B-52s and the nuclear force?

382 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Yeah, but that [was] principally in the second incarnation, the XO-OI. The Air Force tends to pipe its officers. You’re either in the strategic—the terms of have fallen out of use now—but strategic forces or tactical forces or missile forces, which are strategic forces, or intel or civil engineers or…You’ve got these pipes.

The value of air staff and Pentagon training is that you get to see the cross rough of those. You don’t learn until you get out in the field that the civil engineers, on a given base, control the majority of the budget. And you don’t get to see…Everyone thought it was the operators; it’s the civil engineers and the loggies [logisticians]. At the Pentagon, the R&D guys control a big slice of the budget.

There was some things, even when we were sitting in the PRC, where this block of money would come rolling through, and they’d say, “Well, we can’t touch that.” And that’s one of those black things; it just sits there in a line item that nobody knows what the hell is in the line item, maybe one or two guys in the room. [To] everyone else it’s just said, “It’s untouchable.” You have no idea if it’s untouchable or not; it’s just asserted to be untouchable. So it sits there, and you have to work around that billion.

We’d work out tails…We’d go into sessions early. They’d call the meeting, and we’d have the meeting, and we’d find out we’re $1 billion out of whack. So we’d work all day to get the $1 billion; we’d take programs here or stretch programs there. We’d get the $1 billion, and we’d go away, having solved the problem. The next morning we’d come in, and [more] often than not, “Well, we ran the numbers overnight”—we had a boiler crew that would run the numbers overnight—“Now we’re only $1.5 billion out.” (both laugh) So you’ve pushed on the pillow over here, and it’s popped up over there.

We were endlessly working next year and sometimes execution year. Not so much execution year, but next submission. From the PRC, it went up to the Air Staff board, which was composed of two-stars. The Air Staff board, if it didn’t get resolved…We resolved 90 percent it; the board would take on the remaining 10 percent. They’d get it down to 8 percent, and the 2 percent would go up to the Air Force Council, then the whole budget would be approved.

DePue: Looking back at my understanding of early Air Force history, it started with— at least according to most historians—as the strategic arm, the bombing arm of the Air Force having ascendancy, having the greatest emphasis. What was the case when you were there in the early ‘80s?

Borling: (sighs) There was a swing, probably, that occurred in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, whereby the preponderance of chiefs of staff were no longer going to be guys who had come out of the LeMay Air Force, if you will. There was a pretty good balance in World War II between the fighter pilots and the strategic

383 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

guys, although LeMay was the unsung hero of both the European theater and the Pacific theater and informed Strategic Air Command before the Air Force was a separate service.

But a swing started with General Disosway and others coming forward and some new airplanes coming off the line, the F-15 and F-16, to name a couple.8 And there was a slant toward the tactical air forces, fighter pilot air forces. You could see that in the selection of the chiefs. I’ve always…Maybe this is just endemic of large organizations.

For example, I was a fighter pilot, but then General Chain was a fighter pilot. We both ended up in SAC, which I thought was wonderful for the command. I’m not too sure the command thought it was wonderful. (DePue laughs) But General Welsh…Once again, it’s the Welsh-Chain- Borling thing; I carried coals and the leavening of the loaf back and forth.

There is a hierarchical structure that exists. It’s played down. It’s probably death to mention it on this tape, but I’m just telling you what is. While there’s excellent officers and aviators throughout the Air Force, then and now, the guys who fly fighters are shit hot. Everybody else may be shit hot too, but maybe not to the same degree of warmth. It’s like infantry guys versus—even though they’re all combat arms—artillery guys versus armor guys, and the “queen of battle” kind of thing. Isn’t that the artillery?

DePue: Artillery is the king of battle. The queen of battle is the infantry.

Borling: Is the infantry. What are the armor guys?

DePue: (laughs) I don’t know that there’s an equivalent.

Borling: Those are combat arms.

DePue: Absolutely.

Borling: And the Special Forces guys are those guys over there, right?

DePue: Exactly.

Borling: Well, they’re in it, and they’re really good guys, but they’re somehow not real Army. That’s changed a bit. I think the Special Forces world has become more integrated and more recognized, but it’s still…If you’re called special, you are, but mostly you’re different. (laughs) In the Marines, even within the Marine Corps, you’ve got the recon guys and the LRP [long range patrol] guys. Some of that’s just good, because it fosters identity; it fosters expertise.

8 General Gabriel Poillon Disosway was a noted United States Air Force four-star general who served as commander of the Tactical Air Command during World War II. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_P._Disosway)

384 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

It also fosters pipes, and that makes the system harder to deal with. You like to have someone who’s had multi- experience across a number of pipes. How the hell did we ever get on this subject?

DePue: Well, I was asking about the emphasis that the Air Force had at that time.

Borling: At that time, I think it was swinging to the tactical force, and I don’t think it’s ever really come back. I will say, going forward, in the ‘90s, ’92 timeframe, ’91 timeframe, when they were trying to reap more peace dividends and going through reorganizations, it came up, a great idea, to do away with Strategic Air Command.

I didn’t think it was a great idea. I was the DO of SAC at the time, the head of operations for Strategic Air Command, and Jack Chain was the commander. We both thought this was a terrible idea and fought against it, because the strategic mission, nuclear mission, and the triad forces and all of that business…This was occasioned by the ’89 breakdown of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War is over, hooray, hooray, and Russia is going to come dancing in skirts, over to the West and all of that.

We’re saying, “Whoa, wait, the nuclear mission is very much different and very difficult, if only in terms of keeping morale up, because the bombers are only flying three, maybe four times a month, per crew. The missile guys don’t fly; they’re buried in the holes. There’s these procedures that we were trying to make more operationally relevant, give SAC a bigger conventional role. It had a big conventional role in Vietnam certainly, but it was a high altitude, strategic bombing thing. We’re trying to work it tactically. I was, in fact, the assistant for conventional matters in the command, as well as being the DO. We were trying to invoke more of a fighter pilot mentality into the crew concepts of SAC, where they would brief the day before, and then go fly the mission the next day.

That was predicated upon the fact that you had to cut a data cartridge, called a DTAC, after you did all this horrendous planning, to go fly the mission. And you were limited by computer capacity. Well, hell, I—and I say I—figured out, that you could take a laptop; plug it into the airplane, and do a normal two-hour brief; walk to the airplane, and do that.

Of course, you had to affect nuclear surety at the time, because of the wiring and stuff. So we had guys flying, and doing it real time, and dropping bombs, real bombs, off the airplane, rather than doing a radar bombing to a machine that would record where it thought the bomb would land, based upon your parameters at the time. We found out that the damn things weren’t even close, especially with respect to conventional weapons.

So, we were dropping real practice bombs and things like that, off of B-52s. In fact, there was a program, which I was both hot and cold on, called

385 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

BYOB. We couldn’t find the ranges, couldn’t get the ranges, but we said BYOB, bomb your own base. Now this violated all manner of laws and rules and things, but we did. Didn’t do it enough. I view that as a fault of mine. God knows, General Chain wanted it, but we were getting so much pushback from people. I don’t think I was as brave there as I should have been. We did it, and we did a lot of low altitude stuff, did stuff in formation.

Why would you put airplanes in trail, three minute trail, bombing the same target? The first one will be fine; it will wake them up, bomb them. By the time the second guy comes through, they’re awake and pissed off. So hell, if you can fly in a tanker and take fuel, why can’t you fly in route formation, and bombers—and these were low altitude flights, before we had JDAM—and sweep through and be in and off target in a few seconds, because a B-52 at low altitude is a very inviting target.9 We were coming through at three to 500 feet and dropping bombs; we were dropping bombs. The guys said, “We don’t have a bombsight, and we’re too low for radar; we don’t have the radar parameters anyway.”

DePue: These were the old fashioned, conventional dumb bombs that you were dropping?

Borling: These are dumb bombs. I said, “Well, just think like a bomb.” I said, “You’re going to have practice dropping bombs.” I said, “In the end, take a grease pencil and put it up on the windscreen, about when the target passes at 300 feet, and when the target passes through that little circle…” You didn’t even have a pickle button.10 You had to say to the guy in the basement or the B-52, the bombardier and the navigator…You’ve got a pilot, copilot, and then the basement, if you will, the bombardier and the navigator. You used to have tail gunners; you didn’t have those any more. It was automatic. So you’d watch it coming down, say, “Ready, pickle, now?” Then the guy would hit it, and you’d allow a little for human reaction. You could get bombs within 100 feet, 150 feet.

Well, when you’ve got a string of bombs that, even if you set the intervalometer as tight as you could do it, you’re still going to get a half to a three-quarter mile string.11 (laughs) So, lay the first bomb in 100 yards short; who cares? You want to walk it. They say never walk your pipper; if you’re strafing, you want to hold the pipper. But with the bombs, walk the bombs for three quarters of a mile. Who says you can’t drop a bomb just…

9 JDAM, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, is a guidance tail kit that converts existing unguided, free-fall bombs into accurate, adverse weather "smart" munitions. (https://www.military.com/equipment/joint-direct-attack- munition-jdam) 10 Pickle button or pickle switch is a name for the airplane’s bomb release switch. (https://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/325021-What-does-Pickle-mean-with-regard-to-bombs-pls-Forums) 11 An intervalometer is a device that counts intervals of time. Such devices are commonly used to signal, in accurate time intervals, the operation of some other device. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervalometer)

386 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

So we did that, and we did that in the first Gulf War, very proud of that. [We] blasted through the Republican Guard positions and the armor and the infantry walkthrough; we blasted corridors that they…Now, when you get the JDAM, the dumb bomb with the steerable tail and the nose with the INS and the GPS, you can take that same B-52, and you can put them at 30,000 feet. You can throw individually targeted weapons forward fourteen, fifteen, twenty miles, throw them off axis, seven, eight, ten miles.

How do you protect something like that? You’re up, well out of small arms fire. You’ve got to worry about other airplanes and SAMs [Surface to Air Missiles], but it’s almost an impossible task to defend against. I had a hand with the JDAM, with others, bringing it on, over the reluctance of some fighter pilot generals.

DePue: What was the resistance there?

Borling: They wanted more things that were tuned to fighter things, electrical, optical powered weapons that cost…It’s like these tomahawk missiles that they have. Once again, we’re shooting million-dollar tomahawk missiles off of frigates in the Gulf, against hilltops in northern Iraq and Syria, God. We used to rail against that in Vietnam, where you take your F-4 up, and they’d have you bomb an underwater bridge.

DePue: Delay fuses on the bombs?

Borling: How about rockets? (DePue laughs) Yeah, I’m not kidding you. That was the frag. It didn’t matter, man, we’ve got to beat the Navy with the sortie race. This is some of the dumb crap that makes you want to go…There’s lieutenants saying, “Hell, a sortie was a sortie. We’ve got rockets; we’ll go shoot the rockets; we’ll shoot the rockets at anything that moves.” But an underwater bridge?

DePue: Going back to that second year—

Borling: Made out of rocks?

DePue: …the second year at the Pentagon, and you’re working on a lot of initiatives. Was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative even on the plate at that time?

Borling: Oh, I don’t remember. I think it was a little early.

DePue: That was my guess. How about—

Borling: And it would have been black initially.

DePue: And you mentioned that B-1 was resurrected. Was that something that was discussed while you were there?

387 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Yeah, that was put on fast burner; that was ready to go, because it had been through development. They did a lot of things to it that made it…number one, the dumb procurement number was 100 airplanes or 110 airplanes. Anything that’s around a 100 to a 110 airplanes is going to have a very short lifespan.

It takes a few airplanes and a few years to bring on new jets, because they’re so complex. I argued then, and I argue now, for a low-cost mix. We need airplanes in a permissive environment, prop airplanes, airplanes that can drop into fields, but with a lot of rrrrrr on them, like the old AD or the A-1—

AD was Alpha Dog; [it] was a Navy airplane, a single seat, tail dragging, prop-driven airplane. The A-1 actually had a large crew component, could carry four or five people, always tended to fly with one or two. I go back; I don’t care if it’s a Piper Cub, if it’s got something onboard that can kill you, or it’s an airplane up there. You think they’re watching you, if nothing else. So you need to have that kind of presence.

DePue: Was the A-10 one of the aircraft that was being discussed at that time?

Borling: A-10 was in the mill. Let me think about that for a minute. No, A-10 was fielded in that timeframe.

DePue: Any new fighters being discussed?

Borling: F-15, F-16. They were talked about…Stealth was all the rage.

DePue: The 15 and the 16 had already been fielded, correct?

Borling: Yes, and I think the A-10 had been fielded too.

DePue: How about anything related to space and the Air Force role in space?

Borling: Very big deal and a bigger deal, argumented over roles and missions, about who ought to have the space mission. As always, the right service was who could scream the loudest and make the best call. The Army wanted it; the Air Force wanted it; the Navy wanted it, mission expansion, more budget dollars.

If you look at the line items of the budget, or if you just look at the budget lines, they are amazingly consistent. They go up a percent or two over the years. But in the end, the services are fighting for marginal dollars. You may as well just throw darts at it and say, “All right, this year you get 31 percent.”

Ideally, we’d get multiyear budgets, so you could do the planning process. But when you’re bringing on new systems in the swing of $10 or $20 or $30 or $40 billion is what’s being argued about, and you’ve got corps eating this much and operations eating a certain piece and R&D. So, when you end up with procurement dollars, which is what the big fight is always

388 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

over, multiyear budgeting would really help. It’s probably the single biggest reform that would really help.

DePue: In other words, that did not occur while you were there.

Borling: No, no, it doesn’t occur now. They make a plan, but every year you fight the budget and then whatever real world contingencies eat into it. I’ve never understood how the cost overrun business worked. Why the hell do we sit there and pay $1 billion in cost overruns? What kind of contracting process allows for that?

DePue: I’m just thinking of the budgeting timeline and your timeframe when you were in this particular position. You start the 1982 fiscal year in October, ’81. But you’re just getting to that job, and you’re not going to be there for that much longer, it sounds like.

Borling: No, I was at the Pentagon for two years. Now, some guys are there much longer, but they had me moving pretty fast. I would be in a new job every year. I don’t know if it was because I couldn’t hold a job, but I was on a very, very fast track.

DePue: I guess the reason I phrased it that way is, did you really see an impact of Reagan’s desire to dramatically increase the defense budget while you were in that position?

Borling: No, but I could see it coming. That was too near-term.

DePue: Was there an increase in the morale among the officers you were working with?

Borling: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. We liked Reagan, “Dutch.”

DePue: Now, you just mentioned that you’re moving on a pretty fast track. What was on the horizon for the next position?

Borling: I was supposed to go to Soesterberg to command Soesterberg. In fact, I was called in and said, “You’re going to Soesterberg.”

DePue: What was there?

Borling: F-15s, a big squadron, twenty-four plus a bunch of…about thirty airplanes. [It’s] all by itself; you run the whole base. There’s a base commander kind of set on top of you. No, I was going to run the whole damn thing. I was going to be the colonel to run Soesterberg. Boy, I was excited about that, because I’d been there and loved it. Ron Fogleman and I did some magic things there.

I remember being called in and said, “There’s a change of plans. (laughs) You’re going to Ramstein to be the base commander.” Ramstein’s in

389 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Germany, and being base commander at Ramstein is a large responsibility, but it’s a non-flying position. And Ramstein was the largest American community outside the United States, some 70,000 Americans in the Rhine Falls Valley, about an hour and a half south of Frankfurt, Army and Air Force. We were fond of saying it was too small to be a country, too large to be an insane asylum.

But General Gabriel, who was the commander in chief of USAFE, United States Air Forces in Europe—held a NATO position as well as an Air Force position—wanted me. General Chain and General Gabriel were very close. I think General Gabriel made a request for a particular kind of colonel, and I got switched from Soesterberg.

DePue: A particular kind of colonel, meaning that there were skills that—

Borling: You’d have to be self-serving. He wanted a good colonel, and I guess I was regarded as a good colonel.

Now, this is one of the cases where I go into an organization as the base commander and encountered a circumstance where my commander really didn’t want me to be the base commander. He wanted somebody else to be the base commander, and that somebody else is now working for me, as the base commander. So, it was an uncomfortable circumstance. The previous base commander was now the vice commander of the wing. So I’ve got a guy who’s working for me, who has special circumstances with the commander, and the vice commander, who was the base commander, knows how things should be run, in his view. I’m kind of in between, and about this time, General Gabriel leaves. (laughs)

DePue: Is the base commander not in charge of the tactical units that are on the base?

Borling: No. There’s a tactical fighter group; there’s a wing commander [and] a base commander. In this case, there’s a…I’ve forgotten. No, I’ve got the civil engineer under me, as well, even though he’s striking out to be his own person. No, I didn’t have the civil engineer. That’s right; there’s a civil engineering group, which is like a…He’s got the guy with all the money. (DePue laughs) And now I’ve got the tactical fighter group over here in the base command, so I didn’t have the civil engineers.

When I walked in, I said, “I want those guys.” Every other base commander has got them, because the wing commander, who’d been there for a year, year and a half, had his thing, and I’m the new guy on the block.

DePue: The wing commander, in Army parlance, would be equivalent to a what, a division?

Borling: This is a one-star.

390 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: One-star position.

Borling: A vice commander is a colonel. [There’s] another colonel commanding the fighter group, another colonel commanding the engineers, and me. I was the junior colonel. I’m not the retiring sort, so we found ourselves in a…fluid situation. I could have, I guess, handled it better, but it ran against my instincts to be rolled over all the time. I don’t roll over well.

DePue: Rolled over because you were the lowly base commander?

Borling: I was the base commander, but I was the junior guy. And I had a guy working for me who was also a colonel, who my boss wanted to have as the base commander, and he got overruled and made sure I knew about that. And I had loyalty issues. I didn’t have the civil engineers, and I had loyalty issues and was getting second guessed a lot by the vice commander, and so it went. It was a long year. Once again, I only lasted a year.

DePue: It’s essentially, you’re the base commander…Are you something like the mayor, without the power?

Borling: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I handled the discipline. My first ten days there, I had a rape/axe murder and a bomb threat that I ended up using some explosives to blow up a suitcase full of socks, as it turned out, or whatever it was or a bag or something, because I was advised [that] this is how you did it.

Hell, I’d never been on a bomb threat thing before, but I said, “Well…” You know my first question? “Why don’t we go look at it?” You have cordons; we’ve evacuated buildings. We’re looking at it through heavy lenses, and it’s out in the middle of a field. I said, “How the hell did it get there?” “That’s where it was found.” I said, “Did anybody look in it?” “Oh, no. We’re set to blow it.” This is the EOD guy, “We’re set to blow it!” I said, “Oh, shit. Okay, blow it.”

I call back to the command post; I said, “We’re blowing it,” because I’m in contact. I’ve got this orange helmet on, and I have an orange vest, given to me by my chief to identify myself as the on-scene commander. I haven’t been through any school or anything like this, I’m just trying to…I’m winging it. So this guy says, “We’re blowing it up.” They said, “We’re going to blow it up.” We’re going to shoot rods through it to disable this thing. So we do; we vroom, and nothing. Then we go over and look at it, and it’s full of socks and chocolate bars and stuff. But the dog had alerted on it, see. Well, my boss goes absolutely bug fuck that we’ve blown up a suitcase or whatever it was or a bag.

That was the last bomb threat that I didn’t personally go. “We’ve got a bomb.” And I’d go over. “It’s ticking.” I didn’t care. Man, we’re going to go look at that thing, and we’re going to open it up. It was nothing, except twice, well, three times, well, four times (DePue laughs) that it was the real thing.

391 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

But then I’d determine, “Hey, it’s the real thing. We better back off and work this thing.”

Myrna would get all upset at night. She’d [say], “Where you going?” “Bomb threat.” “Ohhh,” She’d sit up and wait. After a while—because we got them all the time—she’d say, “Where are you going?” I’d say, “Bomb threat.” She’d say, “Oh,” and she’d go back to sleep.

DePue: What was going on with all these bomb threats?

Borling: Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army brigades, and others.12 Europe was seized by homegrown terrorists. USAFE headquarters had been bombed, using propane tanks and a Volkswagen, about two months before I arrived and had destroyed the bloody building. USAFE headquarters and the NATO headquarters were farmed out into other buildings while they were renovating and making impregnable this new headquarters.

DePue: What was the politics of that group?

Borling: Anarchist.

DePue: So not Communists, not Nazis.

Borling: No, they weren’t Nazis; they were Communists, Red Army Faction, but mostly anarchists.13

DePue: It doesn’t sound like they were very good at what they were doing.

Borling: Well, they were pretty good. They parked this Volkswagen with three or four propane tanks in it and had it go off. The propane tanks went shooting through the Volkswagen, into the building, and blew up in the building. I think it was like the World Trade Center thing; “Jesus, we really did that.” Then they knocked out the whole building. So, I show up two months later, and people are bomb threat crazy.

Anyway, so we did that. Then, after Gabriel left, General Minter was the new chief of staff of USAFE, and I managed to kill his dog.

DePue: Well, it sounds like there’s a story there.

12 The Red Army was the army of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Later it became the army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the name used mainly before and during World War II. After the war, it was renamed as the Soviet Army, although many people have continued to call it the Red Army. (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army) 13 The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group or Baader-Meinhof Gang, was a West German far-left militant organization founded in 1970. The West German government as well as most Western media and literature considered the Red Army Faction to be a terrorist organization. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction)

392 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: I was walking down the hall one day, and I was called into the general’s office. He’s got a hold of the desk like this; his knuckles are white. He’s on the phone with Mrs. Minter, and he puts her on mute. He says, “What have you done with General Minter’s dog?” I said, “Obviously the wrong thing?” (both laugh) Ba-ba ba-boom. I said, “Give me a minute; I’ll find out.”

I went out, and there’s my leading chief, Ernie Pyles—Cheryl Pyles, still a good friend. The chief was the guy that interfaced with the general officer CINC [commander in chief]; he was CINC in those days, and the deputy CINC and the German and a bunch of other guys, the other general officer of housing, but principally the three, the Waldgarten and the other two up on the hill.

I said, “Chief, what do you know about General Minter’s dog?” He said, “Oh, I was trying to protect you from that.” (laughs) I said, “Don’t protect me.” He said, “Well, Mrs. Minter had gone to the States, and the dog, which was a yappy dog, was barking. The airman in the building that was opposite Waldgarten, at Ramstein"…”

Have you ever been to Ramstein? There’s three nice, general officer houses; we live in apartment buildings. The apartment building [is] 100 feet away, window’s open, no air conditioning. The dog was barking, and the airman’s wife, who was pregnant, was not sleeping, because of the barking dog. So he writes the general a note and tells him that. [He] slips it under the door of Waldgarten, where General Minter gets it and says, “Oh, my God!” He writes a note back to the airman, gives it to his aide, who slips it under the airman’s door. Basically, it says, I’ll take care of that. We’ve got the four-star and the airman communicating, with nobody in between, perfect deal. (DePue laughs)

General Minter goes to my chief and says, “We have this problem with the dog. I don’t like the dog anyway, yappy dog. What can you do?” The chief says, “I’ll put it out on a farm, a German farm.” He said, “The dog will love it.” Minter says, “Great.” Mrs. Minter comes back, “Where’s my dog?” General Minter says, “The base commander made me give it to a German (both laugh) farmer.” That was related to me; this is what the chief tells me.

As it turned out, Mrs. Minter had been sleeping with this dog, I guess, for years, kind of thing. So she’s on the phone in the office in there. I said, “All right, great.” I said, “We need to get the dog back.” I said, “Mrs. Minter’s having a problem. And believe me, General Minter will have a problem.” I said, “So let’s go get the dog and bring it back. We’ll figure out if we have to move the airman; we’ll move the airman.” He said, “Well, we can’t do that, because the dog is dead.” I said, (both laugh) “The dog’s dead?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, ‘It got hit by a tractor or something. It got run over and the dog’s dead.” I said, “Okay.”

393 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I walked back into the boss’s office and said, “Good news and bad news. The bad news is the dog is dead. It was run over by a tractor on the farm, where it was sent.” After telling him the story, I said, “The good news is, I am willing to exhume the dog and personally give it CPR on the front lawn of the Minters.” Ba-bom-ba-bom, no humor involved.

Well, I went home that night, and I had another one of those end-of- the-career talks with Myrna. I said, “This is really it this time.” Then it was the end of the career; we were dead in the water. In fact, my next OER, Officer Effectiveness Report…Remember, I was riding high, a junior colonel in the Air Force kind of thing, at one time, youngest colonel in the Air Force.

[The vice] came in. I had a good run as the fighter group commander, didn’t lose any airplanes, operated off taxiways for a period of time and deployed people all over. But I know how to run operations and how to run fighter groups and wings and stuff. So anyway, we had a good run, and now, another year has passed.

I also ran the biggest air show in Europe, Flugtag. As a base commander, I had run the biggest USO [United Service Organizations] show that had ever been put on in the Air Force. Suzanne Somers and her crowd came over with Jonathan Winters and the Pointer Sisters and Dudley Moore, and some long, tall drink of water, never thought I’d forget her name. They put on a massive show, and I was in charge of three days’ worth of taking over hangars. We were drawing more power than Kaiserslautern, Germany, brought in all kinds of generators. So we had some good things.

Myrna, by the way, was great, particularly with the enlisted gals. They loved her, and she did a wonderful job. She did a wonderful job with the Officers Club as well and with the Officers Club bazaar, where they make a quarter million dollars. She was in charge of all the money. We had it in a shoebox—not all of it; some of it was checks—but we had all this money. She got to make the recommendations to how it was spent. She’d ask me from time to time…

She had a little committee, and they talked to and it’s, “Hey, here’s one from an Army group up on the hill,” on the way up to Hahn, going up where they used to make the jewels. I forget what that place was up on the hill. She said, “These guys are on a radar site up there, and they’re asking for some money for morale purposes, in order to purchase magazine subscriptions, so that they can have something current to read while they’re pulling this duty. It’s in a very isolated portion of the deal, and this will do wonders for the guys.” There was some other language of contemporary appeal to young soldiers, something like that. I said, “What they’re asking for is subscription money for Penthouse and Playboy. (both laugh) Do you want to give it to them? Fine,” I said, “But that’s…” “Oh, no, we don’t want to do that.”

394 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: It might be good for the morale.

Borling: Yeah, great for the morale. So, I got the fighter group and spent a great year and, again, learned a lot. I learned something about myself. I think I learned about that balance of personal ambition and institutional ambition and loyalty and, I think, the ego factor. I think I could have played it better, in retrospect. I think I could have played the situation better. I was too frontal assaultish, but I got away with it. I got away with it.

Ralph Havens was the new commander, good guy. I remember when Ralph…The other vice commander moved away, went down to take a small wing, a recce wing [reconnaissance wing], down the road to Zweibrücken. And I was actually in line to go up to be the vice commander.

DePue: This is vice commander of the group?

Borling: Of the wing; I’ve already got the group. I’ve got the group, but the next logical step-up would have been…It would have been a mini step, but it was a step I was looking forward to, was to go be the vice commander of the whole Kaiserslautern military community, working for this general, Ralph Havens. Ralph called me—remember, we were outside. We got along very well—

Ralph says, “You’re not going to be the vice.” He said, “You’re going to SHAPE,” Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. I remember contesting it. I know I didn’t have a chance to get it changed, but I said, “You know, if you would have fought for me, I could have been your vice, but I guess you didn’t want to fight for me.” He came back with some thoughts that, basically, he wasn’t in charge of that. We had a contretemps, if you will, because I was convinced I was now being moved off, that they finally got me; I’m moving off into Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe and NATO job. Now, this was going to be a joint job, and I hadn’t had a…Well, I’d had the White House, and I had Armed Forces Staff College; that counted. National didn’t count.

So I’m off to SHAPE and on pretty short notice; again, it’s been a year. We pack up the car, and we drive to Belgium. Well, hell, I think it’s in Brussels. (both laugh) I look at my orders; it says Mons. Mons, where the fuck is Mons, Belgium? I’d been there as a cadet. I’d been at SHAPE when General Norstad, the only Air Force guy in those days to have been the SACEUR was there, and the Army said never again. So, I’m leaving Ramstein, and we’re going on to SHAPE. I remembered I’m going to be what they call a SPACOS, special assistant to the chief of staff.

It’s an organization of six officers, six colonels: two Air Force, one Navy, one Marine and two Army. We serve as the liaison between EUCOM and Stuttgart and SACEUR, the supreme commander and the chief of staff, both of whom were four-stars. [They] tend to be Air Force, chief of staff [and]

395 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Army, SACEUR. We read all the message traffic. We are not really part of the SHAPE staff; we’re an adjunct off of, like Checkmate again. We look after SACEUR’s U.S. interests on the staff.

SACEUR was Bernie Rogers at the time, a man with a prodigious temper, very smart. I think he was a Rhodes Scholar, former chief of staff in the Army. I’m going to go be this SPACOS guy. In fact, I’m going to be the senior SPACOS, as it turns out.

DePue: Still a full colonel at the time?

Borling: There’s six colonels in this office, and I’m going to be the senior colonel. There’s certain positions that are promotable positions, and this is not one of them, for colonels; this is not one of them. I go driving into SHAPE. I remember Myrna and I drove up. We’re going to meet the other five colonels, who have already talked to me on the phone; there’s been a joint call. Do you know what the first question was?

DePue: I’m not going to guess this one.

Borling: They said, “How many wives have you had?” (DePue laughs) I said, “One.” They said, “Good.” Then they talked about some other stuff. The first question was about your wife, if you had your original wife. We talked and chatted. They said, “We’re going to meet you on the veranda of the Officers Club on the day you drive in.” So we drive in; we’ve got the girls with us. No, I guess Lauren’s in school; we’ve got Megan with us. Lauren’s in college already.

There they are, five colonels and their wives, sitting up there, looking very stern. Myrna and I looked at each other. We had our seven year-old with us, and we said, “All right, well.” I got out of the car. They didn’t bother to go open the thing. I went in the trunk and grabbed a case of German wine, which I’d brought along, and walked up and set it on the stoop. I said, “Hi, I’m John Borling, and this is my wife, Myrna, and this is my daughter, Megan.” I said, “Let’s have some wine.” We drank that case of wine, right then and there.

That was my introduction to an office that had such intellectual capability and just raw talent that it was amazing. Myrna will tell you, to this day that it was an unusually…Well, it was the most intelligent office we ever worked in, the intellectual and the camaraderie aspect. There was a good deal of competition.

One of the Army colonels was very close to SACEUR. The Air Force guy, who had pride of position, but he was junior to me, was non-rated. He was more of the policy wonk guy. We ran the French Connection out of this office, which doesn’t bear a lot of discussion. You know, the French were not militarily aligned to NATO; they were politically aligned.

396 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: So this is after de Gaulle had pulled them out of NATO.14

Borling: Yeah, yeah, and moved them to Belgium. They pulled them out of NATO militarily. We ran the French Connection. Two of the guys were fluent in French, had been through the French War Academy. The Marine, John Grinalds, was just an amazing guy, and Dick Guthrey, the other Army guy— John Cavedo was the other Army guy—and Bob Chandler, and me. Tom Slater was the Navy guy, all of us captains, all of us well experienced, all of us very highly trained in our own area. We tended to carve out areas of responsibility, based upon…John had all the Marine stuff and the things that would deal with Marines. Dick Guthrie and John Grinalds split the French Connection thing and also all the Army stuff Bob Chandler and I split all the Air Force stuff, but Bob tended to do the non-rated stuff; I tended to do the rated. Bob featured himself as more of a Kissinger figure.

DePue: The non-rated means not a pilot.

Borling: Not a pilot. Slater was a naval aviator, so he carried all the Navy stuff. One of the tasks we had was, in the morning, SACEUR would get a stack of messages, 300 messages, maybe, overnight. We would go in, and we would read the messages and get them down to whatever we thought was appropriate for SACEUE, like ten or fifteen or six, whatever or none. We’d just look at them, and if there was stuff that needed to be action, we’d take care of it. That’s how much authority we had over information flow to the SACEUR from American sources. We’re talking stuff that’s coming in from the chairman, from other chiefs of staff…

People would wear more than one hat. SYNCs have your SYNC Army; they would also have a NATO hat. So we’d be screening all of that. And, there was a four-star, who was his deputy SYNC down at UCOM, a guy by the name of Lawson, in this case, General Richard Lawson, who had been the military assistant when I was at the White House. In fact, Dick Lawson pinned me for most of my medals. Now he’s an Air Force four-star.

Well, an incredibly heady position. The interaction with the SHAPE staff was somewhat limited. SACEUR was very sensitive that we were viewed as his American-only mafia, and we worked directly for the chief of staff as well. The deal was that SACEUR still needed us for his “take” on certain SHAPE papers. I remember, I had my courtesy call with him. It was brusque, to say the least. You know, basically, don’t fuck it up Borling. Got it. His exec was an Army colonel, Nick, who’s dead now. Oh, no, it was Charles, whoever

14 Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the French Resistance against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic to reestablish democracy. He came out of retirement to serve as Prime Minister, was asked to rewrite the Constitution of France, founded the Fifth Republic and was elected, then reelected President of France, a position he held until his resignation in 1969. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle)

397 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

he was, and then Nick came in and took his place, very prideful of the SACEUR’s time and things.

The chief of staff was a guy by the name of Dalton, Jim Dalton, wonderful officer, very smart officer. I remember the time that they were working a staff paper at SHAPE. SACEUR would write…He was Carteresque, with a red pencil. But the SHAPE documents were…The language was important, going up to the civilian authorities in Brussels.

I remember, early on…I forgot what the issue was, but there was a significant American component, so the chief of staff invited me, as the senior SPACOS, to come into the meeting with SACEUR. This is my first meeting on a substantive issue, with a document that’s that thick, chief of staff sitting down here, Rogers there, all the allied guys, generals, sitting up along here, and me, sitting next to the chief of staff, as I remember. I may have been back-benching, down a little bit more.

The meeting doesn’t start off well, because Rogers has been through this document, and it doesn’t meet his standards. He’s getting increasingly bothered by this, and the Netherlands guy is saying this, and the German guy is saying that, and the DSACEUR was a German—there’s two DSACEURs, a German and a Brit, and they’re there—and the chief of staff. Rogers is getting increasingly frustrated, and you can see it. I’m just sitting there (whistles); I’m not making eye contact. (laughs) I’m just trying to…Whoa, why am I here with these generals going at it? Here I am, the senior SPACOS. But in the end, I said, “Well, I’m here.”

He finally orbits, I mean, screws himself into the ceiling, with a fair amount of rough talk, unscrews himself, slams himself down into the chair. I remember Jim Dalton, talking as a chief of staff, saying, “Let me have a word.” I remember what he said. He said, “That was helpful.” (both laugh) Did not react well with that, sat down.

The next thing, he said, “What are you doing here?” He’s pointing at me now. This is after all these fireworks, he says, “What are you doing in here?” I said, “Well, I think I’ve got the solution to the problem, Sir.” There’s absolute silence. I watched Dalton, “Oh shit.” He leans forward—and you have to remember, the table is awash in paper and documents and things—and he said, “This better be good.” (both laugh) I said, “I think we ought to do a memo on the subject.” The sharp intake of breath, and he started to laugh. “You’re right.” he said, “We need to regroup. Let’s everybody calm down.” He said, “Let’s go back, and let’s try to distill this thing into a memo.” I said, (signing) “Oh, thank you, God.” (both laugh) That was the day I earned my bones with Bernie Rogers.

DePue: Do you even remember what the issue was?

398 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: I have no bloody idea; (DePue laughs) it was some arcane NATO issue, and I had nothing substantive to offer. I was there to try to see how it was going to impact American issues, if anything, and then get that back to the DESYNC.

Well, we went out. Jim Dalton, who later hired me as his exec…I didn’t last long. I lasted a year there or six months, eight months, and then his exec left, and Jim Dalton hired me to be his exec from SPACOS. Jim Dalton remains to this day a good friend and a very smart guy.

When I moved into the exec’s chair—moved off; I’m no longer senior SPACOS—they brought the guy who was vice commander of the position I wanted in to be SPACOS from Ramstein, who I didn’t know, only by reputation. But I’m sitting at the desk that SACEUR, Eisenhower…It says, a plaque at this desk, “At this desk, General Eisenhower established Allied Command Europe, with himself as Supreme Commander.” And there was a date of whatever it was, 1947 or 1945; I’ve even forgotten the date. But this plaque on it, this is SACEUR’s desk, and it’s a pedestal desk.

General Rogers came in, after I’d had that desk for a while…It had been there; it was always the exec’s desk, because the chief of staff was sitting at General Haig’s desk; that was the desk that General Haig had. SACEUR had his own desk from somebody, all the other SACEURs. But he saw this desk, and he saw this plaque, and he said, “I didn’t know this was here.” I said, “Yes, Sir.” I said, “It’s amazing.” I said, “I’m honored every day to come here and sit at the desk.” He says, “Not any more, you’re not. I’m taking this desk.” (DePue laughs) I said, “You’re the supreme commander, Sir.” He took it. But it was a pedestal desk, and so you got to see your feet under the desk, and he didn’t like that. So I got the desk back in about a week. (DePue laughs) I told you the story about LeMay’s desk, right, at SAC?

DePue: I believe you did, yeah.

Borling: That’s where I’m sitting at General LeMay’s desk…In the White House, I had that standup desk that they said was the president’s desk. So, my memoirs will be entitled Elbowing It. I’m not much, but I had some great desks in my life.

As senior SPACOS… How are we doing on timing? Two fifty-nine, we’re doing great. As senior SPACOS…Oh, God, I’ve got to take this call, so we’ll just put it on pause for a minute.

(pause in recording)

Borling: I think we were talking about being the SPACOS, before I moved over to be the chief of staff for Jim Dalton, General Dalton. It seems like I can’t get through a tour without having some major dustup, so it’s probably my failing all around. In any event, the DSYNC, General Lawson, who I’ve mentioned, Richard Lawson, who was a MacArthuresque kind of figure in the Air Force, frankly, and a strategic guy, he and SACEUR would, from time to time, as

399 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

you might expect, with SACEUR having primacy of his international responsibilities. Yet there’s a significant American component and leadership aspect that existed within Allied Command Europe, some sixteen nations at the time.

Well, as the SPACOS guy, we’re supposed to be the liaison between the DSYNC and SACEUR, and often SACEUR would defer. We would send messages in a message. The DSYNC would say, “I’m going to send this message back to the States.” And SACEUR would give it to us to alter or approve or whatever. Then we’d send it back with our recommendations. Only then would the DSYNC be able to send a message. This was General Rogers’ style, and I’m sure it was a bit bulky from General Lawson’s standpoint, to say the least.

So we’d be finding ourselves down in Stuttgart, traveling to Stuttgart a lot for meetings and staff meetings. Again, the DSYNC had his own staff down there, and General Rogers would come in maybe once a month or once every two months, because he was the SYNC, and this was the DSYNC.

Somewhere—and I’ve forgotten the issue—in one of these messages in a message’s thing that we were staffing for SACEUR…I forget how it happened, but the message went out, and it went out counter to a position that General Lawson held quite dearly. As senior SPACOS, he and I found ourselves at sixes and sevens. In fact, I didn’t have any numbers. He had the sixes and he had the sevens, and I was the guy who was charged with messing up this important communication that he wanted to go out, that went out in a reversal of a position he held deeply. He held it against me and let that be known.

Well, I’m really mortified on this, because that wasn’t the case. I did not go against General Lawson. In fact, as I recall, I had supported the position and taken out, to the contrary. But he wasn’t buying it.

So, I went down to Stuttgart—I remember this—and I’d had a conversation with his staff. He wouldn’t take my call, which was unusual. I’m only a colonel, but he’s…but this is a direct and a special circumstance. So, I flew to Stuttgart and requested an office call and went in and basically just pleaded my…didn’t plead a case; I just looked him in the eye and said, “I’ve never crossed you on this issue, didn’t cross you on this issue, wouldn’t cross you on this issue.” And I said, “But you needed to hear that from me. You need to look me in the eye and make sure that I was talking straight to the DSYNC.” He said, “Okay.” And he accepted that. Again, I can’t remember the specifics after all these years, but it was very important for me to be on- sides with the DSYNC and be respectful and be on-sides with SACEUR as well.

400 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I wasn’t trying to play two things against the middle. It was a bad rap and had done it well. But I don’t think General…General Lawson and I had had a very good personal…As far as those relationships would go, had a fair appreciation, which I still do. General Lawson lives in Great Falls. I haven’t had any contact with him for a long time. He was a really stern taskmaster, and I never thought we got back on frequency, as we were before. But, that’s said and done. You can expect to get beat up for fair issues and foul in this world.

When General Dalton, who was the chief of staff at SHAPE, when his exec left—who was class of ’62 from the academy and went on to another command position—that position was viewed as promotable, the exec’s chair for the chief of staff. He did not get promoted out of it. He was a good guy, could have been promoted. Bob Chandler, who was the other Air Force guy, really wanted the exec’s job, because it was a non-rated guy; it’s hard to get promoted. But General Dalton chose me, and that caused a little friction. But here I am on the SHAPE side of the staff, as the principal staff officer to the chief of staff. [I] got a hell of an education in the process and got to be very friendly with General Dalton and his wife, Betty.

General Dalton lived in a large house on the grounds of Chateau Gendebien. Gendebien is SACEUR’s chateau, provided by the Belgians. It has this large, suitable four-star home, kind of, down at the base of the hill. It’s also where you can get to the chief of staff immediately. Myrna and I and certain other SPACOS had been included in the black tie dinners at the SACEUR’s residence at Gendebien, but almost always on a last minute notice. If someone dropped off, we need someone to fill.

DePue: Is that why they had asked you that critical question, that first question when you got there?

Borling: Oh, about your wife? Yeah, maybe so. In SPACOS, we would rotate through, and all the SPACOS got this opportunity. Often you’d find—because it was a long table; it would seat twenty or thirty—the SACEUR and the Mrs. sat in the middle, so they could control conversation. We, as the colonels, were always at the end. But it was always civilian black tie; it wasn’t military uniform; it was black tie.

DePue: Are these gatherings where you’ve got lots of allied officers as well?

Borling: Ambassadors, visiting heads of state. This is big time stuff, and we’re talking…There’s a couple, three of these sometimes a week. We were forever—the day before or sometimes that day of—saying, you and your wife are expected at Gendebien. It was always 7:00 for…I forget whether it was 6:00 for cocktails, a half-hour cocktails. No, it has to be 6:30 cocktails or 7:30 cocktails, 8:00 o’clock…The Brits always had dinner at 8:00. I think we always did dinner at 7:00, the Americans. Anyway, so a black tie dinner.

401 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Did you have any other languages other than English that you could speak proficiently?

Borling: French, I speak French, and French was the second language of SHAPE. That was another plus, that I was passable in French. I wasn’t as good as Dick and John, who made the French Connection, but I knew French. Those guys were fluent in French, very fluent, from the gutter to the highest things. But they’d gone to the French Air Force Academy or French Joint Staff School in Paris, over near the Arc de Triomphe…no, next to the Tour Eiffel. It’s not the Eiffel Tower, it’s the Tour Eiffel. I don’t know what arrondissement [administrative district] that is, the seventeenth maybe, but they lived there, and we visited the apartment.

Anyway, so there we are. We’re going back and forth to Gendebien and down, because the chief of staff has a social schedule too. So, God, we’re eating and drinking and working. It’s a heady circumstance.

When I was SPACOS, one of the things that I concentrated on was the integrated air defense of NATO, (coughs) which consisted of a layered system. The hawk missile system was part of it, and the hawk office was in Paris. Part of the responsibilities of our office was to monitor that. An innocuous report came out about the hawk missile system, which was the principal Army system that needed to be used. Just let me say that there was a fatal flaw in the chain of command and control and hardware. I’m not going to mention any more about it at this point; it’s long…It’s fixed. But at the point where it got discovered—I and a couple of other guys discovered it—we had extreme vulnerability.

DePue: This was not a flaw in the hawk missile itself?

Borling: I’m not going to tell you. I’ve made it sufficiently elastic so that you can’t trace it. I briefed the chief of staff personally on it, and I briefed SACEUR on it. The reaction was “holy crap.” I was sent personally to brief the chairman of the military committee, who briefed the head of the DPC [defense planning committee]. Meanwhile, we’re not sitting on our hands; we’re scrambling to get thing entrained to get it fixed, but it’s going to take a while. This should give you a clue that it wasn’t just a procedural thing. It was probably that incident, instance—better word—that made Dalton choose me to be his exec.

DePue: The timeframe that you’re here at SHAPE, is this August of ’84 to June of ’86?

Borling: Eighty-four to ’86, yeah.

DePue: And so, again, about one year—

Borling: So, ’84-’85 and then ’85-’86. But I’m working for Jim Dalton for about four months, five months. General Dalton is due to rotate, and another Air Force

402 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

general officer is due to come in, [an] Air Force general officer. General Dalton is looking to take on another assignment. As it turns out—I’m not going to get into any detail here—that next assignment doesn’t work, and he elects to retire. I will tell you, I’m fielding calls from the chief of staff of the Air Force myself. But General Dalton, God love him, chooses to retire. And General Rogers, who loves General Dalton, retires from SHAPE. He goes off and has an amazing civilian career, makes a lot of money on the West Coast, still lives out there. General Dalton and I are still…We talk a couple times a year. He’s a good man and taught me a lot.

Well, the new chief of staff of SHAPE happens to be a guy by the name of Jack Chain. (both laugh)

DePue: So, the stars are still smiling on you at this point.

Borling: He walks in and “You again.” I said, “Yes, Sir, me again.” We’re not orchestrating this; this is just happening. So, Jack and Judy come in and move into the house. It’s a little different. Here he is, a four-star general. He’s had a career with George Shultz up at State, and he’s done all kinds of things and he’s very highly regarded, but this is a position that opens.15 He gets off the airplane up in Zaventem in Belgium on the military side of the field, and the only reception party are John and Myrna Borling. It’s a little different coming to…There’s no trumpets, there’s no…We’ve got his car and his driver and stuff, and we’re there. He kind of looks around and says, “You’re it.” I said, “I’m it.” I said, “We’ve got your VIP quarters set, and I assume you want to do some things your way.” I said, “I assume you and Judy are going to want to get un-jetlagged and maybe take a run.” H says, “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what we’ll do.” I said, “I’ll pick you up tomorrow for breakfast, and we’ll do all that.” He couldn’t believe the lack of…

We got him down to SHAPE and got them into their quarters and things. Then the next morning, I was back. Then they came to SHAPE, and I got him into the office. Then he went down and had his initial call with SACEUR, and they worked through things, came back. And Jack was the chief of staff of SHAPE, and I was the exec. Life went on, and we had some amazing times, great times.

The Hermann Göring train was owned by the army general in Heidelberg. If you were a four-star, you could reserve the train. The beauty of this train was, it could go anywhere in Germany, including East Germany in the daytime. General Chain got the train and took me and the aide and our wives off on a jaunt across Germany on the train. We ended up in Berlin.

15 George P. Shultz is an American economist, elder statesman, and businessman. He served in various positions under three different Republican presidents. He is one of two individuals to serve in four different Cabinet positions, including as Secretary of State under President Ronald Regan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Shultz)

403 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

We’d been to Berlin before, but you always went at night, on the troop train. Now, we’re chasing across East Germany in the daylight and staying at Wannsee House and doing all of that, but doing business at the same time.16 In fact, going across into East Germany, in uniform. You ought to have seen their eyes when we passed through Checkpoint Charlie with a four-star sitting in the back of the car. I knew East Germany and MLM and stuff, so I was able to do that, but it was not normal.

DePue: I can’t get past one thing you just mentioned, the Hermann Göring train?

Borling: Yeah.

DePue: This is a train that he personally used during the war?

Borling: That he personally used during the war and was commandeered by the allies after the war.

DePue: But it was called that?

Borling: No, it was SYNC of Europe’s train, but it was Göring’s train, heavy-paneled stuff and wonderful staff and wines and food, all courtesy of the Army general, but he let other four-stars borrow it from time to time.

DePue: So it had an official name, but in the vernacular it was called Göring’s train.

