Maverick Veterans’ Voices: Interview with Ricky D. Gibbs

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Interviewee: Mr. Ricky D. Gibbs

Interviewer: Heather Scalf

Date of Interview: March 4, 2016

Location of Interview: Arlington, Texas

Transcriber: Matthew Hail

Special Collections UT Arlington Libraries

SCALF: This is Heather Scalf, today is March 4th, 2016 and I am interviewing Brigadier General Ricky D. Gibbs for the first time. He is a 1982 graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington. This interview is taking place at the The University of Texas at Arlington's Central Library in Arlington Texas. This interview is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and is part of the Maverick Veterans' Voices Project.

SCALF: So welcome, I appreciate you being here.

GIBBS: Thanks, glad to be back.

SCALF: So tell us, where are you from originally

GIBBS: Well originally I was born in Austin, Texas. My family then moved to the Harker Heights, Temple, Kileen area right outside of Fort Hood and so that's where I'm from, is Austin, Texas.

SCALF: Did you participate in ROTC in high school?

GIBBS: I did, all four years.

SCALF: Okay, why did you choose to attend UT Arlington?

GIBBS: Well, there are a couple of reasons. I was living in Kentucky at the time at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where my step-father was living, and I'd just finished high school and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with college, or what I was going to do with the rest of my life and then my father called and said, won't you come to Texas and I will put you through college. Well, I had been playing football at the high school there, and so I moved to Texas and I chose University of Texas at Arlington because I wanted to play 00:02:00football, they ran the same offense that I ran in high school. So, I figured I might have a better chance as a smaller guy to try to play football.

So, I chose the UTA for that way and then was planning and signed up for ROTC that way. Well the program for football went away and I had an ROTC scholarship, a small scholarship from the Army, and then when I came here ROTC Department got me a full three years' scholarship. So, that's how I got started at UT Arlington.

SCALF: So, the football program died the year that you came.

GIBBS: Yeah, I think it was the second year, I don't remember exactly, but when I heard it was going away I said, well I better not waste my time doing this anymore. So, I focused on my undergraduate in physical education and ROTC.

SCALF: Okay, so what were your general impressions of the school in 1978?

GIBBS: [Gibbs pauses to think] I liked the feel of it. I very quickly found that 00:03:00a group of Army brats, I'm an Army brat, and five of us rented an apartment and lived in it together for most of my time here at UTA. So, the feel and effect that I very quickly gravitated to people like me, made it very comfortable for me to stay here.

SCALF: So, were their other campus activities that you engaged in besides ROTC?

GIBBS: I played a lot of intramural sports and I tried to referee a lot of different sports through the intramural program, but primarily it was ROTC.

SCALF: Were there other campus activities, at the time, I mean now they have bed races and those sorts of activities, did they have those when you were here?

GIBBS: I don't remember that, no. We had ROTC stuff, but I don't recall campus-wide bed races. If so, I didn't go to them. I kind of viewed my time off I didn't have enough time to do that and I was really focused on graduating on time.

SCALF: Did you work outside of school when you were here?

GIBBS: I worked, I got paid to referee some of the games. I think mostly what I did was softball, a little bit of money and I worked at a place called Taco Cabana or Taco. I think it was Taco Bell? Taco Cabana right next to campus off of Cooper Street.

SCALF: I don't think that's still here anymore. [Lots of laughter in background]

GIBBS: Probably not.

SCALF: There's a Taco Something down there, but I don't think it's that one.

[Third Party Voice]That's awesome.

SCALF: Did any of the professors, professors of military science, any of your faculty when you were here, did any of them particularly influence you?

GIBBS: I have to say all of my ROTC Cadre were phenomenal, I was blessed to have really good people, as a matter of fact, one of the reasons I came back is Ron Munden. is being inducted into the ROTC Hall of Fame; he was one of them. 00:05:00Command Sergeant Major Joe Lopez, Captain Ray Smith, I think is his first name. Dicky Purtell, Jim Breckenridge, all those guys were faculty members and helped coach and mentor me through and what kept me really in the Army from what their example was.

SCALF: Did you keep in touch with them or keep track of them when you were in the Army?

