Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Let Us Now Praise Retired Army Col. David Hackworth

When time allows, I begin each morning by perusing web sites of credible media. I’m a terminal news-junkie and I need a regular fix. Besides, we are all creatures of routine and this provides a good entree for my day.

Since I’m an expatriate, my requirement for coverage is focused on the region of current residency. While I do not overlook events in the United States, and still keep pace with life in Bahrain, there are virtually no English-language on-line newspapers in Germany. So, my main interest is the London media – specifically highly regarded newspapers like the Guardian, the Independent and the Times.

My tastes vary, though I’m constantly drawn to book reviews and, oddly enough, obituaries of high profile people. The attraction of any choice is really the well-crafted sentence or dazzling clause, and respectable British journalists still have a knack for refreshing discourse.

Of course, I do not shy away from the sordid side of life – like English Police Constable Ivor Jones, 40, who recently used a knife to inflict 97 stab wounds on his wife, Maria, 36, who was having an affair with a 21-year-old man. Allegedly, Mrs. Jones began a relationship with the young man and taunted her husband about his relative lack of sexual prowess. I guess the Constable showed her – though 97 stab wounds are a little excessive. Maybe the policeman’s anger management skills will discourage admirers among the butt-hole buddies he will soon meet in prison.

Perhaps a dose of bad news fits with Nicholas Chamfort’s dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead. The 18th century French journalist and playwright possessed an interesting view, though I do not deliberately follow his advice.

What really captured my attention today was the obituary of 74-year-old Retired Army Col. David Hackworth, the maverick American soldier of the Vietnam era. The equivalent of a four-page write-up appeared in the Wednesday morning edition of the Independent. Although the American media has covered this, it’s still noteworthy when a London newspaper highlights a U.S. soldier like Hackworth.

Of course Hackworth was no ordinary soldier. He was a living legend, a highly decorated infantry officer who denounced U.S. policy in Vietnam during the war and later became an outspoken journalist who offered trenchant analyses of the military.

During his career, Hackworth received 78 combat awards- including a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and eight Purple Hearts - during his 25-year military career.

I don’t pay much regard to contemporary American military commanders; no particular reason – I just don’t. Although I recall hearing about Hackworth a few years ago, and after his fall from grace in Vietnam and subsequent self-imposed exile in Australia, he reminded me of Kurtz, the rogue general in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Hackworth was one of the more outrageous figures to emerge from the Vietnam War. A persistent thorn in the side of the Pentagon, Col. Hackworth in 2002 called Afghanistan a Vietnam-like disaster in the making, and last year he told Salon.com that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "misunderstood the whole war" in Iraq and predicted that American troops could be stuck there for "at least" another 30 years.

Hackworth’s outspoken nature and unvarnished view of himself as a trained killer for the military reminds me of George Patton. There’s a lot of noise in the media about the 60th anniversary of Germany’s‎ defeat in May, 1945.

Just this Saturday, nearly 5,000 members of the National Party – a neo-Nazi group, tried to march in Berlin toward the Brandenburg Gate, the new Holocaust memorial and Hitler’s bunker. The group denounced Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, as a traitor.

This is a tough subject for Germans, especially those consigned to the Soviet sphere of East Germany after World War Two. Many historians think Roosevelt gave Eastern Europe away to Stalin, just swapping one form of totalitarian tyranny for another.

George Patton was headed for trouble before his tragic car accident in Heidelberg, right after Thanksgiving of 1945. Patton had difficulty with the de-Nazification program expected by Eisenhower and Marshall. Since so many Germans worked for the Nazi government, loyalties or no loyalties, it was difficult to find competent people with a clean bill. Patton actually respected the German culture, and the ethos of the German soldiers he helped defeat. On the other hand, Patton had nothing but contempt for the Russians – who first sided with Germany, and then switched alliances. He wanted to use the Third Army to drive the Russians out of Eastern Europe. He knew that totalitarianism, fascist or communist, was social slavery. Based on subsequent history, Patton was on the money.

Heidelberg is about 80 miles southwest of Wurzburg, and I’ve been there three times since moving to Germany – just to visit friends; another Bahrain-exile couple. It feels odd to drive along the streets and know that despite Patton’s astonishing sense of history and his genius on the battlefield, his life was squandered in a fatal car accident.

I mean to read Hackworth’s books. His battlefield tips, included in the Independent obit, have application to most experiences.

* Never use trails.
* Always take it for granted that the enemy's watching.
* Always have a go-to-hell plan.
* Never assume anything.
* Always expect the unexpected.
* Talk to the Grunts, they always have the best feel for what's going down.
* Keep operations sledgehammer simple and remember: if it can be fucked up, it will be.
* Train your force like a good football coach. Teamwork is the key and this is done by relentlessly repeating squad drills over and over until they are executed automatically and flawlessly. Then do them again!
* And remember, squads who live by the basics of their trade make great armies; armies don't make great squads. And these squads must be perfectly trained in the basic fundamentals of the killing trade.
* And most importantly, NEVER, NEVER be in a hurry.

For an exposure to his journalism, Hackworth wrote a weekly column over many years - published in various American media. An archive of his journalism may be found at: http://www.hackworth.com

Hackworth was one of a kind.

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