Borling: The Göring train. It had a satellite phone on it. Now we’re in ’84. I picked up the phone and called my dad; I didn’t know who else to call in the States.

DePue: (laughs) Hey, Dad, guess where I am?

Borling: Guess where I am? I’m on the Göring train; we’re chugging across Germany. That sounds like a fluff deal; we had important things that were happening. The command, even in ’86, was in transition. You could see some handwriting on the wall. The east/west thing were there, but there were demands on spending, the 3 percent spending limits; there were modernization issues; there were…General Chain wanted to travel out and see as much of the command as he could. Of course, the chief of staff’s got to be at home. When he was on the road, I was…there wasn’t a deputy chief of staff.

16 The Wannsee House or Villa was built in Berlin in 1915 as a private home. In 1940, the villa was sold to the Nordhav SS Foundation, set up for the purpose of building build and maintaining vacation resorts for the SS Security Service. In January of 1942, a meeting took place in the villa to discuss the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” the annihilation of European Jewry. In 1945, the house was inhabited, first by Soviet Russian marines, thereafter by American officers. From 1952 until 1988, the building served as a school hostel for the district of Neuköln. (https://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Wannsee/History.html)

404 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

When I left SHAPE, the SHAPE SECOS or the secretariat was a Brit one-star said. He said, “What do you want?” I said, “I’ll take a Ferrari.” So they gave me a little tiny Ferrari. They also gave me, which I regard highly, on a plaque, a nutcracker, mounted on a walnut plaque, a nutcracker. I said, “Oh, my management style has been dissected.” (DePue laughs) Harry…I forget Harry’s name, but we were good friends. But someone had to be…I was the detail guy, and Jack was more the big picture guy. I tried to be very complimentary and respectful to him, but he and Judy were and are special people.

I can tell you a host of stories about life as the exec to the chief of staff. Well, here’s one. I was sitting at the desk one day, and the German and Belgium assistant operators came down and a planner, who I think was a Brit. It was the German who was speaking; he said, (using German accent) “Well, the Americans have done it.” (laughs) I could never resist [responding with an accent.] “Well, what have the Americans done?” (both laugh) I could get away with that, because my mother’s maiden name was Strudelmeier. They knew that, so I could josh back at them. But they were dead serious, and they said, “They have dropped a nuclear bomb on Belgium.” I said, (no accent) “Do we have time to finish this conversation?” (both laugh), trying to take the thing off the…(German responds) “What are we going to do?” This is why it’s so wonderful to deal with the Germans. (Borling with accent) “I will brief the chief of staff.” (German response) “Good.” And off they went. (laughs)

DePue: That’s what you said, “I will…”

Borling: “I will brief the chief of staff.” Now, they were looking for audience, but I’m not, without having more facts, going to…I was the gatekeeper too. You didn’t get to the chief of staff unless you got through me. Now, obviously, SACEUR could walk in and did, but no one else walked in on the chief of staff without stopping at my door, and I would let them know. We had the schedule, obviously, for the day. We had a secretary, and the secretary, if it was on the schedule…She sat outside…She was actually my secretary; I had a secretary too. But I was the gatekeeper, and I took that very seriously.

I’ve got some papers and things to move in. He and I have got a colored folder thing that we worked out over the years. Red is immediate action, and yellow is important information, and blue is action, and there’s a green that’s get to it when you can. Oh yeah, it had a signature folder; that was right. The yellow was the signature folder and kind of immediate action. He always liked to get the signature stuff done early. I walked in, and I had a bunch of folders. I’d cleaned up a bunch of folders.

Both he and SACEUR are taking navigator briefcases, often two, home at night to work on at night and bring back in the morning, completed. This is not unrigorous work. I’m still going in, even as the chief of staff, and

405 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

reading the SACEUR messages, because I…So I’m in early, out late kind of thing.

I walked in, and I said, “Oh, by the way,” I said, “We have the German and the Brits, and the others were down. They said we’ve apparently dropped a nuclear bomb on Belgium.” I said, “My guess is that it’s an orange practice bomb off of a 1-11, and it apparently happened up on the ranges up in Northern Belgium, next to the border.” I said, “I’m getting a read on it.” (both laugh)

In fact, that’s what happened. They had thrown an orange, blunt-nosed practice bomb, about a ten-pound bomb, off the range. This was the nuclear simulator bomb, but someone had written on the side of the thing in magic marker, “nuclear bomb.” (both laugh) And that was the end of that. But I remember not overreacting to the nuclear bomb dropped on Belgium.

Jack Chain got nominated to be commander in chief of Strategic Air Command. He made a trip back there to get acclimated. The commander of Strategic Air Command was General Larry Welsh, which makes me off target with respect to who I was talking to about the Dalton thing. So that was…I don’t know how that worked out. But Welsh was going to be the chief of staff of the Air Force. Welsh was a fighter pilot. Chain…Remember when I’m back at George and it was Welsh and Chain again?

So, we fly out there. I go with him on the trip, take an airplane back, and we land. I think Welsh may have sent…KC-01may have sent his airplane. In those days, SYNCSAC had his own 707. We get off the airplane, and Jack is greeted by the whole retinue of Strategic Air Command headquarter generals, including General Welsh. Eunice comes up; Judy’s there. Eunice gives Judy a hug and then gives Jack a buss on the cheek. I am hanging back. The aide’s already gone. I’ve got a few things, but I’m hanging back and kind of at the top of the steps.

I think, Okay, I can go down now; people are starting to break up. I go down the steps, and General Welsh turns around. I salute General Welsh, and Eunice says, “Oh, John” (both laugh) and comes running up and throws herself into my arms. Eunice and I have been book exchange people. I don’t know why she was so friendly, but she gives me a very warm welcome. I look down the line; here’s all these SAC generals and the other colonels, wondering who is Mrs. SYNC—in those days, SYNCSAC—welcoming.

Then I tried to fade back into the crowd, but it was nice to be recognized. As we’re walking out, Jack says, “You know, I can’t bring you here as my exec.” He said, “I just can’t do it.” I said, “I know that.” I said, “It would be bad medicine, two fighter pilots rolling in, you the SYNC, me the exec.” So, we enjoyed the trip, enjoyed Omaha. I hadn’t been to Omaha in a

406 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

long time, and there was some indoctrination and stuff going on. Then we flew back to Belgium.

We got back to Belgium, and the nomination process is going slowly, as it always does, in the senate, and time is unfolding. There’s some other stories I can tell about this, working with General Chain and Judy there. But, after about a week back or ten days back, I’m in the office doing some stuff, and he said, “It’s not going to work.” And he said, “You’re going with me.” He said, “It will be easier for me to be translated to the staff through you, than me trying to do it through a new exec.” He said, “So pack your bags.” This was with about five to eight days to go, ten days to go. I said, “This is going to make me a real hero with Myrna.” (laughs)

DePue: Was this a normal, three-year tour you were supposed to serve?

Borling: No, no, I’d been there two years. The problem was, he wasn’t nominated. So I came home to Myrna, and said, “Hey, I’m leaving. Get to Omaha when you can,” (laughs) which made a lot of sense. It was a Saturday morning, and…I think I’ve got the welcome thing wrong. There was an indoctrination tour; I didn’t go on it.

This is the mission; we land in Omaha. But the big thing was, he still hasn’t been approved; the vote wasn’t there. I’d been working back and forth with Washington, trying to get the bead on this with the congressional liaison and the chief’s office. And the night before we’re supposed to take off, he’s still not confirmed.

DePue: Do you have orders already?

Borling: Oh, I’ve got orders, yeah. In fact, he said, “You’re flying back with me.” “Goodbye, Myrna.” We go to bed that night, and he’s not confirmed. I get up, and I’m at the airplane. He calls me from Mulls; he’s about an hour and fifteen away. He says, “What’s up?” I said, “They say the vote’s going to happen any time.” He said, “Well it better.” I said, “Yeah, I can control the vote.” I said, “Get in the car, and come to the airplane.” He says, “What if I have to turn around and go back?” I said, “I’ll ride with you.” (both laugh) I said, “I may have to live with you.”

Anyway, I’m sitting there; I’ve got one phone in my ear to Washington, and this is like…I don’t know; it’s 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, 4:00 in the afternoon. He drives up, and I’m listening. I can see the car; he’s driving up, and I’m saying, “Has there been any action? Is there any action?” He said, “The vote’s being taken now, and there’s a delay.” I said, “Talk to me; talk to me.” It comes down; he’s confirmed. I said, “Thank you,” and cut the line. The car stops; he gives me one of these. I said, “Get on the airplane. You’re confirmed as commander in chief of Strategic Air Command.”

DePue: All you’re talking about is happening in Belgium, correct?

407 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: It’s happening in Belgium.

DePue: Now you said it was 2:00 or 3:00; what was the time in D.C.?

Borling: It would be 8:00, 9:00, 10:00. It would be about a six hour difference.

DePue: Was there any issue at all involved with hanging this up?

Borling: No, it’s just normal, standard screw-around on the part of the Senate. There were some things, but nothing that was going to be there. It just took longer than it would. Then we got on the airplane, and we flew into…I think we flew to Washington, and then we flew in the next day to Omaha.

DePue: Well, what I’d like to do, Sir, is to pick up the SAC story next time, because I’ve got some more questions to ask you about, while you’re still in Europe.

Borling: All right. We’ll start with day one when we do SAC, the Monday morning. Didn’t I tell the story about me being the new exec, meeting the old exec, and locking myself in the little office?

DePue: I don’t remember that story.

Borling: How much time have we got? All right, I’m going to take five more minutes.

Now we’re in Omaha. Myrna’s getting the goat in the frying pan, and she’s moving to Omaha on her own, which I still get talked to about. But it’s day one, and I’m reporting for duty as the new exec. I walk into the office, and General Chain is due in as the SYNCSAC at 8:00 or 7:45 or whatever. I’m there; it’s 7:00. Somehow Myrna has gotten there, so there’s a period of time that we survived a tornado. No, I guess that’s later. I’m there; I’m still in the BOQ [bachelor officer quarters].

I walk in, and here’s the exec sitting there. I said, “Good morning.” I said, “I’m John Borling.” He said, “Oh, I know who you are.” He said, “You’re the fighter pilot.” (DePue laughs) I could see this coming. He said, “There’s just one thing you have to know. In SAC, if it’s in the book, you can do it, and if it’s not in the book, you can’t do it.” I said something smart-ass, like, well where’s the book? He’s got books and books and books.

He says, “I’ve prepared a briefing book and a transition plan for you to be the new exec. I will be with you for two weeks, and your desk is over there. He said, “Oh, by the way, this is General LeMay’s desk.” You know, aaah, whew. I said, “Okay, so that’s my desk over there, and that’s your desk, and you’ve got two weeks planned to train me to be the exec to General Chain.” He said, “I have.” I said, “Okay.” I said, “Interestingly enough,” I said, “where’s the keys to this place?” He said, “Right there.” He’s got a big thing of keys that opens the office and all the offices. I said, “Oh, good.”

408 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I said, “How about the combinations of the safe, with all of the materials to it, the SIOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan] and all the things that SYNC needs to look at?” He says, “Oh, that’s here, on this card, which is maintained in the command post. But I have it up here to show you that this is the card, and you will have this memorized.” I said, “But that’s the card?” He said, “That’s the card; it opens every safe.” He walked me through, safe one, safe two, safe three. I said, “Is there a safe in the SYNC’s office?” He said, “No, no, no safe. Just here.” I said, “Okay,” I said, “So this is the card?” He said, “That’s the card.”

I said, “On the phones,” I said, “you’ve got a bank of phones there,” I said, “This rings there, and that rings there, and you’ve got the red phone, and,” I said, “This is the one direct to the Secretary of Defense?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “All right; that’s fine.” I said, “And that one there,” I said, “You don’t have a direct line to the president.” He said, “No, that’s in the SYNC’s office and downstairs.” I said, “Okay.”

I said, “Thank you.” He said, “What?” I said, “Thank you. But you’re sitting at my desk.” He said, “You can’t.” I said, “You’re dismissed, colonel.” He said, “But I’m…” I said, “You’re at my desk. Please leave.” He huffed, and he puffed. I grabbed the keys, (laughs) and he left.

I’m looking around. I go into the SYNC’s office and look around. The first thing, the chair is not at the right height, so I get the chair to the right… little stuff. I get the coffee cooking that he likes to have. I’m looking at my watch. There’s a door right here. It’s a big office, but there’s a door there. I open up the door, and it’s a little conference room, no bigger than this area here, a nice table in it and stuff. I go in and shut the door and look around. There’s another door on the other side. I said, Hmm, a little private conference room, nice to know.

I go to open the door to get out (laughs), and it will not open to go back into the SYNC’s office. It’s a one-way door, and I go over to the other door and try to get out. It won’t open either. Now I have managed to lock myself in this little conference room, (DePue laughs) with the secrets of the world laid out in the office, the war plan of the United States. Not really, but synopsis stuff, you get the synopsis thing in the morning, all the folders. Oh, scheisse mit hund [German expletive]. So, I know there’s nobody on the other side. I’m looking at my watch, and I know the general’s due in, in like fifteen minutes, and here I am, locked in the…He’s going to find me locked. I’m going to be pounding…So I start pounding on the other door.

DePue: The door that you didn’t come in.

Borling: The door I didn’t come in, because there’s nobody there; it’s just me, pounding on the door, nothing, pounding on the door, seven minutes, pounding on the door. Oh, please, God, let somebody open the door. The door

409 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

opens, and here stands an older looking guy in a cardigan sweater and a pair of slacks. I said, “Oh,” I said, “Thank God.” I said, “I’m Colonel Borling, John Borling,” I said, “I’ve done a dumb thing and locked myself in this little conference room.” I said, “The SYNC’s due in just very shortly.” I said, “I don’t mean to disturb you, Sir,” I said, “But I’m very grateful.” I said, “By the way, we’ve not met. Who are you?” (laughs) And he said, “Well, I’m General Hatch, the vice commander of the command.” (both laugh)

I said, “Oh, General Hatch, the vice commander of the command.” I said, “You must pardon me now, Sir.”—I always use this line when I’m in extreme—“I’ve got to go out to the parking lot and stab myself in the heart.” And I said, “You took me aback.” He said, “There’s a golf outing today that’s been long on the books, with the SAC consultation committee, and I’m representing. I was just here to say hello to the SYNC.” I said, “I’m so glad you are.” We walked out. I got back into the office, and he said, “That’s the secret little briefing room that we have.” And I said, “I’ve got that one figured out.”

I got back, and Chain sweeps in a minute or two later. General Hatch, who he’s already seen, who I’d never met, sees him. He says, “You’re going to go take care of the civilian guys.” He said, “I’m going to do that.” I said, “I wish I could go, but he said it would be bad form to play golf on my first day as SYNC.” So, they’re having this conversation in the hall, and he said, “Well,” He said, “You got everything ready? You know how to run this place?” I said, “Yes, Sir, I do.” (both laugh) General Hatch gives me the thumbs up.

I will tell you, Monroe Hatch, from that day forward, was my go-to guy in Strategic Air Command. What a gentleman, what a mentor in many cases, because there would be some…Bob Beckel was the chief of staff. General Beckel was an Air Force Academy graduate; I did not know General Beckel well, but we became very good friends. I’ve got that screwed up too, somehow, because it wasn’t…The vice commander of the command…Yeah, it was General Hatch, and then he moved, and General Peat came in and took his place. Then another guy came in to be the chief of staff, Randy Peat. They were both very close to me as the exec.

We managed to do some great things for Strategic Air Command. But I started out that morning, locking myself in that small room and then becoming more rabidly SAC, I think, because of my background and a defender of the command, along with General Chain. The command never should have been done away with, shortly after General Chain retired. I was long gone by this time as well. The new guy didn’t want me hanging around. I’d gone off and been promoted and had done things in Strategic Air Command.

410 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

We’ll tell those stories next time, but I must tell you that I met some exceptional officers in Strategic Air Command. That little bump at the beginning was more humorous than it was anything else.

DePue: I’m wondering, that one officer you told “dismissed” to, if and when did he hear the story about what happened right after you left?

Borling: Nobody heard that story. I didn’t tell it. Years later, I told Jack about it, and he gave me this look like you stupid shit. But General Hatch never breathed a word of it to anybody. He went on to be the vice SYNC to General Welsh, the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Welsh pulled him along, because he was a consummate officer, a different style, a quiet style but incisive style, very hard worker and had a lovely wife. We’ve lost touch with them. I need to Christmas card him again. I have great respect for General Hatch, obviously so, because General Welsh pulled him to be his vice.

DePue: That’s just the kind of thing where he’s not spreading this word about you. That forms some loyalty, right from the start.

Borling: Absolutely. He could have…that would have just reputationally, would have been a bad thing. I’m indebted to this day. But that was…I can remember that there’s a disease that the advance men get, called the grand klong. Are you familiar with the symptoms?

DePue: No.

Borling: The grand klong is a disease principally for advance men, when things are so screwed up, and there’s no hope of recovery, and you feel a great rush of shit going directly to your heart, (both laugh) that’s the symptom of the grand clong. I had an acute case of the grand clong.

Anyway, good to be with you again. Sorry to be so graphic, but as I said, military guys tend to be and should be a little rough around the edges. I’ve got a conference call in nine minutes.

DePue: Thank you, General.

[end of transcript #9]

411 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Interview with Major General John L. Borling Interview # 10: February 10, 2015 VRV-A-L-2013-037.10 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

DePue: Today is Tuesday, February 10, 2015. My name is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I’m once again in Rockford, Illinois, sitting across the table from General John Borling. Good morning, Sir.

Borling: Good morning to you.

DePue: It’s been a while since we last talked.

Borling: I don’t think I have anything new to add. I think I could just say, “The end,” and you can drive back to Springfield.

DePue: We’ve got about four or five or six more assignments to go through.

Borling: Ahhhh! My wife thinks I’m doing this for some vainglorious purpose. What I’m really doing is, selfishly, if I ever do intend to write memoirs, this is going to be a great database.

DePue: Well, I know I’ve sent you the first nine sessions.

Borling: Which I have not looked at.

DePue: I thought you might say that.

Borling: I don’t have time to do that, especially over the last month and a half.

412 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Well, I know you’ve had some challenges in your own personal life, so let’s go ahead. I want to ask you about, I’m not sure exactly where this fits into your life story, what timeline, if you will, but I know that there was an incident that you visited the Lorraine Cemetery.

Borling: The Lorraine Military Cemetery at Saint-Avold, in France. Do you want more information on that?

DePue: Well, I thought you had an interesting insight or some stories that were related to that.

Borling: You can see it online, under the American Battle Monuments website, and it takes you to all of the cemeteries and the monuments that exist around the world.

Our first weekend at Ramstein, when I went there to be base commander, south of Frankfurt an hour and a half, France was forty-five minutes away; just drive west on the Audubon, and you hit Saarbrücken, then you’re into France. Now the Audubon has turned into a péage, which is a toll road. So we went smoking into France and went about fifteen minutes. I’d looked at the map, and we were kind of heading in the direction of Paris, which is about four and a half hours from Ramstein. There was a sign for Saint-Avold, and it looked like there was a back road that you could meander through the French countryside. I thought that would be more interesting, heading over towards Metz.

As we went south, off of the péage, that connects Saarbrücken and Paris, we came in the direction of this town, Saint-Avold, which, I learned later, was the fallback position for the Germans who retreated from Metz. That’s why Metz doesn’t have any bomb damage or war damage to this day, save one stained glass window from the 1300s or 1400s that was hit by a short round of artillery fire, American, as we were shooting over Metz with our artillery at the retreating Germans, who set up this salient from Saint-Avold, Saarbrücken and a place called Saarlouis. It was a major defensive pocket, as Patton’s Third Army came racing through. The resistance in Saint-Avold, by the French resistance, was so pronounced that Eisenhower, after the war, gave a Purple Heart to the town. You can still see World War II damage; they haven’t wanted to repair it in this little town of Saint-Avold, who is some kind of patron saint of somebody way back when.

But in route to the town, about four or five klicks out of Saint-Avold, still going toward it, we came upon this manicured hedgerow and sign of the Lorraine Military Cemetery. We were in the province of Lorraine. You drive along the péage, vous êtes en Lorraine; you’re in Lorraine, a beautiful expression in French, to my ear anyway. You drive in, you turn left, and you drive in, oh, a couple, 300 yards, and there’s a small building with a parking lot, and you don’t see anything. It was very nicely manicured.

413 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

We stopped at the little building and went inside, and there was some information about the Lorraine Military Cemetery. We left the little building, and you walk out. It’s kind of a blind entry. You keep going, in this case, back to the east, and then you turn north again, up this gravel path, and this large, rectangular building is there, with bas-relief, Saint-Avold, on the front of it and other bas-relief decoration. You continue walking, and the valley opens up as you walk forward, toward this large building, which is a cathedral, a chapel.

Soon, you’re standing on the edge of the valley in this lonesome place, and the crosses are there, underneath you in the valley. There’s 10,000 crosses in that valley. It’s the largest World War II, American cemetery in Europe, and nobody ever goes there, because it’s kind of remote. You go into that cathedral—and you can see this online—and they’ve got the mosaic of World War II set up, and the salients and the thrusts of the American and British forces, as they push on to and into Germany.

Then there’s a list of the fallen, and there’s other inscriptions and wonderful imagery on the front wall. It’s a very moving place. It’s not very big. We’re here in my river room, which is probably twenty-five feet across maybe, twenty feet across. Add another ten, fifteen feet, and you’ve got the width of this tall, rectangular structure that is so imposing. But what’s really imposing is the valley.

So, whenever I would have a chance, I would take people, especially first-time visitors to Europe, go out of the way, and go to Saint-Avold. On Memorial Day and Veterans Day there are observances, but most of the time it’s the French caretaker, who unceremoniously raises the flag at dawn and takes it down at 5:00. You look at the guest book, and there will be weeks where no one will visit there or bother to sign in.

I can remember being there one kind of misty morning, with a fellow who had never been to Europe before, much less been to this place. We were at Ramstein for some reason, and so I said, “We’re getting in the car and taking a trip.” We took off in the predawn time and got there basically just a little after dawn. He was very moved by this sight. And here comes the French caretaker. We relieved him of his duties that morning, and we raised the flag at Saint-Avold, It was a tear to the eye moment, more than a moment. It stays with me, even to this day, that you visit places that visit upon your soul, and you carry them with you for a lifetime.

So, it is that the Lorraine Military Cemetery is one of those places for me. I daresay anyone that I’ve ever been there with. I can remember the reaction of my wife and my little girl. We’d left one of our daughters back in Virginia to finish up her junior year in high school. She then came that summer and had a glorious senior year in Germany, resisting, of course, that

414 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

she was going to have to be blown up out of her senior year in high school, from Virginia, where she had her friends and her identity. She came to―

M. Borling: Good morning.

Borling: Ah, here she is, the leader of the house. We were just talking about Saint- Avold, that morning when we went there.

The emphasis, in our family, the Borling family, that we place on the Lorraine Military Cemetery is such that when that senior daughter, who came over that summer―

She had a driver’s license, and she was the only kid…[driving age in Europe] is eighteen, normally. Boy, she was popular. She was dating the captain of the football team. Brand new high school, and she’s on the reception committee. I’m the base commander; why not? She had a fantasy senior year and never disappointed me. The kids would go out for a Big Mac and fries and a beer, or go hit the Gasthaus, but she never, ever, as I say, disappointed me. She had some incentive, because I would have the air policemen shake down the car every time she came through the base, which they didn’t mind doing, because she’s very good looking. Sometimes, she wasn’t driving, but that’s okay. So it was a great thing.

―We got her to Saint-Avold that first weekend she was there too. I call it Saint-Avold just because of the town. So, now you know the story. I hope you get there some day.

DePue: Well, it sounds like it’s very worth going to. I haven’t visited any of the…I take that back; I visited World War I cemeteries near the Somme, and obviously those were not American cemeteries.

Borling: Well, we have visited Chateau Thierry and other places, and of course, {General George S.) Patton is buried in Belgium, and I wanted to go to his gravesite.

DePue: I wonder if part of the poignancy of the place―if that’s the right word to use―is because it is so rarely visited by Americans.

Borling: The other aspect to it is that a lot of the crosses in that valley are casualties after VE Day, the percentage that didn’t get the…The war ended, but the war didn’t end for a lot of people. You’re still in combat, and weeks later, hostilities are still going on, as pockets of soldiers, who didn’t get the word, continued to struggle and fight.

DePue: General, last time we did talk, we finished off with stories about you assuming command of, I believe it’s Minot Air Force Base, Commander of the 57th Air Division. You had some interesting stories about assuming that command, but

415 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

we didn’t go beyond that point. Remind us again, what was your rank at that time?

Borling: I was brigadier, a newly promoted brigadier. I’d been on SAC staff, planning staff, on XP or the plan staff, but with dual responsibility with the JSTPS [Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff], where I had systems analysis and concepts for the SIOP, for the Single Integrated Operations Plan, or the nuclear war plan for the country. There was an admiral in charge of it, then there were three generals who had different pieces of the formation of the nuclear war plan. I basically was the quality control guy, in some respects at the end, testing it and going into bombing theory and targeting theory and other things that remain sensitive to this day, I suspect. [I] went, after a reasonable period, six months or so doing that, up to Minot, which had three bases under its domain.

There’s a funny story about how I ended up at Minot, which everybody knows, why not Minot. As they say up there, “Fifty-two degrees below zero keeps out the riffraff.” (DePue laughs) Minot had Grand Forks; it was an air division, so it had three bases, Minot and Fairchild. Fairchild had bombers and tankers, a big base, at Spokane. Grand Forks had bombers and tankers and missiles, and the bomber was the B-1, just coming online. Minot had bombers and tankers…No, it just had bombers and missiles, the fifth bomb weighing on the ninetieth strategic missile wing, so a pretty robust structure, six, twelve, eighteen, 20,000 people, northern tier, rough it in at a third of the nuclear deterrent.

DePue: You’ve mentioned 6-12,000.

Borling: Per base.

DePue: Per base, okay. So, you were commander over all three of these?

Borling: I had all that; I had around 30-40,000. It was a big structure; there was some reserve structures. I had walked into Jack Chain, General Chain’s office. He called me in, and he said, “I’ve got an assignment for you.” I’d been through this drill before, and the answer is “Yes, Sir.” You don’t ask what it is; you just say “Yes, Sir,” and you go, because he and I had been associated in various circumstances since I was a major just coming off of the war and checking out in F-4s. He was my DO, later my wing commander. I later worked for him at the Pentagon, and now here he is. I worked for him at SHAPE, and now here we are at SAC, and I was his exec.

Now he says, “I have a job for you.” Boy, I’ve heard those words before, and inside you shudder sometimes, because you don’t know what briar patch he’s going to throw you into next. He says, “And you have a choice.” Well, instantly, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. He says, “You can go and be the division commander at Carswell,” which is in Fort Worth, Texas, which has,

416 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Carswell; it has Dyess, I think, is the B-1 base, and it has a robust, big base, with the Lockheed plant there, with F-16s. I know people there who have done that, so I could probably scarf some fighter time for an old fighter pilot. Here I am at SAC, and I love SAC frankly, glad I went to it late in life.

He said, “Or you can go to Minot.” The specter of Minot again, (DePue laughs) up there in North Dakota, all the snow and the remoteness of it all, versus the Dallas, Fort Worth complex and all the action and the weather and stuff. He said, “What’s your choice?” This is eight seconds later, the sentences roll on. I didn’t pause for an instance, and I said, “Minot.” He said, “Damn good thing” and threw my orders across the table, (both laugh) already printed for Minot, North Dakota.

The thinking, my thinking was, I’m still a new guy to SAC, and I’ve got to go up and get northern tier experience and missile experience and bomber experience. Besides, Minot had had the air division that had some difficulties with respect to an initiative to use heavier airplanes in a demonstration role for airships. There had been a crash of a B-52, which got pretty ugly, as to what the crew did or didn’t do and what the command had done or had not done.

DePue: Was this during an air show?

Borling: I think it was during practice, actually. It was a wormy situation, and I had some responsibility to go up there and try and tamp it down and get it off the…There were some reporters in Spokane who really had the bit in their teeth and were making this difficult. In fact, difficult enough that it shut down the nascent effort to do something other than…In the old days, the tankers and the bombers make a low pass, and that was it.

This was within parameters, maneuvering activity, not acrobatics, per se, but doing some aggressive maneuvering, but well within limits. The guy who was flying the airplane, I believe, lost it by exceeding the limits that were well aggressive, well within the parameters of the airplane. So, it was a pilot thing, in my judgment. But the real problem was the PR problem. So, that was an added component to going up and learning the missile business and being in the field, if you will, although I had wing commanders, colonels, who were commanding all those wings, the missile wings, the bomber wings, the tanker wings.

So, off we went to Minot and had a glorious…We were only there about a year, fourteen months. In fact, Myrna says I was at Minot; you were on the road the whole time.

DePue: Were the girls still with you at that time?

Borling: No. Let’s see, at that point we are 1989.

417 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Well, I’ve got ’87 to June of ’88 for this one.

Borling: Eighty-seven to ’88, all right. Yeah, Megan was with us. Lauren was in college, so she was, as I remember…No, I guess Lauren was in college too. No, no, she was not in college, she was in high school or grammar school or something. Come on, don’t ask me hard questions.

DePue: I just asked because it would be a curious place to be in high school for a year, up in North Dakota.

Borling: She was in middle school, I think. Let’s see, she was born in ’74, so ’84, ’94, would be twenty. So, she was still with us, and she was. She was a cheerleader, I remember that now; she was in high school. We got there, and she went immediately off to cheerleading camp.

Life at Minot was excellent. It’s a great base, great housing, great people. You’re isolated enough; you’re about twenty miles from town. In fact, in the winter, when you go to town, you better take survival gear with you, because if you go off the road or go plowing into a snowdrift, they may not find you for a period of time. You need something to stay alive, so everyone carried survival gear or should have, in their cars. You had the plug-in for the radiator block. And yet it got very, very warm in the summers. When the wind would be up, in the winter, I would go out jogging, and I would jog downwind. And then, I’d tell Myrna, I’d say, “Look, I need to have you pick me up in thirty-five minutes. I’m going in that direction, down the access road. If you don’t pick me up, I’m going to die out there.”

In the fairer weather, we used to do things where we’d line up, on a volunteer basis, on Saturday mornings―we didn’t do this all the time, but―they’d have two wings for the people, dependents and kids and folks. I’d have them all lined up in formation. As I said, we didn’t do this routinely, but we did it a couple of times. [I] called everybody to attention and right face, moving now, forward march. I’d be up the front, double time, march, and we’d go jogging down the flight line, as I recall. I was never too sure if they were following me, or if they were running me off the base. (both laugh)

DePue: I wanted to ask you, General, at this point, you said you just got your first star. What were your career goals? What did you envision for the pinnacle for yourself?

Borling: I had hoped to be competitive for a star, but frankly, I’d never wished for it. You don’t wish for it. I never made that pinnacle. Colonel was, leaving the academy anyway, was the career hope. Colonel, I wanted to make it early, which I did, notwithstanding a few detours along the way. Once I made colonel below the zone and lieutenant colonel below the zone, I realized that I was in a position, given position, to be competitive for a star.

DePue: And below the zone essentially means earlier than your peers.

418 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Promoted early. I was on time to major; I was two years early to lieutenant colonel; I think I was right on the edge of the, or maybe with one day to spare, promoted a couple, maybe even three years early, to colonel. That’s both a blessing and a bane, because I missed some experiences in there that would have helped. They were moving me along pretty quickly.

I had the blessing to be in that F-15 program and do well in it. The White House Fellowship obviously helped. I was able to do some things that inspired the confidence of my commanders. Hopefully you didn’t…You did the same with a large number of the people that worked with you. I was going to say “for you,” but it’s a “with you” circumstance. I was, I think, a hard, but a fair leader and tried to keep it loose and light.

I’m not sure that some of the things I would attribute to a basic personality…I’m a pretty outgoing guy; I like to think. But I’m sure some of the things I would put in the category of charisma today would be viewed as calumny, and I would be ridden out on a rail for any number of excess statements or comments or whatever.

We’ve got a pretty vanilla, pretty politically correct military now that I think is fearful of shadows, and hence, substance suffers. It’s true of militaries throughout history that you look for the generals or the senior leadership who will fight, rather than who can get along in a burgeoning bureaucracy or alliance. I always thought of myself as a get-it-done kind of guy. I never fought a war as a general. I would certainly help direct aspects of wars, but I didn’t…physically wasn’t on the battlefield or in the air, even though I had a direct hand with the first Gulf War, Panama and those kinds of things and was upset when we stopped in the first Gulf War. I didn’t think we should stop.

But, back at Minot…So we’re up there with some strong colonels, who are leaders of their own outfits. You try not to get in their way. At the same time, you try to break trail and to make sure you understand what’s going on. You have to make assessments, because the wing commanders work for you. So, it was a balancing act. And I’d have to travel to the various bases.

So, what I did was something I’d never done before, is get checked out in light airplanes, because the Air Force was going to pay me to fly from Minot to Grand Forks whenever I wanted, basically, or whenever I needed to, same thing to Spokane. I looked at the dollars associated with this and figured out, I could do it a lot more cheaply and more conveniently by doing it by light air. And, once more, I could take Myrna with me or other staff with me, who wouldn’t normally be eligible to go. As a one-star division commander, your wife did not have invitational travel orders. Frankly, commanding, you wanted…I always have, taken advantage of having Myrna as an assistant to, if you will, or sometimes in the lead, and I’m the assistant to.

DePue: Definitely an asset then, in many respects.

419 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Definitely an asset. So I got checked out in light airplanes. Al Peach, God love him, he ran the flying service down at Minot, he and his boy. They did air shows. Al flew a Star Duster, Star Burster. It was an open cockpit biplane, and his son flew Taylor Craft.

Borling: They flew air shows, and one of their final acts was they got their assistants out there with a couple of bamboo poles and a string with banners on it. They would hold these poles, and these guys, father and son, would fly on opposing paths and clip the banners off of the pole, which is a pretty fancy maneuver. Did I mention they did it inverted? (DePue laughs) So, now they’re about six feet off the ground, seven feet off the ground, coming at one another, they roll and cut the banners off the pole. They were spectacular at it, until the day that Al didn’t make it and rolled it up into a ball and was killed.

He was my instructor, and we went off in a Champ, seventy-five horsepower, sixty-five horsepower. Hell, I had more horsepower on the back of my boat than we had on the airplane. It was a tail dragger; I’d never flown a tail dragger. We managed to get it off the ground, with all the torque and stuff.

DePue: Tail dragger?

Borling: It had a tail wheel, so it was a tail dragger. Instead of a tricycle gear, it was a tail dragger. The next thing I know, we’re out at his farm, shooting landings into this dirt field or grass field, which I’d never done either. I told him, I said, “Look, I know I’m a pilot, and I’ve got all this time, and I’ve got all this stuff, but treat me just like a student and work me through this,” because my desire was to fleet up and get checked out and be safe, and more than safe, be competent in what was going to end up to be a Mooney 301, which was my airplane of choice, and a low wing, tricycle gear. We did, and he worked me through everything, and I took a check ride and tests.

I had the ticket, even though I’d never had it exercised, the commercial ticket. I had instrument and day VFR [Visual Flight Rules] and out, and I had single-engine land, because I’d flown single-engine. I had multi-engine, so I’ve got single-engine, multi-engine, all that stuff on the tickets. After fifteen or sixteen hours or ten hours, whatever it was, it wasn’t a lot, I get signed off, and I’m ready to go, and I can rent the airplane from Al.

It turns into my airplane, kind of. So, Myrna and I would fly over to Grand Forks—it takes a couple hours—and we could fly to Spokane—that took a little longer. I could one-hop it, as I remember. Sometimes, if the winds were bad, I’d have to stop at Mountain Home or somewhere like that, but normally I could one-hop over the mountains. I found out how easy it was to almost get killed in light airplanes.

DePue: I wanted to go back to my question about what your career ambitions were at the time.

420 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Stay alive in light airplanes.

DePue: Yeah, that’s what you went into. You went into the discussion about light aircraft, but your entire career has impressed me―

Borling: By the time I made colonel below the zone…By the time I had command of the Hat in the Ring, I thought that I had a chance for a senior position, if A display of the medals that General Borling received during his things worked thirty-three years in the Air Force. out. There’s so many elements of chance involved that it’s―

DePue: You mean multiple stars, three or four stars?

Borling: Yeah, I thought I had a chance to make general, first, just make brigadier. Then once you make brigadier, of course, you get hungry, and you want to think you can do some more. But again, there’s so many factors at work. Then there’s a dynamic that plays in. Ah, I’d rather be a fighter pilot forever than be a general. I’d rather be a this than be a that. You’ve got to do unnatural things to be―

DePue: Like go to SAC?

Borling: Well, I didn’t have a vote on that. Jack Chain told me where I was going (DePue laughs). I was staying at SHAPE and going to be exec to the next chief of staff, who ended up to be John Shaud, who I knew very well as well. [I] helped transition General Shaud. It was a promotable position, and it might have happened there, and I would have been thrust back into the maw. But when General Chain elected to take me to SAC, then once again I’m under his domain. He was a tough guy, a tough guy to work for, fired me a couple times, for effect. Then I managed to ingratiate myself. I’m going to have dinner with him a week from Wednesday, he and Judy, his wife, and Myrna will be with me.

421 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Anyway, yeah, ambition is still important. I would hope to characterize it as “charactered ambition,” where you get involved in things where it’s more important to try to do something [than] to be somebody. Once you make brigadier, you don’t really have to be hungry again. You can be ambitious, and you can be competitive and all those kinds of things, but in the end, you’ve got big organizations to run. You need the help of your fellow general officers, and they need your help. You need the help of the colonels. There’s a lot of stuff you’re responsible for that you have very little knowledge about or how things are working.

When I made two-star, I came back to SAC after the 57th Air Division―there’s more to talk about there―and was the ADO, or assistant director of operations and then fleeted up and was the DO. In fact, I was one of the longest serving ADO/DO combinations. I was kind of like the COO for the command, and General Chain gave me a lot of running room. Of course, I wanted a lot more; you always do (DePue laughs) When he finished up as the commander in chief of SAC, I finished up as the DO, under the new leadership.

DePue: Director of operations.

Borling: Director of operations, big titles, deputy chief of staff for operations, but so, you had operations; I had execution of the war plan responsibilities. In those days, all the tankers were in SAC. Even though they were exercised through the numbered Air Forces, I still had domain over the tankers and worked very closely with both numbered Air Force commanders, 15th and 8th.

We had SIOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan]. We still had bombers on nuclear duty. We had the Looking Glass; that was the airborne command post; we kept it in the air. That was directly mine. We had the presidential E-4B Sentry; we had the presidential command post. There were a lot of moving parts that the DO had domain over. Some of them were down at wing levels or at Air Force levels. The Air Force guys outranked me but were colleagues, good guys, fine officers, and it was serious business.

The night we…We can get into that, the night we launched the attack on Panama, what happened, things that went down. General Chain, God love him, he’d get briefed about what we intended to do, how we intended to do it, ta-da ta-da ta-da, and that was it; take care of it. He had confidence in capabilities.

I ran the battle staff for the first Gulf War, every day. I had all the command and just ran the command and its contributions. In some respects, Minot was good training for that, because of the varied missions and the kinds of things that you encounter at command. It’s not a lockstep circumstance. Funny things happen, important things, career ending things, if you deal in

422 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

those kinds of terms, that you have to work with, career not just for me but for others, and often I had to end them and know that I was at risk of that.

One day Myrna…It was a terrible, blustery, cold day, and Myrna went off to the commissary in a snowstorm to get some things, because we were having people over for a dinner or something. She gets to the commissary, and she has forgotten her checkbook. She hates snow and ice, so she’s tripped over the snow and ice to get to the door. She gets back to the car and hops into the car and takes off, and doesn’t have her seatbelt on.

For some reason, we’ve got a cop out there in the middle of this weather who stops her and says, “You don’t have your seatbelt on. I need to see your driver’s license.” She’s just fuming, because of the checkbook, and she says something about “Don’t you know who I am?” or something like that. The sergeant or the airman said, “No, ma’am.” So she hands him her ID card he says, “Oh my God.” He says, “You’re free to go,” and lets the general’s wife take off. Myrna says, “Thank you,” and drives away and goes home and gets the checkbook.

Halfway home she says, “Oh my God, what have I done” and gets the checkbook, drives back, drives all around the base in this terrible storm, looking for this guy, calls me. She said, “You won’t believe what I’ve done.” I said, “I won’t believe it.” I said, well, something like, “Get your ass over here to the office.” I said, “I’ve got the chief of air police and a base commander and the chaplain and the lawyers.” I gave my wife the maximum ticket (DePue laughs) that she could have, with the maximum points. And an If you do this once more, you’re banned from the base kind of thing. Read her the riot act with all these people in the room. Myrna is not a shrinking violet, but she took it. So I got to enjoy it; I got to stick it in. I’ve never told her that; you’ve got to excise that from the tape.

So, a couple weeks pass, and Myrna’s driving around in another place, and she sees the guy. She hops out of the car, and she says, “Sir, Sir.” He starts running, and she’s running. (both laugh) He stops, and she makes an effusive apology. “I am so sorry,” she said, “I never do anything like that, and I felt terrible. I came back to look for you.” The guy said, “I was afraid, so I ran away.” (both laugh) She said, “You’ve got to know.” She said, “I want you to know,” she said, “my husband gave me a very big and bad ticket for this, publicly.” He said, “Yes, ma’am, I know it.” He said, “The whole base knows it.” If I had not done that, and there was no show, man. She had, by her actions, put us in a very tough…Normally it was me who put us in a very tough position, but this was her baby, and so that was Minot.

DePue: You and I are assuming a certain level of knowledge here, but could tell me exactly what the mission of that unit was?

423 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: The missions varied by base, but Minot, for example, had the full nuclear alert and nuclear or SIOP commitment, as well as a conventional commitment for the bombers. The tankers had support of conventional and nuclear operations and were on alert as well, although not at Minot. The missiles were obviously there to respond to the various levels of potential nuclear conflict, and they were on alert, all the missiles, all the time, with maintenance ongoing.

You’d send out convoys of twenty or thirty folks and trucks and air police, youngsters, with nuclear weapons, to go out and change out warheads. Guys that you’d run away from in the alleys of Chicago were now out there prepared to give their life, after a little training, basic training and security police training. You would send them out, and we never had an incident, never had an incident. And it’s hard duty. You send them out in the middle of a blizzard. We used to generate airplanes. Up to…I’ve forgotten specifically now, but thirty below, forty below, with chill factor. We were generating airplanes in the open. We’d have to bring our people in after thirty minutes. It was an all-weather operation.

At Grand Forks, once again, you had missiles on duty, and you had the B-1 wing, which was coming on in terms of meeting its operational commitments.

DePue: So you would always have some of your bomber force in the air at all times?

Borling: When I was at SAC, not bomber force in the air. You have the…When I was a DO—we’re skipping now—I didn’t have the authority to launch the bombers as the division commander, except under certain circumstances. You would normally have a certain percentage of your bombers on alert, and the direction to do that, to start engines. We could start engines, but to move them with nuclear weapons onboard, that took instructions from the SAC DO and code words and all kinds of things, much like the posture missiles took two man control and dual keys, and you couldn’t do it from across the room, independently. And I had a lot of tankers and bombers out at Fairchild, the same kind of thing.

A typical circumstance would be that you would generate all your airplanes, or as many as you could, load them out with real weapons, absorbing all the nuclear surety rules of handling nuclear weapons, and get them ready to go, as part of an operational readiness inspection. We would not fly aircraft with nuclear weapons onboard, intentionally anyway.

Minot, well after I left, had that incident where they flew nuclear tipped missiles and didn’t know it. (whistles) But that has to do with the demise of Strategic Air Command and the Air Force taking its eye off the nuclear ball. It’s a whole different ballgame. Plus, you had conventional stuff, which was the more likely scenario, even in the Cold War timeframe.

424 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Remember, we’re doing this just as the Berlin Wall is coming down, just as the Soviet Union is “crumbling.”

DePue: I definitely wanted to talk to you about that, but before we get to that point, before we get to the Gulf War, you’re at SAC, towards the end of that whole Cold War era.

Borling: I only spent a year at Minot but came away imbued with the northern tier ethos, if you will, and all the crazy Scandinavians that live up in North Dakota. (DePue laughs)

DePue: You ought to fit right in.

Borling: …and show up in the middle of the night with their bus and their booze, wanting to look at the northern lights. We’d let them on the base. It was a very collegial circumstance at the Forks and at Minot, a little less so. Spokane was where that accident took place, bigger town. But the Dakotas are very special, boy, really, really, and there’s people that even to this day we have good relations with, from up there.

DePue: I’m going to give you an opportunity to either relieve me of some misconceptions I have or reinforce some views I have. That’s about: you’ve spent your career up to this point―let me describe it as the high octane world of being a fighter pilot―and now you’re in―

Borling: Except for command and staff, some of it high-octane stuff as well.

DePue: …and now you’re in SAC, where I would think that the personality profile that you’re looking for, for a lot of these people, is quite different from your experiences before.

Borling: Well, I think there are cultural differences. I told you the story about taking over as the exec, and the LeMay thing―

DePue: Yes.

Borling: …two weeks. I think muted aggressiveness would be the cultural distinction that I would make. A lot of it had to do with the seriousness of the nuclear mission and also the frequency of operational flying. You’d fly maybe a couple, three missions a month versus flying a couple, a couple, three missions a week or more. So you were always more operationally intense. You go off for a ten or twelve-hour mission and SAC, you go fly for an hour, hour and a half, in fighters.

DePue: And you’re not doing any fancy maneuvers in the process, are you?

Borling: Well, it’s pretty fancy when you’re refueling a B-52 in the middle of the night; I’ve got to tell you. It’s pretty fancy when you’re running low altitude,

425 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

using radar and old systems, when the airplane has been on active duty longer than you have, (DePue laughs) and when it’s not very responsive to…You do this, and it thinks about turning.

When you take off a fully loaded B-52, you’re in excess of a half million pounds. Think of that. When you take off that E-4B, you’re in excess of 750,000 pounds. You wonder how these big bastards get in the air.

DePue: Is the E-4B one of the refuelers?

Borling: The E-4B is capable of refueling, but that was a presidential command post, kind of a quasi-Air Force One, but it was his military command post.

DePue: Did you get raided in any of these aircraft?

Borling: No, but I flew them all. (DePue laughs) I was the commander, and I got to fly them. I remember at Minot―this would be fun―we were going out for a thing called missile comp or bomb comp or something, to Spokane. I had a delegation. We got to do this with the large airplanes; you get a delegation from Minot, who would come onboard.

I had the mayor, George Christensen, was his name. George was a heck of a good guy. As the exec, I hadn’t been flying. I had been flying the Looking Glass when I got promoted as a BG, but that means I got to take it off and land it basically, if I wanted to. I never got checked out in it; I just…I’m a general; the general’s supposed to know how to fly.

I can remember the first time I got behind the yoke of the 135 [KC- 135], when it was…I don’t even remember the first flight. I just remember how hard can it be? You push the [unintelligible] forward, and when you hit rotation speed, you pull back on the yoke, and it flies into the air. Then you raise the gear, and you raise the flaps, and you go fly. Coming down, you get the speed on final, and you drop the gear, and you drop the flaps, and you set it up. You get on the glide slope, and when you think you’re close to the ground, you kind of tweak it back a little bit; pull back the power, and let her land. I don’t know how hard it is. Everyone’s got all the stuff, so I never bothered to go through any school or anything. But with George…So, I hadn’t flown the 135 a lot.

DePue: That is the refueler.

Borling: That’s the refueler, a Boeing 707 basically. So we’ve got all these town fathers and people who are with us on the airplane and George Christensen. I said, “George, why don’t you come up, and sit in the jump seat, here in between the pilot and the copilot,” and I said, “We’re going to go fly this thing.”