GIBBS: Oh I did, yeah. We're still in touch with several of them on Facebook, Ron Munden lives in Belton, Texas just outside, and I see him all the time when we run at each other at the store. Joe Lopez retired as a Commander Sergeant Major from the Army and I was fortunate enough, in Afghanistan, part of retiring seeing his son Lieutenant Colonel Lopez in a hangar somewhere in Afghanistan. So, yeah I stayed in touch and I have fond memories of them.

SCALF: Small community.

GIBBS: Very small community.

SCALF: So you were commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in 1982 in the infantry? [Gibbs nods] Okay, can you recall your first days after you left campus, and 00:06:00what happened in the first year?

GIBBS: Oh yeah, like it was yesterday. I graduated, I believe it was on a Friday or a Saturday. It was on a Saturday I believe and had a great time partying with family and I woke up a little bit more hungover than I intended to and I had to drive from Texas to Fort Benning, Georgia, and check-in my first day in the Army on Monday. So, I had a long drive on Sunday, I made it and checked in on Monday and signed right into the Army and went right into training to be an infantry officer.

So, that comprised a, about a sixteen week, eight week, I can't remember exactly how long, officer, Infantry Officer Basic Course is what they called it and I finished that course, I graduated and went into the Army Ranger school, which 00:07:00was the toughest school in the Army at the time and probably still is. Fortunately, I graduated on the first go-round. A lot of people, you get recycled and you go through, it's a very tough school. Luckily I made it and as I was -- the day after I graduated I drove back home to Texas to see family because my first assignment was in Wiesbaden, Germany and so I had a very short, brief vacation at home, and as I was driving home I fell asleep at the wheel and went off a cliff, totaled my truck and ruined everything I had. Luckily I am alive. I crashed that in Pelahatchie, Mississippi.

SCALF: Wow.

GIBBS: So I was able to recover, get out, and got home, had a short Christmas, and then got on the airplane flew to Germany and started my Army career. It was a pretty traumatic year in Germany because the first day I got there we went straight to the field, which is what I like doing, we went to practice our war games. Came out of the field, settled into my apartment, and then in the March 00:08:00time frame went back to the field and during that time our brother was -- he passed away. So, I had to come back home, he had muscular dystrophy and he lived a long life, longer than he expected to and, came back home, did the funeral, went right back to Germany, went right back to the field and in the middle of that field, I got a call that my dad wasn't going to make it.

He was in ICU and said he had two days to live, get home. So, I got home fortunately, he lived and made it through and I went right back to Germany, and that first year-- That's about how that first year went because then I volunteered to go to the Rangers-- Army Rangers and I got selected and I came back to, back to Fort Benning, and helped form the 3rd Ranger Battalion as one of its first members. So, that was my first year in the Army.

SCALF: That was very, very busy.

GIBBS: Yeah, it was very busy. But despite the hardships, I met some wonderful people who I am still in touch with today.

SCALF: So, you have had a number of different assignments. You mentioned you 00:09:00started your very first one in, was it, Wiesbaden. What would you say were the most notable or most memorable? Tending to over a twenty-plus year career is a tough call, but.

GIBBS: Yeah, thirty-plus years. I have to say that the first one was when I went to the Army Rangers. I-- We jumped out of airplanes. We were the nation's first to go when a call came. I learned about standards and discipline and training and embedding that into everything I had to do in the Army from the days on in. Because you did nothing in those days but train, train, train, train Special Operations Force. So, because of that, we didn't have the routine post guard missions; you didn't have to go pick up trash. Every day, Monday through Friday, you trained. You came in, you got a mission, you parachuted somewhere, you 00:10:00trained, you came out of the field on Friday, got the weekend off and you'd do that. And then you would go away for a couple of weeks. So, I learned how to be an Army infantry officer, although I was taught that in the basic course, and I did a little of that in my first unit in the Army, mechanized infantry, but the Army Rangers made me who I was, I think, the rest of my career.

The next event was I went back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where I went to high school, which is the home of the 101st Airborne Division. So, now I was married and had two kids and my kids were born at Fort Campbell. Fort Campbell has a lot of meaningfulness, to me because as a kid I went there, I went to high school there, I played football there, we won our first state championship there. While I was playing, and that's kind of what brought me here, playing that offense, and then Desert Storm hit and I was a Captain and my first time at war.

