ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                        9


    General Schwarzkopf had succeeded Marine General George B. Crist on 23
November 1988 as commander of CentCom, with a staff of 675.     In June 1990,
Marine Major General Robert B. Johnston joined his command as chief of staff.
Johnston, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1937, emigrated to this country in
1955, and came into the Marine Corps by way of a commission in 1961, after
graduating from San Diego State College.   As a junior officer, he had two tours
in Vietnam, including command of a rifle company.      Subsequently, he would
have the peacetime command of a battalion, a regiment, and of the 9th Marine
Amphibious Brigade.
    On 12 August (C + 5), the 7th MEB, moving out from its desert base at
Twentynine Palms, California, with nearly 17,000 personnel, entered the air
flow for Saudi Arabia. 16 The planning figure was that the deployment of a
Marine Expeditionary Brigade by air required 230 C-141 sorties or equivalents.
It was no accident that 7th MEB was desert4rained.   The brigade had long been
earmarked for employment in CentCom's sandy area of operations.
    The first elements of the 7th MEB arrived at Al Jubayl on 14 August (C +
7).  The brigade commander, Major General John I. Hopkins, arrived the next
day, as did the first ships of MPSRon-2, and the marriage of the 7th MEB and
MPSRon-2 was consummated.      Rolling out of the MPS ships came the tanks,
howitzers, amphibious assault vehicles, light armored vehicles, and the other
weapons, supplies, and equipment which would give the 7th MEB its combat
punch.   On 20 August its ground elements occupied their initial defensive
positions in northeastern Saudi Arabia.  They were ready for combat.
    7th MEB's commander, General Hopkins, a 58-yearold New Yorker raised
in Brooklyn and a 1956 graduate of the Naval Academy, is a tough Marine and
looks the part.  A ground officer, he has a Silver Star from Vietnam and a
Master's degree gained at the University of Southern California from part-time
study.
    On 25 August (C +    18), General Hopkins, as CG I MEF(Forward), fully
confident that he could counter an Iraqi offensive in his zone of action, reported
to General Schwarzkopf that he was ready to assume responsibility for the
defense of the approaches to the vital seaport of Al Jubayl.     His brigade,
numbering on that date 15,248 Marines with 123 tanks, 423 heavy weapons,
including artillery pieces, and 124 fixed and rotary winged aircraft, had made
a 12,000-mile strategic movement, using 259 MAC sorties and five MPS ships.
    The 7th MEB's ground combat element was Regimental Landing Team 7
(RLT-7) with four infantry battalions and a light armored infantry battalion. The
latter was equipped with the light armored vehicle (LAV) developed by Gen-
eral Motors of Canada, based on the Swiss Piranha.     The LAV is a wheeled,
rather than tracked vehicle, and is classified as an 8-by-8, meaning that it has
four rubber-tired driving wheels on a side.  It comes in a number of variants,
but the basic LAV-25-so called because it mounts a 25mm "chain" gun, with its
three-man crew-is primarily a troop carrier for six Marines, well-suited for light
infantry and reconnaissance missions in the desert.  It had, in fact, been tested
in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s.