426 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I’m sitting there talking to the…In the right seat is the…he’s an IP; he’s an aircraft commander in his own right. They’re not dummies; they’re going to put somebody there who knows that the hell is going on. I said, “How do we start this thing?” because I’d never started it. We’re working through the starting. I said, “What do I do now?” Do this and advance that; hit this button; hit that button. I had no clue how to start it. We’re getting the engines, all four of them, running up. Which one do you start first? That one and that one. Hell, I didn’t know. One out there and then four and then two and then three. You start the outboards first and then the inboards or something. So, you get it all juiced up, and you’ve got your feet on the brakes, and you’re going through checklists.

George taps me on the shoulder; he said, “You don’t know how to start this?” (both laugh) I said, “No,” I said, “I’ve never started it before.” He said, “Have you ever flown it?” I said, “I haven’t flown a 135 here at Minot.” With that, he’s up and out of his seat. I was about to say, but I’ve flown it a couple times down at SAC, or a few times, maybe six, seven times. He goes back, and he says, “General Borling and the division commander, is taking us to Spokane in this airplane. He doesn’t know how to start it, and he’s never flown it.” (both laugh)

I’m turning around, and I’m listening to this announcement he’s making. There’s, “What do we do?” “Well, I guess we have to go.” He comes back up, and he says, “I’m going to sit in the back” like it would be safer. So, we got out to the runway, and I run them up. You run them up a little bit, make sure you’ve got them on, and then, “All right, ready to go; ready to go.” Then you call the radio, you know, “Viking headed west,” and vroom, which is my…and vroom.

I used to like to do that at Minot, “Viking, headed west.” I would always fly under my call sign [“Viking]. They had these like “Poof Di 2-3,” or something. Screw it; the call sign is Viking, I believe we’d file it Poof Di 2-3, or whatever it would be, and then I would just call the tower and say, “Change the flight plan call sign to Viking. “And they’d say, “Right.” So, Viking’s headed west; that would be the call center.

I pushed them, up and here we go, down the runway. Whatever it was, 140 knots or 120 knots, you rotate, and we’re off. You call “gear.” “Gear.” “Flaps.” “Flaps.” And the other guy has got his head down. Well, I don’t fly with my head down. I’m cross checking gauges, but I’m looking outside, and here comes every fucking goose in North Dakota. (both laugh)

There’s 1,000 geese in the windscreen. I can’t go up more, because I haven’t got the…So I dump the nose. We’re only about 150 feet in the air, so I dump the nose, violently, lighten the seat kind of stuff, to try to duck under this flock of geese, and he screams. (both laugh) In the back they’re screaming. He looks up, and here’s geese all over the airplane, “Rrrrrrrrrr.”

427 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Then [I] goose it back up, get the thing going, and off we go and didn’t hit any geese. I don’t know if I missed the geese or if the geese missed us. That would have been horrific, to take a whole flock of geese in the engines at low altitude. You would have been “Oh, God.” So anyway, we got up to altitude. I gave it back to him, wanted to climb out of there. I walked back there.

DePue: And maybe explain why you’d done that maneuver, to the folks in the back?

Borling: I went back to him, and I said, “Okay,” I said, “Who brought their geese along on this flight? Because they all tried to get onboard on takeoff. They tried to kill you, George.” But the real key was―and I railed against it with the SAC pilots―don’t fly inside; fly inside-outside or outside-inside. Anyway, that was a funny―

DePue: Meaning that they need to be watching what’s on the horizon as well.

Borling: You had to be contact flying, as well as on gauges. Now, if you’re in the clouds―and you’ve got to be on instruments―then you’re glued to the gauges. But, I think if there was a difference, to go back to the SAC and fighter thing, there was more contact flying. We flew outside a lot.

DePue: For the refuelers especially, I would think that landing a fully loaded KC-135, versus landed one that’s done its job and is fairly empty, would be quite different.

Borling: I think there are some restrictions. You can’t land fully loaded; you have to dump fuel. The same thing with bombers, you dump fuel to get down within parameters.

The 135 was particularly tough in crosswinds. Thirty knots of cross was its limit, and boy, you had your hands full. It was a physically hard airplane to fly. I never knew how women could fly the 135 and handle it in a tough crosswind. It was just a fierce airplane, not very…You’d have the wing down; you’d have the rudder in, and you’re fighting it all the way in. At thirty knots, landing, man, that’s a chore.

DePue: Were there female pilots by that time in the Air Force?

Borling: I want to say, yes, but not many. They were just coming on, as I recall. So that was a funny thing at Minot.

At Spokane, with the newspaper and with the stuff…I went out, and I did a black-tie dinner at…This was left over from je peax; we can do black-tie dinners and did one at the Spokane. I think it was the first one they’ve ever done at Fairchild. Everyone enjoyed themselves.

428 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I met Bill Cowles, who was the owner, publisher of the paper. It was his people who were still beating up on this thing. I had had a conversation with him on the phone, where I ended up screaming at him―I’m showing you how renaissance I can be―about the damage he was doing to the Air Force and to the people, weeks after this thing had taken place.

Anyway, Bill and his wife, Allison, were there. We had a marvelous time, became great friends. But it took that evening to…I guess Bill finally went and laid the law down, and the guys laid off the base.

Bill died, heart attack, some years later. Allison married Punch Sulzberger Jr, of the New York Times. Then Punch died, and then Allison died, so now they’re all gone. Allison and Punch would send me a…I’d always get a nice Christmas card from Allison and Punch, who I never met. We always responded in kind with a dodol or something.

We left Minot with a heavy heart. We left a lot of really good friends, good colonels. One guy, who was really bright and brilliant―I was sure was going to have star written all over him―was a guy who, when I was the DO, took the B-52s in to start the first Gulf War. He was in the lead B-52, and we had problems, command and control problems, not SAC. In fact, I had to launch these guys in advance of getting authorization to do so, but they were armed with conventional weapons.

This guy got himself into trouble with a young enlisted type, later and had to be fired. Oh, yeah, okay, well, a difficult circumstance. I was gone by that time. I was the DO at that time.

DePue: You also had the missile guys. I guess a general question, bomb or missile, regardless, what was the quality of the officers and the men that you served with.

Borling: The officer quality in the Air Force is remarkably high, talented. I think there’s different levels of dedication. But in the missile world…As a matter of fact, in the missile world―although I changed it later―the missile world was the host wing commander. He had the…The bombers and the flyers were tenants on his base, and I was a tenant on his base too. He was kind of the base commander.

I think it was a much harder career field to keep motivated, given the alert business, given the severity of the testing, given the responsibility. You’re senior people…You tended to have a lot of first lieutenants, down in the hole, maybe some junior captains. You went out of your way to let them know how important a task they were carrying on behalf of the nation.

But I think the rewards were…I’m not too sure I’ve got the definition right, but “psychic reward” would come to mind, versus kind of being out there, scarf in the breeze, bomber pilot or tanker pilot or fighter pilot or

429 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

whatever. At least you were in the wild blue. These guys were buried in the sod of North Dakota, in some godforsaken farm out 100 miles from the base.

DePue: Was that the kind of career that a lot of Air Force cadets were dreaming of, to go into missile command?

Borling: No, no, not in my day.

DePue: I would think that everybody competes for that assignment when they first get commissioned. You want to be a fighter pilot, or you want to be a bomber pilot or something like that, and the bottom of the list is missile.

Borling: No, you want to be a pilot first. Look at the current class; only about 550 of the 1,200 or so who graduated are going on to pilot training. Everybody else is spit out into the Air Force in intelligence or maintenance or missiles or navigators or procurement officers or lawyers. The force structure is diminished substantially.

When I was at the academy, if you didn’t go to pilot training, you were in the minority. Then when you went to pilot training…People would say that they wanted this or that, but in the end, it was that combination of attitude and capability that determined the gradation. Some awfully good pilots and officers ended up in Strategic Air Command or in Military Air Lift Command. But the swagger factor was for the fighter pilots, for good or for ill.

DePue: I guess the bottom line question then is, do you get a different caliber of officer for something like missile command?

Borling: Caliber is the wrong word. Caliber remains uniformly high in the officer corps of the Air Force. I think what you get is a different degree of (pause) commitment, a different degree of aggressiveness, a different way to express professionalism, because in all cases it’s got to be professional.

Then, I go, “hats off” to the missile crews for their professionalism and their focus on the duty and the responsibilities that the missile career field demands. A lot of them don’t pull more than one or two tours, a couple years, a couple, three years doing that, and then they’re off into other disciplines. So it’s a tougher field for motivation, and boy, you just can’t have any mistakes.

It was interesting when the women started pulling duty. I was a DO when this happened at SAC. We had women and men, and it would be mixed crews who would be going down into the hole, just the two of them, to spend forty-eight hours or whatever it was. We were concerned, obviously, about the sex thing. So we made it voluntary, that if some guy was uncomfortable serving or some woman was uncomfortable serving in a mixed crew, that they didn’t have to do that. So, there was a volunteer aspect to that. We found out it was pretty much a non-issue.

430 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

There’s a story about this one, and I’ve forgotten her name, but boy, she was a knockout. She was a missile crew member, and she was just gorgeous. She was also saucy. We opined―I’m not going to say who the we were―but we opined that this could be a problem. I went to the base where she was and talked to the missile wing commander and talked to folks to try to get assessment. The wing commander told me that he had had one of the wives come up to him and specifically request that her husband be paired with “Bombshell.” The wing commander said, “Why do you want that?” She said, “Well,” she said, “My husband is just average; he’s not so hot.” She said, “She’s dynamite. She won’t give him the time of day.” (both laugh)

At least, I think maybe there’s been one case of something untoward happening, over all the years where there have been these mixed crews. So either it’s a non-issue, as it was, thankfully, on my watch, or it’s just being very well managed.

In cases where we’ve experimented with new weapons systems and mixed crews, I think of the MX missile on trains.17 Again, as a DO, we thought we were going to get the MX missile and have it train-borne. We created some mockup command cars for the train, and we peopled them with missile crews, men, and observed them over a period of…We put them on the road for a couple, three weeks. We observed how the interaction would go, of all the people support and security and the operators.

God, after a couple weeks, the place just looked like a pigsty. There were fights breaking out. We found that it was…and these were pretty well- picked folks. Tensions were there, and after a couple of weeks or so of this enforced living, pretty tight, it just wasn’t working. So, we added a couple women to the mix.

Now, all of the sudden, civilization takes over. (DePue laughs) It’s not to say that there aren’t some bonding things that go on, but the women…The place is clean; the men are acting more civil; the language is better. You get a bunch of guys together, and the language is just fierce, as you might expect. If you ever go into a sorority and go to the girls’ sleeping quarters, beds are made, and it’s neat and tidy. You go into a fraternity house, God it looks like Genghis Khan has just gone through. Well, these are younger people who were doing this thing. So, we found, with the addition of the women, that provided a more optimum operational circumstance. Then, of course, the program got canceled. So, there’s a case of effectivity of women.

DePue: I wanted to ask you a series of questions. You’re not one of the guys who’s making the senior level policy for national strategy, but you’re near the top, so you obviously are interacting with others. The question is about whether or

17 The LGM-118 Peacekeeper, also known as the MX missile (for Missile-eXperimental), was a land-based ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) deployed by the United States starting in 1986.

431 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

not our strategy of what’s been called Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, at that level―

Borling: The essence of strategy is targeting. The essence of strategy is targeting; that’s my definition. So, you want to talk about targeting theory.

DePue: Yes.

Borling: And what’s your question?

DePue: Did MAD make sense to you and those others that you served with?

Borling: Like most easily grasped concepts, with respect to the employment of nuclear weapons, MAD trips easily off the lips and was historically―when you had limited weapons, and you had limited analysis capability―a phase that we went through as a nation. But the SIOP had gradated elements within it.

DePue: You’ve mentioned SIOP several times.

Borling: Single Integrated Operations Plan, it’s the nuclear war plan of the country. At least that’s what we called it back in my day. I don’t know what it’s called now. You had differing attack options and differing locations, dependent upon what the National Command Authority decided it wanted to do.

Now, the big high-end thing, where you throw everything you’ve got with a limited reserve at the other side in the face of attack, had a great societal effect. I’m talking about the areas that were targeted, and it’s not just Russia or the Soviet Union. But a lot of it was directed against counterforce or places that could develop or shoot missiles from where bombers would come. The question was, are you shooting at empty holes, or are you shooting at bases that are vacant now?

So there’s elements, as you might imagine, on how much time, how much preemption plays, and then what level of response, with the analysis of each response being characterized in analytical terms, outcomes, which could be things destroyed and people killed and infrastructure destroyed and elements of society wasted and those kinds of things. As I said, I was in charge of systems analysis and concepts. So, what I’m trying to tell you is it’s a much more complex system than just saying, “Hey, we’re going throw everything we’ve got at every city they’ve got, and that’s it.”

DePue: But that’s essentially the ultimate deterrent, because if they do something, we’re going to―

Borling: Well, that’s what you’re saying, and now I’m going to step away. I’ve tried to dance around this a little bit, trying to make sure I’m parsing my words correctly, because even after all these years, I can get myself into

432 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

classification problems quickly. So, I’m not using any of the special terms, and frankly, I don’t even know if they exist today.

Personally, speaking John Borling, sitting here in the river room, and with the gradation down to levels of nuclear weapons that are still rather robust―5-6,000, our side; maybe a few more on the Russian side―distressed that the president wants to make it a nuclear free world. He’s some kind of Pollyanna. You can’t disinvent weapons; they just don’t go away. You can’t legislate them out of existence; they’re too easy to hide. And the danger in nuclear weapons, frankly, is not that you have too many; although, at some limit, the mathematical propensities, especially for easily transportable weapons and used weapons, it becomes a problem. But when you talk about missile delivery or bomber delivery or things of that nature, it gets more difficult with cruise missile delivery and other things. Thousands of weapons are actually stabilizing. It’s when you get down to fashioning scenarios with limited weapons, where you can create a scenario for use.

So, we need to be very careful. Arms control, in and of itself, has a nice cachet to it, but you can arms control yourself into increasing the propensity for a nuclear conflict. The point that I would make is that, as nuclear weapons…This is John’s point; it seems to me that, as the number of nuclear weapons contract, you throw yourself back into a MAD environment where you, in fact, target society rather than targeting forces, because you haven’t got the wherewithal to do both.

The stupidity would be to target forces, in my judgment, and let society go. So I would hope, I don’t know, that we would have transitioned back into more of a, “You’re going to lose it all, if you take us on, and we’re going to lose it all too;” therefore, deterrence works.

Now, you take the present day context, with the Ukraine and (Russian President, Vladimir) Putin making some statements that would have been quite alarming in the Cold War, and the posture levels, the nuclear posture levels, have, in and of themselves, added alert states. The problem with that is, if we would ratchet up an alert state, and they would know about it, they’d ratchet up; we’d ratchet up. Pretty soon, you’re both sitting on…Just through mobilizing, it’s almost World War I all over again. “Well, we’ve mobilized, and shit, we’ve either got to give in, withdraw or fight.” Scary stuff.

But in the end, it comes down to, how are you targeted? How are you targeted? And I’ve tried to lay some parameters out there. When they did away with Strategic Air Command, shortly after Jack Chain left and I left, although we tried to keep it―another one of those blunt your pick kinds of moments―I recall that SAC had to go back to the JSTPS and brief the secretaries of defense and the presidents every year on the gradations of the SIOP and how you work it, because the decision has to come from the

433 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

president, through the secretary of defense, down to SAC, the commander in chief, working in the command post that he owns, but the DO runs.

Execution responsibilities then fall directly to a very, very small, very small group. When the order goes that we’re going to do this, then another one or two people make sure that that gets done. And the word goes out over multiple links, even in the face of an ongoing attack.

DePue: SAC was involved with two-thirds of the nuclear triad, being bombers and missiles and nuclear submarines. Any sense…Again, I’m asking you personally―

Borling: When you say two-thirds, there was operational control vested in the Navy submarines, but we certainly had the command authority. The Navy didn’t have autonomy. We had them all from SAC. In fact, like I said, a Navy admiral ran the JSTPS. So, while the Navy had certain comm [communications] links and knew things about locations, or not, we’d put them in the box, the box where they could shoot from the box to hit their targets. But we had it all at SAC.

DePue: That’s an important distinction. I guess my question was, which of the three was most important? Was there a preeminent part of the triad?

Borling: I think it was complementary. You had the sea-borne missiles, the land-based missiles, and the bombers and tankers forced to support them, because it posed a complexity for the other side, and it gave you a resiliency that complicated any kind of offensive planning, any kind of first strike planning.

I can make a case for survivability with the sea-borne forces. Back then, accuracy was something to be thought about. Yield versus accuracy is an interesting equation. You would think that the bigger the bang, the better you are. In truth, reasonable bang with great accuracy gives you better results. Now, there’s something to be said if someone’s shooting a twenty-megger at you, and you’re responding with something significantly less.

Once again you get back to MAD scenarios, and then you use multiple weapons on a single target. You would think that, for purposes of probability of kill [PK], given all the vagaries attendant to weapons use, that, well, if you have one missile, that’s good; that takes out X city or X base. Well, yeah, but with the projected PK of say, point-three, given everything else that’s going on, or point-four. When you ratchet up, you don’t double PK; there’s an incremental increase. So in order to get a PK, say, approaching point-nine, you may find yourself having to put four or five or six weapons onto the same aim point.

DePue: This is kind of a diversion, but you’re making me think, here’s the accuracy of nuclear weapons. But you’re also involved, I think, earlier in your career,

434 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

about much more accurate weapons delivered by fighters and bombers, smart bombs.

Borling: Actually, the JDAM [Join Direct Attack Munition] and the smart bombs come a little later. We do have laser-guided weapons, and we do have EO weapons, and we do have weapons that are “guided.” But the measure of merit these days is in a thing called the JDAM, which is a conventional weapon, very, very accurate, using INS [Inertial Navigation System] and GPS [Global Positioning System] kinds of technology for terminal guidance, probably some kind of imaging stuff that I’m not even aware of. In the end, if you can get it to hit the table or fly in through the window, you’ve got something going.

DePue: And you minimize―here’s one of the euphemisms that always strikes me―collateral damage.

Borling: Well, (pause) yes and no. You win wars by altering enemy capability and will. To the extent that populations are willing to serve their masters, do you or do you not find yourself in the business of targeting, under the guise that they harbor military populations, civilians. In nuclear war, it gets pretty clumsy, pretty crass. In conventional operations, you can really hinder your operations by being overly concerned with rules of engagement, to put a population at risk, even if it’s a willing population in terms of support of the other side.

The German society in World War II was a willing population, or at least a quiescent one, and paid the price. I think, when you launch major war, world war, or major regional war, that to not accept the fact that there will be substantial collateral damage is to not know the nature of warfare.

DePue: At the time you were serving in these senior staff and leadership positions, did you view the Soviet Union as a…The term that’s being used today, as “an existential threat” to the United States?

Borling: Well, yeah, I did, just given capability and given the Marxist dialectic and historical materialism precepts, where they concluded that natural laws were going to be our demise, with their help, (both laugh) and that worldwide Communism or historical materialism would triumph. Even if it had to triumph militarily, it would be preferable to just going along.

So, the deterrence thing worked and the acknowledgement that the only way to win a war, win a nuclear war, was not to start it. I think there was some validation of that when both sides had 10,000 or 12,000 nuclear weapons. That’s a lot of stuff, a lot of mega tonnage to throw at countries. But would it destroy all of America? No. Would it destroy all of Russia? No. Would it blot out the sun? Maybe for a brief period of time. Would the southern hemisphere basically be untouched? Yes. Would elements of the

435 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

northern hemisphere, who had no stake in the game, be wildly affected? Yes. Where should you go to live? There’s answers to that question.

Curt LeMay said it right; he said, “Look at Bimini.18 [It’s] perfectly fine to go and have a barbeque on Bimini today,” he said, “just don’t eat any of the crabs; don’t eat any of the crabs.” (DePue laughs) True quote. Now he said, “Nuclear war ain’t so bad.” And I said, “Go to Bimini, have a barbecue.”

DePue: Well, here’s another question I’m asking John Borling.

Borling: You know what I’m talking about?

DePue: Oh, yeah, yeah, Bimini, the islands, yeah.

Borling: The atoll, yeah, where we did the hydrogen bomb test.

DePue: Yeah. Another question for John Borling; you’re serving in a high level capacity at that time. What did you think when President Reagan comes out and calls the Soviet Union “the evil empire”?

Borling: Words have meaning and can be used to try to affect the course of events. Okay, I took note but wasn’t particularly upset over the use of that term, given the motivating ideology that was behind it. Contemporarily, we’re running into a circumstance where we’re not calling a spade a spade, if you will, with respect to radical Islam, the argument [being] that somehow we’ll piss off the other believers in Islam by calling these terrorist organizations, or organizations who are utilizing terror as a tactic, radical Islam, or more correctly, political Islam.

Any time you mate the political power of the state with religious theology and the certitude attended to it, you set the stage for unprecedented violence, historically, internally and externally. Avoid then, that circumstance where political and religious power are mated. Unfortunately, Islam calls for the imposition of Sharia law, with the mating of political and military power. So, moderate or not, extremist or not, political Islam is worrisome.19

DePue: Going back to the 1980s and our struggles with the Soviet Union, one of Reagan’s approaches was SDI, strategic defense initiative, what was called “Star Wars.” Did you think that was an effective approach?

Borling: Well, I think it was kind of a busted flush, but he ran it effectively. At the end of times, the thing that…At the end of the Soviet Union, I think what happened was that their economic system just fell out the bottom. New

18 Bimini is the westernmost district of the Bahamas and comprises a chain of islands located about 50 miles due east of Miami. 19 Sharia law is the body of Islamic law. The term means “way” or “path.” It is the legal framework within which the public and some private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system, based on Islam. (https/simple_wickopedia.org/wk/Sharia_law.)

436 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

leadership, Yeltsin, Gorbachev kind of stuff, became sufficiently sure of themselves on one hand and unsure on the other. Leaders when they come in have to do something; they have to reform something; they have to make something, and they make calculations attended to it.

It’s kind of like how the Berlin Wall came down, almost by mistake, that a midlevel functionary refused to follow guidance and gave conflicting guidance out, which basically was, “Open up the doors.” I don’t have the details, but it’s a very interesting mini tranche of history, how a midlevel, or above, East German functionary took it upon himself to issue the orders that basically…There had been pressures on the wall, but the word from Honecker was “hold the line.” And this guy either misinterpreted it or took it on.

I think, with respect to the Russian leadership, they either took it on or they misinterpreted it, or whatever; they made a societal mistake. But they were helped a lot by the same kind of contradictory forces, internal contradictions in their own structure, that they railed against the west and predicted the end of it, because of the inherent internal contradictions that exist between the working class and the governing class, if you will, the management or ownership class.

In the end, the human condition advances and contracts, often on the narrowest of margins, in terms of success or failure propositions, or even in terms of existence propositions. It seems like, as we get more and more facile with our abilities to create things to destroy us—not just nuclear weapons, but biological, radiological kinds of things, germs, particularly troublesome, designer germs—that the longer term outlook for the human race is more in question.

With all of our accomplishments and all of our achievements and all of our material stuff, and all of the increase across the world, people’s life spans, notwithstanding the horrors that go on in South Sudan and the business in the Ukraine and Boko Haram, and all of the instabilities, it seems like that the fly apart factor will be accelerated, because incredibly efficient means of destruction are at hand, with no apparent defensive counterpoise.

The whole history of military activity has been offense, defense, offense, defense, kinds of thesis, antithesis, synthesizing into something else, to go back to the dialectic, and were managed and handled by relatively large, identifiable units, nation-states or kingdoms or whatever. Now, you can get Harvey bag of donuts and his band of happy boys or girls, living in a garage in some no-name place, who have under their employ, impressed or not, some “mad scientist,” who can put stuff in vials that these people with a true believer mentality, ala Eric Hoffer, can show up at LaGuardia or JFK or O’Hare, and two weeks later, half the nation’s got smallpox.

437 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I’m not leaving my room here for the next foreseeable future, except perhaps, to go put that corned beef on the stove or get another cup of coffee. So, let’s take a pause on that happy notion.

DePue: All right.

(pause in recording)

DePue: We’re back on again.

Borling: I want to react to a question you just asked off tape here, about the end of the Cold War. I made the remark that it never really ended, and it’s plus ça change c’est la même chose. It’s more than changed; it’s the same thing. The antipathy and the competition and the aggression between the Soviet Union, Russia, the rest of the world, particularly the United States, and China too, although you wouldn’t see it now, at 2015, necessarily.

But make no mistake about it; Russia has always been somewhat of a pariah nation, as judged by the rest of the world, if you will. They’ve always taken steps from time—not always, but have taken steps—to align themselves and become more upgraded, if you will. It’s an interesting mentality that Russian nationalism is so pronounced, is so intense. The ideology may have changed; the stakes may have changed, but the basic Russian nationalism continues to be a mode of force that I don’t think we well understand.

It’s not a matter of co-option; it’s not a matter of winning or losing. It’s a matter of standing up for appropriate action and behavior, knowing you’re going to be tested. And the Russians test a lot. When I was the head of Checkmate, we always figured that if they test and they hit resistance, then it’s a different circumstance. They may try to figure out how to get around it or through it or go back and get a sharper stick, but they’ll stop. If they don’t get resistance or if it’s just weakness, then the stick keeps getting pushed in.

In the Ukraine, which territorially is a very difficult circumstance, and ethnically is a very difficult circumstance, in fact, I predicted a year ago, roughly, that the answer would be partition of some kind. I don’t think that’s a great answer, but I think it’s a de facto answer, given the reaction of ourselves and the western states. The ethnicity and the religion…Ukraine tends to cleave itself north to south, with Orthodox on one side and then Catholic on the other, Russia speaking on one side and Ukraine on the other, not pretty. Ukrainia, in Russian, means “on the edge of.”

So, I go back, with the possible exception of Georgia, pieces of it, and that little trans part of Moldavia, which is not geographically connected, so hardly a rimland, it may well be that the pragmatic solution is de facto partition, which may alter and change over a period of time. That said, that goes back to the Cold War. “Life is struggle,” said Lenin, and I think the Russians think of life as continual struggle, internally and externally.

438 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Their history certainly speaks to that.

Borling: Well, but to go back then to something that we need to be concerned about as a nation, the Strategic Air Command went away in the ‘90s. A deal was struck in terms of taking peace dividend, and the Cold War was over. We’re all going to dance around maypoles, in our little national costumes, speaking a common language of peace and brotherhood and ending of conflict and nuclear war. Nuclear weapons will be cast into pruning spears and plowshares and bullshit.

The nuclear business and the business of warfare, from a national or a strategic level, was well served by Strategic Air Command, imperfectly but well served. It also was the basis of an independent Air Force. It required a different culture, a different mindset, a different set of duty parameters. When STAC (Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee) was basically done away with and the missions fragmented and the tankers sent off hither and yon and the bombers put under the tactical air command and the alerting systems and the missiles put under space command, what a dog’s breakfast. It wasn’t too many years later…and people raised their hand, including me, saying so, to career detriment, likelihood.

But it wasn’t too awfully long before the nuclear occurrences in a peacetime circumstance started to pop up, that the eye was not being kept on the ball by the military and by the civilian leadership. The nuclear business is much too important just to be left to a decentralized circumstance. It needs to be pretty tightly held. Strategic Air Command did that.

They’ve tried to recreate, in recent months and years, some kind of surrogate for that. But it’s not the same thing as having your own swagger factor and rights. More than that, I really worry, and I don’t know about such things as the current targeting philosophies, the force structure and its resiliency. We haven’t done nuclear testing for a long, long time. The age of systems, the guts to play in a big game, knowing that the stakes could be horrendous if you miscalculate.

DePue: Are you suggesting that we as a country don’t have the guts today?

Borling: I’m suggesting we don’t have the guts or the experience to play in the big game, which has as its outcome, the ability to stay in the game. I’m certainly not advocating mindless confrontation. You do things indirectly, as well as directly. Indirectly means you pick your targets carefully, and in a way, as we did in the “Cold War,” where surrogates could take on superpowers, but superpowers were very careful not to take on superpowers.

There was a bit of blustering, a bit of shoes on tables being banged, and talk. But there was always a realization that we’d better not screw this up too much, or we’re going to be at a point of no return. So, you won some; you

439 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

lost some; you did something, but you stayed in the game. One can make a case that we’re playing stay in the game aspects now, and there’s never any lack of conflict to draw you in.

Nations, historically, are diminished by letting their economies go to hell. That’s assisted by expensive and inconclusive foreign wars that big nations, successful nations, tend to get drawn into. Then a comfortable people rise up or don’t rise up at all; they just wonder where it all went, at a point in time.

Somehow to inject a new dynamism into the American population is a task to be done again and again and again. I speak to it, and I almost sound like I should be a in a college student union someplace, because the reality is that most governments, our own particularly…And we are a leadership nation just by weight of effort; we’re so busy doing things. God, we’re assessing what the hell’s going on in South Africa, which is going to hell in a handbasket, to the Mugabe stuff in Zimbabwe. The problem is that who really gives a shit about Africa anyway?

Well, there’s only so much land; they’re not making any more, so we’d better care about land things. But in terms of major efforts, is it not really the Chinas and the Russias and the Europes and the Japans and the Southeast Asia combines, along with Indonesia, that are so determinate? It’s almost like you could let other aspects of the world just go on.

I think we have a hemispheric, from our own personal standpoint, a hemispheric resurgence of interests that we’d better tend to. I think we need a broad, big game, as they say, big game approach. That has all your elements of power: military, diplomatic, economic, spiritual. Frankly, the horizons are so indistinct with respect to potentialities that you just wish that the nation would not tie up at the governmental level so much, in the terms of resources, to allow 1,000 flowers to bloom here in America.

The advent of 3D manufacturing is just creeping over the horizon. It can have so much positive impact. But the stuff occurs with such rapidity and privately. I’m talking about really, we’ve always talked about making stuff. Well, boy, 3D technology makes stuff, makes it fast, makes it cheap, makes it unique. Well, not so cheap but makes it anyway. So, the whole manufacturing world is going to change in the next fifty to 100 years or less.

Space. In the end, if we want the next iteration of protection, we’d better get our ass into space and start making Battlestar Galacticas that can discretely offer to take out troublesome spots. Some of the laser rail gun, particle beam stuff is very much on the horizon, and we’d better devote a hell of a lot of attention to it. And it’s a strategic proposition.

440 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying here. To a certain extent, you’re suggesting that the American public or the current administration, whatever, doesn’t have the stomach to act and be a world power, the dominant world power?

Borling: Every administration does a lot of things right and does a lot of things wrong, especially in the second term of a particular president. I think American interests have…Stature has diminished under the current administration. Do I think we’re in the shitter? No. But I think we can smell it, and I worry about that. And I worry about America losing momentum and how we get it back as a nation, as a people. One of the ways you get it back is if you get an affordable catastrophe that refocuses your actions for a while.

DePue: Affordable, meaning something we can recover from?

Borling: Something we can recover from, but a catastrophe, something that would be so riveting to the national experience that we would band together again. I think something less catastrophic may occur, with respect to the ebb and flow of economic outlook.

I think that where the rest of the world is entering another down period, that we seem, at least for the moment, to be in ascendancy. That can be helpful. It’s double-edged again, because it gives you more comfort perhaps or more stuff to work with. But it can be beguiling. It’s easy to get caught up and be soft. And believe me, I’m well past my Spartan period. I like comfort as much as anyone.

So, the administration you look for is the one that seems to be working to anneal the interests of the American people to themselves, first, that mutual respect across economic and demographic lines, rather than affecting centrifugal forces. I think a lot in terms of the espousing of shared values. Diversity is a false god, where it just encourages difference and doesn’t encourage shared value.

Anyway, those are societal thoughts. As a matter of fact, I’ll have a paper for you at noontime, I’m going to want you to read, when we go over to the club for lunch. But I come back to the notion we ought to reinvent Strategic Air Command, not go back; go forward. We ought to have it as a significant structure in our overall defense posture, much like we had it at the end of World War II. Strategic Air Command was established before an independent Air Force. Curt LeMay, a fighting general, was put in charge of it. If you had to identify a fighting general right now, out of the whole group of generals that we’ve got, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, name one.

DePue: I’m not going to take the challenge. There were a couple that have left the service in the last couple years. Petraeus comes to mind, but I don’t think you would define him as a fighting general.

441 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: No, I don’t. I don’t put Dave Petraeus as a fighting general. I view him as an intellectual warrior, trying to do what’s not been done, and that’s to win an insurgency by winning hearts and minds. Christ, give me one example where we’ve won hearts and minds without destroying a significant portion of the civilization we’re trying to go out and win the hearts and minds of.

DePue: I would imagine you’d put Norman Schwarzkopf into the category of a fighting general.

Borling: Yeah, I would. But he’s dead.

DePue: That’s a generation ago now. Well, General, I wonder if we could…a couple options: maybe that it’s time to take a lunch break, or it’s time to—

Borling: No, it’s a little early; it’s only 11:00, isn’t it? What time is it?

DePue: It’s about 11:20. Or, we can go back and kind of pick up the trajectory of your career, back in the last 1980s, for a bit. The next assignment would be assistant to deputy chief of staff, operations, which you’ve alluded to a little bit.

Borling: Well I’ve already talked about it a little bit, yeah. Let me deal with that, then let’s go to lunch.

When I left Minot, after…You know, we really liked it; we miss the people. In fact, after I retired, they wanted me to come back and be city manager, for $27,000 a year. I elected not to do that, although I was honored that they would think of me.

[I] got called back to go to work for Al Rogers, who was an academy guy, class of ’64. He was actually a year ahead of me. Al retired as a major general as well. [He] went into the DO structure there and learned about the span of authority that the DO has and the things that were important to the nation. We also were building a new command center that was hard, but not all that hard, where the center of operational activity would take place in crisis circumstances, and the DO owned that.

There were multiple one-stars who worked under the DO or colonels. It was a big organization, some of it functional, some of it not. The one general was called DOC, who was Ken Keller, just died; I’m sorry. Ken was a brilliant guy; he was a SPECS-OPS, a bit acerbic, very intellectual, a great wife, smart wife, Dr. Carol Keller. Ken ran DOC and [was] a former fighter pilot in his own right.

I remember when we had these…We’d go crazy with this stuff. A lot of it was done before I got there. I forget if I was the DO or the ADO, but we had these huge projectors that would light up these screens. We could stage nuclear war and go through the exercise of responding, and call up stuff from

442 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

all over the world. There was no command post like this in the world, better than the sit [situation] room by a long shot. This was where you wanted to be. That’s where they tried to take Bush after 9/11, to take him to Omaha. They took him to Barksdale. I guess they may have taken him to Omaha briefly. He said get my tail back to Washington.

These huge projectors, it was state of the art stuff, and they were like the P-51; they were liquid cooled, water cooled. I remember coming in one Monday morning, or getting a call, and them saying, “We’ve turned it into a swimming pool.” (both laugh) These large water cooled things, the clamps had let go, and we’d put about six feet of water into the new SAC, not operational, command post. A terrible circumstance, to get that cleaned up and fixed up. I think we finally came up with some different projection system.

But you could sit there; there were various tiers where you had your battle staff laid out and the fabled red phone that went directly to the secretary of defense and the president. I did have occasion to…Not to the president; I went to the secretary of defense, who then patched, as I remember, or maybe we had a direct line too. Maybe there were two phones there, because I thought for sure we did.

Anyway, we had the warning stuff monitored real time, so we’re always looking at real time threats, some of it coming in from Cheyenne Mountain, some from Space Command, and others coming in from different feeds. We spent a little time down there.

On more than one occasion, when I was DO, would get a frantic call from the duty officer that we were under attack. It was always one of those situations where…Now, let me be very clear on that, that there were—I didn’t want to make [you] think this happened all the time, but there were occasions where there would be anomalies in the system, indications of a missile strike underway, normally a very limited number. The question would always be, well why the hell would you just go to war for the hell of it today? We were thinking about an EMP [electro-magnetic pulse] strike that would come, which would knock out your communications, at least some of them.

On one occasion, I can remember that it was a half a dozen or a dozen missiles, supposedly inbound, Omaha targeted and some other places. I was the only one there and had the red phone like this. I said, “Now, it’s got to be a system anomaly; it’s got to be a fake. There’s nothing going on that they would just start a nuclear war for the hell of it.” We let the time click down to zero, and the screens cleared up, and nothing happened, and that was the end of that.

But it was a nervous time, because our reaction time is so limited. You’re talking about a decision loop that’s under…well, it’s very limited, under eighteen, twenty minutes, maybe. Your reaction to do something to get

443 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

out from under or to do something else, the margin for error is very, very limited. So you have to be very, very careful, and there has to be levels of retardation in the system and yet have the timing to be able to do things. I’ve worried about that for years, that there was too much automaticity that would be factored in, human automaticity.

DePue: I’m not sure I understand the scenario that you were talking about, that incident. It sounds like you were at a razor’s edge, facing a decision that would move the ball forward.

Borling: I couldn’t make it. I could have called the secretary of defense in the White House and said, “We have an attack inbound,” for whatever reason. I’d alerted CINCSAC [Commander in Chief, Strategic Air Command], but he was in route. One of the two of us had to be available, and the vice. I don’t want to criticize anybody here, but it got to be a little unworkable at that point. So, I found myself in the chair and making the call that this was not a real thing.

But I’ve always worried that a non-real thing, in the hands of someone perhaps not as experienced or thoughtful. I’m talking about the action officers; they exist at the Department of Defense, and they exist with the guys running around with the football.20 The president’s basically got a minute or two to hit the codes, go into his wallet, get the card, sync everything up and get the think…He’s going to do what he’s told to do. Whether or not he has analysis powers in those few moments to say, What are we really doing? And does the secretary of defense, who change out, have different…None of these people have a nuclear background or experience, even though they get briefed— sometimes effectively, sometimes not—by the delegation from Strategic Air Command, in the old days, by the CINC himself, would brief the secretary of defense and the president about the stuff and the thing.

You’d run exercises, and you’d not even get the principals to play. It’s unbelievable. President Clinton, sneaking out to see some…Reportedly sneaking out to do some extracurricular activity and not taking the communications gear or the football with him. Now, are we going to have nuclear war in the next thirty minutes?

DePue: The football being that briefcase.

Borling: The football being the briefcase, yeah.

20 The nuclear football (also known as the atomic football) is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the President of the United States to authorize a nuclear attack while away from fixed command centers. It functions as a mobile hub in the United States’ strategic defense system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football)

444 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Well, this isn’t even to suggest that your counterparts on the other side of the equation aren’t subject to the same kind of thought processes and maladies, et cetera.

Borling: Your what, please?

DePue: The folks in the Soviet Union.

Borling: You would think that they would be either less sophisticated or more sophisticated. I’ve always thought that what we never really knew is what they were targeting. I have no doubts in my mind that, with the mega tonnage they have at their capability, that they weren’t out for total and complete societal destruction, never a question in my mind, But [I] argued persuasively against it by many of the intelligentsia, not in my reading of Russian history. They’re going to hit you with every bloody thing they’ve got.

DePue: So that assignment was a sobering one for that timeframe.

Borling: Very sobering, very sobering. I’d learned enough to know that it’s much more complex than people make it out, and that it takes a specified command to do it. But more than that, it takes a seriousness on the part of the defense establishment, secretary of defense and things. They did have some guys who were good at it, within the Defense Department, but they were always pushed off.

Then it takes a president who understands that this can very quickly become job one. It’s not going out to raise money for something in Reno, Nevada that’s important. You’ve got to be on top of your game, and you’ve got to be briefed on this all the time. You’ve got to play the game to understand the game. Then you’ve got to ask hard questions. You’ve got to ask the hard questions, because the Defense Department and the military, they won’t lie to you, but they won’t shine lights sometimes, where lights need to be shone.

DePue: I’ve got June, 1988 to July, 1989, assistant to the deputy chief of staff operations at Strategic Air Command. And then July, ’89 to February, ’91, deputy director of operations for STRACOS [Strategic Air Combat Operational Staff], if I’m pronouncing that right.

Borling: No, I’m deputy chief of operations.

DePue: Is that just one step ahead?

Borling: I was the assistant operator and then one step up. When Al left, I took it over.

DePue: So essentially, you’re working in the same arena.

445 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Changed offices but the same stuff. We were a pretty good team, interchangeable parts. And he was a good enough guy, a good enough leader, Al Rogers, that boy, when I had come in and jump all over his mess kit, he could jump all over mine. We were academy graduates; we knew each other. He’d had a fighter tour, even though he was a SAC guy. We’d been on the JSTPS together. He had the bigger job; he was the guy who really had to put it all together. I was the systems analysis and concepts guy. We were a pretty good team.

We’re Christmas card buddies now. He and Linda live out in Colorado, moved out. [He had] a very successful civilian career, again, retired as a major general. Somewhere along the line, toes get stubbed, by yourself or by others, because I thought Al had more “potential.” I thought he had a couple more stars ahead of him, as I thought for me, other people thought for me.

DePue: Were you a brigadier for this entire timeframe?

Borling: I was a brigadier, and then I got promoted to two stars. In fact, I think I got promoted to…Yeah, I got promoted to two-star after two years. I was in that job a few months, then I got promoted. The DO is a two-star job.

DePue: Any other particular stories that come to mind during that three-year timeframe?

Borling: Nothing to…It’s all a blur, long time ago. The command was very much an operational command. SAC always helped, centralized control, decentralized execution, and a good place to work. The senior staff got along pretty well. We argued about…I do remember, but that was a DO thing…The B-2 was coming on. I remember the MX arguments. I ended up being briefing…I’ve always been pretty good as a briefing officer, bringing people in and doing things that the command would bring in. I would always get trotted out to offer some thoughts.

I remember, and I forget, when we were talking about the MX, there was another…Well, the B-2 was coming out, and it was so secret that the DO of Strategic Air Command couldn’t get inside the compartmentalization of that program. I went crazy. I said, “Come on, we’re the senior operator.” Some of my colonels could, but the general couldn’t get inside of it.

This is a true story. Well, the others are true stories. (DePue laughs) I finally got clearance to be able to read about the stealthy B-2—hell, I’d been out as…Oh, anyway—read the stealthy B-2. As I’m reading through these volumes of specs, I come to the bomb bay doors on the B-2. The bomb bay doors on the B-2. The bomb bay doors on the B-2 have a lifecycle age requirement of twenty or thirty cycles.

DePue: A cycle being a length of time?

446 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: No, open and close. They’re expected to open and close thirty times in the lifetime of the airplane, maybe forty times, whatever it was, a very finite number of times. I looked at that I said, “What the hell is this?”

So, I have to go up to the Ex [executive officer] of our shop; I forget who it was, Fred Fiedler and his guys. I said, “What is this, about the bomb bay door?” And they said, “That’s all we’re ever going to have to cycle the doors.” It’s a nuclear bomber. I said, “How many times are we going to have to drop a nuclear bomb?” because we’re going to score the bombing, using radar scoring devices rather than real bombs. I said, “You can’t posit a circumstance where we would use this weapon conventionally?” They said, “Oh, it’s much too expensive ever to use.” (DePue laughs) I said, “It’s got intercontinental range; it’s stealthy. You don’t think we could use it to go drop conventional bombs?” “The racks aren’t built for conventional weapons in the B-2, only nuclear weapons racks.”

Well, I went absolutely crazy. I said, “Trust me, we will build conventional racks for that airplane, and we will use it conventionally,” and I said, “And we’d better have a bomb bay door that we can open and close as many bloody times as we want to open and close the bomb bay doors.” It got changed and, of course, now years later—

DePue: A bit prescient on that respect.

Borling: Anytime you build a weapons system, and you say you’re only going to use it in one instance, you’re blowing smoke. You’re going to use it with as much flexibility as you can muster. To say that you’re not going to…Now, the B-2 carriers, the JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munition], can throw weapons forever, and it comes in cruising at 40,000 feet, or whatever it is, without anybody seeing it and can throw stuff and be gone, and nobody knows it was there, except there’s lots of holes on the ground.

That was an instant that the DO and the ADO thing meld together, except, I think if you look at the records—and I’m not sure I’ve got this right; I would have to go back and check it out—in terms of ADO/DO combinations that have served at Strategic Air Command, fighter pilot Borling may have been, if not the longest serving, right in the top two or three. I think Tommy Powers, General Powers, who later became CINCSAC, may have outscored me there. But that’s when they had the poker games at SAC.

DePue: I’m glad you mentioned that, because the positions leading up to this, it seemed like you had a pattern of one year in this position, one year in this position. You had a series of those it seemed like. Was that somewhat unusual?

Borling: I couldn’t hold a job. You know it was, especially for me not being piped into certain areas, like always a fighter pilot. Then I’d go to a POL-MIL thing, and

447 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

then I’d come back and do a school thing, or then I’d go into a NATO thing, and then I’d go into…you know. I bounced around a lot. I always felt myself skating fast, to not fall through the ice. I like to think I was a pretty quick study.

The French have a phrase, sur la question, “touch lightly on the question.” Sometimes I felt I had just enough time to touch lightly on the question. I felt I may have been…Well, either moving too fast or not moving fast enough. (both laugh) It’s like the famous prayer at Thanksgiving.

DePue: You’ve stumped me there.

Borling: You know how you go around the table, and you say what you’re thankful for?

DePue: Right.

Borling: It would come to mind, being facetious…They’d come to me, and I’d say, “Dear Lord, I’m thankful that they didn’t find out.” (both laugh) Sometimes you move too fast; sometimes you didn’t move fast enough.

DePue: General, that might be a good place for us to stop for the morning.

Borling: (laughs) You’re thankful that we’re going to go to lunch? All right, let’s do it.

(end of transcript #10)

Interview with Major General John L. Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.11 Interview # 11: February 10, 2015 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

448 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: We are now in the afternoon of February 10, 2015. Again, this is Mark DePue. I’m with General John Borling. Good afternoon, General.

Borling: I hope lunch was satisfactory.

DePue: Thank you very much for lunch; it was more than satisfactory. On your diet though, maybe not quite as satisfactory for you.

Borling: No, it was fine. Did you notice, I had three kernels of popcorn? Do you know what kind of willpower that takes? What kind of internal discipline?

DePue: You’re to be commended on that, but then you had years of practice, back in your cadet years and your training years and then your POW years.

Borling: You are not unfamiliar with that; you scarfed the popcorn.

DePue: Yes, I did, and I sat at attention at the table quite a bit of the time too. (Borling laughs)

Borling: Haven’t we all?

DePue: We had talked about your career up to 1991. I had one quick question. During your tours, I believe you were, officially, maybe, the deputy director of operations for STRĀCOS. What is STRACOS?

Borling: STRĂCOS. [Strategic air Combat Operations Staff]. I’m not sure, look it up.

DePue: STRĂCOS. That’s quite an acronym.

Borling: STRACOS, deputy chief of staff for strategic operations. I was deputy chief of staff for operations in STRACOS and strategic contingency…I don’t know. But I did it very well.

DePue: You and I have been talking about this to a certain extent, but I’m struck by the events towards, let’s say, the maturity of your career, if you will, in the late 1980s and especially 1991.

Borling: The transition point with the Soviet Union “losing,” and we were doing things like grounding the Looking Glass. For the first time in forty years, the Looking Glass was no longer—this is the old military command post—was no longer in the air twenty-four hours a day. We’d do it with three eight-hour shifts, and we would fly continually. A last resort if you will, a SAC general officer, who had all of the nuclear codes and capabilities that he would need if everybody got wiped out. We would still have the Looking Glass, survivable, at least for eight hours or until we went to some location that was still survivable.

449 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: But before we even get into the operational side of things, how surprised were you and how surprised were your fellow officers that you were serving with, when this whole thing came apart, when the Berlin Wall fell in November of ’89, to start with?

Borling: I think that the circumstances accelerated with a pace, to the coming down of the wall. Now, I was in Europe; in fact, I was in Berlin, when the wall went up. That would be in what, ’60 or ’61? When they started building, we were literally there as cadets from the academy. I want to say it was ’61.