I deployed with the 101st when we invaded Iraq in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and invaded Kuwait around Iraq and prepared to liberate Kuwait. So, that was-- I commanded two companies there, 3rd Brigade of the 101st and then deployed as an aide-de-camp to a commanding general, two-star, where I learned from him about what leadership was at the senior levels. He was General Binnie Peay. He was like a father to me, took me under his wing, cared for me, and on my first deployment we went, and he taught me about remaining calm under pressure and I called him my true Virginia gentleman.

From there I went to the Army Command and General Staff College where I was promoted to major, the next promotion up, but I spent a year in school learning how to plan and coordinate military operations at a higher level. That was a good year to break, and then I went to-- from there I went to Fort Bragg, North 00:12:00Carolina. Jumped out of airplanes again with the 82nd Airborne Division. Had a couple of real-world alerts to go somewhere and fight a war and I can remember the first time that happened, it was "Wow this is really real. Man, we could go to war, and soldiers could die based upon decisions that I made." Actually, that occurred in the Ranger battalion.

And from them, I went back to Texas, Fort Sam Houston, Texas where I was to help train Army Guard and Reserve and mentor those kind of units. Then I went to the Pentagon where I learned really strategic level leadership on the Army Joint Staff, managing big budgets, and then back to the 101st again as a Lieutenant Colonel where I commanded an infantry battalion and that next very significant 00:13:00event was we invaded Iraq in 2003. My job was as the 101st Airborne Division G3 which was basically plans, training, and operations, so I was responsible for writing the plan or supervise the writing of the invasion plan for our division and then once we deployed to fight it I had to provide the operational overwatch for my boss of the plan that we had. That was significant because what helped me in that job was the invasion of Iraq in 2000-- In Desert Shield, Desert Storm. I had a little bit better understanding, although the situation and circumstances were different. I think that helped me be the G3 and I think do a pretty good job with that. Got promoted out of there to Colonel, went to the Army War College and so there's really two more significant events.

One, I went to the Pentagon after the War College and learned that I was going 00:14:00to command a brigade of infantrymen at Fort Riley, Kansas and after a year went to Fort Riley, Kansas and stood up this four thousand five hundred soldier brigade and very quickly thereafter standing it up got alerted to go to Iraq during the surge. I think that's probably the most rewarding and tragic time of my life in the Army because as we stood up the infantry brigade, the Army and the war were taking different turns and I knew that from my time in the Pentagon that they were going to have a, what we call an "on-ramp", although they were talking an off-ramp, in other words, reducing troops in Iraq. Because of my position where I sat I kind of knew a different story based upon field reports that were coming in and knew that we were going to increase numbers of brigade combat teams that the fighting nucleus that the Army was based on and is pretty 00:15:00much today is based on deploying brigades.

They sent me to Fort Riley-- the mission changed so often at Fort Riley I lost troops because the commander out there decided he was going to take my troops to go do training teams so my cadre of people that I had flown in to help me stand this brigade up to go fight were stripped out by somebody who didn't quite have the big picture. Well, that got all turned around very quickly, higher leaders came in and said no you're not doing that anymore, this brigade is going to war. And very quickly I got a call from some very senior leaders "Can you be at the National Training Center in thirty days?" I was in the field in October training my brigade for its big test. So, I said, of course, we will be there, you don't say no to your nation and within thirty days we were parked and deployed in the deserts of Fort Irwin, California for the "big test" as we call it. The ultimate, well it's not the ultimate, the big final exam before the Army sent as 00:16:00all off to war. In the middle of that training event. We were being trained--

[There is a gap in the video here that jumps forward]

The senior leaders, here is your mission, it was basically to secure and conduct counter-guerrilla terrorist operations in the Al Rashid security district, which is essentially the heart of Baghdad. So, I very quickly wrote a plan and as my troops got off the airplane and I directed them to go here, go here, go here, go here. Start practicing, "here's your mission", we rehearsed for thirty days, and I can't remember the exact date, I want to say it was on the first of March, thirtieth of March, somewhere in there, we attacked and we established our base in-- FOB, at Forward Operating Base Falcon which was in the Al Rashid security district and at that time it was the most violent place in Iraq. I got, with my brigade combat team we got there with four thousand soldiers and I was quickly augmented with up to nine thousand soldiers and for fifteen straight months we 00:17:00fought a hard battle we lost over one hundred and two killed and over eight hundred wounded [Gibbs takes a pause] and all the soldiers were spectacular.

