Defining Excellence: Lieutenant General Walter Gaskin By Robert Voris


Georgia, to Brussels, Belgium, and NATO high command was not easy. Excellence never is. But LtGen Gaskin, one of the highest ranking African Americans in the United States Marine Corps, has not only excelled, he has participated and helped shape changes in the Corps.


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Born in Savannah on May 8, 1951, Gaskin graduated from high school at the height of the Vietnam War. ROTC service during high school was mandatory, and while the ROTC was a meritocracy, which appealed to Gaskin, it had only recently become integrated. “The idea of integration was good. The practice was kind of stressful,” Gaskin remembers. Still, the fact that bright, driven young men were promoted and acknowledged as part of military culture held obvious promise for the bright, driven young Gaskin. He accepted a NROTC scholarship and attended Savannah State University. In addition to his NROTC duties, Gaskin double majored in history and mathematics – subjects that are no one’s idea of easy.


Upon graduation in 1974, Gaskin began his mandatory four years of military service. Both family and friends had served in the Marines during World War II and Vietnam, and Gaskin knew that the only service branch for him would be “The first to fight, the first to go, the best there is. There was never any doubt in my mind.”


Though he was assigned to the infantry, he never served in Vietnam. Instead, he became a platoon commander assigned to the Second Marine Division and deployed to the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. In the mid-1970s, when Gaskin began his career, there were no African American generals in the Marine Corps. No Marine, no matter their race, advances without a mentor, and Gaskin’s first was his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Raines. To this day, Gaskin remembers the first evaluation that LtCol Raines gave him as a platoon commander. “It was like the Spanish Inquisition,” the general said. “Hand-written. He sat me down and said, ‘I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. Frankly, I had my doubts. You’ve ranked as one of the best lieutenants I have ever seen.’ To him, performance was more important than any


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he path that Lieutenant General Walter Gaskin has traveled from Savannah,


to CEO,” he decided to pursue a master’s degree in public administration. He was commanding ever-larger blocs of Marines and felt that “education gives you the tools to deal with issues that are vastly more complicated than they once were.” To understand what the general means by vastly more complicated, imagine the difference between commanding a battalion of 1,200 troops and a division of 20,000 as the difference between feeding yourself and feeding your entire family during the holidays – except that your family never leaves and the holidays never end.


personal prejudices that he may have come from or had.” The meritocracy that Gaskin first admired in NROTC was proving true in the Marines, just as he hoped. “No matter what color you are, you can rise to the top if you are better than your peers.” Gaskin had planned on serving his four years and then attending law school, but a sign at Parris Island stuck with him: “Your Own Company at 26.” Combined with LtCol Raines’ encouragement, Gaskin’s dreams shifted. The Marine Corps offered leadership opportunities in the present, and while it could be difficult as the only African American officer in a 1,200-man battalion, it was easy for Gaskin as one of the best officers in the battalion. He stayed on. Just because Walter Gaskin had settled on a career didn’t mean that he stopped striving. Excellence demands focus and knowledge, and as he advanced through the ranks, Gaskin educated himself on nearly every aspect of military life. His professional military education includes Amphibious Warfare School, the United States Army Command and Staff College, the Army War College and The Combined/Joint Force Land Component Command Course.


By the early 1990s, when, as Gaskin puts it, “I graduated from junior management


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As a battalion commander, Gaskin saw combat in defense of the United States Embassy in Liberia, though the experience of controlling the operations in Anbar Province, Iraq, is what he says gives him “instant credibility” among his NATO peers. And indeed, if one tries to imagine, say, the governor of Arkansas attempting to do his job while the population of that state simultaneously resists and begs for help, one can see why Gaskin’s peers find his assignment in Iraq particularly impressive. Now the senior military adviser to Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Gaskin is charged with briefing the admiral on all military issues the 28 nations that comprise NATO might face. It is, Gaskin admits, an easier assignment, since he works with general officers who represent “countries we’ve been working with our entire military lives;” but keeping the interests and contingencies of 28 separate nations aligned with the overall goals of NATO is not, by any stretch, a cakewalk.


“There is a desire to always be in the field, but someone needs to tell the Marine Corps story and offer that perspective at this level,” LtGen Gaskin says of his current post. Now 59, with a Senate-confirmed assignment with the most prestigious and powerful military alliance the world has ever known; with four grown children, one of whom, Michael, is a chief warrant officer in the Navy; with no current plans to retire, Gaskin offers this statement of what his career choices, from NROTC onward, have meant: “My success in the military represents the fact that thousands of young people of color, if they just keep marching, they can do whatever they want and more.”


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