Straight Shooter

By Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson

When two soldiers under fire are thrown into the same foxhole, survival depends on putting any differences aside. Perhaps that explains why General Tommy Franks and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld left work one night recently for a stag dinner right out of a buddy movie. Back in January, their wives out of town, Franks and Rumsfeld hit a Georgetown sushi bar after the multimillionaire Pentagon chief decided to give the Oklahoma-born and Texas-reared artilleryman his first taste of raw fish. As Franks recalled it, "About midafternoon he said, 'Let's go eat sushi,' and I said, 'Eat what?' I told him I'd be proud to do it if he'd show me how, so he did." Both men enjoyed themselves that evening, as other patrons stopped by their table to wish them well. Afterward, Franks gave TIME his review: "Terry Bradshaw was not far from the truth when he talked about eating bait."

Generals come in all varieties--loud and brash, brainy and bookish, and occasionally a little worrisome. Tommy Ray Franks is none of those: he is quick, funny, very private, ferociously hardworking and, everyone says, a rare leader of soldiers, particularly enlisted troops. He is also, at least in public, the consummate strong and silent type, the good soldier who shuns the limelight in marked contrast to some of his predecessors at Central Command. All this makes Franks, 57, ideally suited as the go-to general for the second Bush Administration. Retired Admiral Archie Clemins, who commanded the Pacific Fleet when Franks was serving in Korea six years ago, noted that "a lot of generals have a media persona, and then they have their real persona. With Tommy, what you see is what you get."

Now, as the U.S. mops up one war in Afghanistan and prepares to launch a second in Iraq, it is increasingly clear that if Franks is not Rumsfeld's better half, he is surely his other half, his alter ego, the soldier's soldier who can rein in the supercivilian and gently remind him that battles are won not with dash but usually with numbers. If Afghanistan had been fought Rumsfeld's way, we might still have commandos mounting up on horseback to hunt down the Taliban. If the war had been fought Franks' way, we might have nabbed Osama bin Laden a long time ago--but only by having 100,000 G.I.s in position beforehand. It's a slight exaggeration to say Franks and Rummy are a bit like the tortoise and the hare: one man is always in a hurry; the other takes his time. But it is fair to say that the abilities and instincts of each man compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is one of the strangest organizations in the U.S. military. It has no troops to call its own, just responsibility for a huge arc of turf, from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan, that is home to some of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods. Franks' job--held in the past by such men as Norman Schwarzkopf and Anthony Zinni--is to meet and befriend the civilian leaders of each of the region's 25 countries in case the U.S. needs to drop in on short notice to clean things up. When that time comes, the general has to call Washington and ask for troops from all over the U.S. and the world, both active duty and reserve. The Centcom job is both highly strategic (you've got to stay on speaking terms with Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf) and tremendously detailed (you've got to make sure a quarter of a million troops have enough of everything, from tracer bullets to disposable razors). From a sprawling concrete headquarters in Tampa, Fla., that looks like a huge Wal-Mart without the big blue signs, Franks and a staff of 3,200 are running both the war in Afghanistan and the looming conflict in Iraq.

More than a year ago, when President George W. Bush and Rumsfeld first asked Franks for a plan to topple Saddam Hussein, Franks replied that he would need five divisions and five aircraft carriers to make it work. A dismayed Rumsfeld famously sent the plan back two or three times, asking the four-star general to shrink the forces in half, or even more. Following the Powell doctrine that all Vietnam-era generals swear by, Franks wanted an overpowering force to make sure America would prevail. Rumsfeld wanted him to do it faster and lighter, in part because he didn't want to wait the four or five months required to get all those troops dressed and ready. But as the diplomatic wrangling about inspections dragged into the fall and winter, the spat became academic: Franks was getting all the time he needed to prepare his massive strike force. Now, with a war as little as a week or two away, the plan looks remarkably similar to what Franks proposed more than a year ago: five carriers are on station in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, the equivalent of five divisions have been dispersed to positions on Iraq's borders, and a total of 250,000 troops are standing by in the region.