The unit won Valorous Unit Award, we secured the area and I take great pride in-- by the time we got there in March, by November the people of those cities brought in Thanksgiving meals to my soldiers, and they did the same thing at Christmas. So, I celebrated Christmas Day, Christmas Mass in a Catholic church in Dora, they had been blown up and demolished and Dora was where a large 00:18:00population of Catholics, Chaldean Catholics, lived. So, it was me and my leaders with the Bishop of Iraq, the Catholic Bishop of the Chaldean. He came in and gave mass and sitting with us were the different sheiks and the imams from the Shia and the Sunni tribes that were celebrating Christianity in that church and that was another day that I take great pride in that we were able to do that and then we redeployed home, I got promoted to general and very quickly we returned back to Iraq on my fourth tour where I was responsible for operations for the 1st Infantry Division and still doing counter-terrorist operations, but primarily at that time helping advise, assist, and train the Iraqi security forces so that they could take over conducting military operations on their own, 00:19:00another rewarding experience.

Very quickly after that, got re-assigned to Wiesbaden, Germany where I started my Army career as the Deputy Commanding General for 5th Corps and very quickly deployed to Afghanistan. So, then I retired after that, five tours was enough.

SCALF: I think so, I agree. So, as you reflect back on your career and all these activities, so you've shared some of the drama and the tragedy of-- particularly of commanding, right? Are there any stories that you think back on and you just, these are the moments that make me laugh, that make me remember why this is so important and that are really strong memories for you?

GIBBS:[Gibbs pauses] Wow, I have a lot of them at a lot of different points in my career. [Gibbs pauses again] I remember as a young Lieutenant in 3rd Ranger 00:20:00Battalion, we were standing it up and I was on what we call SDO, Staff Duty Officer, that night and the Battalion Commander had a series of books on his shelf that he wanted us to read as we pulled duty, and the first then that I remember, and I carry this with me for the rest of my Army career was-- the title was "Burn the Midnight Oil." It was a short story about a major of infantry teaching lieutenants at Fort Benning, Georgia during World War Two, and I'll keep it short. It said, he basically said "Remember men," there weren't women in the Infantry then. He basically said "Remember men to burn the midnight oil, so in years after you're done serving your country, you don't look down 00:21:00upon your hands and see the blood of your soldiers on your hands because you didn't do your homework," and I remember that being the very first time that I remember that "damn it, we could go to war," because up until that point it was kind of fun, I mean I. It was high adventure jumping out of airplanes, repelling out of helicopters, climbing mountains, walking in the swamps and that's just what a young man like me enjoyed doing back in those days. I still enjoy it, I just can't do it anymore, I'm too old. But that struck me and I copied that article and I still have it and why is that important? Well, about a month later, we got our alert to come in.

We had just gotten off work on a Friday for the weekend. I got back to my apartment in Columbus and it wasn't like two o'clock in the morning and I got a phone call, there was an alert, so the battalion had to assemble and we were 00:22:00going through a training event that was designed, it was an ARTEP, Army Training, and Evaluation in the old days. It's another test to see if you have met the standards of what you're supposed to do on your mission and I had a particular mission basically to fly in helicopters to go do a raid, an attack, my platoon of 50 troops.

So, I get to my platoon offices and the sergeants are all frantically moving, packing stuff. So, I left there and went to my commander's office and he was in his office frantically moving stuff and he said "this is for real, this is for real, this is not a test, this is for real" and I remember him being very shaken and I thought "Wow, this is kind of why you came into the Army." So, I went back to my Platoon CP as we called it and the battalion commander walks out and he walked into my office, he chased out all my sergeants and he said that this is the real thing and your platoon is the main effort and the epiphany came on like holy crap, he means it for real and I don't know if I could tell you where we 00:23:00were going to go, but we were going to go jump in and do some bad things to some really bad people. Well, fortunately, that didn't happen, we got real close, but we turned it off.