DePue: I believe that’s right.

Borling: I remember when the commanding general or the Army general said…He was all a tither, “What do we do? The Soviets are building this wall, and the Germans are building this wall, in violation of the tripartite arrangement there in Berlin.” We said, “Knock it down.” “Oh, we can’t do that; we’ll start World War III.” It’s always, you’re big enough to do what you’re big enough to do, kind of thing.

Anyway, in 1989, when the wall came down, I was in Berlin again. I was in Berlin when it came…Not the precise day, but in that year, I had been in Berlin. I always thought it would take a world war to bring that wall down. It did; it took a war of the human spirit and that guy who made a mistake (laughs) on the East German side, in the face of all that tumult.21

DePue: But there had already been a laxening. By that time Poland had left; they became independent in June of ’89. I think in September, Hungary was and a lot of East Germans were already heading through Hungary.

Borling: Hungary, trying to get out, yeah.

DePue: Exactly.

Borling: Well, that just shows you again, you relax that authoritarian, that hammer, just a little bit—that’s what the Chinese I think are afraid of—and the forces of individual freedom run like water, downhill into rivulets, until there’s a flood. Then there’s a mudslide, and you can’t contain it. So you try to stop it early, up the hill. I thought, literally we just took it astride; we just took it in stride. All right, this has happened; that’s good. There wasn’t any gloating, but you’ll

21 At a November, 1989 press conference, an East German politburo member prematurely announced the lifting of restrictions on travel visas “immediately, without delay.” The policy that was to be announced the following day would have required a long visa application process. Confused answers and erroneous media reports spurred thousands of East Berliners to the Berlin Wall. Receiving insults, rather than instructions from superiors and concerned about his own cancer test results, the overwhelmed officer on duty at the checkpoint opened the border crossing, and the other gates soon followed. (https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not- know-about-the-berlin-wall)

450 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

recall that we’ve gone through now, multiple exercises at the national financial level, in terms of reaping the peace dividend.

There was a real hurry on the part of the federal government to downsize the military and to seek economies in the name of the peace dividend. The war’s over mentality. So we did things at SAC, as I say, like grounding Looking Glass, which was more of a financial operation than it was doing something to be mindful of what was going on across the globe. The nuclear posture or reservoirs, core structure, had not changed but intended change was led for. How do you measure intent?

DePue: Does that mean that you saw those kind of decisions leading to a greater threat or a greater danger for us?

Borling: I think we assumed greater risk. We took bombers off of nuclear alert. Certainly, there goes a leg of the triad, if you will. As we went on, we diffused the tankers into various commands. That, again, I think eroded capability. We substituted hope for some of the harsh dose of reality, the facts if you will, that were facing us. Well, we have to give signals.

The START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] treaties came into effect, and the START treaties were modest enough. We now know that the Russians have abrogated some of the earliest treaties, the range of ground launched cruise missiles, et cetera, and we are ineffectual in our response.

DePue: So, the days of “trust but verify” were behind us?

Borling: Yeah, yeah. We used national technical means, and if they’re not good enough then we’re screwed.

DePue: I wanted to ask you though, looking at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, would you be part of that school that would credit Ronald Reagan and his desire to do SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] and basically outspend the Soviets?

Borling: I think the outspending thing works. I’m not sure we had them shaking in their boots over the SDI, although as I called it earlier, a busted flush we ran through pretty good. I think the foundation blocks of the Soviet system turned to sand and started to trickle away. That, for an ideologically based system that claimed it had locks on natural law, just proved too much, both the economic realities and then the ideological underpinnings. It’s kind of like there is no true god except Communism, until you found out that there is no true god. Then it all comes apart.

DePue: So that would have happened regardless of Reagan being on the scene?

Borling: I don’t know; I don’t know. I think Reagan certainly was an accelerant to that process, but I’m not sure…I think his personal walks in the woods and

451 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

interface personally with Gorbachev…I think Reagan’s pride in this country, the shining city on the hill kind of thing, was more than a metaphor. It was his view of life; it was his view of circumstance.

But don’t forget, Ronald Reagan keeps being offered up, much like Roosevelt or Teddy Roosevelt. These are just men. These are men with enormous flaws. These are men who made enormous mistakes in their time. Look at the Iran–Contra thing, just for starters.22 I’ve always thought that it was by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin, that Ronald Reagan escaped an impeachment process. He had to pardon his secretary of defense [Caspar W. Weinberger].23 Ollie North, of course, is infamous.24 Some suggest Colin Powell [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] was wound up in this thing and others who were close to the machinations of the inner circle.

It’s almost difficult for a president to get through his term without committing—not because he wants to but because forces are at play that he has to respond to—what could result in an impeachable offense. You look at the current administration, I’m absolutely dumbfounded that this interaction with the IRS has gone unanswered, when this was one of the most serious things that an administration can do.25

Look what it cost Nixon. It was one of the things that was thrown into the applecart, along with, quote, “the low-grade burglary of Watergate.” It was the cover-up that got him, but the IRS thing really was a driver as well.

So, the venality of activity, sins of omission, sins of commission, happened because of the pressures and, in some respects, the venality of the combined legislature on an individual basis or not. These guys are in there wheeling and dealing like rug merchants, trying to get a little more for their district. I use it in that paper I provided, “The avarice and ambition of all

22 The Iran-Contra affair concerned the selling of U.S. missiles to Iran and the channeling of funds received from Iran to guerilla rebels, Contras, who were fighting the government of Nicaragua, though such funding had been denied by the U.S. Congress. Indictments against fourteen Reagan administration officials resulted. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Weinberger) 23 Weinberger resigned and received a presidential pardon before the Iran-Contra trial. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Weinberger) 24 Oliver North, political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, was convicted on three counts related to the arms scandal that were later overturned. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North) 25 During the Obama administration, allegations were made that the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea party organizations and other conservative, nonprofit groups that were seeking tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012. Critics said the tax agency had subjected the targeted groups to extra scrutiny, questioning and long delays, largely because their names suggested they would be political opponents of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/four-years- later-the-irs-tea-party-scandal-looks-very-different-it-may-not-even-be-a-scandal/2017/10/05/4e90c7ec- a9f7-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2c786df560fe)

452 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

mankind.” How do you craft lofty service to country things when you’ve got to be in there with the short knives, thrusting and parrying and—

DePue: In that respect, are you talking about people within the administration or within the military, fighting for their piece of the action?

Borling: Any administration, sure; it’s a blood sport. The opportunity to express a well- intentioned and executable altruism—all too often when the bloodletting starts—is well forgotten, and you’re back to issues of individual survivability or individual competitiveness or triumph or securing of a particular position or more than that, getting some money that you can spread out to buy loyalties for the next election.

I believe deeply in the process, the democratic process that the republic has evolved into, in terms of how we are represented, but I wish we had more renaissance men and women who were less concerned about political future and more concerned about future of the country. I would much rather see people sacrificing their careers on the altar of righteous action in behalf of the nation state at the federal level or on the state at the state level or on the local level, the city, than to see this, not only the endless factionalism. You’re going to have factionalism in a system like ours, but it should be offset by the quality of the individual who goes and holds office.

Therein the problem, because democratic accountability is a two- edged sword. The sword, one, is that the governmental officials or the governments are established by citizens who have a choice and do so upon reflection. When there’s no choice, with the districting circumstances and the tenure circumstances, democratic accountability becomes very hard to put into effect.

So I’m arguing that we need more flow-through in the system and that the races at all levels need to be more competitive. That suggests a certain giving up of power by political parties, principally legislative parties, who win elections and then, every ten years on the census, get to draw boundaries that make races non-competitive. This is a sickness in our society.

On the other hand, it’s like prostate cancer; it’s long-acting, and you may die of something else before you die of prostate cancer, because it’s been around since about 1812, when the term “gerrymander” came into being, named after Governor Gerry or someone, back in the eastern states, New Jersey or someplace—you’d think it would be New Jersey.26 (DePue laughs) Some guy came into his office and drew it like a salamander, he said; so that’s

26 The word “gerrymander” was a combination of “salamander” and the last name of Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed into law a redistricting plan designed to benefit his political party. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/the-twisted-history-of-gerrymandering-in-american- politics/262369/)

453 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

where gerrymander came from. Well, like I say, it’s been around a long time, but that doesn’t make it right.

DePue: Well, I wasn’t expecting a discourse on gerrymandering, but I find it interesting because…Well, here’s my thoughts on it. I rarely like to do this, but what we’re talking about now, what you’re discussing, is very much part of human nature, which is exactly why we ended up with the type of divided balance government that was designed in the first place. Maybe they didn’t foresee the machinations of it. But would you say that our founders had a good sense of human nature, the avariciousness and the ambition of it?

Borling: Well, that’s Franklin again; that’s Franklin’s quote. I would say, yes. I would say they were broadly steeped in the writings of Montesquieu and anticipatory of Mill, certainly Locke was there.27, 28, 29

Recall, these are people who would sit around at night, the Adams, conversing in Greek or Latin, John and Abigail Adams talking. They didn’t have TV; they didn’t even have Downton Abbey30 for god sakes. They would be discussing the primal forces of the day. The society was new enough and malleable enough, small enough, that these big issues could move on the backs of relatively few folks—the oligarchs if you will—and try to create a more perfect union.

They didn’t do badly, and we’ve not done badly, when it’s all said and done, despite the venality—the term I use—or the vagaries of the human condition and all of the scandals over time, when we ricochet from one governmental scandal to another, rivaled only by church scandals, rivaled only by, I think, family squabbles at the micro level.

So, what’s that line from The King and I?31 “It’s a puzzlement, (DePue laughs) and it’s a wonder.” I just want the wonder to be able to go on. I think that we need to do a little tuck pointing, a lot of tuck pointing, from time to

27 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, and political philosopher, famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montesquieu) 28 John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, political economist, and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory and political economy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill) 29 John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke) 30 Downton Abbey is a British historical period drama television series set in the early 20th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downton_Abbey) 31 The King and I is a Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical, based in turn on the novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, which was based on the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, who became school teacher to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_I_(1956_film)

454 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

time, but beware reformists. Ho, ho, ho, reformists have driven us down lines and pathways from which we are still trying to recover.

DePue: Well, let me use that as a segue back to the discussion of the demise of the Soviet Empire, which gave opportunity for reformists to look at things like downsizing the military to find that peace dividend. My question for you though—for you and again, your colleagues at the time—what did you envision as the new threat, or was it still the old threat?

Borling: Oh, no; we had to invent a new threat. That’s part of the job of the military, because that’s how you defend budgets in the Congress. In fact, even in the Cold War we invented a threat, which was a Russia prepared, poised, willing to attack through the Fulda Gap, with forty-eight hours or less notice.32

DePue: That’s an easy argument to make when you’re looking at the number of tanks and artillery and troops and divisions that they had versus ours.

Borling: Except that they’re a combined-arms army by doctrine and that, while they may have been positioned for a blitzkrieg, with respect to their German positions and encampments, they certainly weren’t equipped to do so with the Germans. And Czechoslovakia was so ill-equipped and manned as to make the thrust, a single thrust, a dagger-like thrust, into the heart of Eastern Europe through multiple axes, but the Fulda Gap being the most famous.

Then the whole question of the reliability of the Warsaw Pact allies came into mind. From a Checkmate standpoint, we assessed that they were a noisy, but not a particularly immediately bellicose group with which to deal. But boy, it made for great theater in the Congress.

DePue: So what did John Borling think the threat was at that time, in ’91, let’s say, prior to the time of the Gulf War?

Borling: You’re going to have to go back just a little bit, because in the ‘80s, where I acknowledge that the capacities for conflict existed, and if mistakes were made and events started to control events, then in fact, superpowers could lurch one to another. I didn’t really see the superpowers getting into it—in fact, I saw them trying to avoid getting into it—and thought that the world, notwithstanding the occasional flare-up here, the flare-up there, was going to be fairly benign.

Our concerns were access to areas where resources that we needed to continue the economic growth of the country. So the Mid-East, in all its various permutations and combinations, was of interest and of concern. I

32 The Fulda Gap is an area between the Hesse-Thuringian border and Frankfurt am Main that contains two corridors of lowlands. During the Cold War, the Fulda Gap was one of two obvious routes for a hypothetical Soviet tank attack on West Germany from Eastern Europe, especially East Germany. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap)

455 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

thought that we were spending a lot of money and military effort on what I’ll call societal issues: the drug war, not dealing very effectively with illegal immigration, protection of our own borders, not the stuff you would be out using nuclear weapons on necessarily, mildly aware that political Islam was beginning to rear its head again.

If certain Arab and Persian leaders had not become troublesome, I think we were perfectly content to let them manhandle their own people and keep the Sunni-Shiite tensions at bay. I think there was a good deal of denial that it could never happen in Europe again. It can always happen in Europe again.

The Balkans were going to pop, as the Balkans always do pop, every fifteen, twenty years, whether we want them to pop or not. Africa is hopeless, continues to be hopeless, with the exception of a very few states. South America has potential to launch itself in a greater hemispheric circumstance, but gets held back by the venality of their own political systems. Australia is fun. New Zealand’s better. [I] don’t think we’re going to fight any of them. Southeast Asia, god, Vietnam is wonderful. We fought over there with such fierceness, for correct reasons, in my judgment. It came out badly for a while, and now it’s turned to the positive side of the ledger.

DePue: How about their neighbor to the north? Again, this would be in 1990.

Borling: You’re asking me to do a geopolitical tour de force. As many times as I’ve visited China, I always come away from China knowing more before I go. Truly, it is the Churchill mystery wrapped in a riddle, enclosed in enigma, or whatever that phrase was from Fulton, Missouri, except they too have that damnably disturbing sense that they are pragmatically superior to everyone else in the world, and there’s a lot of them.33 Much like the rabbits being chased by the fox, they say, “Well should we continue to run, or should we just stay here and out-populate them?”

I think quantity has a quality of its own, and both China and India are having that mark. They’re generally able, notwithstanding terrible pollution problems—India now worse than China—to effect weight on the world. Whether or not they can hold it together with a centralized system, or semi- centralized system, deserves real analysis.

I think that the fly-apart factors in the Chinese society may well become unmanageable. Then the question, “Will they turn to an external

33 Within the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, is this statement made by Winston Churchill in a 1939 radio broadcast: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/riddle_wrapped_up_in_an_enigma)

456 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

enemy to deal with internal forces?” which is an old trick that despots have used for a long time.

DePue: They wouldn’t be the only one trying that trick.

Borling: Yeah, and their rapprochement with Russia, with some of these economic deals, is troublesome. Of Russia and China, I really don’t see it happening. I think these are bedfellows of a moment and bedfellows of a common nature. China holds so much United States debt that they’d have to be very careful to not…They’ve always tried not to “interfere” in other nations’ affairs, necessarily, while they’re interfering all the damn time.

But, I don’t think we’re going to fight China in the next…quarter century. The difficulty, of course, is preparing for the unknown, and that can be threatening.

The thing that the Chinese lacked that the Russians had was a pretty good sense of self-deprecating humor. The Russians could laugh at themselves. The Chinese are unable to laugh at themselves. They are either so insecure or so prideful in the chrysanthemum kingdom, that such an effort is unthinkable. That’s worrisome geopolitically, really worrisome, because unless you can poke fun at yourself, you don’t have a balance or a sense of confidence that will help you in the longer run. At least I think so.

DePue: One of the areas of the world that you haven’t addressed directly in this whole scenario—again, we’re talking about what’s the new threat—is Israel. Not that Israel was a threat, but its existence perhaps posed a threat. Was that part of the equation at that time?

Borling: It was lumped in with the Mid-East. If people said right now, should we go to war over Israel, or in support of Israel? I guess I would say that that broaches on vital interests for us and moral responsibility, and yes, we should back Israel. I think we would do so with a consortium of others that would sit it out, if not support it. At the moment that would be Egypt and Jordan and…At the moment that would be Egypt and Jordan…maybe Saudi Arabia backhanded and some of the other folks.

You know, the Palestinian problem is more of a problem for the Arab nations than it is for anybody else. They could use it to whip up the horses. But Israel made a major mistake when they gave back Gaza. They never should have done that. Gaza was thriving; it was wonderful. Now it’s a rat hole, not the least of which is it’s been bombed a lot, because it should be.

Whether or not Japan adopts a new militarism, I don’t see it. And I am mystified why the world does not take action—with Chinese help—against that fat little bastard [Kim Jong-un] in North Korea. Why are we waiting for what, to me, seems to be the inevitable.

457 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: The inevitable that the country implodes?

Borling: No, no, the inevitable. I think well before it implodes, it will explode outward. Given enough capability, they can cause substantial agony, even in death throes. The councils of war suggest you can use nuclear weapons in defense, and surely they—like most nations that want to do this—would go to war over “somebody did something to us” and so external enemy; God knows words count.

But I think that to—absent Chinese support—try to put an army in the field and to support it for very long, is not logistically within their capability. I do worry about the few nuclear weapons that they may have. There would be horrendous damage in South Korea; South Korea worries about that. So the question is, can you contain them, and can you wait for them to inevitably fail?

DePue: We got into this discussion on strategic threats in the world, because in those early days of the 1990s, suddenly the main strategic threat that had been guiding American policy for four decades or so had disappeared. Does that suggest that this was a period of instability or uncertainty, as far as people in your profession were concerned?

Borling: When forces suck out of the game, if you will, other forces suck into the game and achieve prominence. That’s, I think, in large measure why the Mid-East thing kind of bubbled up and continues to bubble up, now with the resurgent Russia coming back.

But look, this isn’t meant to be a geopolitical analysis by John Borling. This is kind of talking memoirs. Conflict is the norm, peace much sought, people just wanting to be left alone. John Q. Public, Thornton Wilder, was it Wilder, was it Oscar Wilde, or I don’t know. Who did The Skin of Our Teeth? Oscar Wilde? Thornton Wilder?34

John Q. Public comes home from the war—he’s all beat to crap—and drags himself in the door. The survivors come out from the thing, and he’s sitting there with his head down. They say, well great, great, now we can do this, and now we can do that, and march with flags, and set up this and have a better that. He shakes his head; he said, “You know, in war you hope for a better life, and in peace you look for a comfortable one.” So we have these periods of comfort, brief interregna, is that…An interregnum is a brief period. What’s the plural of interregnum?

DePue: I’d go with gna.

34 The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder, a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. (http://www.twildersociety.org/works/the-skin-of-our-teeth/)

458 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Interregna of peace between the normal periods of conflict.

DePue: Well, let’s focus on the—

Borling: How gruesome.

DePue: I’m sorry?

Borling: How gruesome a thought, how real?

DePue: Let’s talk about a couple of those dust-ups, if you will. Let’s start with Panama, December of 1989. Did you have any involvement with Just Cause— that was the name of it—Just Cause?35

Borling: Boy, did we. There was an ice storm that night that hit the East Coast. I had launched…oh, two-thirds of the United States’ tanker force, to position it to support the push to Panama, had some recce and some other things going, and we were monitoring this—

DePue: Recce meaning reconnaissance.

Borling: Reconnaissance, yeah…for the push. They’ll spin-up to this and over secure lines and all. Once again, I’m in the command post and running the operation. The TAC DO [Treatment Action Campaign Director of Operations] is on the line and MAC DO [Military Airlift Command Director of Operations] is on the line; I’m on the line, working the matters.

Meanwhile, they’re pushing out of [Fort] Bragg, and they’re pushing out of other locations. We’re using the Stealth [aircraft] 117 for the first time. I thought it was kind of strange that we were going to do that. I was going to go down and hit some early targets. We were going to airdrop in; we’re going to get Noriega; we’re going to do all this stuff.36 The routes are going to fly down south, and then we’re going to lose altitude with all the attack force and duck under the radar at Cuba and then climb back up and continue on, so that we can have the element of surprise.

Well, the Navy was kind of pissed that they didn’t have a bigger hand in all of this, so they positioned a carrier in that gap, right in the Cuban gap, and put up fighter CAP [Combat Air Patrol], (both laugh) without

35 Between mid-December 1989 and late January 1990—ten years after the Torrijos-Carter Treaties were ratified, transferring control of the Panama Canal from the U.S. to Panama—the United States Invasion of Panama, codenamed Operation Just Cause, took place. During the invasion, de facto Panamanian leader, Manuel Noriega was deposed, president-elect Guillermo Endara was sworn into office, and the Panamanian Defense Force was dissolved. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Panama) 36 Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno was a Panamanian politician and military officer who was the de facto ruler of Panama from 1983 to 1989. He had longstanding ties to United States intelligence agencies; however, he was removed from power by the U.S. invasion of Panama. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega)

459 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

coordinating it with anybody. So that blew that. The element of surprise was lost.

But the biggest surprise for Just Cause was…As I’m talking to, as we did, to the MAC DO, basically the call was, “I don’t know how you did it, John, but thanks so much for the flexibility. You know, the whole push has been slowed down,” whatever it was, “two or three hours, because of the ice storm on the East Coast.” He said, “Thanks for delaying the tankers.” I said, “Hang on a minute,” and I turned to my tanker cells. I said, “Have we delayed the tankers two or three hours?” I said, “I haven’t heard anything about that.” They said, “No, they’re out. They’re on station, waiting for the push.” I said, “Just a minute.” I said, “We didn’t delay the tankers.” There’s this stunned silence. He said, “We sent you a message saying, ‘Delay the tankers.’” I said, “You didn’t call me and tell me to delay the tankers?” I said, “What’s the date, time group on the message?” Now there’s a pause on his end. He comes back and says, “Jesus, we never sent the message.” (both laugh) And he said, “But the whole force is delayed like three hours.” Well, you’ve got your tankers up there with so much gas. He said, “What are we going to do?” (laughs) I said, “What do you mean? What am I going to do?” I said, “Hang on.”

Meanwhile, so we’ve got Mike Ryan on the phone, soon-to-be chief of staff, and Mike’s attack is he’s got the fighters. He said, “I’ve held the fighters, but we’ve got these other fighters in the air. We’ve got the 117s coming down from…” I think they forward deployed them from Tonopah, but they were flying the 117s. Everybody’s on hold; everything’s getting jacked around.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my tankers out there; I’ve got the recce already gone, and I’m saying, “Hang on.” I turn to my tanker guys, and I’ve already got a plan in my mind. My plan is well, fuck it, I’ll just degrade the SIOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan]. We won’t have nuclear war capability tonight, because I have 235 tankers on alert, on alert. The crews are there; I’ve got the tankers there.

The fact is that I won’t have the ability to launch the SIOP, and there’s only two people who can degrade the SIOP. That’s General Chain…Well, they can do it higher, but really, General Chain and me. So I’m perfectly willing to do that. I’m pretty comfortable that I can cover this, but I turn to my tanker guys, and I said, “Massive cock-up.” I said, “We need to do this with about eighty tankers, ninety tankers,” you know, rough order of magnitude, in terms of staying power, in terms of this and that. I said, “What can we do?”

My wise tanker cell commander—I forgot his name—said, “We rat holed a few tankers.” (both laugh) I said, “How many did you rat hole?” He said, “About ninety.” Which took every other tanker we had, every. I said, “Can we crew them up? Can we slingshot them?” He said, “We can work the

460 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

problem.” He said, “We’ll make sure that when they come through, that we’ve got stuff and we got gas, and we’ll push stuff out.” I could have kissed the guy.

I called—I forget his name, I used to know it. He got fired—and I said, “We got it covered.” I said, “Let us know when the launch time is, the new launch time.” It was going to slip too; we knew that. Mike said, “Yeah, we got this, and we got you covered.” We hung up.

I had such great respect for the planning expertise of the colonel and his guys, a crew of about ten people who, absent their operational savvy, the whole thing in Panama would have crumped. People would have got there, would have run out of gas mid-Caribbean; we’d have to bingo all over the damn place.

DePue: Here’s a real ignorant question on my part. Does that mean that the tankers couldn’t refuel themselves?

Borling: Not all the tankers have that capability, although the Christine tankers could, and we in fact used some of that, where refuelable tankers did that, but that’s a very small percentage of the force. We had tankers scattered all over hell’s half-acre that night.

SIOP was not degraded. As you know, they were waiting for us because of bad radio communications and the Navy thing, and a lot of people got killed—special forces that went in early—even though the 117s hit some places that they should and one places or a couple places they shouldn’t, as I recall. I may be off there. But it was a pretty good, normal, cocked-up military operation where a lot of things went right, and a lot of things went wrong. In the end, the guys at the point of the spear adapted, took some losses, but got the job done.

You’ll recall that we finally got Noriega out by playing loud music at the Vatican rest home or whatever it was or mansion. Don’t think noise can’t be a weapon. I’ve stood in a chamber at Wright-Patterson. You want to torture somebody easy? All you got to do is put the right high-frequency stuff in. When the hair stands up, and then the pain starts. Not very fancy stuff, it’s just high-frequency noise. You can make it painful beyond belief. I don’t know if we did that, but I’m sure we had a variation on the theme. So that was Panama and Just Cause. I remember that, and I was really proud of the SAC guys.

DePue: And it was good practice for the next one to come, perhaps.

Borling: Oh yeah, the next one, which was Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Desert Storm I. I was at Harvard when it started.

DePue: August 2, 1990, is when Iraq decided to invade Kuwait. It wasn’t too much longer that, I think, the president came out and the Department of Defense

461 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

was going to call it Operation Desert Shield and start deploying troops to Saudi Arabia. Can you pick it up from there?

Borling: I’ll pick it up before then. Saddam [Hussein] invaded, took Kuwait, in a matter of what, a day, a day and a half, something like that?37

DePue: Not a big country.

Borling: And stopped at the Saudi border. Now, this is supposition, but I’m on the phone talking to my deputy, back at SAC. I’m at a big school, the JFK School, very hard to get to, executive education, run by one of my White House Fellow classmates, Roger Porter, the JFK School.38 We had, at Diego Garcia, three B-52s and some tankers at Kadena [Air Base].39 And we flew sorties within thirty-six hours, in coordination with the National Command Authority, up the [Persian] Gulf and across the Kuwait line and back down, so they would know that we had B-52s in the area.

DePue: The B-52s were stationed at Diego Garcia?

Borling: We had them there on deployment, just happenstance.

DePue: Which is just a spot in the middle of the ocean, is it not?

Borling: A spot in the middle of the ocean, built by another one of my White House Fellow colleagues, Robbie Robinson, Captain, United States Navy, who built Diego Garcia, and who, by the way, later went to work for Ross Perot and built that corporate complex in Plano, Texas.40 (DePue laughs) Robbie’s a very talented guy, worked for HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development].

We had a great class at White House Fellows. Robbie worked for Carla Hills at Housing and Urban Development. Roger worked for Bill Simon at Treasury. I was with the Council to the President in foreign policy, so a very, very talented class of White House Fellows, all of whom are now in play as this thing is happening.

37 Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein) 38 The John F. Kennedy School of Government (also known as Harvard Kennedy School and HKS) is a public policy and public administration school of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_School_of_Government) 39 Diego Garcia is an atoll just south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean, and the largest of 60 small islands comprising the Chagos Archipelago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia) 40 Henry Ross Perot is an American business magnate and former politician. As the founder of the successful Electronic Data Systems Corporation, he became a billionaire. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot)

462 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Then Saddam stopped. Démarche, démarches back and forth are flying.41 The first assets in theater are SAC assets, both tankers and these bombers.42 We flew them a few times to make sure that they were—and announced—that they were there.

I get back to Omaha, and we are in the throes of generating forces to move to Saudi Arabia, and other places, to offer and build the coalition. Now, a long period of time takes place, four or five months, as I recall.

DePue: For the deployment, yeah. The war started…January 12th, Congress authorizes use of military. January 17th is the beginning of Desert Storm, and of course, that’s when the air war starts.

Borling: Yeah, but when did the build up again go? It was the summer.

DePue: It was the fall, the fall of 1990.

Borling: Okay. But a three-, four-, five-month period.

DePue: Right.

Borling: Well, what we did was we set up what we called the original Desert Express with the tankers, and they were bulk loaded, but we were moving forces into theater. This is where, again, where MAC, TAC and SAC, the DOs, we talked daily, because MAC was working the transportation command thing and air mobility command. But we were faster on our feet, because I could task tankers and send tankers and crews directly into theater. We would pick up stuff that didn’t work, tip fit all kinds of things, either troops or supplies.

DePue: MAC being?

Borling: Military Airlift Command, Transportation Command, Military Airlift Command.

DePue: Which would include control of civilian aircraft to transport?

Borling: They would have CRAF [Civil Reserve Air Fleet], and they would have the C-17s and C-5s and C-141s and that kind of stuff. TAC wanted to move their fighters, and we wanted to move some bombers. But anyway, so we were all using our resources.

41 Démarche, a word coined by the diplomatic community, refers to a strongly worded warning by one country to another and often, either explicitly or implicitly, with the threat of military consequence. (http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/D/Demarche.aspx) 42 In warfare, a theater or theatre is an area or place in which important military events occur or are progressing. A theater can include the entirety of the airspace, land and sea area that is or that may potentially become involved in war operations. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theater_(warfare)

463 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

We probably weren’t as centrally efficient as we could be, but by golly, in the early days, if you needed some tires, Mike Ryan would call me up and say, “We need nose gear tires at Khamis Mushait.” I’d say, “Where are they?” He’d say, “They’re at San Antonio.” So I’d send a tanker to San Antonio. They’d have the nose gear tires. We’d move him on to Europe and then on to the Mid-East; he’d land at Khamis Mushait.

Once again, my tanker guys are working this kind of one-off. It was, you go there; you go there. It was very much sandlot football for a while, until the Transportation Command got into the game, not only air, but sea. You want to close your sea locks, because a single ship can carry as much as a whole week’s of air thing. But when you need the air you’ve got it, and when you need the nose wheel tires or the O-rings, call Borling, because he’s got all the tankers, and we can…Go out, turn left, and we’ll throw you a pass. (DePue laughs)

It may not have been the most efficient thing in the world; we called it Desert Express. And then H.T. Johnson, who was the head of Transportation Command, took over with the big MAC, and they took the title Desert Express away from us. But we were there first.

Then I sent one of my two-stars, Pat Caruana, over to be the SAC liaison in theater. Basically, he had control of everything we sent over. We just chopped it to Schwarzkopf and his staff once it got there.43 We didn’t do the SAC thing, where we would direct it from Omaha, except the recce, the U- 2s and the SR-71s and that kind of thing.

Do we still have the SRs? No. SRs had gone down six months prior, and boy, did we really need them. I tried to bring them back and couldn’t, even though I had one of the last flights in the SR-71, trying to be “expert” in the system, trying to fight to keep it. I managed to keep three for NASA; I gave them to Sean O’Keefe.44

DePue: Tell me a little bit more about the SR.

Borling: The SR-71 is the Blackbird, the recce platform, the high, fast flyer, the sled, the habu. We had taken it off of active role six months prior, and I’d gone crazy. I’d gone back channel to the Congress. Larry Welsh was the chief of staff; he made the decision, and I thought it was the wrong decision. Then I

43 General H. Norman Schwarzkopf commanded the American-led forces that crushed Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and became the nation's most acclaimed military hero since the mid-century exploits of Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/us/gen-h-norman- schwarzkopf-us-commander-in-gulf-war-dies-at-78.html) 44 Sean Charles O'Keefe is the university professor at Syracuse University Maxwell School, former chairman of Airbus Group, Inc., former Secretary of the Navy, former Administrator of NASA, and former chancellor of Louisiana State University. He is also a former member of the board of directors of DuPont. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_O%27Keefe)

464 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

tried to bring them back, and the Pentagon rolled us. He said it would take $150 million and six months.

I said, “I can do it for $2 or $3 million, and I’ve got the crews who were current six months ago in this airplane. I can bring them back, and we can be in the air in a couple weeks.

DePue: Is that part of that peace dividend kind of analogy?

Borling: Exactly, exactly. And we ate $1 billion worth of spare parts, a $1 billion that we just bought. (curses under his breath) Anyway, so it went down. Then I have to take a break, so hang on just a second.

(pause in recording)

DePue: We’re back at it here, General.

Borling: I want to make sure I don’t do a Brian Williams thing and inflate this too much.45 The day the war kicked off, or the night the war kicked off—

DePue: The air war or the ground war?

Borling: The air war. We had positioned some airplanes from Minot, down to Barksdale, where there was a black missile, which was called a black ALCM. [Air Launch Cruise Missile] It was a conventional air launch cruise missile, and this had impacts on START and other things. No one knew we had a conventional ALCM. They thought they were nuke. Now, why this was all that sensitive, I don’t know, but it was.

So, we parked them at Barksdale, and we put them on alert and had crews down there who were briefed to hit certain targets to help be part of starting the air war.

Our guy in Riyadh, Pat Caruana, was not aware of this eventuality, but the DO, the director of operations for Schwarzkopf, was…His name was Burt Moore, a very good friend. The problem was that when the war was going to start, we needed to launch these B-52s well in advance of the official start of the war because they had to go across the ocean, and they had to show up and help start the war on time, coordinated with the other strikes that were going to be going in. We also had tankers positioned so that they could support the B-52s going across. All this was done surreptitiously.

Well, the orders to launch came, or the fact that the war was going start at a certain day at a certain time, came, as I recall, by courier with guard

45 Brian Williams was an NBC news anchor whose credibility plummeted after he acknowledged exaggerating his role in a helicopter episode in Iraq. He was suspended and has not returned to his former position with the network. (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/business/media/brian-williams-suspended-by-nbc-news-for- six-months.html)

465 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

and manacle thing on his wrist. We didn’t trust the most secure systems we had. There were a couple of us who knew about it, me and General Chain and the intel guy and one other person, I think. Oh, I was told…Yeah, that’s right. …No, that was for Panama.

There was one time I had a…I forget which incident this was, that I had a conversation with the J3 off of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, name was Kelly as I remember, a three-star, a red haired guy, excitable Army general. He told me once, over the most secure phone channel we had—I forget what operation it was—he said that we need to have these tankers, and I thought he had some bombers too.

He said, “But don’t tell anybody.” (DePue laughs) I said, “Well, I’ve got to tell a couple people.” I said, “Can I tell the pilots?” He said, “Yeah, you can tell the pilots.” I said, “Well, how about the copilots?” He said, “Okay, you can tell the copilots.” I said, “And the navigators?” He said, “Yeah, you can tell the navigators.” I said, “How about 300 or 400 maintenance people, who’ve got to generate the airplanes?” (both laugh) I said, “How about the chow hall that’s got to be open?” He finally just said, “Just do it the best you can,” and hung up. Anyway, so I’ve got all this stuff going on. I don’t know if that was for Just Cause or if that was for this one, but anyway, I suspect it was Just Cause.

So, the thing’s going down. I know the time it’s supposed to go, and I know what time I’ve got to launch the airplanes. We’ve got a special method of getting them out with no notification to anybody, except the citizens of Shreveport, that we’re going to go out over their heads in the middle of the night with six or eight B-52s, however many. (both laugh)

DePue: Kind of hard to hide that.

Borling: Yeah, I know, yeah. But maybe they won’t hear us. (laughs)

No one picked up the fact that they were sitting out there on alert with these missiles on them. So that was pretty good operational security. We were rotating crews back and forth. I had, at that time I thought, my best colonel in the lead, B-52, as mission commander. I think it was six, now that I think about it, or it may have been eight, but six comes to mind.

We’re coming up on launch time, and I haven’t got a “go” out of Riyadh. So I call Riyadh, and I’m trying to get to my friend Burt. Well, I have had a hell of a time getting through. I finally get through; this is…I’ve got maybe two hours to launch or something like that. I said, “Burt, this is John.” I said…By the way, there’s no authentication at this point. You’ve got to know the guy’s voice. (laughs) “Burt, this is John; this is the Vike.” I said, “Where are we?” He said, “I can’t talk; I can’t talk,” and he hung up. I said, “Holy shit!”

466 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

So now I called back, couldn’t get through; the lines were shot. I’m looking at my watch. I’ve got to move people to the airplane. I move people to the airplane. Still can’t get through. It comes time to start engines; I start engines. Comes time to launch; I’ve got no authorization. This is the middle of the night. I said, “Launch.” So they took off.

The next time, I could talk to these guys, but I didn’t want to until they’d coasted out and were over international airspace over the water. They went blind and blacked out from that point until they got to a certain coast-out point, which we worked with FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], radio silent, and now they’re out to sea.

I had a brief call, which said basically, Press on. That was the call. It was Jack; that was the guy with all the OPs and everything else, no special call signs of Uniform Victor or Sixty-four. Jack, this is Vike, press. So he pressed.

The next time, prearranged, was when they coasted into Gibraltar. The tankers were positioned out of the Azores and stuff. When they coasted in at Gibraltar, I still hadn’t heard anything. They coast into Gibraltar, and I said, “Jack, call me before you go feet dry.”46 He said, “Right.”

Feet dry is over Egypt. So, he’s flying down the bed now, with his B- 52s again, not talking to anybody, no International Aircraft Control, nobody. He coasts in, between Alexandria and the Libyan border, flies outside Libya. Now, I’m—

DePue: You could start the war all by yourself.

Borling: Yeah, obviously, Jesus, what’s going on? And if you were watching it on TV, I forget the guy, Bernie Kalb, or whatever his name was.

DePue: Bernard Kalb.

Borling: The black journalist, yeah.

DePue: Who was in…I think he was in Baghdad at the time.

Borling: Baghdad. He’s on the balcony up there with the guy, and it’s night, and they’re talking, “Well, we think things are going to happen.”

Anyway, so Jack is coasting, just about ready to coast in at Egypt. The phone rings, and it’s Burt. (both laugh) He said, “Vike, did you launch them?”

46 Feet Dry is a U.S. Navy term describing flight position "over-land." (https://sierrahotel.net/pages/aviation- slang-pilot-slang)

467 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I said, “Yes.” He said, “Good” and hung up (laughs) or, “Go.” “It’s a go” or something like that and hung up.

DePue: But that’s hours after you’d launched already.

Borling: I know, this is a long, long time. I’m down there, and Jack is coming in. I told him what we’re doing. He said, “You got it.” I was going to have to do something, and I didn’t have any tankers. I couldn’t do anything at that point to hold them. So, I was going to have to bingo them someplace to abort them. Actually, I did have some tankers, because we never landed them.

So anyway, they hit; they penetrate Egypt. Now they get into Egypt. Egyptian military and air traffic control come up and want to know, who the hell are you? They said, “Well, we’re delta echo flight, and we’re on a training mission.” They said, “We don’t have any record of a training mission coming through.” They said, “You must land, and we’re going to take over your airplanes.”

So Jack starts bullshitting them over the phone. Well, we’ve got a mission down at so and so, we’re going to drop practice ordinance at…There’s a range, right on the Red Sea. They’re tracking them with SA-2 missiles. They say they’re going to launch fighters to force them down. And Jack basically bullshits his way through Egypt.

DePue: But Sir, they’re part of the coalition that was supposed to be part of this whole operation.

Borling: Now. I think they were doing it because of the…I don’t have all the details on that. My recollection of that is, I wasn’t with them, but Jack had to talk his way through Egypt.

They hit the Red Sea, and now they’re penetrating into Saudi Arabia, north of Jeddah, where they’re going to turn north and shoot the missiles to start the war. As they get into the Red Sea, now they call up Saudi air traffic control, who’s monitoring the war. There was no surprise. Again, the com channels are alive with stuff. But my flight of six, as I recall, calls in with Jack, and they deny them entry into Saudi air space, because the war’s starting. (both laugh)

Jack said, “I know. We’re here to start it,” or something to that effect. They break north, shoot the missiles, and then the fighters are going north, everyone…It’s the big start of the air war. When that thing explodes, because they know what the targeting aspect is, Kalb and company, said, “My God, the war’s starting.” I’m sitting there watching it on TV like everybody else. We get another call from Jack, who has an easier time getting through Egypt this next time. We get tankers on him in the Eastern Med [Mediterranean], and we bring them all the way home to Barksdale, undetected, nobody.

468 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

So Jack lands, and we’re all happy. But it’s still a clandestine mission, until Senator Bennett Johnson from Louisiana gets on the TV, either that day or the next day, and said, (uses a Southern accent) “I’m so proud of my boys at Barksdale, shootin’ their secret missiles and startin’ the war.” (laughs)

DePue: Well, I was going to ask—I’m sure you’d mentioned it before—the ordnance was JDAM?

Borling: No, JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munition] didn’t exist at that time. This was in ALCM, air launch cruise missile, but with a conventional warhead.

DePue: What was the standoff distance from the border of Iraq when you launched those?

Borling: I don’t have that data any more.

DePue: It’s probably classified anyway.

Borling: It wasn’t as far as you might think. The guys had to go into harm’s way, and they were on their own, no fighter cover, nothing. Now, there was fighter cover up as part of this deal, but we were a secret mission; we were kind of on our own. We were secret for about twenty-four hours until Senator Bennett Johnson got on the line and started touting about his boys and the secret missiles.

DePue: Not so secret anymore. (laughs)

Borling: Not so secret anymore.

DePue: I’m curious though; weren’t there also Naval-launched cruise missiles about the same time?

Borling: Tomahawks?

DePue: Yeah.

Borling: Tomahawks were launched; we threw the kitchen sink at them that night.

DePue: And was the initial set of targets primarily air defense systems?

Borling: Command and control, air defense, and electricity. Checkmate helped with the electricity targets, a guy by the name of John Warden. I talked to John when… In fact, I’d gone back to Checkmate, as an old Checkmater, and didn’t have any input. Well, I had some input, obviously, but I don’t think…They were doing what I thought I would have recommended. So, it was just a collegial thing, as we were going through and working the target.

469 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Checkmate was working a lot of the target structure. We’ve always argued, put them in the dark; put them in the cold. It’s just good targeting sense. Don’t worry about hitting that particular node; hit the node that supports that node, and that’s what we did.

We also would have liked to have been more aggressive with some target categories that I will not mention, because lots of people would have died.

DePue: Your story—

Borling: It’s typical.

DePue: It illustrates the challenges that a coalition of forces had to coordinate activities among themselves.

Borling: Oh yeah, it wasn’t just the U.S. stuff, yeah.

DePue: I think one of the innovations during the Reagan—

Borling: That was, by the way, the longest combat mission flown at that time, actual combat mission, flown at that time. I think it’s been exceeded now by B-2s.

DePue: Going to Afghanistan maybe.

Borling: I had flown a mission that had gone from Minot—this was a training mission, in practice—from Minot to—in fact, this is when I was the division commander—to Egypt and back to Minot, which at that time was the longest…and dropped bombs, practice bombs, on the range in Egypt. That was the longest combat mission.

The funny thing about that mission is we’ve got the pilot, the copilot; we’ve got another pilot; we’ve got me. There’s very narrow bunks in the B- 52. I guess we didn’t have another pilot, just me and a crew chief. Anyway, we had another pilot.

So, we’d fly, and then someone would sleep, and then someone would get up and fly, and then someone would go back and sleep. It’s physically demanding to fly these, and you were in formation with other…and you were refueling. Anyway, I’m in the left seat, flying, and we’re back, maybe mid- Atlantic, coming back into Minot. Now everybody’s asleep except me and the crew chief, who’s in the right seat. (laughs)

We’re flying along; all of a sudden the fire light comes on. I look out, and the far outboard engine’s on fire. So we go through the drill of isolating the thing and turning on the fire bottle and all that stuff, and it’s still burning out there. Well, the other AC, the aircraft commander, the real guy, gets up. He looks out and he goes, (yawns) “Yeah, it’s burning.” (both laugh) I said—

470 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

you know, I’m the General—“What are we going to do?” We can’t eject. He says, “It will burn off and drop into the ocean.” And it did. It burned off through the pylon and dropped into the ocean.

So, we’re flying along, and we’ve got a few hours to go. I said, “I assume we’re going to land at Pease or someplace on the way,” and we’re down to seven engines. He said, “Why?” I said, “Well, we just had an engine burn off the wing; we might have wing damage.” He said, “Ah, it happens from time to time.” (both laugh) Okay. So, we flew back to Minot. (laughs)

I wasn’t frightened; I was surprised. Once the guy said, “Yeah, yeah. I’m going back to sleep,” the crew chief. So, we flew a while, seven engines. Maybe it was not quite as blasé as I’ve made it, (DePue laughs) but it was pretty blasé; I’ll tell you. That was another story.

Anyway, the air war had all went very well, and Desert Shield…I think this is right about the time (sighs)…Anyway, that’s how I remember it; I’m reaching back on timelines.

DePue: I would think that the air war was a week or two long, and then the ground war, the ground phase, was very short, 100 hours or something like that.

Borling: Yeah. How long the air war went on?

DePue: A couple weeks, maybe not even that long.

Borling: Yeah. And then it was just in that time that I was moving to Washington, as well, to go be the XO for the command. That’s when we kind of made a left turn career-wise. I went in and in briefed, and then General McPeak had come in and took over and did away with my job. I ended up in ops requirements, a new position, and it was disappointing, because I knew I was being positioned to be XO of the Air Force and get a third star, and all of that evaporated with the new chief of staff. He and I had never gotten along that well.

DePue: Who was that?

Borling: General [Merrill “Tony”] McPeak. He had a tough job. He had a lot of downsizing to do and reductions in force. But that’s another story for another time.

Let me go back to one more story about the DO. Are you sure I haven’t relayed a story about General LeMay’s flyby?

DePue: You might have, but we’ve been at this for a while, and it’s extended back into 2013 when we started.

Borling: Well, I don’t know. Anyway, General LeMay died, probably ’90, I would think.

471 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: In 1990?

Borling: Nineteen-ninety, I think he died. He had been out at SAC a number of times, under General Chain’s tutelage. General Chain was the first guy strong enough, I think, as a CINC, to bring General LeMay back. LeMay and I’d gotten close after I fixed his coffee machine one day—that’s another story— when I was a young one-star. He told me once. He said, “Borling,” when I got to be DO. He said, “Remember, the business of SAC is tankers,” he said, “and don’t you forget it.” I said, “Gotcha,” because that’s how we project power.

When LeMay died, Jack Chain was going to give the eulogy at the academy where LeMay is buried. There was a great story about LeMay when he was chief of staff, when I was a cadet at the academy at Doolie. General Stone called him up and told him that we had just achieved a first. We’d gotten our first Rhodes Scholar out of the academy or second or whatever or we got two Rhodes Scholars. General LeMay growled back, “How many tackles have you got?” (both laugh)

Jack Chain said, “Hey, set up the flyby for General LeMay at the academy.” Well, there was a policy in the Air Force at that time, and I forget what it was, but it basically [was] that flybys were severely restricted for deceased general officers. You could only do a very limited thing, or you couldn’t do anything at all.

Anyway, I call up the secretary of the Air Force’s office, or maybe I had to call a J3 guy again; I don’t know. 47 I called a couple people, and I said “Hey, we want to do a flyby for General LeMay.” I was basically told that the policy is that you can’t do it or that you had to be very limited, like one airplane or something like that. I said, “Okay, I understand the policy. Thank you very much.”

I scheduled the biggest damn flyby (laughs) that’s ever been held. We didn’t fly single in, we flew formations of airplanes. This is General LeMay, for god sakes, 135s and B-52s and fighters. Everything we had, we just threw at it, and it came off very well. I put one of my colonels on it to be the ground commander, but I got all the airplanes, and they flew.

Now, I got a call from—I forget what shop, secretary shop or head of the J3 at JCS—and they said, “You have violated an explicit verbal order.” I said, “No.” I said, “I called to inquire what the policy was.” (DePue laughs) They said, “Well, we told you what the policy was, and you violated the policy.” I said, “I did.” And I said, “I think you should court-martial me for flying all those airplanes for General LeMay,” and I hung up. That was the

47 J3 (operations) is the third level in the US National Level Command Structure, primarily assisting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) in carrying out responsibilities as the principal military advisor to the president and secretary of defense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_(J3)

472 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

last thing I heard. That’s also the last star I made, but that’s the last thing I heard. (DePue laughs)

Postscript, I’m walking through the academy cemetery, where my best man and one of my roommates at the academy, first semester, senior year, is buried. He’s buried very close to General LeMay’s grave, just another couple rows up. I went and said howdy to Stu and was walking up the path there. I feel a hand on my ankle. It’s General LeMay, and he says, “You know, number four on that flight of four 135s was a little loose.” I said, “I know that, General LeMay. I’m very sorry about it.” He said, “Don’t let it happen again.” I said, “I won’t, Sir” and walked up and continued on my way. Now, you think that’s a made-up story, but not if you knew General LeMay. (laughs)

DePue: Would there have been anybody of his generation, of his stature in the Air Force, that even gets close to comparing to that?

