David Perkins already had his tickets to attend next weekend’s game, held for the first time at the New England Patriots’ stadium, when the congratulatory calls from his Army buddies began. That’s how the retired four-star general, who grew up in Keene, learned that this year’s Army team uniforms were designed to honor the 3rd Infantry Division.

“They had great operational security,” he quipped in a phone interview from the North Country home where he lives with Ginger, his wife of 43 years.

Every year, the Army and Navy design special uniforms for their historic rivalry. The designs are kept secret until just before the big game.

“It’s not a national secret, but it’s a big secret,” Perkins said.

Revealed just before Thanksgiving, Navy’s dark blue uniforms pay tribute to the U.S Submarine Force, the “silent service.”

The Army uniforms honor the “dogface soldiers” of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Perkins, who commanded the 3rd Infantry Division’s Spartan Brigade 20 years ago, said he still has no idea how the mission — and his own part in it — will be commemorated at the game. “It’ll be a surprise,” he said.

“I’m just there as an interested alumni,” he said. “Everyone is so incredulous that I didn’t have anything to do with it.

“Which makes it all the more special in some ways. It’s not like I had to lobby for it.”

But Perkins was proud to learn of the recognition for his young soldiers who so masterfully carried out the daring, dangerous mission.

In April 2003, then-Col. Perkins was commander of the “tip of the spear” that swept into the heart of Baghdad, shocking the Iraqi army and surprising even U.S. military strategists.

The operation, dubbed “Thunder Run,” is now taught in military academies as a prime example of “mission command.”

It’s about “empowering subordinates,” Perkins explained. “You give them the big mission but you don’t micromanage.”

Perkins is credited with planning the mission to punch through the Iraqi Republican Guard lines encircling Baghdad, to enter the city and to hold it. Within days, Baghdad had fallen, and Saddam Hussein was a hunted man.

Perkins was awarded the Silver Star for his valor.

A design for victory

Perkins said the designers “did a good job” of including important symbolism on Army’s team uniforms: the desert tan color, the Iraq campaign ribbon on the collar; the 3rd Infantry’s division patch on the left shoulder; and the V-shaped tank markings they used with thermal imaging to distinguish friend from foe during combat.

Army’s helmets feature Rocky, the bulldog mascot; the call signs of the three brigades involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom; the nickname “Rock of the Marne,” earned during World War I when American soldiers held off a German offensive at the Marne River in France; and the words “Nous resterons la” — their promise to French allies: “We shall remain.”

Even West Point’s athletic director kept the secret, Perkins said.

The two men met recently at a conference at the academy. They sat next to each other at dinner and talked about how Army had beaten Air Force and would win the coveted Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy if they beat Navy on Dec. 9.

But the AD never let on about the uniforms, Perkins said — something he plans to bring up if he sees him at the game.

The Army-Navy game is a family tradition for the Perkins clan.

The general’s brother, Rick, went to the Naval Academy and became a Marine fighter pilot. For two years, David Perkins was at West Point at the same time his brother was at Annapolis.

Their parents, Paul and Louise Perkins, were diplomatic.

“One year they would sit with the Army side, the next year they would sit with the Navy side,” Perkins said. “It just worked out each year they went down, the side they sat on was the side that won. They took complete credit.”

In a strange twist, the two brothers — one a brigade commander, the other Special Ops — would meet at Saddam’s palace in Baghdad on an April night in 2003.

Paul Perkins died in 2007; Louise Perkins died last month at the age of 102. Both are buried at the New Hampshire State Veterans Cemetery.

Then and now

In his 2004 book “Thunder Run,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Zucchino, who was embedded with Perkins’ brigade, described the harrowing first days and weeks of the American armored campaign.

First the Americans took the Baghdad airport. Then they set their sights on the city itself.

Zucchino recounted the briefing Col. Perkins held the night before the push into Baghdad. They needed to convince the world that Saddam’s regime was over, the colonel said, and the way to do that was to put American tanks and Bradley armored vehicles into the palace complex and remain there overnight.

They needed to win both the tactical battle and the information war, he knew.