Those are some first times of "Wow". What I remember is my NCOs, my sergeants, were all very professional, "Alright boss. We got it, we are going to do it." and it inculcated into me the importance of tough training, good training, discipline, and standards because those sergeants-- It was my first time, really, with something like that, they'd been doing it for a couple of years ahead of me and they knew it, they jumped right in, they got it, and it was trusting NCOs [Gibbs pauses] There are a lot of others, but I'll skip to the one that struck home to me. In the middle of all the fighting in Iraq, in the surge of 2007 and we were taking a lot of casualties within the first five days I 00:24:00think I had seven guys killed, blown up, and I remember the spirit because everyone would ask, "Oh my gosh the fighting's bad, you're losing people." and I remember the spirit of the young men and women.

We would have our memorial service within a day that they were killed and the whole unit would get together and we would cry and, you know, remember and after each event, bar none, I did too many of them and I could almost say that behind every single one of them, when it was all over with and they had the crying done they would all say "Sir let's get after it, this is for Tom, or Sue, or Billy" and they'd go out that gate with a smile on their face, knowing that they could 00:25:00get blown up and they did it with courage and conviction and no regrets and they came back in and did it every day because as we say you have to go outside the wire every day and I remember, I can't remember that kids name, but I ask him before he went out I said are you ready to go? And he put a smile on his face "This is for Tom, boss. We're gone, let's go, let's get after it." And I will never forget that and it dawned on me as I heard that, I remember reading the book about the Greatest Generation and the talk that that generation of soldiers that we had were the "Nintendo Generation" and I didn't see any of that, those kids went after it with the best of them and served their nation well.

SCALF: So, you've received many awards during your service in the Army. Each one of those represents events, activities, battles in some cases, right? Is there 00:26:00one award that you have received that is particularly memorable to you?

GIBBS: I would have to say it's the Valorous Unit Award, and that's a unit award because of the valor and the spirit that those soldiers did and displayed during the surge, I mean I had very little to do with it other than be there where they needed me to be. I was blessed with great leaders and great soldiers and they didn't ever let me down and some very tough days, they never let me down and they every day went out the wire into the fight knowing you're going to get blown up. I think we got bombed every night for the first six months, we got rocketed every night, mortared every night, I mean I don't know how we did it because as soon as you'd go to bed, go to sleep sirens would go off and they'd 00:27:00wake you and everyone one would have to run to the bunkers, stay there for an hour or two until we had accountability and then you went right back to your bed, and of course now your wired and you couldn't sleep and you had to get up next morning and go out on patrol. So, I would have to say it was the Valorous Unit Award. None of the individual awards I have matter, that's the one that matters most to me.

SCALF: Thank you. So, you mentioned that you had a family while you were on active duty. Tell us about how your time on active duty affected your family. What were the upsides, the downsides?

GIBBS: Well, unfortunately, my marriage didn't last. I think it started when we started going to war and I went to war for ten years. I'd go a year, come back a year, go a year, come back a year and I think that contributed to my marriage, but I think on a good side though I got two wonderful children, Army brats. The bad side is like me, they moved every two years. I think my daughter still hates me to this day because she was in four high schools, but she went on and is 00:28:00working on her Ph.D. in chemistry and is a brilliant girl and I'm very proud of her and my son is back in college about ready to graduate. So, I think the fact that my kids moved around so often and are very easy to get along with, very easy to go into a community and talk to people because of that experience that they had and they have told me that now, despite all the moves that I put them through in some very tragic times, hard times of their life, you know, young girls in high school moving their junior, senior year is not good, but she went on, like I said, and is doing great and my son is too. As for the family time, you know, it was tough on the family, you know, unfortunately for my marriage, I would go to war, fight the war, come back, and I knew pretty quickly that I was 00:29:00going back very quickly.

So, you'd get back and try to reintegrate, but now you're back at work focused on going back to fight and I go back to that statement of "Burn the Midnight Oil" because I didn't want to look at my hands and I still keep that to heart is I didn't want that statement of Burn the Midnight Oil to be me looking at my hands today and saying, "Wow" and I don't have that feeling, but what did that do to me, it caused me probably to focus more doing that because I had to write the letters home and in many of the cases where I was there where they didn't make it, you know I have to live with that, but I remember one.