Borling: Hap Arnold maybe, Tooey Spaatz, but I didn’t know him well. I didn’t know Hap Arnold at all, didn’t know Tooey Spaatz; this is just by reputation, the World War II guys. Postwar guys, I don’t think any of them held a candle to Curt LeMay. He was certainly an imperfect human being, but if you wanted a fighter, you got a fighter.

DePue: Yeah, he would have been a pariah among a lot of civilian anti-war circles.

Borling: He was a pariah inside; Kennedy couldn’t stand him; Johnson wanted to get rid of him and finally did. You have to be able to accept excess; LeMay created the word. He probably, single-handedly killed more people in World War II than any other general. He did it in Europe, and he did it certainly in Japan.

DePue: I’ve always thought it ironic, in retrospect, that so much angst was expressed over the dropping of the atomic bombs, when there was so much death and destruction long before that.

Borling: Well, the fire raids over at Tokyo, low level, were his brainchild. Dresden, Hamburg speaks to General LeMay. He told me, and I’ve never forgotten it, “Wars are about killing people. You kill enough of them, and they quit fighting,” a palpable lesson. That’s also reported in his book, the most current biography on General LeMay.

There were some great stories. He and Tommy Powers and the rest of the guys, in the old days of SAC, would always convene at quarters, whatever, I think it was thirteen or eleven or ten, kind of down the row of those old cavalry homes from Fort Crook days. There was an area that was a BOQ [bachelor officer quarters], and it was kind of a social area. They would have a poker game on whatever night, Wednesday night or something. The generals and colonels would sit there and play pretty high-stakes poker. If a new colonel came on, he was supposed to report immediately to General LeMay,

473 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

even that night. The rumors or the stories have it that a colonel, or more than one colonel, showed up in the poker game and reported in to General LeMay. General LeMay said, “Great, sit down.” (both laugh) If you won, you were on permanent shit list. You were expected to make a contribution to the senior leadership in that poker game. Whether that’s true or folklore, I don’t know.

One more story, Myrna and I went to Puerto Rico—did I mention this story about—and stayed at the old Ramey Air Force Base, which is now a Coast Guard station out on the northwest tip on the island. There’s a lighthouse out there that you can stay at, really very lean and spare circumstances. It’s behind a fence, and it’s a nice area, and you can look out at the ocean, and it’s pretty cheap. It’s now run by the Coast Guard.

General LeMay had gone down to Ramey for an ORI [open ranks inspection] to get the out brief, and the ORI had gone very well. General LeMay is leaving the base in his airplane, and he asked to go to the bathroom. So he runs over to the flight line latrine, and he goes into the wrong latrine. He goes into the Puerto Rican workers’ latrine, and it’s a nightmare. LeMay does his business, comes out, calls over the wing commander.

He said, “I need the base commander, and I need the chief civil engineer.” He walks them into the latrine, and he says, “I think we need to clean this up now” and has the wing commander, the base commander, and the civil engineer swabbing floors and cleaning. He gets a paint crew and gets paint and everything. LeMay is standing there doing all of that, and finally it’s clean and disinfected. It takes several hours and LeMay says, “Great.” It was a good ORI, by the way, very high marks. He said, “Fine.” He said, “I’m leaving now, and you’re leaving now, and you’re leaving now, and you’re leaving now. You’ll be off the base by nightfall.” He gets back in his airplane and flies away.

I’m standing out at the lighthouse. Next to the lighthouse, there are a series of privies with running water, four outdoor latrines and some outdoor running water and things, like if you came up from the beach—which you can’t get to anymore—you could take a shower and things. So anyway, these latrines were used by staff who came in and took care of the lighthouse, and there were some other small facilities there.

We only had one bathroom in our quarters, and we had four people staying. So, I went out to use one of the outside latrines. I walked into it, and it was a nightmare. We ended up going over to the BX [Base Exchange] that day, and I got a broom and some buckets and some stuff. While people were doing whatever they were doing, I went over and cleaned four latrines in General LeMay’s honor. (DePue laughs)

When I got done…It was really messy too. I didn’t paint them or anything, but I got them clean. I did latrine duty. This was long after I’d

474 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

retired. This was five years ago, four years ago. I stood there, I remember, on my broom, looking up, and I said, “I hope you’re satisfied, General LeMay” or something like that and walked away. I never told anybody that story. Myrna came out and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m cleaning latrines.” She said, “Well, okay.” (laughs)

DePue: Close the circle.

Borling: Close the circle, yeah.

DePue: One other question about your experiences during Desert Storm, take us back to Desert I with that failed rescue attempt. After that, I believe one of the consequences was the decision to kind of divide up the world into these commands and have unity of command. So that’s how General Schwarzkopf got to be commander of CENTCOM [Central Command]. My question is, from the stories you told, it’s an imperfect kind of a system, but do you think that concept of those central commands worked?

Borling: They don’t call them CINCs anymore; they call them commanders because, under the Obama Administration there can only be one CINC commander in chief. Yeah, the world has always been divided up under one of the reorganization acts, where you have a particular, normally a four-star, in charge of a particular theater. For example, EUCOM [European Command] used to own all of Africa or a major portion of it.

DePue: And it’s a joint command.

Borling: It was a joint command, yeah. The arguments have been, under a joint commander, who can be any service, but typically they were Army, you would have a Naval and an Air Force component commander who would run the air and run the Navy. And you would have an Army component commander, with the commander, the CINC, sitting on top of all that, and those four, sometimes Marines were there, because no one can ever figure out how to use the Marines on their own or on the flanks.

Marines are very hard to employ in joint circumstances, because they’re combined arms. They’ve got their own air; they’re just very hard to use is the traditional viewpoint. Special operations have added to that conundrum.

That aside, you’ve got component commanders. Then the question is, who controls the air, because the Navy wants to control their piece; the Marines want to control their piece, and you end up in these squabbles, which have generally resolved down that air will control the air from a certain height up, because the Army wants to have freedom of maneuver over the battlefield with its helicopter and low- flyer stuff. So, nominally, you’re at 1,000 or 2,500 feet, and below belongs to the Army. From 2,500 feet up to something

475 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

belongs to the Air Force, except for over here, which belongs to the Navy, a cocked up circumstance.

DePue: That’s one of those trick questions; what service has the most aircraft?

Borling: Well, the Army, of course. But you’re right; they split it up geographically. You’d never figure out CENTCOM’s headquarters is really at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, which I think is a screwed up deal. If you can’t be in theater, why have the theater to start with?

DePue: Do you think it worked as designed? From the stories you told, it was less than perfect, by far.

Borling: It never works as designed.

DePue: Was there a better way of doing it?

Borling: Yes.

DePue: And that would be?

Borling: Ensure that only mission type orders are given, and then let execution occur at the very lowest level you can stand. If you can’t give a mission-type order, maybe you ought not to be in the enterprise to begin with.

DePue: Would it have worked for an inherently political kind of an organization, when you’ve got multiple nations involved?

Borling: This assumes that you’ve got a unity of command in the particular AOR [Area of Responsibility] or even outside of it, but ideally in. And the forces flow into that commander, and he uses them in accordance with the mission type orders that he’s received.

But if you’re going to go to war—this is where I think we fail—go to war to hurt them; go to war to stop further encroachment; that’s okay. But if you’re going to go to war, go to war to beat them; go to war to kill them all; go to war to achieve regime change and unconditional surrender; go to war so that you make a difference by having gone to war. Otherwise, why do you want to go to war? To reassert the status quo? Like we did in Gulf War I, where, well, now they’re back inside their borders. That’ll teach them. Even when we had them in the pursuit phase…By that time, I was in Washington. I couldn’t believe that we stopped; a bunch of people couldn’t.

DePue: Where should we have stopped?

Borling: We should have issued bicycles to everybody, and let them ride into Baghdad, because that’s what it would have taken. We could have ridden bicycles to Baghdad. We should have taken over Baghdad and set up an occupation

476 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

government, and then do what we’ve never done well, and that’s bring back the elements of the people who knew how to run the country, the Iraqis, to have them back in power, like Patton wanted to do with the Nazis. He wanted to bring the Nazis—not officialdom but structure back—because they knew how to run things, do things. [He] got castigated for that.

You don’t have permanent enemies; you have permanent interests. Part of it is knowing how to run the occupation. We’ve never done that very well. Docile populations, like the Japanese, were run pretty well by MacArthur, but they really got beaten down. They were also left political leadership, the king or Hirohito, whatever the guy’s name was.

DePue: The emperor, Hirohito.

Borling: The emperor in place, and the emperor could demonstrate control. So, every circumstance is different. But yeah, if you’re going to go to war, go to war to effect change.

DePue: But as I understand, there would have been no planning for an occupation that was going on at CENTCOM or back in the United States or certainly in any of these coalition countries. That would also be something that would have taken an immense amount of planning to execute properly; would it not?

Borling: It depends on how bad you kick their ass. Can you go back in there with three guys and a dog and do the British thing, ride in on elephants and say, “We’ve got it now chaps,” and plant the flag and go to work? Or do you need to assume you’re in a hostile territory and that you’re going to have to fight it day in, day out?

I suggest to you that the capitulation circumstance was so probable that we could have gone in with the forces that we had and have exacted our will and set up a provisional government, run by us but sensitive to the political realities that existed at the time. We may well have gotten a surrogate Hussein back, [Barzan Mohamed] Tikriti or whatever.48 But given the structure of the Arab countries, where apparently only force keeps these sectarian forces in check, maybe that’s not so bad.

Now, you’re tricking me into making observations whereby I have the luxury of speaking from ignorance. I’m perfectly willing to accept that the notion that I’ve offered is rife with critique capability or worse. But if we went into that enterprise saying, “All we’re going to do is restore the status quo,” before the war started, then I think we went in short of the mark, and we should have planned for a total capitulation and what we would do then. In

48 Barzan Mohamed, also known as Barazan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Barasan Ibrahem Alhassen and Barzan Hassan, was one of three half-brothers of Saddam Hussein, and a leader of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barzan_Ibrahim_al-Tikriti)

477 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

other words, not only work for the worst force, but work for a best force or a best scenario.

They were talking about losses in the 30 or 40 percent circumstance. We didn’t lose anybody. We had people giving up to drones landing on the sand and waiting for someone to come. They stood there like it was some kind of R2-D2 thing.49 Once we broke those initial perimeters, and we did so, by the way, using some B-52s to knock holes in that stuff—using some tactics that I have at least advanced, along with others—you have to be able to do this stuff quickly and on the fly. This thing, “Well, we need six months to plan it.” What if you’ve got twelve hours? What if you’ve got no hours? What if you just got to guess your best case, and you’re going to swing your forces in that direction?

We came very close to doing one of these things, with our divisions that were going in that direction, because of cock-ups with the Brits and the Americans getting almost into it, as I recall—or maybe it was Americans and Americans—because people lost their way, even with all the electronics that we have and even with JSTARS [Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems]. Frankly, it was JSTARS and AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System] that got it unscrewed, when we had ground forces [that] were going to engage other ground forces.

DePue: But you’re back in Washington, D.C. now.

Borling: Yeah.

DePue: What I’m curious about is that it sounds like you and many of your colleagues were very disappointed that the war was called to an end when it was, but could you have been surprised?

Borling: Pardon me?

DePue: Would you have been surprised, because this is what Bush and the coalition were saying was the objective from the beginning.

Borling: Yeah, but the thing…and I don’t have this firsthand, and I’m not sure I was involved in this. I remember sitting up with the Air Force group in small numbers and people talking about that reign of death, when we had them in pursuit. The chief got it right; he said, “We’re in pursuit. This is the time when you pursue, when you can bring them—”

DePue: On the highway going out of Kuwait.

49 R2-D2 or Artoo-Detoo, a small astromech droid, is a fictional robot character in the Star Wars film franchise created by film producer George Lucas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R2-D2)

478 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: The highway, the highway of death, that we could have just continued going. We all wanted to do that, but you recall, we only fought for five days; is that right?

DePue: Again, for some reason 100 hours is sticking in my mind.

Borling: Four or five days, yeah. Well, and some suggested that the issue that we stopped was that the Israelis had done a six-day war, and we wanted to show them we could do a five-day war. (DePue laughs) What it shows again, is that the damn Arabs can’t fight. When are we going to learn that? The Arabs are really shitty fighters.

DePue: Well, you’re looking at me, but I’m thinking about today’s scenario, where those who are inspired by Islam seem to be okay at it. You’re not agreeing with that.

Borling: I don’t think we’ve tested them. It doesn’t count when Arabs fight Arabs; they’re all ineffectual. But if they’ll let us go and exercise violence, you only got to bring down about 10 percent of them before they start coming unraveled, according to John Keegan and notwithstanding the death to the infidels and martyrism and all that stuff.

I at least had one firefight. When the bullets are flying, and they’re hitting around, it gets real ______in a hurry. Now, I’m not talking about airplanes; I’m talking on the ground. When people are getting blown up, and airplanes are hitting things and mortars and artillery, it’s…How in the hell can these guys, running around with their rags on…I got guys so mobbed up they can hardly walk, with all the stuff they’ve got on.

I worry about that too, with armor and various things that they wear so that they won’t get hurt or shot, vests and things. And we’ve got doctors and helicopters and things. These guys out here, the best thing they can do is maybe somebody will have a Toyota that can take him back, so at least they’ll die behind the lines. What kind of doctors do they have? What kind of capabilities do they have to support their people? They don’t have that. How many people are going to understand that, god, if I get wounded or if I get shot or if I get hurt, I’m dead?

Lawrence of Arabia, go read Lawrence of Arabia.50 It hasn’t changed much. He said the Arabs, the reason that they fight is that the tribes, especially the sheiks of the tribes, if they get the gold, they’ll fight. No gold, no fight. Nothing’s changed much; we’ve got to pay me.

50 Lawrence in Arabia, by Alistair MacLean, is a 1962 epic historical narrative, based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Arabia)

479 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Let’s go back to your new job. I believe January, ’91, so right in the middle of the war, as you said—

Borling: Yeah, right at the end of it, yeah.

DePue: …to January, 1992, Director of Operational Requirements Headquarters, United States Air Force, Washington, D.C. That’s a mouthful.

Borling: This is what I said. I was AXO, and then General McPeak, who took over as the chief of staff because Mike Dugan was fired by Cheney…Mike Dugan was my next principal boss, but he got fired.

So McPeak came in, and General McPeak and I were not…simpatico. I tried hard to work for him. He kept saying he wanted me to go down and be the head of operational requirements. I’d just come off the most important two-star in the United States Air Force, frankly, with staff and people and things and got there. He said, “Go down and…” He said, “You’ve got an exec, and you’ve got a secretary,” he said, “and you can go sit in the conference room, except when we have meetings.” He said, “And go steal some people from other generals in the Air Staff and do operational requirements.” Well, I didn’t know anything about operational requirements.

DePue: What does that mean?

Borling: Well, in other words, I was able to take care of milestone-0.51 There’s milestone-0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, in terms of coming up with the idea, and then moving it through a very Byzantine structure, most of which is done by the Air Staff Acquisition Group. The operators were supposed to set up the basic operational requirements for new weapons systems. He wanted me to set up a library of operational requirements, so that we could have a record of that. This is something that should be on the operational side. I ran with the vice chief of staff, what they called the JROC. [Joint Requirements Oversight Council] Well, he ran the JROC, but I was the guy who supported him as the one-star, which is the Joint Requirements Operation… something,

Council, the JROC.

This was…why do I think of the general…class of ’59, Mike Carns. He was a four-star who basically ran the Air Force for General McPeak, who ran the joint stuff, except McPeak runs everything.

51 An acquisition framework is established to specify a structured sequence of project management phases and the major decisions—milestones—required for the implementation of high-profile acquisition programs and projects by the U.S. Air Force. (http://www.osec.doc.gov/opog/dmp/daos/dao208_16.html)

480 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: What was the nature of your friction or falling out, whatever you want to call it, with McPeak?

Borling: Well, he kept saying “I don’t want yes-men around me.” I took him at his word on certain types of weaponry and things that we would be examining or other things. He was very much interested in getting things for fighter aircraft, and the JDAM, which was this weapon that Mike Carns—he was the four-star guy in the JROC—and I thought was pretty good. Then we had a chance to get some initial test stuff working to show General McPeak it worked.

After about a year, with me stealing people here around and making myself not so welcome in the building, one day he fired twenty-three generals; he made them leave the service. I was number twenty-four, or maybe I was twenty-two, and then I was number twenty-three. McPeak had three or four of his special generals that had worked for him before, and these guys were his mafia. I was never part of the mafia, in fact, just the opposite, so was not welcome, if you will, in the inner circle. I worked hard, tried to get things done, worked a lot with General Carns, Mike Carns.

But this one day there were twenty-two or twenty-three generals that McPeak fired and made them retire from the Air Force. I got a call to come up to his office. I walked into his office; Topsy was his secretary. She said, “Oh my god, not you.” Pat Gamble, who was one of my protégés, was the exec. He said, “Oh, Vike, not you.” I said, “What’s going on?” That’s where I got the word about all these guys—including his assistant vice chief—who were told to go and quit.

DePue: How did he have that kind of authority or power to do that?

Borling: Oh, he did; he did; he did. You serve at the presence of the chief. I remember walking in, and Mike Carns, from an office across the suite, gave me a shrug and a “I can’t do anything” gesture. I walked in, and General McPeak was there. He looked at me, and he pointed to his chair. He said, “You think you’re going to sit there some day, don’t you?” I said, “Well, if I do well and work hard and have luck and do the best I can, yes, Sir. I’d hope to be competitive to be the Chief of Staff of the Air Force.”

He said, “You’re not even going to make three stars.” He said, “I’ve killed you,” or, “I’ve put a…” He said something that I wasn’t there. I said, “Well,” I said, “you’re the chief of staff.” I said, “I serve at your pleasure.” I said, “If you want me to resign today, I’ll resign.” He said, “I don’t want you out of my Air Force; I want you out of my face.” He said, “You think I’m wrong.” I said, “I think you’re really fucking wrong.” (laughs) He said, “Sit down.”

So, we sat down. No one else got to sit down, I found out, or at least I was told that later. He said, again, “You’re done. You’re not going to be a

481 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

three-star; you’re going to be a two-star.” I said, “Well, maybe I can wait you out.” He said, “There’s no waiting me out.” I said, “You’re a high risk guy; maybe you’ll get hit by a beer truck. Still, I’ll retire.” He said, “I don’t want you to retire. I just want you out of here.”

I was the only one. Everyone else who was told to be fired had to resign. And he said “Go find yourself a job.” I said, “I’ve got to go find a job?” He said, “Go down and talk to General Officer Matters, and let them know that you’re staying around, and you’re going to find a job.”

So I walked out and saw Mike [Carns]; he went out [in] the hall. [I] said, “No, I’m not quitting. He said he wants me to go find a job and get out of here.” He said, “It’s a bloodbath today.” I’ve got stories from others, people were told, reported…I’m not going to say who. This was a three-star, “You’re the worst three-star in the United States Air Force. Resign today,” just kind of really mean stuff.

I went down to the general officers thing, and I said, “I don’t know what to say to you guys.” They all knew me, “General Borling…” I said, “Well, I’m here looking for a job.” I said, “If there’s anything open, let me know.” They said, “Give us a couple days.”

DePue: It sounded like there’s at least about twenty vacancies.

Borling: Well…So I walked out and went home to Myrna and said, “Well, it’s all over again.” We were living on base. That night…They had called, and there was a couple jobs in Turkey. They did away with jobs; they were doing that. They put a guy into my job, Dick Myers, who later ended up assistant chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Dick used to work with me, for me. Pat Gamble made four stars. Some of this is fortuitous, but I don’t hold it against any of them.

Anyway, that night or the next night, I was told that a position had opened in Norway to be the assistant chief of staff for air at Headquarters North in Oslo. “Hell,” I said to Myrna, I said, “Career’s over. We’re not going to go any further.” I said, “We’ve got kids in school.” I said, “Why don’t we go and spend a couple of years in Norway and just enjoy ourselves and quit.”

DePue: Where else would a guy whose call sign is Viking end up his career, huh?

Borling: Well, I knew this job. In fact, when I was a colonel at SHAPE, the two-star used to call me to get stuff done. So it ended up…We had to spend some time. I took some languages and things. It was basically a couple months of learning Norwegian. This other guy’s coming out on short notice, and I go over to Norway.

DePue: Well, I think this is probably…I’ve got one or two more questions—

482 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: I want to finish the story though.

DePue: Go ahead.

Borling: So, I get to Norway, and I’m there, and Myrna is coming over. The organization of NATO is changing; they’re reorganizing Northern NATO. I’m sitting in the meeting, and the whole thing is blown up at the ambassadorial level and the senior military level, down in Brussels.

General [John] Shalikashvili, who’s SACEUR, comes to Oslo. We’re all there, military people from many different nation. They’re talking about this impasse that is achieved. He’s got egg all over his face on this thing, and no one can agree. Norway can’t agree; England can’t agree; Germany can’t agree. It’s all blown up, and he’s looking for solutions.

He calls me out. He said, “John”—I’d met him a couple times—he said, “John, can you fix this?” I said, “General Shali, I’ve been here two weeks.” I said, “I got fired. I’m here to retire, basically.” That’s all I got out. He said, “I know all about that. Do you know how many people wanted you? I fought for you, to get you up here. I need you to reorganize Northern NATO, and make it a success.” He says, “It’s all messed up.” He says, “Can you do it?” I said, “Off the top, I don’t know, but I’ll try. But I know I need this, this, this, and this, and you’re top cover if I can’t make it happen.”

Then I laid out some…not conditions, but things that I needed to at least have a shot. He said, “All right.” He said, “I’ll pull your commander away,” who was an English four-star. I said, “I need an English two-star to be with me as part of this, because the real problem, as I see it, is the English losing a four-star spot in favor of Norway.” And I said “I need two three-star Norwegians to work for me, and I need access to the chairman of the joint chiefs or the CHOD [Chief of Defense] of Norway.” We went through all of this stuff; he said, “Okay, okay, okay.”

I spent the next two years with this Brit two-star and the top cover of the four-star and some people who were upset, with a number of things, with reorganizing Northern Europe and moving things into England. That was the English guy. I got to set up an integrated command in Norway and move to Stavanger, Norway, where Norway agreed to it, if I would be the chief of staff of the command, which was a high, and I would be the senior U. S. guy in Scandinavia and the senior allied guy in Norway, and AOR [Area of Responsibility] would run from England to Moscow. Talk about a wonderful command.

I did have a three-star boss, Bjornar Kibsgaard, but he let me run it. I made sure that I was properly in deference to him, but we got along great. Myrna and I had a marvelous time in Norway. When, in fact, McPeak left and Ron Fogleman came in, my classmate, as chief of staff. The same day that

483 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Ron took command, he called me and basically said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “I’m the chief now.” I said, “I just promised the Norwegians that I would stay and be the chief of staff.” I said, “I can’t go back on my word. I’ll do this for two years.” I said, “I’ve only got four years left anyway,” I said, “not enough runway to go.” I said, “Set up your own staff. Thanks for calling, Buzzard.” We stayed two more years, had a wonderful time, had a great command experience and a great cultural experience to end up. So there you go.

DePue: I want to hear more about some of those experiences the next time we get together, but one more question, if you’ll permit me. That’s to put you in the dangerous position of trying to understand the motivation of General McPeak, why he did what he did.

Borling: He was a very controversial guy. We’d crossed before; when I was base commander, he was chief of staff at USAFE, when I was base commander at Ramstein. It was just one of those things where it was…I wasn’t in his tribe. In the end, when you get into higher groups, you get hired into tribes, and you succeed or fail. If Mike Dugan…the saddest thing, if that had happened and this would have happened, but I just think we were oil and water.

DePue: But not just you. There was twenty-some others.

Borling: Oh, yeah, and more than that. But he was under a lot of pressure, more of this saving money for the peace dividend. But in my case, in some measures, I don’t think he liked what we did with the JDAM, and I was really vocal about that. In some cases, I think I pissed off some of his personal generals that were using…But I’ll never know. It’s not something where they lay down and do it. In the end, it gets into personality in a hurry, and I might have created some problem that I wasn’t fully aware about or mistake that came back to haunt me that wasn’t whatever. You’re feeling the elephant or watching the shadows on the cave wall.

But for all that, while I felt badly about that, because I thought I had a better shot, I cured myself of that pretty fast. Myrna didn’t. She thought I had the stuff to be the chief, but a lot of guys think that. I was very fortunate to break into a new daylight, a new briar patch, and thank Shalikashvili for giving me that chance and then tremendous support by Mike Carns, who made sure I had every potential—the vice chief—emolument of office that I could have, special command positions.

I was literally the highest paid officer in the United States Air Force, given the COLA [Cost of Living Allowance] in Norway and drivers and cars. I had all the emoluments of office, plus what the Norwegians gave me. We were leading an idyllic life and doing important work at the same time. I was the first American to go to the Baltic States in uniform—a wonderful,

484 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

historical thing—and meet with the head of Soviet forces. It was very satisfying.

So, I didn’t get as far, perhaps, in rank. People ask me—I’ll finish up with this—why didn’t you make three stars? I said, “Well, I guess I wasn’t good enough.” Then that gets them embarrassed, so I let them off the hook by saying, “Or maybe I was too good.” (both laugh)

DePue: A good place to stop.

Borling: I suspect it was not good enough. Thank you.

DePue: Thank you, Sir.

Borling: All right, you bundle up here, and I’m going to go to the washroom again. You make me want to take a leak after hours of this.

DePue: Well, next time we’re going to hear more about that last assignment and a lot about your retirement.

Borling: Yeah, all right; that’s fair.

(end of transcript #11)

Interview with Major General John L. Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.12 Interview # 12: March 5, 2015 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

485 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Today is Thursday, March 5, 2015. My name is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in Rockford, Illinois, for what I believe, General, is our twelfth session. I’m sitting across the table with General John Borling.

Borling: I thought the operable adjective was supposed to be last.

DePue: Well, I think this afternoon’s will be the last.

Borling: Oh, I see; all right.

DePue: But we’re getting close.

Borling: You’re being academically precise, Mark.

DePue: We both think this will be our last day doing this. (coughs) I’ll have to cut that out.

Borling: Yeah, I know, you’re just all choked up because of the moment here.

DePue: When we left last time, you were just arriving to Norway, deputy chief of staff, Headquarters Air Force North.

Borling: Deputy chief of staff Air for AF North, Headquarters, Allied Forces, Northern Europe.

DePue: That’s what the AF stands for, Allied Forces, part of NATO then.

Borling: A principal command, a major subordinate command of NATO.

DePue: How many principal commands are there?

Borling: Actually three, in Allied Command Europe, north, central and south. North was headquartered in Oslo for many years, has been, in Kolsås Mountain.

It was interesting how I got there. I’m not sure we did that, but in any event, it was what I’ll describe as an altercation between me and the chief of staff of the Air Force, that I lost.

DePue: We did discuss that quite at length. What we didn’t do is much about the job, once you got there.

Borling: I was fortunate to be drafted by Shalikashvili, as I found out early on, but there was a graceful transition, where I took some Norwegian language lessons and where I got ready for the existing two-star to depart the fix. He had family requirements that had him reposted back to the States. I think I may have mentioned, I knew the job. It was not a strenuous job, but it was in a wonderful location. Having had the two-star basically almost report to me as a colonel when I was at SHAPE, I knew the details of it and had gone to

486 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Norway in advance, to be part of a conference and meet the allied officers who were there; also, there was a larger SHAPE conference.

I’d had experience in Allied Command Europe, so I wasn’t unknowledgeable about the military-political relationships that existed. To an outsider they are somewhat obtuse, but once you’re inside and you see how the alliance works, you become a convert very quickly. So I’d been to this conference down in Copenhagen and had gone home. No, I’d stayed. I’d preceded Myrna to Europe, and she came along several weeks later. I picked her up at Frankfurt and drove with her, because I had some business at USAFE, the United States Air Forces in Europe, which was headquartered in Ramstein.

I used to be the base commander at Ramstein. So we spun around to Ramstein, then moved north to Copenhagen and took the ferry across to Sweden and then up into Norway, where I was just cutting my eyeteeth, if you will, in the new job, working with/for the actual deputy chief of staff for ground and naval operations, a fellow by the name of Rear Admiral Leonard Revang, R-e-v-a-n-g, or nickname Lelleand his incredible wife, Liv, who was part Norwegian and part gypsy. She was an absolute delight, as was Lile, and we became fast professional and social friends, very, very quickly.

I remember Myrna being, not apprehensive—she’d moved around the world a lot—but here she is going to a new circumstance. She’s Swedish; we’re going to be living in Norway. There are certain jocular antipathies that exist between the two countries and peoples, more of it manufactured than real, some of it quite real, stemming from the World War II neutrality aspect and the fact that in 1905, Sweden and Norway almost went to war over independence.

Norway did not become independent until 1905. The Norwegians were fond of saying, every time Denmark or Sweden lost a war, they gave away a piece of Norway. Well, Sweden was on the correct side at Waterloo and was granted Norway as a suzerainty, if you will. That persisted until 1905, when the forces of nationalism reared up, and they nearly went to war. Sweden folded and Norway became an independent state. Before that, they’d been 400 years under Danish rule. It was Denmark that was on the wrong side in the Napoleonic Wars, ending at Waterloo.

DePue: Sweden and Norway have distinct languages?

Borling: They’re akin. Denmark and Norway are close, and one is almost interchangeable with the others. In fact, the Danish Navy was captained by Norwegians for several hundred years.

My, what eventually would be, Norwegian boss, went to sea at the age of twelve as a cabin boy and then worked up through the ranks to vice

487 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

admiral. So the Norwegians have this naval tradition. Obviously, they don’t take cabin boys at twelve anymore, but now we’re talking a guy reared up in the ‘40s, late ‘30s, and off to sea at the age of twelve. I remember, his name was Bjornar Kibsgaard; he’s dead now. B-j-o-r-n-a-r means the bear, Bjornar Kibsgaard.

Myrna and I were on a Coast Guard cutter, going across to the Lofoten Islands, across from Bodo. It’s a special place in Norwegians’ hearts, out there in the Norwegian Sea. A couple of memories, number one, we were standing out along the rail, and the waves were quite substantial. We were hanging on to the rail on the inside, attached to the superstructure of the ship. Between that thing there’s a passageway, and then there’s another railing, which is the railing that leads overboard.

For some reason, the Brit woman lost her grip on this railing and slid across this narrow space and was going under the railing, to be tossed into this raging sea, when Myrna reached out and, almost frogman-like with her elbow, got her and managed to pull her to safety. I mean, this was some considerable event. Well, they all went below. Everyone was shaken by this, because the seas were, as I say, enormous. We were climbing up waves and crashing down. It was really quite exciting.

Myrna and I carefully made our way all the way the back end of the ship, to what you would call the fantail area, but the aft of the ship. We wired ourselves with one Norwegian guy, a sailor, with us, into the back of the railing. I remember saying to Myrna, I said, “Look, if I go overboard, quick, turn around and get a picture.” (DePue laughs) I said, “I’ll do the same for you.” There would have been no rescue. We were stupid, and we were by now climbing up—I don’t want to oversell it—twenty foot, twenty-five foot waves. That’s a lot of waves.

DePue: It reminds me of hearing all the stories about delivering supplies to the Soviet Union during World War II.

Borling: Oh, the Murmansk Run, yeah.

DePue: Exactly.

Borling: I went from Kirkenes in a boat—this was later on in the deal—under a NATO passport, across the Barents to Murmansk. On that voyage I was the only American on. I was traveling under, frankly, a Norwegian and NATO passport and visa. As we steamed north out of Kirkenes…If you drop a line from Kirkenes and go down, you’re in Istanbul.

We steamed out into the Barents, and the waves were terrible. The wind was in our face, and the waves were crashing. We had about four hours of this to go until we got into the Murmansk Fjord, protected waters, and went down to Murmansk. What a rat-hole place that is. Everybody onboard—there

488 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

were probably 400 people onboard—started to get ill; I mean really ill. My good friend, Torkel Hovland, who was…I call him the King of the North. He was the deputy commander in AF North at Oslo. I went out, and Torkel, he was standing aft, a death grip on the rail, expectorating downwind, thankfully. He said, “John, throw me into the sea.” (both laugh)

Well, I was okay. I’m not a great sailor, but for some reason I was fine. Now, there’s people getting ill, and the floors of the passenger lounge are becoming slippery, shall we say. After a couple hours, there are three people onboard the boat who were functioning, the captain—all his crew is down— the coffee lady and smørbrød [sandwich] lady and me. I’m busy mopping and helping people and doing stuff, and she’s mopping and helping people. So we’re working our ass off.

The captain has put the machine—the bridge is right there, forward of the passenger area—and he comes out, and he says, “Thank you, thank you,” and he goes back in, because he can’t leave the helm. He had it on autopilot for a minute. But the waves were so terrible. If we’d gone broadside, we could have breached, in my view.

So, we’re working, and we get things pretty much settled down. A number of people are still outside; Torkel is still outside. It was terrible weather. In temperature, it’s got to be ten below. He’s out there hanging on to that railing, because it’s better to be outside than inside, where everyone is groaning and moaning and rolling around. Well, so I go back, and I’m talking to the coffee lady, a young girl. I said, “Wow,” I said, “This has been quite an experience.” I said, “I think I’ll have a sandwich and a cup of coffee.” She looks at me, and she says, “You want, you want…” and then she gets sick. (both laugh) So now there’s two of us, me and the captain.

We get into the Murmansk Fjord, and we go down the fjord, and the water is obviously quiet in the fjord. We pass these rusting hulks of ships, cargo ships. Certainly, one can fashion up that they’re leftover from the Murmansk Run, but also, ships of the Northern Fleet, which looked terrible. This is 1992, maybe?

DePue: I know that’s when you first got there, in ’92.

Borling: Yeah. So, mid-’92. We get down to the wharf in Murmansk, and one of the Brit ladies, she comes staggering off. They’ve recovered by now, because the water has been calm. She looks at me, and she said, “You’re an American Air Force officer, aren’t you?” She said, “Thank you so much.” She said, “There’s just one more thing, please.” She said, “Bring on the goddamned helicopter; I’m not going back.” (both laugh)

We went and toured Murmansk—continuing the story—and minder guides from the Russians. You’re also near that big nickel plant; you can see it

489 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

belching particulate into the air from fifty, sixty miles out. The Murmansk Peninsula itself, bordering Norway, is a hunter’s paradise and a fisherman’s paradise, but it’s very difficult—or at least it was back then—to get permission to fish it and hunt it, because some of the great salmon rivers are up there, right next to the border. The border posts, if you look at them…I’ve been up to the border and toured the border; there’s posts on either side. It’s really quite—or it was—quite a relaxed border, from the Norwegian perspective, not so from the Russian perspective. They were primed for… And this is after the Berlin Wall is down. The Berlin Wall was down in ’89.

DePue: Well in ’92, this would be after the collapse of the Soviet Union, period.

Borling: Yeah. But they’re still manning this and guarding the Murmansk boundaries, although the Norwegians told us that there’re ways that people sneak in and sneak across and smuggle.

Northern Norway was quite well disposed toward the Russians actually, because they were the ones that rooted out the German occupation forces after World War II. I understand now, from friends, that this has changed, that it’s a really frosty relationship, in part because of the Ukraine and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.

DePue: General, I need to clarify my own mind. I’m trying to envision that region’s geography. Does Norway, basically all the way, kind of rim the top, north of Sweden and north of Finland?

Borling: And north of Finland, yeah. But the border…Now, I’ve got to get my thing right. I don’t think they have a common border with Finland. They’ve got a common border with Sweden and Russia. We’ll have to look at a map. [Norway and Finland have a common border, 457 miles long.]

The Finns up there, of course, are not Scandinavian; they’re Nordic, but they’re not Scandinavian. The Finns, for all their fierce and successful ways on the battlefield, against Germans and Russians, were viewed and are viewed as kind of the ethnic inferiors, if you want to use a very weak and inappropriate analogue. They’re kind of the butt of the Polish jokes, although the Swedes and Norwegians have devastating humor, one to another.

But in any event, you got into Murmansk, and it was really dilapidated. They had some of the new Soviet socialist apartment buildings that they were very proud of, that they took us by. I broke away; I got tired of listening to the propaganda. The revolution had not yet come to Murmansk, okay? It was still heavily…almost Stalinist in their approach.

I went into one of these new apartment buildings. The overwhelming stench of cooking oil and urine—and this was one of the great places—single naked light bulbs hanging in the hallways. The elevator shaft was literally

490 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

that, a shaft with no elevator, and trash had been thrown in there. It was filling up [with] rubbish, garbage; people just tossed it into the shaft. I walked upstairs and got up…This was like an eight or ten story building. If you lived on floor ten, you had a lot of stairs to climb.

Some people came scurrying out of their flats. I saw inside a couple; they were small, cluttered, just…We would call it a tenement. They were calling it some of the finest housing available in Murmansk. But I will never forget that smell of cooking oil and urine as kind of the predominant feature.

We had a lunch there. I was surprised that people were going to eat—it had taken us most of the morning to get there—the standard old borscht and vodka and stuff. Then [we] talked a little bit about that nickel plant; saw some other cultural things, some World War II monuments and memorials, depicting the Murmansk Run, and then steamed back up the fjord.

Under great apprehension, we turned left to go back toward Kirkenes. But this time we had a following sea, so the ride back was quite benign and not anything like the horrific morning one. This is a one-day trip, from Kirkenes to Murmansk, tour for three or four hours and then go back. This is the summer; it was long days. [We] went back to a hearty meal of Barents biff in Kirkenes.52 I’d had it before, up in towns like Vardsø and Vadsø and other places, and that’s what is shown on the menu is Barents biff, or Barents beef. Do you know what it is? Hvalkjopt.

DePue: Say that again.

Borling: It’s Hvalkjopt.

DePue: Hvalkjopt.

Borling: Hvalkjopt. Hval is the word for whale, so it’s hvalkjott. Have you ever had kjoptboller?

DePue: No, I have not.

Borling: Ever had Swedish meatballs?

DePue: I’ve had Swedish meatballs.

Borling: Those are called kjoptboller. Boller stands for balls and kjopt stands for?

DePue: Well, I would say shit, but that’s probably not the case.

52The Barents Sea is the part of the Arctic Ocean to the north of Norway and Russia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barents_Sea)

491 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: It’s not; it stands for meat. K-j-o-p-t, is pronounced “shit” in Norwegian and Swedish. Of course, growing up as I did, we’d have them as kids, and they were always called kjoptboller, and we would always give it the tee-hee factor, oh, kjoptboller, shitballs. It wasn’t until I got to Norway as a two-star general, that I find out the word for meat is kjopt, k-j-o-p-t. So, kjoptboller literally means meatballs and hvalkjott is whale meat, but they call it Barents biff, because they don’t want to offend the Americans or anybody else who thinks that the killing of whales is bad.

Now, let’s put this in perspective. What the Norwegians kill is the minke whale and only the minke whale. They don’t go after the other species, as do the Inuit people and Native Americans and the Japanese and the Russians, who kill any damn whale they can get their hands on. The minke whale is not in any way close to extinction. It is a smallish whale. I’ve forgotten the numbers now, but the population is growing of the minke whale.

The Norwegians go out, and it’s really quite humane the way they do it. It’s not people in long boats, throwing fifty-seven spears at it. It’s kind of a one shot deal, and the whale goes tango uniform.53 The meat is delicious; it’s really very good, and it’s very good for you, very lean, no cholesterol. If the world could eat more whale meat, it would be a better place. So, those are vignettes from the trip to Murmansk. This is out of kilter, but that happened within the first six months or so that I was there.

DePue: What’s the purpose of going to visit what essentially is still the enemy of the North Atlantic?

Borling: Yeah. They had taken Myrna and me—the Norwegians, at their expense, using military and other transportation—from south to north to give us the full orientation to the remarkable country. There’s a different ethos between the east of Norway and the west of Norway, across the Hardangervidda.

The western Norwegians think they’re much superior to the eastern Norwegians. And then it gradates north-south, and the people north of the Arctic Circle, basically, think that they’re much superior; it’s called Finnmark. So, they must border Finland too, Finland, Sweden and Russia, but my map is indistinct in my mind. I still think it does Denmark or Finland.

So, north of the Arctic Circle, as it comes sweeping around, you’re up to Nordkapp, which is not the northernmost point in Europe. There’s another point, and I’ve been there, but the North Cape is where everybody goes to see the midnight sun and that. We, Myrna and I, were privileged to go in all manner of places. I think, while I was taking this trip, they had her off, and

53 A phrase to describe something that is dead, out of service, broken, useless, inoperative, likely using the image of a dead rat or possum, lifelessly floating on its back. Origin: "tango" is the NATO phonetic alpha for the letter T, and "uniform" is the NATO phonetic alpha for the letter "U," which means "tits up." (http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/tango-uniform)

492 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

they took off…They did; this is where they took her off in a jeep and went bouncing off into the steppes, into the Markas, the fields and high plateaus, and they ended up at a Sami camp.

A Sami is…We know them as Laplanders, but they’re Samis, a different race, akin to the Finns, frankly, but Laplanders, the reindeer herders. They got out of the jeep, and somebody came crashing through with an all- terrain vehicle, where they were put on the all-terrain vehicle, and they were taken even further back into the trackless forest. There in a clearing was a Sami tent, very beautifully dyed, made out of reindeer skins. You eat a lot of reindeer when you’re up there, by the way. You’re not too sure you’re not consuming Rudolph or Donder and Blitzen, but anyway, it’s quite good. The favorite summer dish would be reindeer meat, white asparagus and then what they call multebaer, which is a cloudberry that grows wild or salmon, cucumber and onion salad and multebaer.

But anyway, so Myrna gets up there, then they duck into this tent. The smoke level in the tent, I guess, is only about three feet high, so everyone’s sitting on robes and having Sami delicacies in this tent. This is kind of girls’ afternoon out. The Samis drink an awful lot, and I guess they were rambunctious. Anyway, so she was doing that, and then she came out of the woods, had come back with some lovely, hand-carved birch wood things that we still have, while I was playing cabin boy on the ship to Murmansk. So, Northern Norway is quite special. In fact, Torkel and I, even now, talk about going to spend a summer on Porsanger Fjord.

It was some years later…If you look at the map, Porsanger Fjord is the last great fjord before you hit Russia. It comes off the Barents, down into a land area, but it’s huge; it’s 100 miles across. We went there in the summer, one June. I’d met this guy by the name of Curt and his wife, Elvie, who was a Sami. Elvie was born and grew up fourteen miles from the nearest road. She didn’t see a road until she was about ten or twelve years old; she never saw a road.

Anyway, we went up, and we were going fishing. We’d been over to the base, and we went out. It was snowing, and it was June. We get down, and we’ve got this sixteen-foot outboard. It was Curt’s boat, and Elvie went along, and we had Torkel and one or two other people from the base. We took off on the outboard, into the Porsanger Fjord. I kind of raised my hand; I said, “Just for the hell of it…” I said…because I had checked it out, and there was nothing on the boat, a couple bottles of water and a spare tank of gas.

There was no one at the dock when we had the boat; they’d pulled it up. I said, “Does anybody know where we’re going? Did we leave a note under a rock that said, “Hey, the six or seven of us are going out to go fishing, north, in the Porsanger Fjord? Ouh, ouh (moaning)” Well, they had booze;

493 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

they had some liquor. It would not be a Norwegian fishing party if you didn’t have liquor.

DePue: Vodka?

Borling: No, they had beer and akvavit,54 and I think they probably had a bottle of whiskey. I don’t remember, frankly, but beer and akvavit would be standard, (repeats with a Norwegian accent) akvavit. We went out, and we were fishing, basically fishing for cod, torsk, and we would just fish and float.

Then we got out, and were well out of the sight of land. We were way the hell out on the fjord, probably twenty miles out, twenty-five miles out. There were some smallish little islands; when I say smallish little islands, I’m talking a couple hundred yards long and 100 yards wide, rocky things. So, we’re out there, and we’re fishing. It’s still kind of sleety, snowy; it’s not a real great day. Curt goes to start the motor again, and it won’t start; it’s not turning over.

As I said, it was June, probably closer to May, and the days were long but not as long as you might expect. But it was getting on, late in the afternoon, when the boat wouldn’t start. We had an oar, (laughs) and we kind of sculled our way over to one of these islands. Curt could refill the gas while we’d been out. I said, “Are you sure we’ve got gas?” but the motor wasn’t even turning over. So, we got onto the island, and a couple of the Norwegian guys say, “Oh, there’s probably good fishing on the other side; we’re going fishing. You guys screw with the motor.”

Curt was going to help with the motor, but frankly, he didn’t know much about it, but Elvie did, the wife, and I knew. It was a Johnson twenty- five horsepower motor. I’ve had Johnsons my whole life. I said, “Let’s tear this thing down, and figure out, is it plugs, or why isn’t it turning over?” As it turned out, it wasn’t turning over, because the pistons were frozen to the cylinder, because Curt had forgotten to put the oil in the gas, and the thing was frozen.

So now we’re on the island, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, and nobody knows where we are. I said, “Did you tell anybody we were going fishing?” Nobody told anybody anything. I said, “I didn’t tell anybody either. I didn’t tell Myrna, “Hey we’re going fishing.” She’s way back in Stavanger by this time; this is three or four years later. I said, “Well, we’ve got a survival circumstance, gentlemen, ladies, facing us. So, it’s a good thing you guys are catching fish.” The only fresh water on the island was the stuff that was

54 Akvavit or aquavit is a distilled spirit that is principally produced in Scandinavia, where it has been produced since the 15th century. Akvavit is distilled from grain and potatoes and is flavored with a variety of herbs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akvavit)

494 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

caught in the rocks, so that we had some fresh water. It was still continuing to snow, sleet. We didn’t have any particular shelter, and nobody smoked.

DePue: So, no matches, no lighters.

Borling: So, no matches; we had no matches. I’m thinking back, we’ll do a bow drill, and we’ll get something going.55 There was wet moss, but there was also dry moss under the rocks. I figured we’d get a fire going, and I was working on making a fire. All the other guys were fishing. (laughs)

DePue: How many people in this party?

Borling: Six or seven. Let’s see, me, Torkel, Elvie, Curt, four, six, yeah. I’ve forgotten the other two guys’ names; they were Army officers from the base. It was a little boat too; we were crowded; we’re sitting two on a chair. It’s a runabout, steer it from the back.

We’re out in the middle of the Porsanger Fjord; there’s no cruise boats that come along here. We’re messing around, and no one’s particularly panicked. We had phones, but they didn’t work. We’ll make a fire, and we’ll figure it out, make a sail. I said, “We’ll use the oar, and we can make a sail and use some of our things,” except no one wanted to take off any clothes, because it was wet and fierce.

Some time passes, and all of a sudden here come another little boat. (laughs) The guys’ hunkered down in it with sheepskin over their heads, a guy and his wife, who’d been out fishing. We hail them down, because they could come right by the boat. They were going across the fjord, maybe thirty miles, back to their hütte [hut]. They’d been out fishing; they had a boat full of cod. One of the guys knew him and explained the problem. They go back and forth, and the next thing I know, we’ve got a rope on our boat, and we’re being towed back to the dock.

We get towed back to the dock, and it takes several hours to get back. The guy unties us when we’re at the dock, and we’ve had some fish, and so we’ve got that, and we’re working on it. The guy says, “Hi, hi;” he says “goodbye.” Now it’s the middle of the night, and he and his wife take off in the dark to go twenty-five miles (laughs) in the middle of the night, back to their hütte.