“We have set the conditions to create the collapse of the Iraqi regime,” Perkins began, according to the book. “This is the last big battle tomorrow, gentlemen. They said it would take five divisions to win this war but there’s no question now that we can really do it ourselves tomorrow. We’ve got to seal the deal now.”

That’s what the American soldiers did.

All the time that Perkins was leading his soldiers into battle, Ginger Perkins was holding down the fort, opening her home and heart to their families at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

Perkins retired from the Army in 2018, and he and his wife came home to New Hampshire, where their backyard has a panoramic view of the Presidential Range. They like to ski and snowshoe.

He continues to mentor future officers as chair of professional military ethics at West Point. He visits his alma mater about once a month to teach classes and participate in conferences.

He’s impressed with the inquisitiveness and confidence of this new generation of American soldiers, he said.

“Every time I go there … it’s always energizing,” Perkins said.

“I think it’s human nature for people to talk about the ‘good old days,’ which is when they were younger, but I have to tell you, every time I leave there, I’m so inspired by their dedication, their sense of commitment,” he said. “They’re willing to do hard work and they’re very engaging ...

“It keeps you on your game.”

The Iraq war was unique, Perkins said, starting out with conventional warfare — tanks, artillery and Bradley tanks — but soon evolving into counter-insurgency. That transition is how it’s discussed in military strategy classes today, he said.

After 20 years of focusing on counter-insurgency tactics, the war in Ukraine is being fought as a conventional battle with armored forces, he said. “History goes in these cycles, and we try to look at each one of them very critically,” he said.

The long view

So is Iraq better off today than when his soldiers were welcomed as liberators — a situation that all-too-quickly changed?

Perkins takes the long view.

“It’s almost a little too early to tell,” he said.

“We still have forces stationed in Europe from World War II,” he said. “And during World War II, the Russians were our allies, and now they’re fighting Ukraine.”

As a brigade commander 20 years ago, he said, “Our mission was to take Baghdad, the capital city.”

And they did that more quickly than anyone predicted.

“What I talk about is what those individual soldiers did, which is just unbelievably courageous,” Perkins said. “And they had never done anything like that before. They sort of had to get it right the first time.”

“I tend to focus on how well they did their tactical mission,” he said. “We should be grateful as a nation that we have people that are willing to do that.”

From a geopolitical view, he said, Saddam Hussein is dead, and Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction.

Today, Iran is the bigger threat, “a malign actor” that backs Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, he said.

What then?

Here is a universal truth understood by those who lead our military forces into battle. “When you solve one problem, it doesn’t mean you take the rest of the day off,” Perkins said. “All it does is let you focus on another problem.”

He teaches future leaders that the most powerful question to ask is: “What then?”

It’s something he learned from the Iraq invasion and the years of fighting that came after. “One of the big lessons learned is you do have to think beyond the immediate,” he said.

“You plan for unexpected problems, but you also have to plan for unexpected success. Because unplanned success can be just as challenging as unplanned disaster.”

In Baghdad back then, he said, “The tactical success happened much quicker and to a much larger degree than most folks had planned. Which means that things are going to start unfolding very quickly.

“And it’s very hard to stay ahead of the power curve then.”

It’s important to teach soldiers to focus on the mission at hand. But at our military academies, he said, “We are preparing people to be strategic leaders and thinkers. We’ve got to look at a much broader horizon.

“You need to talk through the what-ifs and the what-then.”

Serving in combat, Perkins said, is a proving ground for an officer. “I think it lets you understand what your responsibilities are, the true cost of not living up to expectations,” he said.

“So I think it makes you a little more of a serious leader.”

David and Ginger Perkins are grandparents now, with two grandkids and one on the way.

Both of their children, Cassandra and Chad, followed their dad into the Army.

Chad Perkins graduated from West Point and, after six years in the Army, now works for Kaiser Permanente in Atlanta as an engineering project manager. Cassandra Perkins, an ROTC graduate of the University of New Hampshire, is now a major and the executive officer of a Black Hawk battalion with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

The whole family will be together in New Hampshire for Christmas.

“We’re very excited about that,” Perkins said. “We’re getting out our old Flexible Flyer sleds.”

swickham@unionleader.com