I went to every funeral, they have a general officer go and I went to one in Wichita, Kansas and that was hard because I had just come back from Deployment 00:30:00and I was done and as I, I had to stand up at the service in the church and tell the story of the soldier, well I didn't know the soldier, but he had been in the same units that I had been in and had fought in the same areas I had fought in. So, I told the mom and dad "I said I don't know your son, but I know him probably better than you because of what he has done, he was an infantryman" and in the middle of it, I couldn't get through it and then the mom stood up and came up and gave me a big hug and said "I'm not sad. My son did what he wanted to do," and then I was able to keep talking.

Well then it was a blistery, cold miserable day in Kansas, you know the winds 00:31:00are whipping real fast and it's probably minus ten degrees, twenty degrees and I had to wear my dress uniform, but I didn't have any gloves and I didn't wear my coat, but I remember as we walked out of the church and it was about a two-mile drive to the funeral, to the gravesite, and every twenty feet or fifteen feet were the motorcycle men, the bike riders, and at that time there was the church, I can't remember the name of it, that was trying to barge in and protest soldiers' funerals. They couldn't have got in because on a cold blistery day, wearing shirts with no sleeves, vest, black vest, this group of people, long hair, Vietnam vets, old men, young men, young women, who rode Harleys. They stood there with that flag, wind blistering, and they stayed there for two hours while we did that service and it just really convinced me of the value of the people that we have in our country that are serving, and those that aren't serving, but yet believe in what we are as a nation. Those are some fond 00:32:00memories, sad ones, but fond, happy memories.

SCALF: So, you came into the Army in the beginning of the Reagan era, the end of the Cold War, and you have served in both Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

GIBBS: And Enduring Freedom.

SCALF: And Enduring Freedom. So, what are the most distinct changes that you've noted about the Army as the years have gone by?

GIBBS: [Gibbs pauses] Hoo boy, I just gave this speech yesterday. I've seen the Army grow and change probably four, five, or six times. I don't know the number exactly. I remember very vividly when you mentioned Ronald Reagan. I was assigned in Germany. I was out in the cold at; I don't know if it was Baumholder, Germany where we trained or, Weissach where we deployed to do collective training and it was midnight and it was another cold, frigid night. 00:33:00Lots of snow on the ground and we're all hugging around this one potbelly stove to stay warm and we only had enough fuel to burn one stove because during the Carter administration the drawdown was so bad we didn't have enough ammo, we didn't have enough fuel to do the training. We had to practice "bang, bang, bang," which is terrible to do. And I remember from that day how bad it was and I wrote President Reagan a note, a personal letter, I said: "Dear Mister Reagan I'm glad you're elected". He wrote me a note back; I have it framed to this day. Basically said "thanks for your service, we are going to improve it," and he did.

We revamped how we trained, how we organized, and how we led, and that was because of the great leadership from the guys like Colin Powell and others who came out of Vietnam and that era of lack of resources and commitment and they put in place, I remember the Battalion Training Management System, the BTMS. And 00:34:00we learned and trained and trained on that process on how to organize training, how to plan training, how-to resource training, how to do critical leader tasks, individual leader tasks, collective leader tasks, and that's a huge step for me in that. I think the next thing that was, I remember, along those lines was when we went to Desert Shield, Desert Storm.

I remember President Bush, the first President Bush, then Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense; and I was a General's aide and prior to the ramp-up when we invaded. We had built the Army up. We had trained it. We had Airland Battle Doctrine now we're going to war, my first time at war; and what I remember then is a term that I was taught and used to this day is "Train the way you fight, 00:35:00fight the way you train," and I remember vividly that's what we did with Desert Shield, Desert Storm. We had trained. We used what we trained. We used the lessons of war and we applied those lessons of war and we won in a hundred hours, but we also won because, I remember Bush, President Bush, and telling the generals, and I was in the back taking notes, but all the generals there and the President said "You go win and tell me what you need and you'll get it." And we did.