I said to the guys, I said, “We’re the only people that know that they’re out there.” I said. “We have no way of knowing if they get there. If they hadn’t happened by...” It was the only boat we saw, his boat, the whole day. So, they were hunkered down in the weather, with the slicks on. It was then that Torkel and I said, “All right, we’ll come back and spend several weeks on

55 A bow drill is a simple rotational hand operated drilling tool of prehistoric origin. It commonly was used to make friction fire. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_drill)

495 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

the Porsanger Fjord. But, by god, we’re going to put notes under rocks, and let people know where we are.”

I don’t know how I got started on that story, but I have such great affection for Northern Norway and for this guy, Torkel Hovland, who is a noted military historian and bigger than life. He stands about six-five; he’s a couple years older than I am. When you go to his house, he always makes a speech before dinner. He says, (speaks with a Norwegian accent) “Gerd Ellen and I wish you hearty velcome.” It’s so charming. God I loved it; I love Norway, love the people. They were so professionally and personally good to me and Myrna, wow.

DePue: I’m still not getting a sense though, General, of exactly what your military duties were while you were there.

Borling: Oh, yeah. Well, that was part of my military duty, to go fishing in the Porsanger Fjord.

DePue: It sounds like it was more being a diplomat than is was―

Borling: I was on the country team. I was a senior American in the north, in Scandinavia; I was the senior allied officer. This was after we reorganized Northern NATO. When I went to Oslo and the Kolsås Bunker, the Kolsås Mountain…If you look at the Monet paintings, Monet spent a year in the late 1800s and painted from the vantage point of a town called Sandvika, which is on the west side of the Oslo Fjord. It’s where we lived actually, about fifteen miles outside of Oslo. There’s a ring road that goes around the Oslo Fjord; the Oslo Fjord ends there. He painted Kolsås Mountain. In fact, I’ll show you the picture; they made a picture for me, called “the last Viking,” with a Viking— that’s my call sign—over Kolsås Mountain, very much a takeoff of the Monet painting of Kolsås Mountain.

We had an office building there, but we had a bunker. My job was to “be in charge” of the air assets of Northern Europe for our AOR, for our area of responsibility. Now, I didn’t have exact command authority, except in time of war, when they would chop to the command, and then I would have domain over the air and put out the air tasking order and the other things associated with running a combined campaign.

DePue: Did that include some American assets?

Borling: Yeah, American assets. We had reinforcing assets. The principal assets were German, Danish, Norwegian, English, American, Dutch, some Belgjiks, very few; that’s about it. Belgjiks and Dutch [were] more token than substantive. The Danes obviously were all in; Northern Germany was all in; the Norwegians were all in; Northern England was all in.

496 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

The Americans would have yearly training exercises up there, Marines principally, and they had pre-positioned equipment. We would have air units that would reinforce northern…They were all chopped to our command, and then I would have domain and exercise that through two subordinate commands. So it was, at first glance, a bulky arrangement. But that’s what alliances are; they’re a bit bulky.

DePue: This is just shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I just can’t recall that timeframe in some of these former Warsaw Pact countries and new places like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, of their attempts to become part of NATO.

Borling: Their attempts to become free first because, when the Soviet Union collapsed, this did not mean the automatic independence or emergence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In fact, the groups of Soviet forces kept presence in Latvia, which was their headquarters, and had, obviously, Kaliningrad on the Baltic. But in that timeframe, there was a significant rapprochement that occurred, and counterpart visits became the norm.

The Russians would visit our command, both when it was in Oslo and then when we moved it to Stavanger on the west coast. We would have opportunity to visit as well. Now in my case—I think I have this accurate, at least I was told this; I’ve never validated it—there was a case when we had some gold that we had left over from World War II, from Latvia or wherever. That gold was taken back there by Shalikashvili, not in uniform but in civilian clothes, before he became SACEUR.

There was a NATO delegation that was invited to Latvia. This is shortly after the Latvian independence revolution, where there had been deaths, and the Russians had killed Latvians. In fact, the flowers were still laying there, and I want to say the bloodstains, were still on the stairs. I got to go to Latvia as the senior NATO member of this delegation. As it turned out, I was the first American, in uniform, to be in Latvia since World War II, or so I was told.

This meeting was a big deal; there was lots of newspaper coverage and lots of protocol. The Latvians, who were just brand new at self-governance again, were very proud of this meeting that they were having. You got an overwhelming sense of a struggling people, a proud people but a struggling people, in terms of the economic opportunities that were there.

Two or three vignettes come to mind. The first is they make a great beer. (laughs) It’s an unadulterated, no preservatives, bottle it and drink it kind of beer, in dark bottles, and it is great.

DePue: A little bit more potent than American beer?

Borling: Oh, I think so, but it was really good. The second thing is the pride of independence and freedom; it was really something. The third thing, that there

497 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

was this broad disparity. We would go out, and they had already sprung up some exquisitely fine restaurants, where you would go out and pay western prices or a little under what’s western prices for literally a wonderful meal.

I remember, and I don’t mean this to be patronizing. We were coming back from an evening out, and we were tripping across this rather large cobblestone square. It’s probably 10:00 at night. Coming across the square is a woman with two children. She sees us, and she skirts us; it’s dark…That’s another thing, it’s dark; there’s no public lighting. As we pass her, she kind of scurries off behind us, and the kids are looking up fearfully, a little boy, a little girl.

So we pass, and then I hear a noise; I turn around, and she’s slipped and fallen. I’m kind of the last guy, so I say, “Hey, troops.”―there’s six or eight of us―I turn back, and she’s struggling to get to her feet. I help her to her feet. She speaks a little English. I think she speaks French—I forget how we were communicating—but she’s cold; she’s got these kids with her.

I basically said, “What are you doing?” She said, “Well, I was out trying to find a birthday present for my boy,” who was seven or six, she said, “and also looking for an apartment to live in, because we’re being evicted. My husband is an engineer, but he’s been thrown out of work, and we can’t afford to pay for the apartment. I was out trying to find us a place to live, because we’re going to be evicted in the morning,” or the next day, whatever it was. So, she said, “But I’m fine. Thank you.” She gets up and starts to move off, and she does. So then we move off, and I said, “Hey, wait a minute.” I said, “This is an opportunity.”

So, I called her, whatever her name was, now there’s maybe 100 yards between us. We all went over, and I said, “Look, we’re staying at the whatever hotel,” I said, “Please come there tomorrow at 10:00, and bring your husband, and bring the kids. We will have something to assist you here in this transition that you’re making.” We hurriedly had taken a little collection up and had fifty bucks or so. [I] said, “Here, maybe you can find a gift for your boy. Maybe this will help.” She looked at it, and she didn’t want it. I said, “Please, you’re doing us a favor.” So she took the money, and we went back to the hotel.

What we did was we took our suitcases, two suitcases, and we said, “All right, everything you absolutely are not attached to, in terms of sentimental value or something, put it in the damn suitcases, clothes, coats.” Everything we had, we put in the suitcases. We were leaving town that day or the next day anyway, and she came. Then, I took up a collection. I don’t want to make this all John Borling; we all thought this was a good idea. As I remember, we got $1,500 or $2,000, which is a lot of money in Latvia in those days; that’s years-plus pay.

498 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

She came, and her husband was not with her. She said, “He’s too proud; he won’t come.” We said, “Well,” We said―this is a very short meeting―We said, “Look,” We said, “We have great respect for the Latvian people and what you’re going through. “ I said, “And we have a chance to make a little difference in your life, so if you would take these two suitcases of clothing and some shaving gear and deodorant and stuff”―the stuff you take with you on a trip. I saved my uniforms; that’s all I took back, was my uniforms and what I was wearing.

We gave her the envelope. She opened it up, and her eyes…she started crying. She said, “How can I…” I said, “You’re thanking us just by doing what you’re doing. This is one-off here. We don’t want to know your name; we don’t want you to know our names. You don’t have to write us letters.” I said, “This will help you get back on your feet.” She walked out of the hotel with her kids, dragging the two suitcases and with an envelope full of money.

Of course, we felt so selfishly pleased and proud that we were able to make a distinct difference in one family’s life, especially since she wasn’t out…If she was panhandling, boy she was a master, because (laughs) it was artfully done. Anyway, so we did that, and that was Latvia. So that stuck.

Then we had these meetings with the government officials and the transition and the large Russian-speaking population that still lives in Latvia— people who had retired in Latvia, because it was much better to retire in Latvia and Estonia than the Soviet Union; you could live better, and the markets used to go across border. They would go and take goods from Latvia to the Soviet Union, because they had more in Latvia than they had in the Soviet Union. But this inbred, native resident population was a problem then. It’s a problem now, except that they are now in NATO and covered by Article 5.56

DePue: “Inbred” meaning that there’s a lot of Russians there.

Borling: A lot of Russians that live, pensioners. Now, a number of them will have died off by now, but they have families and things, and they are Russian-speaking, rather than Latvian-speaking. They made these rules that you could live in Latvia, and you could be a citizen, but you had to take the test in Latvian.

It’s like that old joke about the guy trying to vote in Alabama. The black guy takes it, and the paper is written in Greek. He said, “If you can translate that, that’s your literacy test.” The guy says, “Well,” he said, “I can’t make out the small print, but the headline says, ‘There ain’t no blacks going to vote in Selma, Alabama.’” (both laugh)

56NATO Article 5, collective defense, means that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all Allies. (https://www.nato.int/cps/ua/natohq/topics_110496.htm)

499 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

That was what the Latvians put in place to hold the Russian population in check. This was compounded by the fact that…This will be a significant story I don’t think I’ve told, about me and the Russian general?

DePue: I don’t believe so.

Borling: Well, I was kind of all over the front pages of the Latvian papers. The word came back that general whatever his name was upset by this, because they still had significant Russian forces in Latvia.

DePue: Was upset by what?

Borling: By my presence, and that I had not observed protocol and made a call on him, because I was working with the Latvians. Meanwhile, the Soviets were going home. They were stripping out the barracks. They were taking everything out of the barracks. They were taking the wiring, the toilets, light fixtures, anything they could. They were stripping down these barracks. But this Russian indicated, through the Latvians, that it was a high affront that I had made a call and that he was going to invite me to lunch with my staff.

So, at the appointed time, this black limousine pulls up outside of the hotel. I go out and get in the car. It’s this big, burly Russian guy and a translator and a driver. There’s another car for the two or three guys who were going to accompany me to lunch. They take off, and we take off. He’s sitting in the car like this.

DePue: Arms crossed.

Borling: Arms crossed, doesn’t shake hands, looking ahead. He starts to talk in Russian, to…straight ahead. The translator is turned around in the seat of this black Zil limousine.57 The words are something like, “We are prepared to throw NATO into the sea when it invades the socialistic states that we have spent so much time creating. NATO, the aggressive alliance, will be defeated. My forces are stronger today than they have ever been, and you imperialist pigs must understand that.”

We haven’t gone a block, (laughs) and I said, “Stop!” And the driver—it’s Russian—throws his feet on the brakes. I look at the translator— I’m sitting like this, not looking at him—I said, “Tell the general he’s full of shit.” (laughs) No. So, I turned to him, and I said, “You’re full of shit, and I’m getting out.” So I reached for the car handle to get out of the car. He put his hand on my arm, and he looked at me. He says, (spoken with a Russian accent) “We go lunch.” I said, “We go lunch.” So, I sat back; it was quiet, all the way out to their headquarters.

57A limousine produced by the Soviet car manufacturer ZiI. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIL-114)

500 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Now we get into the headquarters, and it’s a typical Soviet deal, where the long table with the little Coke bottles with flowers, kind of thing, a couple bottles of vodka, some sausages and hard bread. I’m on one side; he’s on the other. He’s got all his guys; they’re all in uniform, and we’re in uniform, three or four of us. He pours some vodka, “Nostrovia, nostrovia” [to your health], so we did nostrovia. Then, I said, “To the spirit of the Elbe.” They translate that, and everyone says “Oh, oh, nostrovia” again. So we nostrovia to whoever, to good looking women and nostrovia to this.

Well, we go through a bottle of vodka in about ten minutes with these guys. They bring more in. We haven’t had any food yet; I’m eating bread and sausage. They bring in soup, and we’re drinking very heavily. Before the main course comes—which is pretty meager…So, now we’ve had bread, meat and soup. They bring in―this is almost something out of World War II―they bring in the violin and the accordion guy, and they start doing this stuff. He stands up and he says, “Come.” We end up…He and I end up dancing. (both laugh) We do this dance kind of thing, both of us; our powers are somewhat under a cloud.

Anyway, it ends up into a great love fest. It turns out that he’s got a teenage daughter who loves American music, and he can’t get the tapes. He says―he speaks enough English that we’re back and forth—“Can you get me some tapes?” Not CDs, but literally the cassette tapes. I said, “Hey, I’ll get you some tapes.”

He says, “I’m going back to Moscow. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen; everything’s up in the air.” So we’re just having kind of a…the two of us over in the corner having a talk. I say I wish him well. I speak a little Russian, and so I used a little Russian.

I’d studied Russian literature and history, and we got into how Tolstoy was basically fucked up, but he was a great writer, and everyone loves Pushkin. I’d read some poetry, some contemporary, Yevgeny somebody or other [Yevtushenko], who did a book called Blue and Green. That happened to be his favorite poet, and this book Blue and Green was a bestseller. The Russians are very literate, very cultural people. They have great respect for music and literature, because they’ve had such a hellaciously bad life. So it speaks to the extremes.

And then we went away, with a considerable hangover that night― because that was lunch―and went away. I sent him stuff back in Moscow or in Latvia first, then back in Moscow. He became a deputy defense minister, and then he was killed.

DePue: Killed?

Borling: Killed.

501 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: How did that happen, accident?

Borling: No, no, no accident. He was…eliminated. I sit here now―I guess I can go back and look at my paper―I can’t remember his name. But that was the end of that thing.

The other thing, when we were in Stavanger, Anatoly Sobchak, who was the mayor of St. Petersburg and supposed to be―

DePue: What was the last name again?

Borling: Anatoly Sobchak. S-o-b-c-h-a-k, I think. Anyway, he was a Scott Walker of his time and very popular, and again, mayor of St. Petersburg. He had been a guest in our home when one of these Russian delegations had come over, really took a shine to Myrna, for obvious reasons. That was something else; when the Russian military would visit, they wouldn’t have any civilian clothes. We would have to go out and buy them civilian clothes, so they could get out of their smelly, woolen uniforms and come and enjoy a business casual evening.

In both cases, the house in Oslo, and the house in Stavanger—the one in Stavanger being quite large—the admiral of the Northern Fleet came down. I think this is when Anatoly was there as well, but he was savvy enough as a politician. The military guys came into the house, [which] had a large reception area, probably encompassing all of this, out to my front room. They were very polite; they spoke a little English, but they had interpreters with them.

So, Myrna and I greeted them. We were doing the dinner that night; we had maybe twenty or thirty people for dinner. We had a couple tables set up that would be nicely done. I couldn’t seat thirty at my table. I could seat fifteen or twenty, so we split it so it was kind of nicely balanced. We had two major rooms, both looking out on the fjord. This was in Stavanger.

We sat down, and we did the speeches before dinner. The guy stood up there, and he said very nice things. This was the head of the Northern Fleet. He said, “Well, we’re sorry if we’ve inconvenienced the other families that live here,” and this interpreter said that. It came out again about how many families really do live here. We were now in a position of trying to avoid embarrassment. We indicated that this was a representational house and that my wife and I used it, but it wasn’t a place for a multifamily dwelling.

It was smooth enough, but they noted, and in the course of the evening, others came up, “Just you and your wife live here?” We said, “Yeah.” It was so strange again, thinking about the…You could imagine these people communally, even at high rank, shoved into smallish apartments, and here we’re living in 12,000 square feet kind of thing of living space.

502 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: I’m listening to these stories; they’re amazing stories. There’s so much change going on in the world at that point in time, but the―

Borling: Yeah, things were just galloping change. I would go in and out of Moscow, and I would see, in a period of six months, changes. You know what told me they were on the right track? Because remember, not only would I have the military job…now we’re in Oslo for two years. Shali has given me another guy on the job of reorganizing Northern NATO, with a lot of help, but we were the action officers. My principal focus was Norway; the other guy had England.

DePue: Now, you were there basically from ’92, all the way through ’96?

Borling: Ninety-two to ’96, until I retired, yeah. I was two years in Oslo, and then I set up a new command, with a lot of help, but it was my invention; it was an integrated command, because it had blown up in the DPC [Demand Processing Center] and the military committee, in terms of Northern NATO. This is part of the peace dividend thing.

DePue: Integrated in terms of the various nations?

Borling: No. What had happened was they had gone to the DPC…Just as I was arriving in Norway, they’d gone to the ministerials with the proposal for how to split up and get some dollar savings out of Northern Europe. Before it came to a vote―it was supposedly all greased; everyone had agreed; all the nations had agreed―the Norwegians voiced objection; the Germans voiced objection, which caused the English to voice objection. Now all of a sudden there was no reorganization of Northern NATO. This was just a couple weeks before I arrived in Norway.

Shali, General Shalikashvili, came up and met with us and was talking about this. That was when he pulled me off and said, “I want you to try to fix this for me.” I said, “Fix it? I came up here to retire. (both laugh) I’ve been fired by the chief.” He said, “I know; I fought to get you.” I said, “Okay.” I said, “Well, I’ll need this, this and this, access to you.” It took a couple years, as I say, with a lot of help. I don’t want to presume that I was the only architect of this thing.

But I was the architect of the fact that Norway felt slighted, and Germany felt slighted, under the new command structure, with the English being a bit heavy-handed on this thing. At least that was my take. I had an English two-star. I said, “You work the English thing, and I’ll work everybody else.” Norway, particularly, didn’t like the diminution of their status. So we formed a new headquarters, called Headquarters North.

Norway wasn’t willing to shake hands on this kind of arrangement. They certainly were at loggerheads with any other kind of arrangement that could be conceived in terms of headquarters. I said, “Well look, if we can’t

503 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

hold each other at a distance, and we can’t shake hands on the matter, the only thing left is to hug each other. So, let’s hug each other; let’s form an integrated command where it is a NATO national command, and every officer in the headquarters will answer to Norway, NATO or not, and every Norwegian in the headquarters will answer to NATO, NATO or not.

We will have an international command staff; we’ll have a Norwegian commander, a three-star,” I said, “and to keep it balanced,” I said, “we’ll have an American chief of staff. But then we’ll have every component commander, Army, Navy, Air Force, will be Norwegian, under the commander.” Because the chief of staff is just the chief of staff; there’s no command problem, when in truth, the chief of staff runs the command. I said, “This will be an integrated command, and nationalities don’t obtain; NATO doesn’t obtain; Norwegian nationality doesn’t obtain. Everyone will work in this integrated command, and the command structure will ensure that it remains integrated, especially the chief of staff.

DePue: I’m trying to figure out how the Germans and the Danes don’t get a little bit bent out of shape, because they’re not part of the formal structure.

Borling: The Germans were, by now, focused on getting most of the command positions in Central Europe. The Danes were too busy partying to worry about it. We did have to give a tip of the hat and have a major subordinate command to Headquarters North in Denmark, which was run all by Danes, frankly. I had a few international officers, but the Danes got a command out of this as well, and I was servicing.

So, anyway, I set all this up; [it] took two years. Then this thing about, are we going to leave it in Oslo or move it to Stavanger, Norway, because the Norwegians had two major bunker complexes. They had a thing called Command Southern Norway, where [there was] the army command or the Military Command, South Norway, Military Command, North Norway, in Buda.

Torolf Rein, who was the chief of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs for Norway, and I became very close. Torolf said the Norwegians could live with this. This went all the way to the prime minister. I’m up briefing the Norwegians; we’re in there talking, and I’m doing the briefing. Torolf then weighs in. He said, “We can live with this. This is a good command, and John has done a good job, our American friend.” Then he turned to me and said, “The only thing that we ask in this circumstance is,” he said, “you must be the chief of staff,” because I was going to be a two-year tour and be gone. I was going to retire.

DePue: And retire?

504 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: And retire. By this time, we’d elected to move it to Stavanger. I didn’t think that was a good move. I was overruled, because I thought we were going to lose the diplomatic community and the international community that was in Oslo. Part of my responsibilities…I was a senior American up there, so I was on the diplomatic country team of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. I had diplomatic status in those countries or had diplomatic status, period.

I had to make a decision. I said, “This is a high honor that you’d let me do this.” They basically indicated that I would be the Norwegian commander, but I would be the guy. I said, “Okay, that’s fine.” I knew Bjornar Kibsgaard. They said, “Okay, well, first we’re going to make you the chief of staff of the military forces in Southern Norway.” This is a Norweigen position, not a NATO position. I went over and transitioned, went over to Stavanger. I’d been there obviously, a lot.

Bjornar was a great, great guy, wonderful guy. We hit it off very well. He basically said, “I’m the commander, but you’re the chief of staff.” I had these three Norwegian two-stars under me, who didn’t want to be under me, but were under me. They would go to Bjornar, sometimes go around. Bjornar would say, “Talk to the chief of staff,” because he was busy with…Well, there are some stories here I’m not going to tell; he had some issues.

So, Myrna and I moved. We moved into this beautiful house that the Norwegians found for us on the fjord, three acres, apple orchard, 10,000- 12,000 square feet. I had a fifty-foot yacht at my disposal, with a Norwegian crew, a driver―of course we all had drivers―but Mercedes and drivers. The Americans ensured that I had a great representation allowance, as did Norway, because we were entertaining three times a week.

The job was substantive. We’re building this because we’ve got some tensions with Northern Norway that’s closing down. In fact, we had taken the commander up there—I forgot his name—and made him the Norwegian MILREP in Brussels, the military representative. So we had a new junior commander in northern Norway, because they were under us. It all worked out and it was a magic two years.

Out of that thing, I’d go to Moscow, or I’d go to Helsinki or even Sweden. We had some arrangements with Sweden that were counterpart visits; Bjornar, God love him, gave me full run. I was very careful to make sure that his command prerogatives were respected, and we would have our daily meeting. They used not to have daily meetings. We’d have a daily, quick meeting, just the five generals, six generals―there was another Marine there ―and then we’d go do things.

DePue: There’s something I’m not clear on. I should know this, but were Sweden and Finland formally part of NATO at that time?

505 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: No they were not, and they are not part of NATO now.

DePue: So that was kind of a continuation from their different status, even through World War II.

Borling: Yeah, Finland was forced into neutrality by the Russians. The Swedes chose it and have continued there; although they’re now making noises. There has always been noises about joining NATO.

I think Putin’s activities can temporarily…will perhaps force Sweden and Finland over the edge. That will be a source of angst for the Russians again. But as I said, in truth, without creating something that would not be accurate, there was opportunity to meet with the Swedes and the Finns and to talk about matters of mutual importance. Well, I did it, on one level.

That was a thing where Bjornar made his own forays. He would go with nobody else, just him. Then he would come back, and we would talk about it. He would report back up internally to the chief of defense. But I was as integrated, I think, as anybody could be. In fact, when I went to Savanger, I went in advance of the formal setting up of the headquarters.

In order for that to work well, the Norwegians published a new command structure in Norway. Part of that was that the stabchef pajattanutten or the chief of staff for military forces, Southern Norway was now this American. (both laugh) They put me into a Norwegian national position unilaterally, didn’t ask anybody, didn’t ask me, but there I am in the Norwegian Defense Register as the stabchef pajattanutten.

When we took that command down, because I was wearing the tre sverder, the three swords shield, and other things, different things. I had a change of command with the existing chief of staff, which you don’t normally do, but it was a change of command. So, I didn’t have to have a change of command when we set up the new command. In fact, I was the first officer in the new command, because I was previously knighted, if you will, by the Norwegians, very wonderful, pragmatic, professional folks, even though they only work from about 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon. (both laugh) I would be in at 7:00, but then I fell into it. I said, “Why am I going to be walking around an empty headquarters?”

They tell a funny story about the American, Brit and the Norwegian talking. The American says, “My wife is so good-looking and in such great shape, I can put my hands around her waist and my fingers touch; she’s that svelte.” And the Brit says, “Well, chaps,” he said, “when my wife is astride, equestrian, you know,” he said, “her legs are so lithe and long, she has no need of stirrups because they in fact touch the ground.” He says, “She’s that trim and that tall and that intriguing in every way.” The Norwegian guy says, (uses a Norwegian accent) “Ah, you guys, when I go to work in the morning, I

506 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

flick Ingrid on the bottom with my finger, and the bottom starts to quiver, and when I come home at night, it’s still quivering. It’s not that she in such good shape; it’s just our working hours are so short.” (both laugh) They had a great sense of humor. But they were; you got used to it. Three o’clock comes and it’s over.

So, if you’re doing this right, you have breakfast with the Danes, who make you drink Gamle Dansk, which is a get your head straight on after the night before. Then you go to lunch with the Brits, and they have beer and wine with lunch. And then, of course, you go out to dinner that night with the Norwegians, and it’s drinking akvavit. I think in large measure, many of the European militaries are peopled by functional alcoholics. They really enjoy the social aspect of military services, as well as the military service.

We’re going to take a break for a minute.

(pause in recording)

DePue: We took a quick break, and we’re back at it. General, talk a little bit more about the military aspects of the job, after this reorganization, which was certainly significant.

Borling: Sure. I didn’t want it to come off as a walk in the park kind of experience. It was fraught with representational and diplomatic responsibilities, cutting across nations and also in a tumultuous time in Europe, with Russia going through a transition with all kinds of potentialities for things to get off track. [They] didn’t. Russia had severe decline, climbed out of it. Now, of course, they’re back on a more adventuresome path, much more adventuresome path, troublesome path here, as we sit in 2015. (dog barks)

DePue: She had something to say about that.

Borling: Well, she agrees. The reality is that we were in a circumstance where the tensions between Russia and the West were much reduced, that there was this outreach, while we were still going through our drills. The questions were, why do we have NATO? That seems to be a question that comes up every so often. The answer, of course is, if we didn’t have NATO, today we would have had to invent it, and it’s much harder to invent. We have this continuum of a military political alliance that has provided Europe with basically almost three-quarters of a century of peace, if you go from ’45 to today—fifteen, twenty, fifty—almost seventy years of peace, notwithstanding tension. Now, of course, we have war in the rimlands [peripheral areas] in Ukraine.

DePue: And there was also the problem with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and plenty of dust-ups there as well.

Borling: We had a problem in the Balkans. It seems like conflict is the norm, rather than peace, if you look at the human condition. We were keeping our military

507 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

readiness in the north, through a series of yearly exercises, reinforcing Americans through air meets, through naval activities, through visits, through ground force maneuvers. We were a bevy of exercises. The exercise schedule, which tends to be established years in advance, in our case we had some like that, but we had to make up some as well to get the new headquarters structure, Headquarters North, functioning in a way that it would be able to discharge its military responsibilities.

At the same time, we had all this representational stuff that would go on with the nations, the many nations that served in that headquarters. The American ambassador, Ambassador [Thomas A.] Loftus and his wife, Barbara, would come often and be very much a part of what we were doing. Whenever I would go back to Oslo, I would certainly stop at the embassy and be part of the morning meetings. Again, I was on the country team and had an embassy pass. Tom Loftus and I were good personal friends; Barbara and I and Myrna were similarly inclined, one to another.

I joke—telling another funny story, if you want—that there was a major military international ball, civilian and military, that we hosted at the Stavanger Art Museum, which was a large structure, had a large rotunda, beautiful area to host a formal military ball in. Tom and Barbara had come over for it, along with other members of the staff and international diplomatic staff. Everyone is formal, and it’s quite a spectacular evening.

Barbara and I were dancing, and the orchestra switched into a tango or what seemed to be tango music. Barbara kind of froze up and said, “I don’t know how to do this.” I said, “Just ride with me.” I didn’t know how to do it either, but I wasn’t about to admit it. So, we started to do the maneuvers that one could call tango, I guess. As we continued to get more enthused in our efforts to tango, we, shall we say, became more personally adventuresome as the dance went on, with some significant improvisation of dragging legs across the floor and doing the things that you think you’ve seen in some kind of Argentinean version of the tango.

Well, as it turned out, we were doing pretty good I guess, because the crowd kind of split back, and it was just the two of us. That, for the moment, just lent more encouragement to your erstwhile fighter pilot here. The orchestra finished up with a smash, and she finished up kind of recumbent in my arms, and everyone broke into applause. We stood up, understanding now that the moment had passed that we had created some significant spectacle.

As we turn around to go off the floor, we look across the room, and there stands Ambassador Loftus with Myrna, with this frozen smile on both their faces. (DePue laughs) As we walked back across the room, Barbara leans over to me and utters the words that will forever be salutary words whenever we meet in receiving lines or lunch or at dinner or wherever. Through clenched teeth, much like doing the Charlie McCarthy thing, she said, “You

508 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

son of a bitch.” (laughs) I roundly deserved the appellation, but I certainly got to know Barbara Loftus well, that brief moment or two on the dance floor.

I can say, with some finality, that I have not tangoed with another woman since. There was a strict codicil established, written, signed in blood, as I recall, that was put into the family safe that night, that I would never again dance the tango with anyone. (both laugh) So that comes to mind.

There was a major…You know the Tall Ships thing?58

DePue: Yeah.

Borling: Well, the Norwegians hosted a Tall Ships thing, and that kind of fell into our naval commander, a guy by the name of Rino Paus. It was a big deal across Europe. One of the things that Bjornar did was he had the Norwegian Tall Ship, which was a captured German, three-masted vessel, brought into the harbor at Stavanger. He was dressed in the costume of a Norwegian admiral of the 1800s kind of thing.

I recall looking up into the rigging and saying to myself, This is something I need to do. I need to go to the top of that mast and look out. This is something that the chief of staff of Headquarters North needs to do. I told Myrna, I said, “Here, hold my drink; I’m going to climb the rigging.”

DePue: How much had you been drinking before this?

Borling: I had been drinking a lot. I got up on the gunnels and then started climbing up on this wide rope ladder, which did that as you got further to the top.

DePue: Narrowed.

Borling: Well, in my case it never narrowed, because I got up about three rungs, and I said, “I forgot; I’m terribly afraid of heights.” (laughs) I’m up about all of fifteen feet, hanging on and wondering how the hell am I going to get down without falling into the fjord. [I] struggled down and rescued my drink from Myrna. She was properly impressed. I was very impressed of how to climb the rigging. Bjornar looked at me.

Meanwhile, some of the young Norwegian sailors are scampering up and down these things like monkeys. I should have known better, because, as an Air Force academy cadet, I tried to climb the Eagle, which is the ship at the Coast Guard Academy in Newport; it is a big, three-masted schooner. I wasn’t any more successful there than I was that night in the Stavanger Harbor.

58 A tall ship is a large, traditionally-rigged sailing vessel. Popular modern tall ship rigs include topsail schooners, brigantines, brigs and barques. "Tall ship" can also be defined more specifically by an organization, such as for a race or festival. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_ship)

509 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

The relations between the government officials, both on the executive side and on the representative side or the Storting, as they call it, and the king, who lives…If you go to Oslo, there’s a street that goes up and down the main drag, which is called Karl Johans Gate, gate being street. At one end is the slott, or the castle, where King Harald den femte and Queen Sonja live, King Harald V. Then, at the other end of the street, is this kind of art deco tile-ish kind of building called the Storting, which is where the Norwegian Parliament meets, the prime minister. And then, up and down Karl Johans Gate—we’re talking probably a mile and a half—are all the fancy stores and the Grand Hotel where Ibsen would write/eat in the window. There was an orchestra hall. It used to be the opera house or was close to there; it’s now down on the waterfront. As you go just past the Grand Hotel, just a block up from the slott—all the side streets that cut in—you have the local condomerie.

DePue: The police?

Borling: The condomerie, your local neighborhood sex store—

DePue: Ah.

Borling: …which is manned by two beautiful blonde-haired girls, as wholesome a group…“Hva vul du?” What will you have? You walk in, oh Jesus, the window is full of things, just, again, kind of innocuous. In America, it’s behind painted windows. Not in Norway; it’s just laying out in the…“Hva vul du?” What do you want? Kids are walking by and mothers and fathers. Of course, you hit the beaches…They don’t put bathing suits on kids until they’re about five in Norway, so the mystery is not a mystery. It’s a very innocuous people.

But I was going to comment, again, from the Stavanger perspective, that there were only four and a half million Norwegians in the whole country when I was there. If you think about it, in World War II, with a population of about two and a half million, they kept 600,000 German troops, first line troops, garrisoned in Norway. Think of what those troops could have done, either on the western or the eastern front, when things got so difficult. Hitler never pulled them out, because he was concerned of the last, that somehow… and the Norwegian resistance was significant. They’re very proud of that.

There’s a gigantic fort in downtown Oslo called the Festnung [Akershus Fortress]; in the Festnung is the resistance museum. It talks about what the Norwegians did in terms of World War II resistance, deservedly proud. They certainly tied up…When you think about it, one German for every three Norwegians; that’s a hell of an occupation force.

But from Stavanger, across country there, we would have dealings with the executive and the legislative side of the house, not so much the judicial. We had opportunity to interface with what they called the

510 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

fylkesmann, or the county man or the county governor. Just like we’re divided into states, they have fylkes. In our case it was a woman, Tora Aasland Houg. We always sat together at the various functions because of the protocol. She was a senior, local government official.

Leif Johan Sevland was the longtime mayor of Stavanger. Leif Johan was a good friend and a frequent house guest. So, we found ourselves embroiled in both federal, state, and local government activities as a principal presence in the Stavanger/Western Norway area, and that took a lot of time. There were cultural responsibilities.

At the same time, when boats would come in and violate the Norwegian territorial waters, be they American or British or German, I would have them arrested. I would be called to have them towed into port for violating Norwegian fishing rules or territorial waters. This is part of the business.

The Russians were less frequently coming around the corner with their bombers, but we kept airplanes on alert to intercept them. Crafting and preparing for exercise, checking the readiness of the troops that were there, attending exercises in the various countries and then the diplomatic forays to places like Latvia or Estonia or Russia or the surrounding northern little of Germany, or back to England, that all kept a pace that was unrelenting, and [I] found it quite demanding.

Again, we were in the early stages of setting up this new command. I’m now talking ’94 to ’96. There were some shakeout things, which you had to get through and some personality things that needed to be worked on. But on balance, it was a glorious way to finish up a military career. I remember at the end, I said, “Look, we’re going to retire.”

In fact, I’d been called by my chief. The old chief of staff left, and I got called by the new chief of staff of the Air Force, a guy by the name of Ron Fogleman, who happened to be a classmate from the academy. Ron and I had known each other and had regard for each other, still do. Ron basically told me, he said, “All right, what do you want to do?” He said, “You haven’t got enough runway left for me to make you any more stars,” He said, “But we can certainly find you a good…”

There was the inference that there was a third star in the offing, but I’d go back and be a Washington general. I’d rather, what is it, “Rather to be king in a distant province than a deputy in Rome.” I told Ron, hey, I’d stay. As a matter of fact, I’d committed to the Norwegians that I would stay. So I said, “Look, I’ll finish up in Norway, and that will be it, and I’ll leave a couple years.” I’ve only got a couple years to go anyway, in terms of mandatory retirement, which would be thirty-five, so I left at thirty-three.

511 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Thirty-three years.

Borling: Thirty-three years commission, yeah, a little more than thirty-three years’ commission. And the Norwegians saw…We said, we’re chief of staff; we don’t get anything. Oh, no, they had parades, dinners. At the course of the dinner, formal dinner…and everybody was there, from north to south, all around the country.

We were very pleased, and that was where they announced that the king had decided to confer on me an award. In Norwegian it’s Kongelige Norske Fortjenstorden Commander. I was going to be made a commander in the King’s Order of Merit, which was the third highest order or award given by the country of Norway. The other two have to be, I understand, World War II vets. There’s rankings of this Fortjenstorden Ordine, and I was in one of the highest rankings and a commander in that high ranking thing and the first American military guy, first military guy, foreign military guy to receive the award.

Then I had to go in to the king and have an audience with King Harald Femte, King Harald V, and spent the obligatory private audience, private meeting. He made the official presentation, even though it was presented to me that night. It’s a heavy Georg Jensen silver and inlaid cross; it’s quite spectacular. I treasured that as a statement that our final tour, which was supposed to be such a letdown in many respects, turned into such a high point of our career, one of the many highpoints, but obviously a big one. What a way to finish up, being recognized by the king of Norway, recognized by your peers first and by the commanders and by the Norwegian military establishment, that I would be worthy of such a high decoration.

So we left Norway, regretfully. There were a lot of people who wanted us to stay, including me, but [not] Myrna, who had been on the road all these years and with grandkids and stuff. We ended up coming back in July of ’96 to our summer home up in Michigan; it’s a cottage on this lake—that’s kind of where we started out on our honeymoon—and spent the summer of ’96, what remained of it, at the cottage and then into the fall.

Somewhere, after about four or five months, I started getting anxious and said, “Well, it’s time to go get a job.” I still had kids in school, and retirement income, while satisfactory, adequate, wasn’t enough to maintain the lifestyle to which we’d become accustomed.

DePue: I wanted to jump in here and ask just a couple questions while we still have you close to your military career. Previously, I started asking this; do you know how you can tell things are changing? It was in reference to Russia, how things were changing in the old Soviet Union.

512 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, the difference was the kiosks. Again, I made three or four trips to Russia, over the course of those four years. I, in Checkmate, had studied Russia; I’d certainly studied Russian Marxist theory and Marxist- Leninist theory and had read a lot of Russian literature and music and stuff and aware of the French connection and all that business.59

When I first went to Russia…this was shortly after the business in ’89, a little later than that. I’m trying to think back, if I was still at SAC. We had Russians visit us in Omaha. In fact, we took them down into the bunker and did a simulated nuclear war for them.

DePue: While you were in SAC?

Borling: While I was in SAC, yeah. This would be up to the ’91 timeframe.

DePue: There still was a Soviet Union.

Borling: Yeah, but it was…the rapprochement was frazzling, and we were taking Looking Glass down and taking bombers off alert and doing all that. No, I don’t remember if I went to…God, it’s twenty years ago now. I don’t remember if I’d gone to Russia. I can’t imagine that I did, as the DO of SAC, but I may have. I traveled a lot and went around to Europe. I know I was in Europe the year the wall came down. I don’t know why I was there, but I was, because I was in SAC by that time.

But the first time I went to Russia…You go into the GUM Department Store. It’s Potemkin Village; there’s nothing there. There’s nothing that you would want to buy, these large department stores with basically empty shelves. They tell the story…This is a Russian story. Did I mention the shoe factory or the shoe store?

DePue: No.

Borling: This would be my first trip then. Krokodil is the, or was the satirical magazine that Russia allowed to have published, even in the Stalinist years. It was a bitingly, cleverly…It was the Charlie Hebdo but reserved kind of thing, under the Soviets.60 You always look for nations that can laugh at themselves as some semblance of hope that they will be responsible. If they’ve got a sense of humor about their own foibles, then you can expect some kind of responsible action from time to time. That’s why I worry about the Chinese, who don’t have the capability to laugh at themselves. They do have a good

59 The French Connection was a scheme through which heroin was smuggled from Turkey to France and then to the United States through Canada. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Connection) 60 Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) is a French satirical weekly magazine, featuring cartoons, reports, polemics, and jokes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo)

513 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

sense of humor, but it’s internal. They’re not willing to share their foibles with the outside world.

But in this case they talked, in Krokodil, about a couple of things, one of which is still so troubling, but dealt with [the] very real. That is that there’s a shoe store, and the shoe store is going to open at 7:00 in the morning. Of course, the line has been forming since midnight. Seven o’clock comes and goes, and it’s 8:00. The door of the shoe store opens up, and the proprietor of the shoe store, there in Moscow, says, “Well,” He said, “We’ve been inventorying the shoes, and we don’t think we have as many shoes as we thought we were going to get in the shipment.” He said, “So all the Jews go home,” and he closes the door.

An hour later—now it’s 9:00—he opens the doors, and he said, “Well, we’re finishing inventorying the shoes.” He says, “We were right. We don’t have the number of shoes that we thought we should have.” He said, “So only party members stay; everybody else go home,” and he closes the door.

At 10:00, he opens up the door, and he says, “Now we’ve been doing quality control on the shoes, and we note that the quality control of a number of these shoes is not what we want it to be, so what we want to have happen here is—we know all you are party members—but only the party members who knew Lenin personally should stay, and everybody else should go home,” closes the door.

At noon, he opens up the door. There’s a couple of old guys standing there, (laughs) and he says “Ah,” He said, “Come on in.” He said, “We’re so glad to have you in, comrades.” He said, “You’re not Jews,” he said, “you’re party members,” he said, “you knew Lenin personally.” He said, “We can tell you the truth; there’s no shoes.” (both laugh) He says, “There’s never been any shoes, but we thank you for being such great patriots for the great Soviet Union” and ushers them out.

So, Sergei and Boris are walking down the street on their canes, and one guy turns to the other guy; he said, “Did you ever notice, even with the revolution, the Jews get the best deal?” (both laugh) Now, that sounds very anti-Semitic, and it is. The Russians are very, by history, anti-Semitic. But that story, which was uproarious—I’ve heard it told a number of times—it came from the magazine, Krokodil.

If I could tell another story, this is about Russian humor. There used to be the great cuckoo clock contest every year. All the Russian republics and Warsaw Pact countries would come with their hand-carved clocks, and there would be this great clock contest, exposition in the big coliseum in Moscow.

This one year, just before the collapse, the Bavarians—but on the East German side—showed up with this massively carved cuckoo clock, presented

514 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

it and moved the big hands around until it struck 12:00, and the little bird came out. The bird said, “Lenin, Lenin, Lenin,” and the crowd went wild.

From Kazakhstan, there were a series of craftsmen that came out. They had a beautifully carved clock out of ebony wood, which is not known to be indigenous anywhere except in Kazakhstan. They presented it and moved the hands, and the little bird came out and said, “Stalin, Stalin, Stalin.”

Well, not to be slighted, the region around Moscow has a certain pride of position. They were in the finals as well and the third entry. These guys, they looked like they’d torn apart pallets, plywood pallets, and cobbled together this very rough looking clock. It wasn’t very pretty at all, but it went back and forth. They moved the hands around, and it hit 12:00. Nothing happened. The guy kind of hit the side of the clock, nothing. He hits the other side of the clock; a little bird comes out and goes, “Cuckoo, cuckoo.” (both laugh) Now that’s Russian humor at its best.

So, what I saw going “Cuckoo” were the kiosks. The kiosks on the corner—the babushkas and the others huddling down with their kiosk—where you could buy some bottled water, and you could buy some faded flowers and some toothpaste and some stuff, the kiosks had stuff in it.

Six months pass; I’m back in Moscow—maybe a year, nine months— now the kiosks have got bananas, and they’ve got canned goods. The kiosks are looking more like the 7-Eleven kind of thing.61 I go off for another year, and the kiosks are looking like mini stores.

And wow GUM has got stuff in it, and there’s car dealerships, and there’s things happening at a great rate. The crime of it is that most people can’t afford that stuff. But you can see the economy is picking up. On one of these trips, we were with some university students. We took them down, not too far from Red Square, a main shopping street; that’s where McDonalds were set up.62 None of these young people had ever had a McDonalds, much less a milkshake from McDonalds.

We went in there, and I bought everybody Big Macs and Cokes and a milkshake.63 Gosh, it was expensive, but I did it. Oh, they went crazy with this comfort food. But you could see the things going up that way.

At the same time, there was kind of an aversion to the Western presence. I remember going through Moscow—I pronounce it incorrectly,

61 7-Eleven Inc. is a Japanese-owned American international chain of convenience stores, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-Eleven) 62 McDonald's is an American fast food company, founded in 1940 as a restaurant operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald, in San Bernardino, California. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s) 63 The Big Mac is a specially prepared hamburger sold by international fast food restaurant chain McDonald's that was introduced in the Greater Pittsburgh area in 1967. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac)

515 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Sheremetyevo Airport, something like that—with Myrna and being shouldered out of the way by some burly Russian women; Russians are very pushy in crowds. I had to do the “diplomat,” thing in order to get us through without being constantly pushed to the back of the customs crowd.

I remember we, on that particular trip—I’d been there before—we went to Lenin’s tomb to see it. It was a fairly easy thing to do; you go through a couple checkpoints and get in and walk around the bier, much like you would at Les Invalides in France, for Napoleon.

We had another trip or two that they tightened up security. They had, kind of like, now you’ve got to get into the White House; you’ve got to go through multiple checkpoints.

I tell the story of a harried American businessman who wants to see Lenin’s tomb. He goes up to the first checkpoint and says, “Look, I’ve only got a few minutes before I’ve got to get a cab and get out to the airport.” He said, “Here’s twenty bucks; can I jump up ahead?” “Sure, go ahead.” He gets up to the next checkpoint, another twenty bucks, the third checkpoint, twenty bucks.

Now he’s up to the steps where there’s an old NKVD [Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del, People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, former Soviet Union under Stalin] guard. He says, “I want to go in and see Lenin. I’ve got a few minutes.” He said, “Here’s twenty bucks. Let me in.” “Imperialist pig, American swine,” he said, “you think you dishonor the presence of our great leader, Vladimir Lenin. Notwithstanding all of the changes and the turbulence, he still represents mother Russia.” He said, “You think you can buy your way in here like gross capitalist.” He said, “I’m here to defend the rights and the prerogatives and the respects of the motherland.” The American says, “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” reaches into his wallet and pulls out a $100 bill, hands it to him. The guy looks at it, takes it. He says, “You want to go in, or should we bring him out?” (both laugh) There’s an essential pragmatism that goes.

Again, there’s this great sense of Russian humor, but let’s not let that—in my experience anyway—take away from the dangerous moment we’re in, because there is no accountability. We’re back to the days of the czar or the days of Stalin, with a government that is truly representative of one man, and it’s [this] one man who is attempting to recreate, for good or for ill, Russia with rimlands surrounding it, for purposes of his own concept of national security.64

64 With regard to Russia’s one man, Vladimir Putin is, of course, the most influential and powerful person in all of Russia. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2018/09/03/russias-top-10-most-influential-only-one- woman-and-one-private-company/#3eb68cb176cd)

516 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

This is very worrisome, because wars start on the rimlands. Ukrainia, which means in Russian, “on the edge of,” is just the latest example of all of that, although I have been saying for two years, maybe a year and a half, that the answer for the Ukraine has got to be some kind of de facto partition. I wish it were not so, but I think that’s where it’s going to be. It may even be de jour partition. But with half the country being Orthodox and Russian- speaking—basically the eastern half—and the other half being Catholic and Ukrainia-speaking—even though there’s a great mixture—you’re going to see that, I think, happen. At least there will be autonomous regions created. It’s going to be a difficult circumstance, and I hope it diffuses.

The Russians don’t pull back unless, when they stick the spear in, they feel resistance; at least that’s my experience. In international relations, especially if you have interior lines of communication, that which you’re willing to fight for, but the other guy is not willing to fight for it, just fight for it, you’ve ceded the initiative.

So that’s part of the stuff that we learned and we did in Russia. You could just see the economy, with the freedoms associated with it, taking off. That’s one good hope, that there still are is significant movement for freedoms in Russia that you can’t…I don’t think Putin can walk it back all the way.

DePue: I want to end our discussion about your long military career. This might sound like a stupid question, but you had six and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp and saw Communism from that perspective. You end your military career in this fascinating four-year tour up in Norway and seeing the dissolution of the Soviet Union, seeing the conditions in Murmansk and all the stories you talked about here. Why did it fail?

Borling: Why what?

DePue: Why did Communism not work? What is it?

Borling: Oh, I think that the premises of Communism, which dictated that the natural laws surrounding historical materialism were inviolate and would result in the triumph of worldwide Communism in some form, or worldwide Socialism, which were always suspect and where you tried to make everything fit into that model, it became such an intellectual sham, on top of which was trying to manage a centralized economy, became a circumstance that fell almost of its own weight. I thought that the Berlin Wall would require a world war to bring it down. It did, a war of the human spirit and also the mistaken order of a midlevel functionary in East Germany that was followed with enthusiasm.

