General John Galvin served as the US’s and Nato’s top military commander in Europe in the final years of the Cold War. In a 44-year military career, he was widely described as a prototypical warrior intellectual, a West Point graduate who earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University and revelled in the poetry of WB Yeats.
The son of a bricklayer and plasterer, as a brigade operations officer and battalion commander in Vietnam he earned medals for valour and became known for an outspoken defiance of combat orders when he saw them as near-suicidal. He also refused a commander’s instructions to inflate the official body count of the enemy on the battlefield. “The way I was doing things wasn’t what you’d call career-enhancing,” he once said.
But his leadership ability and scholarship earned him friends in high places. He contributed to the Pentagon Papers, the US Defense Department’s secret multi-volume history of the Vietnam War, and played roles in reshaping the Army after the post-Vietnam era. He wrote influential reports on counterinsurgency strategy and guerrilla warfare that defined conflicts in the Middle East after the invasion of Iraq.
In 1987, as Nato’s new supreme allied commander in Europe, he endorsed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. As the Soviet Union collapsed, he pivoted Nato strategy from one of Cold War defence to small-conflict peacekeeping, arguing for a “fire brigade” strategy in which troops were available in case conflict arose.
John Rogers Galvin, soldier: born 13 May 1929; died 25 September 2015.
© The Washington Post