Now fast forward to Iraqi Freedom, 2003. I'm sitting in a chair as the guy writing the plan for my boss, it's his plan, but I had to write if for him, he gave guidance and I wrote. A bunch of us wrote it, not me, but we all did it collectively And I remember as we rehearsed this plan, we'd go back to Germany, 00:36:00we'd rehearse it, and here's how it changed. You don't need all that stuff to fight, somebody said that somewhere, so you're going to cut that out. So, we had to go back to the 101st, back to Fort Campbell, rewrite our plan, go back and rehearse it. No, they're not going to fight, you don't need that stuff, and that's the difference in strategic leadership. One guy said I want you to go win and the other guy said second-guessing the Commanders in the field. I have my own personal opinions of who's done that. I won't cite those here, but somebody did it; and when we got into the fight on the invasion on the first day, I remember General Wallace, the III Corps Commander, saying "I don't care what those guys back in Washington say, that they're not going to fight, but when we cross border there's going to be somebody that fights. So, y'all stay ready" or words to that effect.

And he was right, we crossed that line and they fought us the whole way up. Because they took out a lot of the different resources that we said we needed, 00:37:00we would go through, cut through the enemy, and we didn't have enough to leave behind us to secure our lines. And so our convoys got hit and soldiers, I think, paid the price for some strategic leadership that perhaps should have done something differently.

Those are two things that I remember vividly. As well as though all of that I remember how our Army grew and it shrunk and it's grown and when you needed it, the Army was able to get you there when you needed it. Like in the surge of Iraq, I took Humvees over, four-seater Humvees, that as soon as they got hit they were decimated and all five people in it were killed, very few walked away. I remember Secretary Gates, he came to visit and said what do you need; and I said we need the MRAP and because my brigade was the main effort I got MRAPs 00:38:00like that; and a big, massive, mine-resistant anti-personnel vehicles and that saved a lot of lives. So, I learned that the Army could grow and shrink when it needed it and when it put resources in the right place. And we changed every ten years. We grew we changed how we're shaped. We're now in the process of, you're talking about how the Army's changed, we went to a brigade-centric concept where brigade combat teams of four thousand deployed, and now they were a certain configuration. Now they are reconfiguring those to a different configuration and have less of them. So, yeah, I have seen the Army change a lot. You know, good and bad. Mostly good.

SCALF: So, you retired in 2013. Tell me about your transition from military to civilian life. What are you doing now?

GIBBS:[Gibbs laughs] I'm not having as much fun as I had in the Army. It's a much slower pace. I got out of the Army and I got hired to be an advisor in a gas company when the market tanked and the company laid off a lot of people, and that was when I was in Pittsburgh. I moved back to Texas, my home. Staying with family now up in Temple, and I'm doing a contract job as an independent contractor, for the Army. When you talk about the changes in the Army, they're taking out three thousand three hundred and fifty soldiers from Fort Hood. So, I have been hired to conduct an assessment to see what is the economic impact. So, that's kind of what I'm doing today, looking for something full time; and I came back here for the ROTC Hall of Honor ceremony that's occurring tomorrow.

SCALF: Have you joined any veterans organizations or veterans support groups?

GIBBS: No-- I am in the VA. So, I get care by the VA. I have spoken at a lot of 00:40:00veteran's events, but no, I haven't joined any. There's so many of them out there to join. So, I try to go to wherever they need me to go talk or help out is kind of what I do and not kind of get stuck on one. I am a member of the Association of the United States Army. I'm a lifetime member of the 101st Airborne Division Association, the 82nd Airborne Division Association, the Ranger Regiment Association. So, I stay in touch through those guys.

SCALF: So, that is the end of my questions, thank you very much. Is there anything that you would like to tell us that I have not asked you?

GIBBS: [Gibbs pauses] No, I can just close by saying again that young men and women that we have served our country are first class, the next Greatest Generation, whatever you want to call them. When their nation called, they went, and they did so brilliantly, bravely, and I'm very proud of them and I'm glad I had an opportunity to say that I served with them.

SCALF: Well, it's been a pleasure talking with you today and I want to thank you for your service. You were very helpful and very informative and I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and for your contribution to this project.

GIBBS: My pleasure, thanks.