517 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Eric Hoffer, again, [said] that the only way you beat an idea is with a better idea, or sometimes the idea beats itself.65 I’m rereading The True Believer, by the way. It’s a hard read, but it’s a revelatory read. After a period of time, societies just grow weary with themselves. I worry a lot about America not being regenerative, not focusing on renewal themes as much as we should. It’s almost like tuck pointing chimneys; you’ve got to keep tuck pointing all the time, something I had to look forward to this spring. I assume you’re paying me by the word, (DePue laughs) so I can afford to tuck point my chimney.

A secular ideology, philosophy, absent the ability for the human condition to express itself, has never lasted all that long. Even when the human condition, call it freedom, is in play, the tendency is for the population to give up its freedoms in favor of comfort. Once you do that then you tend to lose your security and your freedom and all of those things. You’ve always got to be a little hungry. It’s kind of like a hungry fighter.

You don’t find a guy out of New Trier High School, on the north shore of Chicago, or out of Kenilworth or Lake Bluff or Lake Forest becoming a heavyweight contender. You’ve got to come up through the rough ranks. Once you get comfortable, you’re never satisfied; you want more comfort. It’s like John Rockefeller said. They asked him, “How much do you need?” He said, “Just a little more, just a little more.”

Russia failed because they misappropriated their economy. A centralized economy wasn’t going to work anyway, too many variables, too many parts missing. They had these metrics, where the factories had to produce so much. The factories went into these periods called “storming periods,” where they would try to make the quota. We have quarterly reports on our stock market; they had quarterly quotas that they had to make.

They tell the story, another Krokodil story, about industrial facility, in this case a nail making facility, had a requirement to make a certain amount of nails in order to meet the State quota. The metric that they used was pounds of nails. The story goes that the factory manager was notably lax, drank a lot of vodka, didn’t show up, and the factory would spend eighty-nine days doing nothing. Then on the last day of the quarterly period, it would produce a 20,000 pound nail. (laughs)

DePue: One other question, completely different kind of question.

Borling: I hope that touches a little bit about what you were saying.

65 Eric Hoffer was an American writer on social and political philosophy. His first book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) is widely recognized as a classic on mass-movements and the psychological roots of fanaticism. (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer)

518 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Absolutely.

Borling: Also, another thing that made it come down, people will, absent individual expression, turn to their vices. The instance of drunkenness in the Russian experience is laughed about, thought about, very real. This causes a breakdown between Russian men and women. I’ve seen Russian women look and spit in the street with respect to Russian men that they think are good for nothing, just sex objects and drunks.

DePue: Completely different question for you then. I’m just curious if you and Myrna got to see the Northern Lights.

Borling: Oh, starting in Minot, North Dakota, when we were division commander of Minot, the Northern Lights would come out. In fact, the people from Minot would take buses and come out with a busload of people and a couple of bottles of booze and wake you up to see the Northern Lights in Minot, North Dakota and then come into your house and drink all the booze you had. We’d go around do Northern Lights things.

And yeah, we saw them all the time up in Norway, just absolutely dancing. It was funny; you had blackout curtains in the summer to try to block out the sun, so you could sleep. Of course in the winter, it was dark most of the time, but you would sometimes have to put the blackout curtains up when the Northern Lights were so bright, it was almost daytime. In fact, it was and just spectacular. The further north you went, the more dramatic the lightshow.

DePue: Well, let’s take you to your decision after what sounds like just a little bit of time, in Michigan, that you weren’t quite ready for retirement.

Borling: Well no, I never thought I would retire. I believe in sabbaticals between positions. I’ve wanted to go read and water ski and play golf and do all those kinds of things. But I always knew that I would have something. When I retired, it was 1996. I was fifty-six years old; I was still a young man.

I did not want to go back into the company whore business, go work for Lockheed or Raytheon or McDonnell-Douglas, go knock at the door of the generals and try to weasel a contract or whatever. You always had to be respectful of the guys who would come through and do that.

DePue: No desire to work in D.C. then.

Borling: No. We sold the home. We had a home all those years in D.C., and that enabled us to go back to Chicago and to buy a…Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. But we did have a home that we bought, on the water, in Virginia, that went up by a factor of three or four over the succeeding years.

The summer passes, and we’re into the fall, and I start circulating a resume here and there. I’m not getting any takers. I’m not enthused about my

519 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

potential. So, I go into Chicago, and I meet with a few people that I had met over the years, principally with the White House Fellows program, and did some networking. But snow comes and—the snow came early, but it ended in October—we move out of the cottage, because it’s a summer cottage, into a condo of friends over in New Buffalo for a couple of weeks.

Then we go for Thanksgiving. I’m looking at it; we don’t want to stay in the condo, just this port in a storm. I say, “Let’s go out to Phoenix, and we’ll live with Lauren— our oldest daughter—for the winter. Why not?” So we packaged up the dog and the cat and the stuff, and we hopped in the car and drove out to Phoenix and got there for Thanksgiving.

After Thanksgiving, I got a call back from Chicago that said I was wanted for an interview for the CEO of the United Way of Chicago, which is big business. It was $80-$90 million a year fundraiser, but they hadn’t made their goals in a long time. So, I went back and interviewed for that.

DePue: This was a paid position.

Borling: A paid position, yeah. In fact, was selected to be the CEO of United Way, with the charge that I had to make a campaign and grow the campaign into the neighborhood of just shy of $100 million, that first year.

DePue: Was this for Illinois, for Chicago, for the nation?

Borling: Chicago and the surrounding region, but Chicago was the biggest. But again, it had been going downhill. So, all of a sudden we hop back in the car (laughs) and drive back to Chicago and start looking for a house. I was supposed to take over that first week in January. We moved back and moved into the Four Seasons [Hotel], because they took animals, and went out that New Year’s.

We don’t go out New Year’s, normally. But we walked up and down Delaware Street and Walton Street and ended up at the Knickerbocker Hotel at the bar with some people, talking and had a great New Year’s. They were all out; they didn’t have anything to do either, so we had an impromptu party at the bar of the Knickerbocker Hotel. The next day, we watched games at the Four Seasons.

Then on the second we went out; we’d been scoping some places. We’d found a place that we wanted; it was Carol Moseley Braun’s penthouse, and were in negotiations to buy it, in Hyde Park South, lovely place at 5000 South East End, two-floor art deco penthouse, reasonably priced.66 But we found a place to live in a carriage house, up on the north side, while final things happened, and we concluded arrangement and got that, because that

66 Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun is an American diplomat, politician and lawyer who represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 1993 to 1999. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Moseley_Braun)

520 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

house that we owned back in Washington, which was able to translate into payment terms that were going to work out.

So anyway, I started running the United Way. In that job you meet every corporate chieftain in the area. I found out how rife and riddled the United Way system was, with competition between the suburbs and the city and also some economic incentives that didn’t speak well to reducing the admin burden that United Way had. My view was, I wanted to get the admin burden somewhere between 12 and 15 percent, and he suburbs were causing us difficulties, where I was having to pay a couple bucks to get a new dollar in. It was really out of kilter. So, I kind of went on the warpath in, I thought, a thoughtful way, to bring the suburbs into Chicago.

I had too many boards and too many committees. They were all the do-gooders, and what I needed was businessmen. I also needed to change the model a little bit, so that we could have some show dogs. The United Way model is that hey, we’re going to do health and human services stuff and give money out to deserving agencies.

I’m going to come to you and say, “Hey, Mr. CEO, I want all your people to sign up for this. I want you to sign up for it. Health and human services needs are bad, and I want all your money.” Then the next year I go back to you, and I say, “Thanks for all your money last year. Things are worse this year, and I want all your money again.” I looked back, and the thing every year was, things are getting worse. I’m saying we’re spending all this damn money; why aren’t things getting better?

So, I suggested we needed some show dogs to show how we were moving the needle, whether or not they were in the health and human services region or not. We needed things that were good for the greater Chicago community.

Well, this put me at odds with a couple of the boards that I had, but I managed to get new people in and get the boards skinnied down a bit and get the Commercial Club of Chicago interested.67 But after a couple of years of fighting the good fight, if you will, it became evident that half the people wanted me to go to heaven, and half wanted me to go to hell. All of them wanted me to go away. So, I left after two years, with a nice package from the board, and was able to influence the choice of my replacement, who was a Commercial Club member, a retired executive, who came in for a couple years, did a good job. You had another Commercial Club member going after

67 The Commercial Club of Chicago promotes the economic development interests of its members. It championed member Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909), also known as Burnham's plan. The plan gave the blueprint for the future growth and development of the entire Chicago region. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Club_of_Chicago)

521 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

that. Now we’ve got the Commercial Club and the Civic Committee holding on to the United Way model.

I still think the model is a good one but is flawed. They’ve gone to it by not trying to achieve outcomes that you can hold in your hand and say things are better because of what you’ve done. But the United Way model, we made our $95+ million…our goals. In fact, we audited more, but it’s driven down now, to sixty-five, sixty [million].

DePue: Were you there prior to the time that they got in the political issues?

Borling: Well, that was a guy, the national guy, back maybe five or six years before I got there, who got hit for malfeasance and hurt, publicly, the United Way model, but that was water over the dam by the time I got there.

The first thing I did was bring in…I called United Way of America and I said—you pay dues to them, by the way—I said, “Who are the two best executives in United Way who are not in United Way of America?” And, I said, “Who’s the best fundraiser, salesman, that you have out there?” They gave me three names. So I invited those three guys, in my first two weeks, to come to the United Way, paid their way in.

Bryan…blank, Joe Rafferty, and Warren Good came in. I said, “We’re going down. We’ve got a week, and we let…” This guy, who was the head of a big United Way, and Joe was too; he was up at Grand Rapids and Warren Good, who was the fundraiser…We’re talking to these guys about how you do these things. Basically, you run it like a business.

Well, I needed to change out a lot of our leadership. For example, my CFO [Chief Financial Officer] was…This is so delicate, because she was over fifty, and she was minority. Yet, when I went and said, “Hey, I need to see the financials, the monthly financials, where we are, how we’re doing.” She said, “Oh, we don’t do it that way.” “Oh, we don’t?” “No,” she said, “What we do is we do the campaign; we take out what we need, and then we have the apportionment of the rest.” I said, “How do we know we’re not going broke?”

There were no financial controls in place. Money would come in, and I would come to the mailroom. A guy there would open the envelopes; there was no control. We had lockboxes; most of the money went to a lockbox, which was good. But I kept seeing things, and I just kept drilling down deeper and deeper in the organization, trying to understand it. Then, in the course of that, I had to move most of the vice presidents who were not performing.

So, I hired that guy, Good, as the fundraiser. I tried to hire the other two guys to come in and work for me, but as it turned out, Brian and Joe both went to national. One became the president of United Way of America, and the other guy became the COO [Chief Operating Officer]. That’s how good

522 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

they were. We were great friends. We understood what we needed to do in Chicago.

I could have ridden with a less stern hand, I think, but there was so much that had to be fixed, notwithstanding the good efforts of the guy before me, who is a good friend to this day. I got a new chairman; the old chairman and I had a tough relationship; we’re good friends to this day, play golf. The new chairman that I got, I don’t think has ever forgiven me for putting [him] under the wars. It was Bill Osborn from Northern Trust, a guy who had big responsibilities. Bill is such a paragon of civic involvement. He’s well retired now, but still, he and his wife are very, very prominent in terms of their philanthropy in the Chicago area. I got him into the tar pit.

DePue: When you got there, was there concern or fear of even embezzlement, that it would be easy to skim this off?

Borling: I went through that, and I never found anything. I did find where we were not reporting our admin costs the way we should. In fact, I added a penny, or a percentile, to the admin cost, myself, kind of like Ronald Reagan’s supply- side stuff, trying to get a level of performance out of the organization and did and did. But in the end, I left earlier than I wanted to leave.

At the same time, however, I’d been inducted to the Commercial Club of Chicago, which was the nation’s oldest men’s and most exclusive business club. You’re invited to join; you don’t order to join. I’m now a life member of that club and very proud of being that. At a point in time, most of the chairmen and CEOs in the Greater Chicago area, I’m on a first name basis.

DePue: It’s exclusively a men’s club though?

Borling: I’m sorry, please?

DePue: It’s a men’s club you said?

Borling: It is a business men and women’s club. It also has an offshoot to Civic Committee, which is central to advancing the cause of the Greater Chicago and greater state interests, very much into pension reform and things. The Burnham plan…Burnham was a member of the Commercial Club, and the outline of downtown Chicago is very much because of Burnham.

DePue: A long time ago, you mentioned that you have a story that involves the baseball strike. I think we’re roughly in that timeframe.

Borling: Actually a little bit past it, but I’ll mention it. The baseball strike was ’94.

DePue: You’re still on active duty at that time.

523 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Yeah, two things happened when I was on active duty in Norway. Fay Vincent got canned as the commissioner of baseball. They were going into a new search for the commissioner of baseball, and somehow my name came up in that process. I didn’t fail to push it either, once I became aware that there was some enthusiasm for me to become a candidate. This was late in the process; they’d been through a lot of people. They were down, kind of, to the finals.

I was told to contact Bob Bodine down in Dallas—Bodine & Bodine—and met Frank Bodine over the phone, who was the father. Bob Bodine is the son, now has taken the firm to stratospheric levels. For whatever reason, I had a phone interview with this guy, Frank Bodine. I’m still on active duty; I’m in Stavanger, I guess, at this time, ‘92, ’94, yeah, it’d be just into Stavanger. They said, “Well, we want you to come back to interview, in Dallas, face to face.” I did; they flew me back, and I interviewed, and I flew back to Norway.

A few days later they said, “We want you to come back and meet with the owners, but it’s very secret, because you’re in the finals.” They said. “You’re in the finals.” I said, “Okay,” I said, “I’ll come back.” I went in through New York and stopped at the apartment, found him, his name is Marvin Miller. He was the guy who was the labor guy who broke the antitrust thing and was such a pain for the owners, he and Catfish Hunter.68 But what I didn’t know about baseball and the owners and the union business…What I did know wouldn’t fill the teacup; I needed to be able to fill the gallon jug.

I called Marvin Miller from Norway and explained what I was doing. He said, “Well,” he said, “of course I’ll see you, but you’d better not tell anybody you’re coming to see me.” (laughs) So, I stopped into Marvin Miller’s apartment, a very modest apartment. He and his wife, we had coffee. I talked to him for the better part of three quarters of a day. He gave me, albeit admittedly his side, but I came away with a great deal of respect for Marvin Miller. Here was a guy who took baseball to a whole different level with respect to player-management relations and remuneration and didn’t profit very much himself, much unlike Don Fehr, by the way.69

I went back, and the Vincent thing had gone awry because of the “best interest of baseball” clause. Vincent was trying to do some things that were antithetical to the owners’ interest. So they fired him, and there was a great deal of labor unrest associated with this.

68 James "Jim" Augustus Hunter, nicknamed "Catfish", was a professional baseball player in Major League Baseball. From 1965 to 1979, he was a pitcher for the Kansas City Athletics, Oakland Athletics, and New York Yankees. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfish_Hunter) 69 Donald Martin Fehr is the executive director of the National Hockey League Players Association. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Fehr )

524 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

So, now I’m in a meeting room in the O’Hare Hilton. I fly from New York to Chicago, get off the airplane and walk into a holding room. Bob Bodine and Frank are there, and they’re telling me stuff. They said, “You’re being factored in here, and there’s only about three, four, five people left.” They said, “They’re not real satisfied with everybody, and we think you’re great.”

I walked into this owner’s meeting, and there’s Jerry Reinsdorf and Frank Wilpon and Gene Autry’s widow, and all the guys are there.70, 71, 72 They’re sitting at this table, and I’m there. They’ve got a thing up here at the head of the table, but hell, I go around and shake everybody’s hand and say hello. They’re all most convivial. I sit down at the other end of the table from these guys. This is all very secret; you’re shuttled down the hall with bags over your head kind of thing; I’m obviously facetious.

The first question is, as I recall, “You know, we hired a general once to be the commissioner of baseball.” He said, “It was a disaster.” I said, “Yeah, you hired the wrong general.” (both laugh) They all laughed. Had a great interview; we just had a great interview. I told them, I said…In the course of this I said, “You know, you’re going to have to make peace with the player’s union. You’re going to have to give up some stuff,” I said, “or you guys are going to have a baseball strike.” Some of this I’m parroting from Marvin Miller, but I believed it too, because I went to the bottom of the earth trying to research this, read every book I could get my hands on, read background bios on all these guys. I didn’t go in light loaded. I said, “It’s going to take a big chunk out of baseball’s hide when you have this strike.”

Well, they didn’t like that message, but it finished up on a convivial note, and I left. I said, “I’ve got to go back to Norway.” They said, “Why do you need to go back?” “Right, you need to go back.” This thing went longer; I forget whatever happened; there was some delay associated with it, and I looked…because I was still in the military. I said I couldn’t get out of the military. This one I would have told the Norwegians, “For the good of baseball, I have to leave.” But this was…Let’s see, ’93. No, I was already at Stavanger.

DePue: Well, the strike starts August of ’94, so obviously there’s—

Borling: The strike was August of ’94?

70 Jerry M. Reinsdorf is a CPA, lawyer and an owner of the NBA's Chicago Bulls and the MLB's Chicago White Sox. He started his professional life as a tax attorney with the Internal Revenue Service. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Reinsdorf) 71 Fred Wilpon is an American real estate developer, baseball executive, and the majority owner of the New York Mets.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Wilpon) 72 Jackie Autry is the former owner of the Los Angeles Angels and widow of singer, actor and businessman Gene Autry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Autry)

525 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: That’s when it began.

Borling: Yeah. In any event, we’d moved to Stavanger in late ’93. But I’ve got to get back, and I remember that they said, “That’s not a problem.” They said, “Get up to New York.” Bodine had his people look at some things. He said, “The only way we can get you back is on the Concorde.” I said, “Are you sure?” (both laugh) What I got out of Major League Baseball was a flight on the Concorde, going back to Heathrow. That was fun. They had their own waiting room and everything else.

But I didn’t get it. Arnie Weber, the chancellor of Northwestern, was the heir apparent. The Bodines called me and said Arnie Weber, chancellor, to be announced, and he was, and then they pulled it back, very embarrassing for Arnie, very embarrassing for Major League Baseball. They put Bud Selig in as the chairman, and he’s been a pretty effective chairman. He’s been inside baseball; he had the Brewers, daughter ran it now. He had a big, long, very successful run. They did have the strike, but they fought back out of that.

This is very self-serving, very self-serving. It was a couple years ago, maybe a year ago, year and a half, I got a call from the executive vice president of the Bulls.73 Now I’m drawing a blank; I should have his name. I know it like my own name. I know his secretary’s name, but why can’t I think of his name. Anyway, the guy who…I brought him to the academy at the fiftieth reunion. It will come to me in a second. He’s retiring this year. Got it! Steve Schanwald.

He said, “I’ve got a phone number you’ve got to call.” I said, “Well, who is it?” He said, “It’s Bob .” I said, “Bob Beaudine?” I said, “I haven’t talked to him in ten years.” He said, “I was having lunch with him, and he said—this is a little embarrassing, but for the record—he said, “I asked him,” I said, ‘Who, of all the people that he’d advanced in the sports world and all the people that he dealt with’—nobody moves anywhere in sports management, endorsement deals, whatever, without Beaudine and company behind it. He said, “I said ‘Who was your most impressive guy that you’ve ever met?’ Beaudine looked at him, and he said, “You never heard of him, but there was one guy that stuck with me.” “Who was it?” He said, “It’s John Borling.” He said, “John Borling? He’s one of my best friends.” (DePue laughs)

So, Bob and I connected last year—that’s certainly high praise—and promised to get together. We haven’t yet. His schedule is much more demanding than mine. So, they were the champions. But I didn’t get to be the commissioner of baseball but had some fun and flew the Concorde, apparently did okay with the Beaudine family. Frank died, and I sent some notes down

73 The Chicago Bulls are an American professional basketball team based in Chicago, Illinois. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Bulls)

526 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

about that. Bob had written a book, and I sent Bob a copy of my book. I haven’t heard back. Life goes on.

DePue: General, this is probably a decent place for us to take a break. We’ll finish off your career after lunch.

Borling: Oh, you’re ready for lunch? Let’s go to lunch at the club.

(end of transcript #12)

527 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Interview with Major General John L. Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.13 Interview # 13: March 5, 2015 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

DePue: Today is March 5, 2015. My name is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I’m with General John Borling. Good afternoon, General.

Borling: We’re on the last lap.

DePue: The thirteenth session. I don’t know if that’s an appropriate number.

Borling: It’s a lucky number.

DePue: I was born on Friday the thirteenth, so I’ve never been too worried about the number. Last time, when we finished this morning, we had you into retirement.

Borling: Into military retirement.

DePue: Yeah, military retirement. But you were obviously not nearly ready to actually hang up the hat and call yourself retired. Before we go into the next step though, I wanted to ask you what Myrna was telling you during this time, what she wanted you to do, what she wanted to the two of you to do.

Borling: I guess the thought that was central was that we, either by chance or by design, figured that we would go back to our beginnings. We have the advantage of all these years together, high school experiences, college and the academy, and then obviously, all the things there, but with family still in the

528 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Chicago area and both of us being “proud south-siders.” When people retire they often want to say, “Well let’s go to Florida; let’s go someplace where we don’t know anybody; let’s go where the weather is.” All those are good reasons, but in our experience, retirement is one of those cathartic moments, where relationships can fly apart if there have been particular stresses anyway, along the way. God knows we’ve had particular stresses. We found it good to go back to streets we knew and a town we knew and had regard for.

Going back home to Chicago was important. I would urge people to “go back to your beginnings.” It’s kind of like these attractions of fifty-year high school reunions and old girlfriends and boyfriends and associations. You may never see them again after fifty, but it’s kind of important to get that adrenaline shot of yesteryear. So, I think when you go into retirement, in our case leaving the military after all those years, this adrenaline shot of yesteryear was helpful to us.

She was very supportive, but she was also ready for a sabbatical of her own. It was good that she didn’t have to give a lot of dinners and do all the protocol things, which she did well but didn’t come comfortably to her. That’s not her Myers-Briggs profile. She’s an ISTP [Introvert, Sensing, Thinking, Perception], I’m an ENTJ [Extrovert, Intuition, Thinking, Judgment]; the twain meets only with respect to appreciation of the bottom line.

After I left the United Way, I did some marketing things and had some other “small gigs.” We did have the advantage of having Michigan, our summer cottage, only an hour forty-five away, and we would go there a lot. Comiskey Park, or the U.S. Cellular Field, was only nine minutes away, and I had that pass that was given to us, to be able to use any seat in the park that wasn’t occupied and park in the player’s lot and take Myrna with me, so that was fun.

We found ourselves enjoying Chicago, me running the lakefront and actively belonged to a couple clubs, certainly had no lack of social and civic activity. We got wound up obviously in politics to an extent, but by that time we’d moved up here. The reason we moved up here was that my businesses tended to travel. I’d gotten into the energy business with a former academy person.

DePue: Is that Ascent Exploration?

Borling: No, this would be Performance Consulting Group, which I was associated with as the non-executive chairman for a number of years, down in Norman, Oklahoma. It was an energy efficiency company basically. Later, it expanded and tried to get a pretty big appetite for other things and brought in a new CEO [chief executive officer]. I was not attracted to the ways they were going and left the company, because I thought they were going to go bankrupt. A

529 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

couple years later they did. But that occasioned me the opportunity to travel around the country doing energy things, at least in the early years.

DePue: We’re talking now—

Borling: I was talking now about…If I got out in ’96, left the United Way in ’98, ’99…this would start around ’99, 2000. We moved up here in 2001, because she was frankly tired of apartment living, co-op living. My businesses traveled, and O’Hare was marginally ten, fifteen minutes further.

DePue: But you knew you wanted to have a place on the water.

Borling: We had to have a place on the water, much like the penthouse was on the water, at least with a great view of Lake Michigan. We wanted to have a place on the water. We like the calming effect that moving water provides our relationship. You’re familiar with the Keats poem, “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art?”

DePue: I’m afraid I’m not a poet like you are, Sir.

Borling: Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priest like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.

That’s some poetry. I’ve got to tell you the rest of that, of course goes…It’s a Lolita message, because it is,

No—yet pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel forever itself fall and swell And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

So, this guy Keats was getting some young stuff, I guess. But the phrase about the moving waters, that their priest-like task of pure ablution, or cleansing, around earth’s human shores. That’s a beautiful line, and it made me look up the word Eremite. Do you know what an eremite is?

DePue: Well, I’m sure you’re going to help me out, Sir.

Borling: It’s an observer or a watcher. Last night on Errata, they used the word jejune. I used to know what the meant. It was that “don’t be jejune.” Don’t be cajoling or coaxing in manner, or is it something youthful, do you know?

DePue: No.

530 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: J-e-j-u-n-e, I used to know it. I’m going to learn it again. I’m going to l’arn it again, like Lyndon Johnson would say. So, we came here because she’s got a widowed sister, lives down the way about a mile, and they’re sisters. She’s the older, the other one’s the middle, and they get along famously, except when they don’t. Then I get in the middle (DePue laughs), sisters.

Men are so easy to get along with. You don’t like your brother, shit, you don’t see him. But sisters have to see each other all the time. I don’t have a brother, but if I had a brother, and we didn’t get along, we wouldn’t see each other for a couple years. That would be fine. But anyway, so they do sister things, have great fun most of the time. We live here on the water, and I go and do my chores. She’s quite content to putter around the homestead here.

DePue: So you’re moving around in 2001, but you’re certainly not ready to retire. It sounds like you’re involved in a lot of things at that time.

Borling: Yeah, I am. I’m chairman of an energy company. I’ve cranked up SOS, which I continue to fail at. I’ve been active on the White House Fellows Board and Council, doing some things with this wildcatting bunch―all we’ve done is drilled expensive water wells―leading into the Synthonics business, which is the biotech business.

DePue: When did that start?

Borling: Oh, probably 2000 and…’07 or ’08, ’09, somewhere around there.

DePue: We have talked about that quite a bit in previous sessions. Let’s go back to something that I heard you discussing over lunch. That was 1997, I believe, and the rededication of the Logan Statue.

Borling: The Logan Statue, yeah. I was CEO of the United Way. People came to me, Lawrence Pucci and his wife Carol. Pucci was a fashion architect, handmade suits, great patriot, interested in what they call the Cultural Mile, which is South Lake Shore Drive, not the Magnificent Mile, but from the bridge, south, to Roosevelt road. That’s the location of the Major General John A. Logan Statue, who was a Civil War general, born in Marion, Illinois, loyal to Douglas and loyal to Lincoln―kept the south part of Illinois in the union―was a distinguished general, confidante of [General Ulysses S.] Grant, elected to the Congress, then left to become the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, which was the union veterans’ organization.

DePue: And if I can just throw in one line here, Sir, “Considered by most military historians as the very best of the political generals of the Civil War.”

Borling: I don’t know how you define a political general. I thought we all were.

DePue: Well, he was a politician before he became a general officer.

531 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: But he was also wounded several times. His men thought he had extraordinary heroism. He was not a back-behind-the-lines guy; he was leading from the front.

DePue: He also had the distinction of having real animus against the West Pointers, who he felt had slighted him, and wrote extensively about the traditions of the volunteer soldier after the war, as well.

Borling: All of this speaks well to the man called the greatest unknown hero of the 19th century, certainly in terms of America, where all over America, certainly all over Illinois, but all over America you see streets and statues and things named for Logan. Well, this statue, done by Augustus Saint-Gaudens of General Logan, with his big, black moustache―

DePue: Black Jack Logan.

Borling: Black Jack Logan. I thought his horse was Black Jack too.

DePue: Could be.

Borling: Pershing’s horse was named Black Jack, but Pershing was not as well regarded by the troops as…Anyway, Logan, through General Order 11, established Decoration Day. When his statue was dedicated, with a quarter million people, as reported, in attendance, in 1997, I was asked to rededicate it and did. Then in 1990, as part of that, the mayor was there, Rich Daley, and asked me to bring back the Memorial Day Parade, because I had staff at United Way, and I could devote some people to that. That goes back to my thing about how United Way needs to be involved in the fabric of the community.

So, we did it down Michigan Avenue, and we had a thing at the Logan Statue. The next year it moved to State Street, “that great street.” We had a ceremony on Saturday at Daley Plaza, but then we moved to the Logan Statue and then back to the parade. It got to be unwieldy, so the Logan Statue ceremony dropped out, except we never let it drop out; we always did it on Memorial Day, over and above everything else.

This was Lawrence Pucci and the Wedgwood Society and J.R. Davis, the chairman of Davis Bank Corps, and me. Now it’s…Lawrence is dead; Carol, his sister, is alive. So, the Wedgwood Society continues its support; J.R. Davis continues his support.

I continue to, in large measure, emcee it. I have my first Memorial Day meeting next week, where we have buglers and shooters and…Senn High School, which was Lawrence’s high school, provides honor guard and color guard. We have about an hour program that is on Memorial Day, as it is now construed, no longer the last…It used to be what? The last Thursday? It used to be the thirtieth of May, didn’t it?

532 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: I don’t recall that.

Borling: They’ve changed it to one of the three-day weekends things, and I’ve forgotten too. So, a lot of people are out opening up summer homes or doing things, and we get a couple hundred people maybe; that’s about it. You’ve been there; you know. What we have is tailored the program over the years, so it kind of moves with dispatch.

DePue: You said that when you first started it up there were parades attached to it, as well?

Borling: We had parades. They still do have Memorial Day parades, but that’s on Saturday, down State Street. The Chicago observance that I brought back is now on Saturday at Daley Plaza, which is the home of the eternal flame. They lay a wreath; they have speakers and that business. They also…I was proud of creating the Major General John A. Logan Chicago Patriot of the Year Award, the highest order of patriotic recognition that can be given a citizen by the City of Chicago. I do beat my chest a little bit; that was my brainchild. So the years went by; a number of people have received it. I would always announce it and read the deal, and the mayor would give the award, center stage. We would always do it outside at Daley Plaza.

This one year, we gave it to Alderman Jim Balcer, who was a Marine, very active in Illinois veteran affairs, very deserving. As I finished reading that, and Jim came over to the podium to offer his response, which he did, and then he paused and said, “Now,” he said, “For a second award of the John A. Logan Patriot of the Year Award for Chicago, it’s my pleasure to announce…” He announced me.

I was very…You don’t like surprises, although you deal with them. But that was a high honor, to receive the award. This was ten years after we’d put it into effect. So, I carry that around as an arrow in my personal self- esteem quiver. But then time passed, and administrations changed and other people wanted to be participatory. So, I was, not elegantly, but quite inelegantly, included out. But that’s fine. I understand that, but we keep doing Memorial Day.

DePue: An obvious question for you, General, but why is that Memorial Day celebration so important to you?

Borling: (pauses) As you know, Memorial Day celebrates our war dead. As a lifetime professional soldier, I think it’s important to take just a few hours out every year and take note of and remember and cherish the many who have perished for our nation—some valiantly, some not—but somehow the great mass of sacrifice has moved us to the circumstances where we are today.

There will be other great masses of circumstances and sacrifices that occur, that will continue to move us, hopefully, on an upward—since up is

533 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

good—upward direction. I think it’s something you carry with you, easy to forget, easy to let it go. I don’t intend to let it go, because it’s kind of a part of my own self-image that is important to maintain.

DePue: I hadn’t thought about this question before, but do you recall when the dedication occurred for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.?

Borling: You know, I remember the controversy. I thought it was ill-placed then, because I thought the memorial was beautiful.

DePue: You’re talking about the controversy over the design.

Borling: The design, yeah. I remember when they added the statue, I was not there. So, no I don’t remember that, because I…You tell me when it was.

DePue: I think it’s the ’84, ’85 timeframe.

Borling: Okay. I wouldn’t be surprised, because…and the statue came along a couple of years later.

DePue: Right.

Borling: The first time I went to the wall…I was in and out of Washington a lot, but I never went there; I never wanted to go there. I was in TDY [temporary duty assignment] and staying at Fort Myer, up the hill over Arlington. There’s this long hill that leads down through Arlington, out-going toward…You can go across the Memorial Bridge, and it’s a great place to jog. You go down, and if you want a long jog, you go all the way down to the Capitol, or you can cut it loose and go to wherever, the Washington Monument, come back, and then you have to run up that hill. I must tell you, I’ve never made it. (both laugh) I’ve gotten halfway, maybe three quarters, but I’ve had to walk. That’s a tough, tough, hill.

DePue: Where is this hill again?

Borling: The Fort Myer hill, going back up. But, it was on a misty morning, predawn, that I took off from Myer and ran down, came across the Memorial Bridge and skirted the Lincoln. I was going to go down Constitution Avenue, around the Mall. But I was in for a long run that day, and I come abeam the statue of the three soldiers, leading into the wall. I said, Okay, maybe now is the time; today is the day. I walked, a slight pause, walked down the wall. About two- thirds of the way down, in the first part of it before it angles and goes back up…Again, this is predawn, and a light drizzle coming down, not cold necessarily.

But two-thirds of the way down there’s a wooly, wooly guy, beard, field jacket, hanging on a girl, hanging on the wall, sobbing. I tried to ease by, and the guy looks up abruptly, turns to me and says, “Were you there, man?” I

534 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

said, “I was there,” and I moved on down the way and started to angle back up. Now, I’ve forgotten if it was 2E or 3E, put my hand on it to steady myself, moved by that experience. I’m looking at the names, and the name underneath my hand, down a bit, is Frank Ralston. Frank was my classmate from the academy, my squadron mate in the 433rd. He and Don King were killed in Pack 1, Route Pack 1, we think. Frank’s remains came out; I don’t think we ever found Don. Don’s wife didn’t know he was flying combat. She thought he was flying test.

Well, anyway, so there I’m standing on the wall and that’s when I lost it. I’ve probably been back to the wall three or four times. It’s a place that I kind of carom off of.

DePue: Well, the next topic I want to get into is…You’ve mentioned this several times in the course of the interview…I’m sure you say it more eloquently, but maybe it’s the normal course of human nature that we seem to tend more towards war than peace. So I wanted to ask you, if you recall…I’m sure you have vivid memories of September 11, 2001.

Borling: Yeah. I was at my summer home on the phone with the CEO of a hospital. I was trying to close an energy deal to basically re-lamp the entire hospital. I was being as forceful and eloquent―but in a light way―as I could, to convince this CEO of why he needed to make the decision to let us go ahead with this multimillion dollar project.

In the course of that conversation, I kept getting gasps over the phone. I wasn’t going on at any great length; I was just pushing it hard, correctly, economically. And he said, “Do you have your TV on? Oh my God, do you have your TV on?” He said, “I can’t talk to you anymore,” and he hung up. I said what the hell was that all about? We rarely have a TV on up in Michigan. I turned it on.

Then, of course, like all America, riveted to the horrors of 9/11. [I] never got the damn hospital thing either. But that’s where I was that day, in a place that has always been…Much like in bullfighting, when the bull goes into its querencia, its safe place in the ring, Michigan has always been our safe place. It’s always been our querencia.74 I felt that 9/11 violated my safe place by intruding in such a horrific way.

Then, of course, your mind immediately turns to what are we going to do about this? If you recall, the president had been reading to an elementary school class, and they hustled them out of there. They took him first to Barksdale Air Force Base, not knowing if there wasn’t going to be some

74 Querencia is a metaphysical concept in the Spanish language. The term comes from the Spanish verb "querer," which means "to desire." Querencia means to haunt somebody in Spanish. In bullfighting, a bull may stake out his querencia, a certain part of the bull ring where he feels strong and safe. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Querencia)

535 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

follow-on at the White House. They wanted to have him safe. Then I think they took him to Omaha, to the SAC [Strategic Air Command] command post, where he could be in charge of things, in case this was a nuclear precursor. It was at that point that he said, “Get me back to Washington,” which is where he had to go.

The example is you always want your leadership—and we’ve gotten away from this, to our detriment—you want your leadership to be at physical risk, not to foolhardy risk, but you want them to be representative of the fact that personal courage is still a prized commodity. If you want the…They just found the bones of King Richard III―I think, in a parking lot―who died in combat. Kings were supposed to ride in combat.

DePue: You lead from the front.

Borling: You lead from the front, and I’ve often thought that…Somebody said it once, when you shellproof…

DePue: A very minor adjustment here, Sir. (adjusting Borling’s microphone)

Borling: When you shellproof your generals, you shellshock your troops. We used to joke, or at least I joked, that nothing so inspires the troops as to see a dead general on the battlefield. It doesn’t even matter what side he’s on. I think President Bush’s instincts were right: I need to get back to Washington and show presence in Washington. I think it was the right thing to do.

I recoil that we send our presidents around in bulletproof limousines and things. At least from time to time, you ought to roll back the roof, and stand up and take it like a man. The same thing on the battlefield, you ought to put your senior leadership out there, where they’re in harm’s way, just like the troops are.

DePue: Did you have any moments of doubt who our new enemy was? There was certainly a lot of talk about that, that first day or two.

Borling: Reaching back, [I] recall that it was going to be some representative of fanatical Islam or…We used the wrong term. It’s not fanatical Islam as much as it is political Islam. Any time you mate the power of a state with the power of, or quasi state powers, with the power of religion, then that breeds really great terror and great, unimagined pain and suffering.

DePue: But wasn’t that the case right from the birth of Islam, that it was not just a religion but a political structure as well?

Borling: Yeah, exactly, and that’s what makes it so troublesome and why it doesn’t go away. Look, I’m just a numbers guy. If there’s one and a half billion adherents, and ten percent of them are leaning towards supporting political Islam, well that’s a group of 150 million. If only one percent of them are the

536 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

real active shooters or radicals, that’s still 15 million. There’s a whole lot of killing that’s going to have to be going on, because I don’t think we’re going to change hearts and minds in this thing.

In fact, I’d go to the point where I think this whole fascination with stopping insurgency by winning hearts and minds and nation building is a crock. I can’t see one place—I’m probably short of the mark—I can see very few places in the course of history where, absent a lot of bloodshed, a lot of killing, where success is achieved and has been maintained against insurgencies. I think you could say something about that spottily in the Philippines, maybe a bit in Malaysia. Can you name another place?

DePue: Well, this is one I don’t think you’re thinking about, but…

Borling: How about the American Indians? We knocked them out pretty good.

DePue: Yeah, but the American Civil War was an insurgency, to a certain extent.

Borling: I don’t call that insurgency.

DePue: I was going to say, it never became a guerilla war. There were certainly parts of it, Missouri, places like that.

Borling: Yeah, but I’m trying to think through history, where…Certainly insurgencies or discontents have grown and toppled nations. I’m trying to figure it the other way around, where you’ve gone in, in the face of such an insurgency, or a civil strife or civil war, and where such external intervention has carried the day.

DePue: Well, going back to the topic of 9/11, did you at that time think, Boy, I got out at the wrong time. I need to be back in the game again.

Borling: Oh, when the fight’s on, if you’re an old battle horse or warhorse, you always think that, Jesus. Then you figure out that you go driving those little open wheel sports cars against your son in-laws, and they beat you by a second a run, and you’ve lost your reflexes, so―

DePue: Did you start reaching out to any of your old military buddies, at least to have discussions with them?

Borling: I did not feel the urge to go throw on my G-suit and get back at it, very much, but the naggings were always there. No, the thing we talk about is, we’re just so tired of screwing around with war. If you’re going to go to war…And America doesn’t tolerate it. We don’t tolerate long wars. We don’t tolerate wars that we deem somehow to be unjust. We don’t have a long penchant for imponderables. We want stuff to be wrapped up. That’s what we look to.

537 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: What did you think when, shortly after all this, we decided to take the battle to the enemy and to invade Afghanistan and go after the Taliban?

Borling: I thought, Fine, but, I’ve read enough Kipling, and the Soviet experience― which we countered, by the way…It’s a Charlie Wilson’s War kind of thing.75

DePue: Done by stingers.

Borling: Yeah. I thought it was going to be a difficult proposition, and it turned out not to be. Then, what we have this capacity to do is to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. There was a time we could—I was told; I’d never been there—we could wander all over Afghanistan in a pickup truck and a couple guys.

But by the time we started the pacification business and we put some wrong political people in office, we helped fracture the country and through indecisiveness, letting Osama get away, bin Laden. Although there’s a cute story going around that Osama bin Laden was holed up in that house, that compound, for about five years, with three of his wives, and the rumor is that he called SEAL Team 6. (both laugh)

DePue: Well, I want to follow this line a little bit more.

Borling: Are you using, so war the objective? Is that where you are?

DePue: Well, I’m looking at your book, and I wanted you to read these two pages.

Borling: So, “once elected, the war the objective”? “Wrap it up neat.” Okay, well, I was already quoting it.

DePue: To start from the top then.

Borling: Well, when you’re on a mission―

DePue: And this is from…What would you call this, your epic poem?

Borling: This is from the epic poem, “A Sea Story (a Southeast Asia Story)” These guys have been out flailing around, and they’re sent off on a diversion. After they can’t get in, they’re weather diverted. So, they’re going off to a different target. They went away from Mu Gia Pass basically, where this is augured, and it’s easy to hit the mountains over there, and they got out of there.

(Borling reads poem)

75 A 2007 American comedy-drama film, based on the story of U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos. Charlie Wilson's War may refer to the efforts of U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson (D-TX) to help the Afghan Mujahedeen fight Soviet forces through the CIA's Operation Cyclone. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War)

538 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

So we went grinning; the war we’re winning, or so all the papers say Our war machine, the best the world’s seen, a shame we can’t have our way.

You say something’s wrong; we’ve been here too long; why won’t they bend to our will?

Maybe forgotten, words to put stock, the name of the game is kill. Now, I’m just a jock, so I can’t knock, our leaders, statesmen and such My job is flying, maybe farm buying, for beliefs that mean so much. But all the dissent over money spent, the lives lost, some say a waste While both left and right continue to fight, holding their nose in distaste.

I’ll tell you straight that war I hate, because I’m the guy that fights ‘em.

But once we’re in, let’s go for a win, heavy the hand that smites them. If game and candle be worth the gamble, then go for the throat and kill A war half fought will be for naught, and mortally wound our will. So once elected, war the objective, wrap it up neat and fast. It won’t be pretty, and that’s a pity, but better first than last. Moral, immoral, a senseless quarrel, winners are right in history. The fact is in war, I tell you once more, no substitute for victory.

Now you chose those four stanzas, because you believe it too. It sounds so easy, rolling off the lips, so pristine. But if you can’t frame the contest in such a way, where the military is given mission type orders, and where you go, not for status quo, but you go to conquer; you go for regime change; you go to effect a different world order, then don’t go. And you shouldn’t go unless the Congress says go.

The public will support that if they think there is, to use the phrase, “just cause,” at least for a little while. But boy, we have got a fickle American public, or maybe a very wise one, that don’t put up with the bullshit of “We’re in it for a decade” or “We’re in it for…” “We don’t know what we’re going to degrade and dismantle. We’re going to go kill their ass. We’re going to have to kill a lot of innocents to get at the bad guys,” because the bad guys were hiding behind the innocents. Man, if you’re not ready to do that, then we’d better hunker down in Rockford.

539 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Well, that leads right into the next skirmish, the next decision that the Bush Administration made, and that’s the invasion of Iraq or the occupation or the liberation of Iraq in 2003, however you want to describe it.

Borling: At the time, the estimations were universally accepted that Saddam Hussein was in possession of and pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction. Now this includes chemicals, radiological, biological or nuclear weapons, biological weapons. The chemical thing had been fairly well proven, but the proof of the pudding apparently was the nuclear stuff.

We went to the UN [United Nations] with multiple, multiple resolutions and got them, trying to legitimize this. It goes back to the casus belli business. When you’re attacked it’s pretty easy to say, “That’s casus belli;” that’s a cause for war.

You look at Japan attacking the United States; you could make a case that we caused that to happen by cutting off Southeast Asia resources. You can make a case, although a poor one, that in Vietnam, that there were international understandings that were violated; although the other side said the same thing.

And then, of course, you had this Tonkin Gulf business, which I think is now generally accepted to be, at the best, a series of gross miscalculations, and at the worst, political subterfuge of the worst kind, being engineered by a president who was known to be without scruples―and that’s President Johnson—to try to find some flashpoint to take us into conflict.

The flashpoint…I think the decision was made to go into Iraq, but I don’t believe that there was as much fabrication as people would have you believe. Now, nothing was found, some low level stuff. But even Saddam seemed to think that he had something more than he had, so I think the intelligence read may have been an error.

I wasn’t troubled by going into Iraq at all. I was troubled on the first go-round that we stopped, that we never should have, in Desert Storm 1, never should have pulled up short. The casus belli was they wanted Kuwait. All right, great, then let’s take them out, all the way.

The difficulty is, is that the Shiite, Sunni and then all the various other factions, religious factions, almost need a strong arm to keep them in line. They need to have a despot to keep those factions going. Even though you look at the Iraq-Iran War, which was a Sunni-Shiite thing. Now, of course, you see Iran and Iraq doing common cause, supposedly, against ISIS, which is Sunni. And Iran is, frankly, on a Shiite march, which is causing significant problems to the Sunni population, which were and are in the majority. It goes all the way back to the beginnings of Islam.

540 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

The short answer to your question: I wasn’t troubled by going into Iraq. I thought we ought to have finished it ten years earlier. Then our problem was that we didn’t know how to be sufficiently wise with respect to the vanquished armies, because the armies always are willing to change allegiances in the face of reality.

Patton wanted to use, and did use, defeated Nazis to help administer towns and things. They knew how to do things. Similarly, when we failed to make use of what nation-runners were still left, I think we created the circumstance that exists to this day. We made some bad, bad political choices.

Democracy takes some real growing pains. It takes civil wars normally to make it take root, and then it has so many blind corners it can go into. So, democracy is not necessarily the answer. Freedom, individual freedom and responsibility is. I go back to Plato, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

DePue: Do you think we could have done the occupation better than it was done?

Borling: Yes. I think we let significant elements of the Sunni population be abused. But in the end, I’m not sure that a foreign power can walk into entrenched political Islam of whatever persuasion and prevail without doing a lot of wholesale killing, I mean really wholesale killing.

DePue: The occupying force doing wholesale killing? Well, the American public is―

Borling: Do it on the way in, and you’ve got to do it while you’re there. The American public, unless the issues are great, would not tolerate that. But you let a dirty bomb go off in New York or Chicago, and I think if you do it with speed and with dispatch and you do it with savagery to repay an inhabitable South Side of Chicago, then the levels of savagery will be tolerated.

DePue: Clearly, a few years after we got there, the American public was ready to be able to say we’ve got this behind us; we’re withdrawing our troops. Do you think President Obama did the right thing by withdrawing? Now he says they didn’t ever get a status of force agreement, that that was the reason for it.

Borling: Well, that’s the biggie. I never think it’s a good idea to tell the enemy what you’re going to do and by when, or what you’re not going to do and by when. We are currently guilty of so much weakness of resolve that I have great fear for the nation. But that’s an opinion. Now you’re just getting me to spout off political thoughts, which is not the same as saying, “Gee, there I was at thirty thousand feet.”

DePue: The reason I feel somewhat justified to do this is because you did run for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Borling: Yes I did; yes I did. I ran and debated about Barack Obama. I thought that… He’s a very likeable guy on one hand. I frankly did wish the president a lot of

541 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

success when he got elected, but I worried that he was out of his league. I worried that it was just going to be too much for him; he was not skilled or practiced enough in that environment. And I worried about his orientation, having again, debated him on the trail.

I think he’s done some things right, and I think he’s done a lot of things wrong. I think that dragging America down internationally, in terms of our strength position, has been a mistake. I think he has exacerbated, rather than bettering, race conditions and class distinction, those latter two being really castigatory comments. I think he has tried to politicize the IRS, and that’s an impeachable offense in my view.

