Four-Star Send-Off for Tommy Franks

TAMPA, Fla. -- Gen. Tommy Franks, who led U.S. forces to bold, swift victories in America’s most recent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, relinquished his command Monday, praising his troops for their feats in distant lands but warning that more battles and dangers for the country certainly lie in the future.

“Rough road behind, rough road ahead,” said the four-star general, 58, famously a man of plain, if few, words.

“Bring it on,” Franks said, echoing the recent words of President Bush.

Given a loud and brassy send-off by the U.S. Army Band, standing ovations from his troops and best wishes in person from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, with whom he reportedly had clashed on strategy and war plans, Franks transferred leadership of the U.S. Central Command to Gen. John Abizaid, a grandson of Lebanese immigrants from Coleville, Calif., and a former commandant of West Point.

“Today’s the day I make myself an honest man, having told my wife 34 years ago that I was leaving the United States Army,” joked Franks, who despite that promise ended up serving 38 years in uniform.

Observing what he said was a long-standing cavalry tradition, Franks had a subordinate present Cathy, his wife of 34 years, a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses.

Offered the job of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he turned it down; he plans to instead retire at the end of the month.

Since June 2000, the 6-foot-3, jug-eared general from Midland, Texas, had served as America’s military commander for the volatile region arcing from Africa’s Sahara through the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf and eastward to the Himalayas.

After the Sept. 11 attacks and the shift in national priorities to the war on terror, the field command based at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa became the most important in the U.S. armed forces.

Reminiscing out loud during the change-of-command ceremony, which was held in the downtown arena where the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team plays, Franks noted that when he took charge at Central Command, the Taliban were still imposing their puritanical strain of Islam on most of Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein and his dictatorial regime were ruling Iraq.

“What a difference 22 months makes,” Franks said.

As he expressed words of gratitude to the men and women he had commanded, the usually upbeat general mopped his face with a handkerchief, and his eyes glistened with tears.

He had country recording artist Neal McCoy come onstage to serenade the troops with his song “I’m Your Biggest Fan.” Film star Robert De Niro also made the journey to Tampa to honor Franks, whom he had met during a visit to Central Command.

Military analysts generally give Franks quite high marks for his accomplishments in one of the hottest seats in the U.S. military, and for the use of Special Forces and other unconventional methods to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq. However, several of the Bush administration’s key objectives in the operations led by Franks have not been achieved; Osama bin Laden, or his remains, have yet to be found, for instance, and the whereabouts and fate of Hussein similarly remain unknown.

In Afghanistan, the authority of the U.S.-backed provisional government seems shaky in much of the rugged, ethnically disparate country; in Iraq, American soldiers are still dying in hit-and-run attacks.

Only hours before Franks’ public farewell in this city on Florida’s Gulf Coast, a U.S. military convoy in Baghdad was attacked by bomb-throwing insurgents, and an American soldier was killed.

“The situation at the moment [in Iraq] is like a slow infection, with some casualties along the way,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson.

During his remarks at Monday’s ceremony, Rumsfeld praised Franks, who enlisted in the Army after dropping out of the University of Texas and was badly wounded as an artilleryman in Vietnam, as “truly a soldier’s soldier,” and he lauded his strength, intelligence, energy, good humor and loyalty.

In Iraq, Rumsfeld said, Franks managed to achieve tactical surprise despite the lengthy and well-publicized buildup of U.S. and allied forces. It took the general only “a matter of weeks” to topple Hussein’s regime, Rumsfeld said, adding that Franks managed it without massive loss of civilian life or destruction of roads, bridges, oil fields and other key elements in the country’s infrastructure.

According to press reports, the strong-willed Pentagon chief and the chief of Central Command butted heads numerous times, including over the proper type of war plan to use for the invasion of Iraq. Whatever the truth of those reports, on Monday Rumsfeld declared his respect and friendship for Franks, and he said the war-fighting techniques pioneered by the outgoing general and his aides would be used by many commanders to come.

Franks was notoriously more media-shy than another leader of Central Command, the garrulous and high-profile Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had the job during Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led invasion to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. But Franks was popular with his subordinates and their families because of his lack of formality and attention to their problems. After Monday’s 50-minute ceremony, soldiers and spouses lined up to shake his hand, hug him or pose for photos with the general, who was clad in desert camouflage and a black beret.

“He has a big heart and is very nice with his soldiers,” said Marion Frye, one of the more than 1,000 people who witnessed the change of command. Her husband, Steve, an Army sergeant first class, said: “What we accomplished [in Afghanistan and Iraq], in the amount of time and the way it was done, it couldn’t have been much better.”

In his first order, read aloud in the arena, Abizaid said that policies in place under Franks would continue. Given his fourth star at a separate ceremony earlier in the day, the Californian -- who had been Central Command’s deputy commander at its forward headquarters -- said the duties of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq remain dangerous, “but we know they can do it.”

Self-deprecating to the end, Franks told the crowd that when he woke up Monday, he had military cars and chauffeurs at his beck and call, but now he wasn’t sure how he’d be getting home.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

New Leader

Gen. John Abizaid

Position: Commander, U.S. Central Command; four-star general.

Previous Positions: Led a Ranger rifle company during the invasion of Grenada; served with U.N. forces in Lebanon and oversaw relief operations in northern Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War; served as commander of West Point and as director of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Education: U.S. Military Academy, class of 1973; master’s degree, Harvard; attended the Armed Forces Staff College, Stanford University and the University of Jordan in Amman.

Military honors: Include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with five oak leaf clusters, and the Bronze Star.

Personal: Born April 1, 1951, in Coleville, Calif.; of Lebanese descent. Married (his wife’s name is Kathy), three grown children. Fluent Arabic speaker.

Sources: U.S. Central Command, Who’s Who, Federal News Service, Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times