But Rumsfeld got a fair chunk of what he wanted too: more special forces than Franks preferred, a faster race to Baghdad than the general had originally envisioned and a quicker start to the ground war than the Centcom chief had proposed. Rumsfeld also wanted the air and ground campaigns to start simultaneously; if war begins late next week, one will quickly follow the other. "Rumsfeld is particularly enamored of special-operations stuff, and Franks is less so, and that was reflected in how the Iraq plan came together," a senior Centcom officer says. "The two of them tugged and massaged and tweaked the plan many times."

Many of the men who have worn four stars on their shoulders in the past say that Franks has already exceeded his critics' expectations. He has brought to one of the most difficult strategic assignments in a generation a mind agile enough to satisfy the perpetually demanding Rumsfeld--and still get approval of a plan that favors overwhelming force. "Rumsfeld doesn't always know what he wants, but he knows what he doesn't want," a Pentagon official says. "Franks is good at finding him what he wants." Franks explains the give-and-take in the hard-to-reckon Pentagon dialect: "The process of planning is, in fact, a process--it is not a thing... Whatever we do will be executed somewhere in the middle of an ongoing planning activity." (Translation: We're going to be arguing about how to fight this war right up until the moment the shooting starts.)

Franks gets along with Rumsfeld--who doesn't suffer fools lightly, especially if they are in uniform--because he has the right mix of attitude and intellect. More than a dozen senior officers who have worked with him over the years say that behind the aw-shucks, I've-never-had-sushi wrapping is a very well-oiled military mind. In an interview with TIME, Rumsfeld heaped praise on his field marshal for being open to new ideas. "He's intelligent and quick, and he knows his stuff," Rumsfeld said. "He has total ownership over these matters. He cares only about what is the most effective way to put military power on a military target--that's not the norm, necessarily."

Franks is clearly shrewd about avoiding battles he cannot win. Too shrewd, some say. When the Bush Administration wanted Jim Wilkinson, a former Bush campaign aide, to be Franks' spokesman--a job that has traditionally gone to a uniformed officer--the general went along, though many in the military complained that the move politicized a position that should remain apolitical. But a senior Pentagon official said Franks had no choice: "It is not a given that George Bush will win re-election next year, but it is a given that he will lose if this war goes badly. He's got to manage expectations, and he's got to manage the message with a clear eye toward the political concerns involved. There is no screwing around here--these guys are going to stay on message every minute of every day. And the only way you guarantee that is to have your guy at Centcom."

And like any good soldier, the general knows when to keep his head down. Rumsfeld loves the spotlight; Franks is only too happy to stay out of it. "Franks thought that Schwarzkopf cut way too high a profile during the Gulf War," says a military subordinate who has worked on Franks' Centcom staff. "He thinks it's tawdry." Ultimately, Franks is really more comfortable behind the scenes. A Marine officer puts it another way: "He's been a low-profile guy all the way up. That's been the secret to his success."

Everyone knows the story about the boy from Midland, Texas, who overcame the handicap of low expectations. But it belongs more to Tommy Franks than to George W. Bush. Franks was born in the tiny town of Wynnewood, in south-central Oklahoma, but moved as an infant with his mechanic father and stay-at-home mom to Midland at the same time the Bush clan arrived from Connecticut. The two families didn't know each other, though Franks went to high school with Bush's future wife Laura. She doesn't remember him, and their high school principal's memories aren't particularly vivid either: "You were not the brightest bulb in the socket," the retired principal remarked to the general at a recent reunion. Replied Franks: "Ain't this a great country?"

It was in dusty Midland that Franks learned some of life's simplest pleasures: shooting birds and riding motorcycles, smoking cigars and drinking margaritas. After high school, he headed to the University of Texas, but he dropped out and enlisted in the Army. He began as a lowly private in 1965 but became an artillery officer two years later. In Vietnam, he spent much of his time out in front of U.S. ground troops with the 9th Infantry Division, directing artillery fire onto enemy positions. Franks was wounded three times, at least once seriously. His legs bear the scars, but the details are sketchy because Franks, like a lot of other veterans of that war, wants them that way. Several officers who have been close to him for years report that they have never heard him talk about it. His official biography states only that he has three Purple Hearts.