I think this thing currently breaking with Hillary Clinton and her private emails and that business is disqualifying for public office but also indicative of an administration that views itself as somehow above the law.

You worry a lot about factionalism, about the established justice aspect of the governmental activities. It starts with the president being seen as eminently fair and just. I’m not sure we’ve got that circumstance today.

DePue: You did mention that you thought that President Obama has done some things right. What would those be?

Borling: Well, I think he had to take profound steps with regard to the economic meltdown. I think he left the stimulus packages in too long. There’s a lot about the economy curing itself. But I think he can take credit for keeping it— Bush started it—but keeping it hung together in difficult times. We are, notwithstanding everything we have around is still subject a somewhat fragile economic system, given the magnitude of the impact of transfers of money that can happen so quickly and be so adverse. So, I’ll give him that.

There are points in space where, okay, he got Osama bin Laden. That’s important, but that’s not central to stopping political Islam. I think he took a swing at healthcare. I think it was a misguided swing. He could have had a much better healthcare system, much more affordable and much more effective, than the one that he put into place. I increasingly think that we need to go in with an understanding that healthcare will be metered, but that a single payer system is about the best we could hope for at this time, to get out of this morass.

I think he keeps bouncing from one crisis to another. For example, when the VA [Veterans Administration] thing was bubbling over, then he’ll use a PR [public relations] thing, a campaign thing, like taking Bowe Bergdahl’s parents and bringing them to the Rose Garden to try to score a PR coup and to take the eye off the VA thing.76 Of course that’s standard

76 Beaudry "Bowe" Bergdahl is a U.S. Army soldier who was held captive from June 2009 to May 2014 by the Taliban-aligned Haggani network in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bergdahl was captured after deserting his post

542 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

technique. If you’re getting beat up on one thing, try to set up something positive over here to do it. But the Bowe Bergdahl thing has blown up in his face, and they’re just trying to ride it out. I think that the military has been co- opted by the White House on this subject.

DePue: The other part of the Bowe Bergdahl story is the exchange of five prisoners.

Borling: Yeah, I’m saying, that this is without consulting the Congress, as was required. So, you’ve got all these things that you can criticize. I’m sorry to say this, but I think he’s going to go down as one of our worst presidents.

DePue: Well, let’s steer to a completely different subject then, because I understand in 2002 you had an opportunity to return to Vietnam.

Borling: I did.

DePue: Tell me about that experience.

Borling: White House Fellow Delegation, under the imprimatur of the State Department and de facto, the White House, we went back and went south to north with a pretty heavyweight crew, starting in Saigon with the American consulate and ambassador.

By the way, we learned that no American should ever try to speak Vietnamese. American diplomatic corps always thinks that it’s so good to speak the language of the country. The Vietnamese that we talked to said, “Please tell your people, don’t speak Vietnamese. It’s got five layers of intonation on one vowel or consonant, and you end up saying terrible things, thinking you’re saying wonderful things. At best, you’re unintelligible; at worst you’re saying very, very bad things.”

And bigger than hell, our ambassador stood up there and read a statement in Vietnamese, halting Vietnamese. I asked my Vietnamese colleague, who was sitting next to me, I said, “Do you know what he’s saying?” He said, “Most of it is unintelligible.” He said, “And the few things that he is saying, it’s something about doing obscene things to a cat.” (both laugh)

So anyway…Actually Myrna and I flew in a day or two early to get un-jetlagged. I wasn’t sure; I’d been in Saigon.

DePue: Ho Chi Minh City at that time.

Borling: Where?

and was released as part of a prisoner exchange for five Taliban members in an exchange and ceremony held in the White House Rose Garden. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowe_Bergdahl)

543 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: Ho Chi Minh City.

Borling: Everybody calls it Saigon. The officials call it Ho Chi Minh City; the people on the street call it Saigon. We stayed at the Caravel downtown; it had been newly renovated. I had a couple days before the rest of the delegation got there. I can remember Myrna said, “Don’t go out and run in the streets, because they’ll kill you,” or something, you know. I said, “I’m just going to go down to the fitness center in the hotel.” I went down to the fitness center of the hotel; it’s 5:00 in the morning, and it’s locked. So, I put on my shoes and ran out in the street.

I ended up somewhere over by Cha Lun. I got lost. Dawn is now coming up; the people are bringing in the produce. It’s a busy time, predawn in Vietnamese cities and towns. I’m crossing this bridge, and this guy is there. The Vietnamese are crazy about badminton, and he’s got a shuttlecock and two things. There’s no net, but we’re on this bridge, and we end up playing badminton early in the morning with this guy. This was day one. Then I…He beat me, big time.

Then I ran back and found the hotel. Got back to the hotel, and Myrna said, “Well, how was it?” I said, “Oh, it was great; it was great.” Then we went down to breakfast, and we went around. We were staying right by the cathedral. Rex Hotel is a block and a half away. I went out a little bit on my own, in a samlo [pedicab] and told the guy just to take me around some side streets. We ended up in the antiques district, and I found that statue that you see in my yard, the La Jeunesse. It’s French; it came off the top of an oven, cast iron oven. I found it anyway and thought that would be an interesting street for Myrna to see.

So, we went to dinner at the Rex Hotel, up on the top, where they used to blow up the Mekong floating restaurant, and you could listen to things going off and shelling in the distance.

The next day, before the delegation was due to arrive, I went out running again. I didn’t play badminton. After the thing, I’d come in and taken a massage, because it’s so cheap. The next night I had told Myrna, “You need to do this.” So she did it, and she said, “Oh, it’s wonderful.” By the time the delegation got there and we told them about it, after dinner, everybody was standing with their bathrobes and their towels, waiting for these great massages that you would have.

But I’d taken Myrna back over to that antique place. We weren’t doing anything official at this point; we’re still waiting for the delegation. We had gone into the shop, and she said, “Oh, that’s beautiful,” that statue out there with the clock that works when we wind it. The guy wanted $4,000 for it. I said, “Ah, I can’t do that.” I said, “I need it delivered to Rockford, Illinois three weeks from now, and I’ll give you $2,000 for it.” The guy said, “Okay,

544 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I’ll do that.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper, and I gave him my address, and he said, “Cash.” I had travelers’ checks and cash, just at $2,000. That’s all the money we had for the whole trip. Myrna is standing there, screaming that we can’t do this. I said,”2,000 bucks shipped” and handed it to him, and we walked out.

Well, she was just apoplectic. I said, “It’s going to be all right.” And sure enough, although she’d bitched at me the whole trip about giving that guy $2,000, and we had to wire back and get some money to have the trip, we…Actually, I borrowed some money from a guy on the trip. That thing was in our yard. It cost me more to get it put up on the pedestal and everything else than it did to get it bought and shipped from Vietnam. It’s been out there now since 2002, and this is thirteen years later. It’s a handsome piece, with the boxwoods growing up and things. So, we did that.

Then the delegation arrived, and we had a big thing at the consulate, where the ambassador was screwing cats, or whatever he was doing in English. Then we went and did the Cu Chi Tunnels and the war museum, and we did all the things that they wanted us to do.

DePue: They being the Vietnamese officials?

Borling: They being the Vietnamese, yeah, but high level Vietnamese people traveling with us. They didn’t travel as minders. We could go anywhere, talk to anybody. It became quite clear that the orientation in Vietnam was so pro- American as to be overwhelming. The industrial part was heavy Taiwanese, heavy Chinese and some Japanese. We met with and toured a number of factories. We made, as I said, the trip out to Cu Chi and the tunnels and that business. And we did some things with war veterans, Vietnamese war veterans.

We had as our guide or person who helped set all this up, a fellow by the name of Kien Pham, who was a guy who came out from Vietnam after the war, a boat person, and ended up in a Thai refugee camp. The only thing he had on was a army bush jacket. This was in ’75, ’76. They were supposed to go to Australia, ended up coming to America, didn’t speak any English going into high school and graduating very quickly in high school, college, got hired into Tenneco Corporation and did very well.

The guy’s brilliant, although he lost his eyesight, principally because of beriberi in the camps, and ended up being a White House Fellow, like about ten years after hitting our shores, this guy is a White House Fellow.77 It’s an

77 The White House Fellows program is one of America's most prestigious programs for leadership and public service. Exceptional young men and women gain first-hand experience working as full-time, paid Fellows at the highest levels of the federal government, including senior White House staff, cabinet secretaries and other top- ranking officials. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/get-involved/fellows/)

545 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

amazing story. He was our guide. He was the guy who set it up. He’s now back in Vietnam and runs an investment firm in Vietnam, he and his wife, Thuy, and their two kids went back.

DePue: I assume he’s an American citizen now.

Borling: He’s an American citizen, yeah, yeah, but he was a White House Fellow. It’s an amazing story? A good, great friend, Kien Pham. In fact, the last day we were there, we were at the Metropole Hotel, the hotel I tried to escape to— unsuccessfully I might add—the old colonial hotel. Everybody left except Myrna and I.

We were going to go out through Bangkok, because I wanted her to see Bangkok, the Oriental Hotel and the queen’s serpentarium and all that stuff. I thought we might even fly over to Ubon; I’d left some shirts there, and I thought that I might pick them up out of the photo lab where I left them. That’s supposed to be funny. But I did; I had bought some shirts, handmade shirts, and left them.

So we’re sitting there in the lobby; we’re waiting for our transportation to take us over to Chi Lam and then fly on to Bangkok. Kien comes downstairs, and he’s crying, and he’s got his cane. Then he sees us, and we said…well, we shouted, “Kien.” The three of us, Myrna, Kien and I, are hugging in the Metropole Hotel lobby. He said, “I was upstairs in my room, and I got overwhelmed by the thought that you’d all left me again.” Whoa. Saw Kien a couple months ago.

DePue: Kien or Kim?

Borling: Kien. K-i-e-n. Pham, P-h-a-m, Kien Pham and his wife, Thuy, T-h-u-y, just a delightful gal. So we did a combination of business, touristy things in Saigon and then moved north to the capital.

DePue: To Hanoi.

Borling: No, to the old, imperial capital.

DePue: Hue.

Borling: Hue, right. From there I took some side trips and then went up to Da Nang and the Furama Resort and Marble Mountain and did all that again, seeing cultural and touristy things as we went. And because of Kien also meeting with the local government people and also veterans and schools, we took some significant, financially…We took 1,000 wheelchairs with us, because there were a lot of amputees, stayed at the Furama Resort. You and I should leave now and go to the Furama Resort, run by Japanese on China Beach, spend six months or a year there or five years; it’s that neat. Then [we] went up to Hoi An, which is the old city.

546 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

The trip was great, and we could ebb and flow. We don’t like tours a lot, so sometimes we’d bail, and we’d just wander around or just stay at the hotel or just go meet people on our own. Ended up in Hanoi.

DePue: Was the rest of the White House Fellows group not with you at this time?

Borling: Oh, no, they’re all with us. It’s a group of about thirty. We went out to Halong Bay and did that. That’s a wonder of the world, those karst islands.78

In Hanoi, we stayed at the Metropole Hotel, and we met with the central committee. This is where we met with Vo Nguyen Giap; it’s in the book, where I was interlocutor for that portion. Giap was supposed to spend five minutes with us and ended up spending an hour. I’d gone out to the hall and greeted him in French, “Je vous connais bien, General Giap,” I know you well. He had come back, “Je vous connais asi,” I know you too, General Borling. Then we walked into the room, and he spent all this time with us.

There was an expression, a bit muted, about how we’d won the war too, but we heard that from members of the—again, muted—Central Committee, but you heard it all over the streets, and you saw. Young people would stop you and want to speak English. Half the population in 2002 was under the age of twenty-four. They had no independent recollection of the war. Think about it.

DePue: But how do you explain their affection for Americans?

Borling: Our music, our culture, our clothes, our size—

DePue: You didn’t feel any animosity towards—

Borling: There was no animosity, just the opposite. There was one time, when we were giving wheelchairs to amputees, that there was a brief rumble, but you almost had to want to hear it.

It was Tet while we were there, and we were off into the home of two staunch party members who were in the administration. One was a doctor; another was an engineer. We went to their home that was, by all standards, very nice. You entered into a garage, it’s concrete block, and there was animal feces laying in the garage. We went upstairs into the one big room, which was the kitchen, dining room, sitting room, one big room. Then the bedrooms were off on the side. We’d stopped and bought some flowers and brought them to this place. There were three or four of us. This woman had toiled for the Tet dinner. Her daughter was there and her husband.

78 Karst is a topography formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst)

547 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

The husband was hostile; the daughter was wonderful. She worked for a foreign company as a translator and an administrative assistant, fluent in English, fluent in Chinese, fluent in French, one of those, fire in the…I had a kid. [The] TV’s on, blaring; dogs are barking; the food is being served; the cat’s running around.

I reached for my camera, because I wanted to take a picture. I always carried my little black camera case with me, and it’s not there. What did I do with my camera case, because in the camera case is not only my camera, but my passport and about $500 cash, and some travelers’ checks—I got some more of those. Like I said, my wallet and passport, big time. Anybody got it? There were four of us there, Myrna and then two other fellows who were not accompanied and me.

So I asked for a phone, and I called the Metropole Hotel. I said, “Look, I left—apparently in the cab, or I stepped out by the flowers, so I must have left it in the cab—“and I said, “I have no idea who the cab driver is, et cetera. We picked it up a couple blocks from the hotel. We were out walking.” I said, “I don’t know what to do, but this is our phone number here. If there’s something that can be done, please do it,” and I hung up.

So, we went on. Nobody else could eat the food, principally because the cat and the dog shit laying down on the thing had turned people off, and there was a decidedly Southeast Asia smell, which was overpowering. Hell, just like being home. (both laugh) I’m digging in and eating all this stuff and talking and trying to be pleasant.

DePue: I would assume you were somewhat distracted though, as well.

Borling: Well, at this point, there’s nothing I can do about it; I’ve lost it. We’ll have to figure it out; that’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now, let’s enjoy the wine and the banh chung. Banh chung is a sticky rice cake that’s made in…you know what banh chung is. There were a couple of years, toward the end [in prison] where we each got a banh chung, Man, that was great, or at least I thought it was great. So here they give a banh chung. I found out that the banh chung wasn’t as great as I thought it was. I’m eating everything and having fun. Myrna had a couple bites, and she gives me the, “I can’t do this,” and she’s a pretty adventuresome eater. The other people were not very polite either, so I did it for all of us.

About forty minutes later the phone rings; it’s the Metropole Hotel. They said, “A cab driver just dropped off your stuff.” I said, “Okay, thank you.” I said, “Make sure you get his name.” You know, he said he was frightened. He dropped it off and wanted to know if this is where General Borling is. I guess I had my cards in there too. They said he was only too glad to drop it off.

548 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Now we leave, go back to the hotel, and I get my camera, open it up; everything is there, $500 in cash. I would have given the guy a couple of hundred bucks just for bringing it back. When you think about the…I think the yearly salary in Vietnam, if you’re well employed, was around $500, a year. I can imagine that happening in New York.

We had a pretty tumultuous meeting with members of the Central Committee out at Ho Chi Minh’s house on the little lake. I didn’t bother to go to Ho Chi Minh’s—or as we called him, “Horseshit Minh’s”—I just had no desire to go. It’s a Lenin-like mausoleum kind of thing. Oh, we went to the old prison.

DePue: The Hanoi Hilton?

Borling: Yeah. Did I tell you about how I’d gone out jogging there in the morning?

DePue: No.

Borling: Well, I didn’t know how I was going to react to it, so I went out jogging toward…had a map, another rainy, misty morning. I always run predawn. I find it great fun to run in strange cities in their predawn and see what’s shaking; see what’s going on. Fascinating in Vietnam, people perched by the edge of the road with little fires, making tea and things. It’s still very much, at least in 2002…The proximity of an agrarian economy and society is there. It’s almost like in La Boehm, the Gates of Paris opening up and people showing up in the morning with the wares.

Anyway, I ended up on Hoa Lo Street, which means the oven, and the prison is called the oven, Hoa Lo. You stand outside of it, and I can remember pulling my blindfold off in ’66 and seeing those formidable words on the front of the prison. Now I’m standing in front of it again, looking at those words, maison centrale; it translates—

DePue: Central prison?

Borling: Central house, which was the name of the French colonial prisons all over the French colonies, maison centrale. I had a pictured in my mind’s eye, going inside and what was inside, but ran around the side. Half of it had been torn down. I got into a hotel, the Soff Hotel, I think, or Sofitel, and managed to get up to the fourth floor, which was the recreation floor—it’s open—and got out of the elevator and got out onto the basketball court and the volleyball court and the badminton court, and the swimming pool over there and stuff. I was able to go over and press up against chicken wire and look down into the courtyard of the…well, one of the courtyards.

As best as I can tell, I’m standing over an area, close to an area, that we used to call “Heartbreak Hotel,” which was a principal torture area for new people and for others, a terrible place, a really bad place. (pauses) I’m leaning

549 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

up against the chicken wire, looking down, and I’m standing in a children’s playground. So, God either has a great sense of circularity or a great sense of humor.

Later that day we went by bus, and they wanted me to tour. We had a tour guide, and they said, “No, we don’t need a tour guide; we’ve got one.” Actually, I’d spent months there. Some people spent years there, but I was mostly…A number of us were in a satellite prison a few miles away called “The Zoo,” after they get done with you. But I walked them in, and the prison is now heavy French focus. There’s a guillotine in there.

Vietnam was one of the last countries to stop using the guillotine, lots of anguish about the French and what they did. In fact, Vo Nguyen Giap’s family, daughter and wife, were put into Hoa Lo Prison in the ‘30s? Yeah, the ‘30s, I guess, and never came out. So, there’s a lot of horror stories that are in there, with the glass embedded in the top of the walls and the barbed wire and the double walls. It’s an impossible prison to get out of.

But we went in and went to Heartbreak. Off to the right, into what we used to call “Little Vegas”…had to pass some of the interrogation rooms and cells. So, I’m with everybody, and I’m saying what I know and what I don’t know, preaching it straight, not trying to be dramatic. We come to a punishment cell that’s maybe this wide, from me to you.

DePue: Four feet wide.

Borling: Pardon me?

DePue: It sounds like about four-by-five, or something like that.

Borling: Let’s see, it’s that wide, and it’s about six feet long, maybe, two concrete narrow bunks; there would be a bucket in between, shackles that come through the wall and clamp down on your legs. People said, “Well, what’s that for?” I said, “Those are shackles; you put your legs out and stick it in, and then they…” Of course, the shackles are made for small people, and so they need to jam them. “Then,” I said, “they would put you in them and leave you there for a long period of time, days. Or, if they were feeling frisky, they would put your hand in with your foot or put you in backwards with your hands or switch hands. So, I said, “You can play all those variations on the theme.”

Then we went into a room where they had the hook. They said, “What did they do with that hook?” I said, “Well, that’s where they’d hang you up and play piñata with you.” There were other things they wanted to know about. It was surprising to me how you could talk to them about some of the things, but the thing that was most horrific to them, the fact that you had a rusty bucket for a bathroom, when you could get to it, and that you had to shit in a bucket, and they would let it overflow, then you had to go dump it down

550 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

this hole, which was also the place where, if you were lucky, you could get some water on your shower.

One of the girls got sick and couldn’t take it, had to leave the tour. I wasn’t preaching it hard. I didn’t even give them a taste of the real stuff.

DePue: This group you’re talking to, these are your fellow White House Fellows.

Borling: Fellows, yeah.

DePue: And were there some Vietnamese who were with you as guides?

Borling: Kien was with us, obviously, and there were some Vietnamese who were trailing, but they weren’t really much interested. So we went around, and we looked at it. We went into the French area, and they’ve got John McCain’s flying suit, and they’ve got some other stuff and “lenient and humane treatment” posters and all of that.

I thought I was doing very well, keeping it very balanced: what they thought, [that] we had been bombing their country, da-da da-da, no Geneva Conventions, that stuff.

Anyway, so we left. We’re in a samlo, going to the next…In fact, we’re going to the Apricot Gallery, where we bought that Dinh Quan, that sits on my wall.

DePue: Is this a rickshaw you’re talking about?

Borling: Well it’s a…yeah, a bicycle driven samlo. The guy is peddling along. Everyone’s in them, and so we’re going along, and I’m speaking pretty sharply to the driver. In fact, I’m pretty brusque.

DePue: In English, in French?

Borling: English, yeah. “Go faster; go left; get over there,” you know, “come on; what the hell are you doing?” that kind of thing. Myrna grabs me, and she said, “You know you’re being ass-hole, don’t you?” I said, “I am?” She said, “Yeah.” She said, “It affected you that much, didn’t it?” I said, “I guess you’re right.” So, as inured as I thought I was to the experience, I wasn’t as inured as I thought it was, but her calming influence made me come back.

So, we went to the Apricot Gallery. There’s another one of those upstairs—In fact, I think I took you upstairs—the one we bought off the wall of the Metropole. Din Quan is now one of the big, big artists of Vietnam. I’m so glad we have it. That painting, or that lacquerware, is very valuable now, though we’ll never get rid of it.

551 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

So, the big things we got out of Vietnam were the two Dinh Quan paintings, that statue and a couple of things from Marble Mountain, some fountains that were out there; that’s kind of what we got, and one rug.

DePue: Your experiences going through the Hanoi Hilton and explaining all of this, did that have a strong impact on Myrna as well? She’s the one who has no idea what you’d gone through, at home wondering, “In God’s name, what’s going on with him?”

Borling: Yeah, you know, I think it did, but I was impressed how tough she was. To this day, if we were to go back…If you were to ask us, “What countries would you live in if you wanted to go back and live in a country?” We’d both say, “Belgium” in a heartbeat. We’d go back there and live for a period of time. Posted or whatever, we would think that would be…If you asked us, “You’ve got to go live in a foreign country; where would you go?” We would both agree, Belgium. I would then agree Norway; she probably wouldn’t. We would both agree Vietnam. How’s that?

DePue: And why Vietnam as a third location?

Borling: I think because, one, it’s a beautiful country. Two, we really did have a…It was a magic trip. The group was great; Kien Pham was a wonderful guy. Somehow, you’re instinctively drawn back to the battlefields. Even though I didn’t fly in South Vietnam, you’re drawn back to the battlefields of your youth. I think thirdly, that perhaps, there’s a bit of this neocolonialism that is not quite dead. You could live very well with a bevy of assistants there, and boy, that nightly massage was really something, I mean…(DePue laughs)

DePue: If only you could get a massage like that in the United States, huh?

Borling: Yeah, absolutely. But it was like ten or twelve bucks for thirty minutes of a great massage. You had to laugh; the whole delegation lined up with their towels and their little bathrobes, waiting in the hallway.

All right, what else we got going?

DePue: Well, I wanted to talk to you about the book. What led you to finally, after so many years, decide that you wanted to write the book of the poetry?

Borling: Yeah, I’d been on the board of the Pritzker Military Library—

DePue: I assume they invited you to participate? Did you know about that already?

Borling: I did not know about it. As part of the Memorial Day thing, I got invited to be part of the board, and I was for five years. Then I dropped off the board. I give not-for-profits a few years, and then I’m gone. They came back to me, and they said, “Gee, we’d like to do something, and we’d like to make your book the first imprint.”

552 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

I had given a manuscript to, at that time, the CEO. The new CEO had looked at it and said, “Yeah, we want to do this.” They made up a budget, and were going to front the cost. At the same time, I’d been getting some urgings from some of the people, as we were coming up on the fortieth anniversary, saying, “You’ve really got to publish those things that you wrote in your mind and kept memorized all those years and passed it through the walls” and also face-to-face, frankly, as years went on.

That book, which I used, in part to help be an ally against crushing time, helped me run that uncertain race, began to…I’d published an earlier version called Poems for Pilots, for a small exhibition done down here at Memorial Hall, only a small run of 750, self-published, did it in about ten days, replete with error.

Pritzker put together a production team, a layout team, editors in New York, Donnelley Publishing, all this stuff, distribution, and we went into the process in 2013. You can look at the blurbs on the back of the book. Let me see that copy that you have there. (pause) I need to give you a new copy, and I will.

DePue: I’ve got another copy, General.

Borling: Oh, do you? Okay, well the blurbs, Leo Thorsness, the Medal of Honor guy, and others, said nice things, Gary Sinise, Mayor Daley, Ron Fogleman and J.N Pritzker, Colonel Pritzker.79, 80, 81, 82 I wrote a new front end, a new back end, glossary, got the pictures with Myrna and me, biography, and then went through the poems.

The poems were in the four pieces, in the four segments of the book. Charles Rue Wood chose the layout and did a great job. I did a very minor edit on the poems. Most of them are exactly as I transcribed them at Clark―coming out of prison―into that tape recorder.

A new front end, a new back end, and then the guts of the book inside. The budget accounted for a book tour around the country. We had a lot of good press from Reader’s Digest, New York Times, Fox and Friends, NPR, on and on. The book did quite well.

79Gary Sinise is an American actor, director and musician and a supporter of various veterans' organizations, both personally and through his Lt. Dan Band. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Sinise) 80 Richard M. Daley is an American politician, lawyer and author who served as the 43rd mayor of Chicago, Illinois from 1989 to 2011. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_M._Daley) 81 General Ronald R. Fogleman is chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fogleman) 82 Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer N. Pritzker (born James N. Pritzker), IL ARNG (Retired) is currently president and chief executive officer of Tawani Enterprises, Inc., president of the Tawani Foundation, and founder and chair of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Pritzker)

553 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

DePue: How many copies have you sold?

Borling: Twenty-five thousand, north of 25,000, a rough order of magnitude.

DePue: How many printings?

Borling: Oh, boy, it turned out…I think the first printing we did, like 5,000. You know, it’s a book of poetry; poetry doesn’t sell. But if they give me a chance to speak and then talk about the book, then we have a pretty good run through. So, I think five printings.

DePue: You said you went on a book tour. Was this supported by the Pritzkers or by the publishing company, or is that one in the same?

Borling: The publishing company was Master Wings, which was an entity set up by the Pritzkers for a for-profit entity. The deal that Jim, now Jennifer, Pritzker, and I had was that we would make back the nut, and then after that, we’d just split everything down the middle. I had a subscription service that went out to some fellows, who would make a donation to the library, and they would get a special boxed version of that book and get me to speak and some other things. So, we ended up financially doing pretty well.

Even this week, I sold three cases of books. The book is marked at $20.00, $19.99, but I sell it, when I’m out, for $25, because I’ve got taxes and shipping, and I’ve got my signature, which is worth thirty cents; so we do that. The market has borne $25, and after expenses, we split things. I also had to buy a lot of insurance, $10,000 a year worth of insurance, because of billionaire Pritzker and his organization. The lawyers crawled all over us with respect to how we were going to do this; I think an overabundance of caution.

DePue: What are you buying insurance on?

Borling: I’m buying insurance in case we were sued for content or for liable or in case somebody came to a book event and fell down the stairs, or I fell down the stairs, but it’s ten grand a year. We kept that in effect…We basically had this arrangement in effect through the end of 2014, and we cranked it up in 2013. It was a two-year deal, and now we’re on our own. We’ve just said, “Hey it’s been great.” I took half the books that are left; they took half the books that are left, and we said everything is straight. We made last distributions, and now we’re off on our own.

If you want to have me down to Springfield, and I’ll do a book thing down there and have a chance to talk to some people and tell stories on a variety of subjects; I just don’t have to talk about the book, and then I get a chance to sell the books; that would be great. How’s that?

DePue: That sounds wonderful.

554 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: I’d be willing to do it. I’d like someone to give me an honorarium and expenses to get down there, but we’d be willing to do that.

DePue: Well, you and I both know whom I’d be talking to to arrange for all of that.

Borling: Well, absolutely. By the way, the Gerald Ford Library is having me shortly, and I’ve spoken at…whose library? Nixon’s, who else’s? Someone else’s; I’ve forgotten…Oh, Dayton, Ohio. Well, I’ve been all over the country.

DePue: Are there places you won’t go?

Borling: Places I won’t go?

DePue: To sell the book.

Borling: I’m not sure I’d go to a male strip club.

DePue: That was probably a silly question to ask.

Borling: I haven’t crossed off the female strip club, (DePue laughs) but I’d better do that too, just in the fairness of gender equality.

DePue: How many times, especially since the book has come out, have you been interviewed?

Borling: Oh, 500 times.

DePue: What are the questions that you get, where you cringe?

Borling: The variation on a theme would be something along the lines of—and it’s asked rarely, but obliquely—that is, “Have you done anything you’ve been ashamed of in life?” My answer of course is, “Yes.” Then if they say, “Tell me about it.” I say, “No.”

But if they say, “Were you ever forced to do things you didn’t want to do when you were in prison?” I say, “Yes, our rule was that we tried to live by the code of conduct, but we understood that, if you were hurt and hurt badly, you had to bend or you would break. Then you tried to give them as little as you could. We had no military information. They were interested in bending or breaking our will, and they succeeded in some cases with a number of guys, who then were more or less putty, either because they wanted to be or because they were heart broken. But we all wrote things that you would call propaganda, after significant physical pain and duration.”

I can remember the first time I broke enough, where I was in the ropes and hung up and the excruciating pain, doubled up and twisted up into some kind of Chinese contortionist ball. I took it as long as I could. They came and

555 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

they wanted me to offer a confession to “the illegal war.” I still remember the phrase to this day.

I wrote that if my actions…When I say I remember it, I said, “If, because of my actions, innocent Vietnamese people have suffered, I regret that.” They bought that sentence. There were lots of other bullshit about I was flying fighters and dropped bombs on Vietnam. I’d come from Chicago, and whatever was there. You had to be careful what you said, because they’d come back, and you had to be careful how you lie. You had to remember your lies, because they’d play them back at you. So anyway, I wrote that.

I still couldn’t walk at this phase, and they threw me back into a cell. No, that was at The Zoo. That was about thirty to thirty-five days later, forty days later. I thought I’d done pretty well, and I hadn’t done anything. But I remember being thrown back in, and I tapped on the wall…I remember coming back crying, that I’d sold out my country.

I tapped on the wall. I think it was Robbie Risner or Jerry Denton, one of the two. No, it was Robbie, I think or Jim Mulligan. I said, “Basically, I’m a traitor. I’ve written something. They hurt me so bad, I wrote something that I didn’t want to write.” I told him what it was. He came back, he said, “We’ve all had to do the same thing. Do your best. Make them hurt you. Don’t give them anything for free. Just do your best. Bend, don’t break.” That was the deal.

It went on for years that way, but then changed in ’69, ’70, and the incidents of harsh physical punishment, save with the escape, where we all got beaten, flayed, flailed, or at least the senior guys―I was senior in my group―we had broken a light to help the guys get out. That was the norm. Then, after about ’71, the physical punishment went away, basically.

DePue: Do you talk to student groups?

Borling: Yeah, sure. They’re always interested. They’re interested in the blood and gore. They just want war stories.

DePue: I was going to say, what kind of questions do they ask? Sometimes they ask disarming questions, I’ll bet.

Borling: No, no, but mostly it’s the blood and guts stuff. Everyone’s interested in the exercise of the mind, how you kept your mind and your body going. How sick did you get and what was your weight, minimum weight? Those things.

The strange thing is that the POW story or the POW experiences, is still like that’s the biggest credential in my whole life. I view it as a formative moment, but I don’t view it as the biggest credential in my whole life. I’ve had other things that are much, much more important to me than the Vietnamese experience. But it’s the one that seems to be so central, because it

556 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

was so central for the country, that people focus on it, somehow view it as the defining moment in my life. It was a defining moment, not the defining moment.

DePue: Well, that leads right into a question I wanted to ask you, because I recall you talking about coming back from Vietnam and getting to know Myrna again, the two of you learning about each other and you going out and having all these experiences, and talk about being a POW. As I recall, you said she was tired of all this and says, “You need to get beyond this POW stuff.”

Borling: Yeah, she did. She said, “If you want to go out and be a professional POW, and go have a shot,” she said, “let me know when you’re done. I’ll be here.”

DePue: Did she have somewhat of the same view, now that you got the book published, and you’re reliving it in that respect?

Borling: Yeah, she does actually. She’s gone along on a number of the tours and things. I think she’s less able to hear it when it gets a little rough. Some of the poems in there rip her heart out and rip my daughter’s heart out. That poem, “Mommy, Where’s My Daddy?” in the book, neither one of them can look at it. All I’ve got to do is say, “Mommy, where’s my daddy?” and they’re both in tears. I don’t even have to start in the poem; all I have to do is say the title.

If I have to talk about “Hanoi Epitaph.” God, they just don’t…Or when the people are so praiseworthy, which they are, and it’s very humbling—enjoyable but humbling—Myrna says, “I know the truth; I’ve lived with you for fifty-two years.” How would you like to have, for God’s sake, don’t tell them about that? So, there’s a dose of reality that’s attendant to all of this.

DePue: That in most cases, you can skip the tango story, huh?

Borling: And worse, yeah, yeah.

DePue: You’ve also mentioned several times in here, and I know when you and I have spoken offline, you like to go on speaking engagements, speaking tours.

Borling: I’m representative. It hasn’t worked out real well, but I do get called routinely to go out and offer remarks in about…I’ve got six or seven principal areas, but I normally ask the client what they want me to speak on or thrust, and the client will often fall back to, “We want to hear about the war in Vietnam and that stuff and your book.”

Often, I’ve got a speech that I do called, “It Ain’t Snake Oil,” where I talk about the biotech world and what we’re doing with synthonics.83 I do a

83 Synthonics is a science technology focused on the discovery and development of metal coordinated pharmaceuticals. (http://www.synthonicsinc.com/)

557 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

thing called, “Death to Business Plans,” which talks to why they’re not very useful and why you need a more short-term, short-fuse business outline. I tell you how to construct that; it’s a workshop. I do MC [act as master of ceremonies] things. I talk “SOS America,” service over self, America. I talk to “The Eight Virtues of Leadership,” which is probably my mainstay presentation, for example, to the bakers’ bunch in the grand ballroom.

I’ve been speaking in the grand ballroom of the Hilton since 1973. That venue has probably been one of my most common venues. I prefer an audience of 100 or so, but when you’re 400 or 500, then I make sure the room is set and make sure the audio is working and make sure the video is working, just make sure things are…I want it to be professional. I never go in and don’t pre-flight this stuff. Then if it’s like a dinner or a lunch, I’ll go out, as I did at the Hilton, I worked every table. Everyone else was having…This was a breakfast meeting. I will make sure that I have a personal touch at every table, just for a few seconds, to make sure that people know I’m very glad to be there and tell some jokes and say, “Al right, you’re the rowdy table,” and “I’m here to see the good looking women; the men are so-so.” (DePue chuckles) We have some fun with that.

Depending on when it is in the day, everyone wants to be entertained, as well as to be moved. So I try to make them laugh and make them cry and make them think. I don’t use a lectern. I wander back and forth across the stage with a lavalier mic [microphone]. I try to involve the crowd to the extent that I can, given the timing that I have. So that’s some of the stuff that I do, and I get paid pretty well to do it.

DePue: Who’s your agent for this?

Borling: Leading Authorities is a speaker’s bureau. But in truth, I have a non-executive arrangement with them, so I can schedule myself. If Leading Authorities schedules, I’m going to have to go out in the $10- to $20,000 range. If I do it, five to ten [thousand dollars] would not be unusual. If it’s a special deal or an academic institution, limited in honorarium, $1,000, $2,000, expenses, that kind of thing. So, I’m currently not the high end guy.

DePue: You mentioned, I think this is the title, “Eight Virtues of Leadership”?

Borling: “The Eight Virtues of Leadership.”

DePue: Can you list them quickly?

Borling: Sure, a sense of justice, fairness―this is what the Greeks thought were emblematic characteristics of a good city, state or nation―a sense of justice, temperance, courage and wisdom. Those are the four elements of those things.

Then, since the Greeks were obviously short of the mark, I added four, having a sense of humor, being able to laugh at things, a faith-based

558 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

relationship and what that can mean for you in good times and bad, the essence of the human condition, which is creation, and lastly, how you run organizations, large and small; I call it the affection or the love factor.

DePue: The affection of the…?

Borling: The affection or the love factor. Then I use examples and can turn that into a thirty minute, forty-five minute, two-hour, four-hour presentation, as you want, if you want it.

DePue: General, we’ve covered a lot of material. I wonder if there’s some aspect of your life that you’d like to illustrate a little bit more, to discuss. We haven’t talked much about some of the other business ventures that you’ve gotten into.

Borling: Oh, I think for the moment, we’ve pretty much covered…The things that people don’t know is that I have a really shit-hot Hutschenreuther Weihnachtsglocke bell collection. Glocke is German for bell, but it’s a Christmas bell collection, dating from ’78. I think you’ve probably seen it back there. I really like bullfighting. Have we talked about bullfighting?

DePue: Well, you mentioned that earlier today.

Borling: I like bullfighting, I’ve run the bulls at Pamplona. I’d like to go back to Spain and follow the bulls with my wife. [I] have Spanish friends. I’ve let that lag. I like to jog, kind of.

I’ve run marathons. The last one was 10-10-10, when I was seventy. I just moved into a different age group; I’m seventy-five this month. I’ll be in seventy-five to eighty. I’m frolicking with the idea of trying another one out, but my knees…I ran this morning, and my knees just get so achy. But I might have enough left to do one more marathon.

DePue: You’ve got a gorgeous house, filled with some amazing artwork, as well. How would you describe your tastes in art?

Borling: Myrna. No, I’ve had a hand in most of our major selections, because I’m the guy that pays for it. Myrna…I buy her things that I know please her. Many of the antiques in the house, she’ll say, “Oh God, look at that,” and I’ll say, “Oh, God, look at that.” We’re very partial to the Louis Philippe period in France; we’ve got a number of things in the house of that. We are eclectic with our art. I don’t think we’re too much into abstract; in fact we’re not, much more traditional. We do like the Vietnamese stuff. We like Bjørn Wiinblad, a Danish artist, a lot.

We both like music, opera. I still play the piano enough to probably get in trouble in bars if I sat down and did it. Although the other day, at the Hilton, I was waiting for this guy to come up, their leader of their group, and he was a little late. So, I was sitting down there, outside the…Well, it’s up the

559 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

stairs, leading into the grand ballroom, and I was playing the piano, just quietly playing to myself. But, of course, when you play the piano, you don’t play it that quiet, because you want other people to hear it. I’m doing okay. He comes walking up the stairs, and he’s looking around. I said, “Are you Dennis?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you the general?” (laughs) “Yeah, I am.” He said, “Playing the piano?” I said, “Yeah, well you know, another career opportunity may be coming.” (DePue laughs)

Well, thank you for your nice comments on the house. When you’re in the Air Force, the things matter a lot, because you move…We moved around so much, almost every year, every eighteen months. You get used to your things. We find, as we get older now―we’ve been here for almost…this is our fourteenth year that we’re in Rockford—the things are things. We’re much more interested in supporting one another, enjoying what heretofore we might consider small things, not quite a Japanese fascination with life. I’m measuring out those impact areas over time that I can still offer some value.

At some point you just sit here and rock and become reflective. I’m not there yet. I still think I’ve got a competitive and a value-add streak in me that I will exploit. I hope I know, when I do reach the top of my game, that I’m there, and it’s all downhill from that point. Now, I’m obviously on the downside of the power curve, but I’ve got some smash left. I’ve got some smash left, as long as my health and her health holds.

We just had this bout, of course, where her health didn’t hold, and that caused me to take a two-month hiatus. I must tell you, I enjoyed it. I mean I played Nurse John and did all that stuff. I really think that when you get to the end of life, one or the other of you—this is easy to say, but I’ve at least been through a two month regimen with it—that it’s probably the highest expression of love and loyalty and continuance of whatever it is that you’ve had, where one services the other and does so willingly and with a glad heart. It even draws you closer together. Now, I think it’s easier for the man to do that for the woman, because there’s some physical requirements; you’ve got to lift, and you’ve got to do some things that are easier for the man, but at least that’s what I think.

Myrna thinks she’s going to throw me into the Quincy Home for Veterans (DePue laughs) and be done with it, see me once a year; just make sure she gets the checks. She’s a realist. The nice thing about that Quincy Home is they take both men and women. Did you know that?

DePue: Yes.

Borling: And if the guy dies, the woman gets to stay, veteran or not. There’s no VA hospital, there’s no VA thing that does that. That’s a hell of a deal. I know Quincy. We’ve got very good friends who are trustees at Lincoln Academy,

560 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Barb and Dell Mitchell, and we’ve been down there on several occasions. There’s a quality couple for you, Delmer Mitchell and Barbara, from Quincy.

DePue: I’ve done one interview there.

Borling: In Quincy?

DePue: In the Quincy Home, yeah.

A few closing questions here. This is what you’ve been waiting to hear for twelve sessions. You mentioned, just a few minutes ago, that you never viewed this POW experience as the defining moment of your life or career.

Borling: A defining moment but not the defining moment.

DePue: What would the other defining moments be?

Borling: If I talked about defining moments, it would be the value of competition and the value of trying to excel. That’s been a motivation as long as I can remember, so it had to come from family, had to come from earliest school. I think it had to come from junior ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] instructor, Joe Ehrich, in high school. But that need to run to and then from the front has always been important. You can shorthand it and say ambition, and I’ll say yes, but it wasn’t a naked, ruthless ambition. It was again, kind of in the spirit of the game, the competition. So that would be formative.

The Air Force Academy. Hoh. I just talked to my last great living mentor yesterday. I felt a need to talk to Mal—I only talk to him maybe a couple times a year—General Malham Wakin, an Aristotelian Catholic. He was professor of philosophy, English, and ethics. As I told him yesterday, he can’t die until I tell him it’s authorized to die, because I still need a mentor hanging around. We’ll see him and his second wife, Lynn. His first wife died under agonizing circumstances. Malham Wakin has talked to every class at the academy since the academy started. I had him for several classes. I’m also trying to get one of my papers re-graded from him; it’s called ”Adaptive Philosophy.” He gave me a C on it; I think I deserved an A. I think I deserve an A. I’m going to rewrite it and take it out to him.

DePue: Well, there’s that competitive nature still.

Borling: Yeah, you’re damn right. Being a fighter pilot. Being a fighter pilot and then being able to get back and be a fighter pilot again, after the prison experience. By doing my best, returning with honor meant a lot. So it was a formative experience. I think in some ways you could say it also saved me from those excesses of youth. Coming off of war, you’re pretty much a wild man, and―

DePue: I recall some stories. Once you got back to Europe, it still sounded like you had a few parties and wildness in you.

561 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: Are you talking about this last weekend or the weekend coming up, or tonight? (DePue laughs)

DePue: Sorry for interjecting there.

Borling: Well, you’re talking about formative experiences. A formative experience [is] being a White House Fellow. A formative experience, [is] having John Gardner as a guy I could call and talk to. Command is a formative experience. Staff is a formative experience. Having, making, working, failing at making a marriage last for fifty-two years is a formative experience. Not regretting having only daughters is a formative experience. Water skiing now is a formative experience. Running marathons…It all fits.

I’m hesitant to just keep babbling on here. I try to make life count. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m short of the mark. Sometimes I’m lazy. Sometimes I’m so energetic I scare myself and piss Myrna off. I’m not afraid of seizing it, and I’m not afraid of letting go.

DePue: Well, certainly I would suspect—that’s kind of contradictory—that you would think that there will be a day when people are looking back at your life and career, and they will remember you because you were a POW for six and a half years. How do you want to be remembered? Give me just a sentence or two.

Borling: On my gravestone, I just want to have two words “fighter pilot.” But I think that’s because of the bravado that I’ve never been able to shake and never want to shake. I guess if I had two other words, three other words, “He tried hard.” I want to be known to the last moments of still in there pitching. That would be ideal.

DePue: Well, and I would add, “succeeded much.” That’s for others to judge, I suppose.

Borling: It’s like when I retired…I was going to say, it’s like footprints in the snow; they vanish quickly. No one has…It’s like John Logan.84 Who the hell is John Logan? Just one of the most important figures in American history, unknown to most, those people. But when I retired from the Air Force, I wanted to do five things attendant to retirement, one of which was to have a parade at the Air Force Academy. But I just wanted it to be me and the chief of staff, who happened to be my classmate, Ron Fogleman.

DePue: A parade in your honor, with the cadets on parade?

84 John Alexander Logan (1826 –1886) was an American soldier and political leader. As the 3rd commander-in- chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, he is regarded as the most important figure in the movement to recognize Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) as an official holiday. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Logan)

562 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

Borling: No. I wanted me and Ron Fogleman to parade with Jane—he calls her Miss Jane; we don’t call her that—Jane and Myrna out at the fifty yard line, out on the parade ground there, the reviewing stand or reviewing area, and that we would do what we did as cadets, walk down the Bring-Me-Men ramp and walk down the other ramp and then walk out, just like we were walking out in formation as cadets, and turn up where Jane and Myrna would be waiting.85

Now, as it turned out, my dad decided he wanted to be there, and my daughters decided they wanted to be there, and my cousins decided they wanted to be there. But that was all, just that family. The superintendent wanted to come out. I said, “No, we don’t want you.” He said, “We could have a deputation.” “No, I don’t want any cadets.” We had one protocol guy who had the gong. They were going to give me a medal, and I had him have a bottle of wine.

But anyway, so Ron and I are walking out—his call sign’s Buzzard— and it had been wet. We’re leaving, and as we’re walking out to the thing, just the two of us, I said, “Well, look, we’re leaving tracks.” He said, “Yes, we have, and yes we will.” I guess that would be something else; I hope I’ve left some tracks. But I have no highfalutin’ notion that they will linger long…but maybe a little.

Thank you for being so assiduous, Mr. Oral Historian, Mark DePue, West Point graduate. I’m going to miss (DePue laughs) our more-than- occasional get-togethers and would hope that there would be other opportunities to cross flight paths.

DePue: I think you and I can both work toward that end.

Borling: Okay. Well, next is, at minimum, Memorial Day, where you will come with―

DePue: I’d be happy to do so.

Borling: …to the area. You laid a wreath last year, and we had a nice lunch. We’ll do more this year. How’s that sound?

DePue: That sounds great. Any final comments for us, General?

Borling: Oh, I think I just did it. My final comments is, I’m going to keep trying and hope a few footprints linger for a time.

DePue: No poetry you’d like to finish with?

Borling: You know, when we did that—you keep leading me—when we did that thing at the academy, I had written a poem for the day, because that was one of the

85 Bring Me Men is the former name of a ramp that cadets walk up on their first day at the Air Force Academy, a symbolic threshold between an old life and a new one.

563 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09

five things; that was part of it. I had this bottle of ice wine. I remember, Ron read the thing, and they gave us certificates and said all the nice things, and everyone is crying, except Myrna and me; we’re not crying. We think this is kind of cool. We opened up the ice wine from Kroth. They knew it from Europe; we knew it from Europe. We had a shot of wine. They took off; we took off. Myrna and I went off with a happy heart, and everyone else was just weepy. We said, “Why is everyone sad? This is a happy day.” But the poem…and I can’t bring it back. But in truth it said something like,

On a rampart day, in a Viking way, with contrails etched on blue, a chief formation takes the field to mark the flight we flew. The sortie’s done and not too bad, but the mission starts anew.

I gave copies of that poem to everyone. It was two quatrains long, a much better rendition than I did just now. It’s not in the book. It was actually a private poem for me and Myrna.

I ran to the rock, and that was part of that thing…so that was the academy thing. I wanted to play golf at St. Andrews. I wanted to run the bulls at Pamplona. I wanted to fly the F-15 one more time, and I did. As I said, I wanted to run to the rock, and then I wanted to have the private parade, me and Ron, and did all five things.86

DePue: I think that’s a great way to finish it.

Borling: Isn’t that a great way to finish it?

DePue: Thank you very much, General.

Borling: Okay.

(end of transcript #13)

(end of volume III)

86 The Run to the Rock is the culmination of the U.S. Air Force Academy recognition of the fourth-class year, when the fourth-class cadets become upper-class cadets. Through the 5-mile run, each cadet carries a 250- pound slab of concrete called “the charge.”

564