He marched steadily up the Army's often unglamorous promotional ladder, serving in Texas, Korea, Germany and the Pentagon, and eventually earning two degrees. He won a reputation early on as an innovator in combat arms, serving in the few Army units that in those days encouraged experimentation. Retired General Crosbie Saint, who served with Franks in one of those outfits, the 1st Armored Cavalry Division, told TIME that Franks practically invented the idea of using long-range artillery against moving tanks, a tactic that is sure to come into play in the coming days.

But Franks excelled at another mission of all rising stars: making your own luck. During the 1980s and '90s, while still a junior officer, he landed jobs under men who would go on to join the Army's most exclusive club: that of four-star generals. There are only nine in the Army, but it was Franks' good fortune to serve under an unusually large number of them, including Saint, U.S. forces Korea boss John Tilelli and former Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan. "There are a lot of young colonels who never get noticed," says retired Lieut. General Richard Lawrence, under whom Franks served twice. "Tommy had the benefit of people who went on to much higher ranks."

It wasn't long before Franks was a marked man. After he served in Desert Storm, directing helicopter and ground units, the Army's high command gave him the job of remaking the service for the post--cold war world. "He has an uncanny ability to look at complex situations and go from concept to application," says Sullivan, who launched the effort. A steady stream of plum assignments came Franks' way in the 1990s, culminating in the Central Command, and his fourth star, in July 2000.

Sept. 11 launched Franks on a different trajectory. The war in Afghanistan was an operation that was initially run by the CIA but gradually became a more traditional Centcom show. Franks didn't exactly wow the White House at first. Bush and Rumsfeld were impatient with the war's progress; the U.S. let bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, and a year later the search for the remnants of the Taliban continues. Franks had been set to retire in mid-2002, and if the Bush team had wanted to change generals, it could easily have done so. But Bush asked Franks to stay on duty for another year because he was steady, easy to work with, and by then, the general had won Rumsfeld's confidence.

Franks' day typically begins at 4 a.m., with 30 minutes on the treadmill in the sunroom of his government-provided house on the grounds of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. He blasts country tunes--Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt--and '50s pop on his CD player. Sometimes he sings along, and sometimes the noise wakes his wife Cathy. Then he heads for his computer to check e-mail and the news amid gulps of black coffee. Cathy kisses him goodbye each morning with a charge: "Go make the world safe for democracy."

Franks and his wife have a daughter, a son-in-law in the 1st Armored Division and two grandchildren, both of whom call him Pooh. Franks met Cathy--whom he has described as his "mentor and guide"--on a blind date more than 35 years ago. He took her to see the movie Doctor Zhivago--a tale of war on the Asian landmass--and they married two years later with a promise that he soon would be leaving the Army. He has been in uniform ever since.

Their relationship was recently the subject of a Pentagon investigation when someone--apparently a Franks subordinate--complained anonymously that the general let his wife sit in on classified briefings and didn't pay adequately for her travels when she accompanied him on official trips. The probe recently concluded that she was present once when top-secret information was discussed--she holds only a secret clearance--but the investigation cleared Franks of the other allegations. "I've been on the plane and seen Cathy excuse herself many times when he was briefed on something above her classification," a Centcom officer says. "It seems very petty." Franks and his wife sit next to each other on his aging 707 command plane--there are four stars on his headrest and four hearts on hers. "It's cute," says a fellow passenger. "When she doesn't travel, he likes to leave that seat empty."

Franks will climb aboard his command plane for Qatar this week, and he won't be back for a while. At lunchtime last Friday hundreds of Centcom troops and staff gathered out behind Franks' headquarters while listening to the country music of Neal McCoy. He's a Texas country-and-western star who traveled with Franks to visit the troops in Afghanistan over Thanksgiving. Before McCoy and his band began their hour-long set, Franks got up, microphone in hand, and belted out a version of an old Charley Pride tune called (Is Anyone Going to) San Antone? As Franks warbled through--"Rain dripping off the brim of my hat"--the crowd hooted, laughed and cheered the old man's a cappella act. "We have to take our jobs very seriously," the general said, before turning the mike over to the band, "but we should never take ourselves too seriously."