Colonel David Hackworth’s highest accolade is to call a man a “stud.” He is certainly deserving of the moniker himself. An Army volunteer at the age of 15, the recipient of a battlefield commission at 20, four times wounded before he was 21, a hands-on battlefield expert on counterinsurgency, an expert leader of men whose ambition was never to be in the rear echelon, but always to be on the line, he was perhaps the most decorated man in uniform when he retired from the Army in 1971. He takes his fun where he finds it, has an affair with the wife of another officer when her husband is posted overseas, and keeps his own wife in line by reminding her that the Army always comes first: “When Patty knocked out two of her teeth in a bicycling mishap, she rang me at work; my response was ‘What the hell do you expect me to do? For Christ’s sake, go to the dentist. And don’t ever call me at work again!'” What a guy!
Hackworth’s portrait of himself is warts and all (though, confessedly, a warts and all portrait done by a combatready egotist). Freezing in a foxhole in Korea, he considers wounding himself so that he can be sent back to the United States, and at another point he exaggerates the pain he is feeling from a wound in the hope that he’ll get sent to a hospital (and get a little R & R) in Japan. But this is the same Hackworth who as a brave and astute teenage sergeant was a regular blood and guts Patton:
“Why didn’t the tanks fire?” I asked my Regular Army platoon leader moments later.
“I didn’t want to give our positions away,” he replied.
I couldn’t believe it. “Give away your positions, bulls—t!” I cried. Sergeants didn’t talk to officers like that, but I didn’t care. We’d had the closest thing to a glorious victory that I’d seen since the Chinks stuck their noses in the goddamn war, and now this p—s-weak lieutenant . . . “You were just too yellow to do your job,” I shouted, and stormed back to my scout section in a rage. I grabbed my pack and rifle. “I’m leaving this outfit right now!” I told my platoon sergeant. “I’m not waiting for orders—I’m going AWOL. I came here to fight, not to play hide-and-seek, and where I come from, officers like you’ve got here would have been drummed right out of the officer corps.”
It’s not every soldier who goes AWOL to get more action.
About Face is mostly one long collection of Colonel Hackworth’s war stories, building up to an escalating indictment of the collapse of the old Army and its replacement by bureaucrats, incompetents, and flabby, pasty-faced careerists who do their fighting in the halls of the Pentagon or who maniacally interfere with their officers who are on the ground, fighting the battle. There is, inevitably, a last chapter that seeks to turn his ideas into policy, and that chapter is, just as inevitably, disappointing. Hackworth is not a politician.
But what he is, is a soldier—or to give him the tide he prefers, a warrior—and with a few lapses, he is a good one. His recollections of his experiences make his case much more profoundly than does his policy-formulating epilogue. Hackworth is a professional who took his job seriously. Never one for “higher learning”—he thinks the B.S. is, well, B.S.—he nevertheless is very well-read in his field. He knows military history, he has read the biographies and the memoirs of the great warriors, and he knows that in battle, field knowledge, tactics, training, discipline, and knowing your enemy are the qualities that save lives and defeat the enemy.
For Hackworth, wars are fought to be won. It was his misfortune to have to serve in three wars—the Korean War, the Gold War, and the Vietnam War—where victory was never the objective: containment was, or nation-building, or winning hearts and minds. And in the Army this meant that warriors were no longer required, except in limited roles. Officers were managers, and soldiers were only required to go through the motions of doing their jobs.
This wasn’t Hackworth’s way. The battlefield taught him some quick and bloody lessons, some of which were surprising—”Tuy Hoa proved to me once and for all that paratroopers were innately unfit for guerrilla warfare, even Phase II (battalion-and regimentsize) guerrilla warfare. So were Marines. . . . Both Airborne and Marines were determined, but they had no patience; they were long on guts and short on brains.” Some were not so surprising—”But the main thing I learned at Tuy Hoa was that there was simply no point in taking any objective you had no intention of holding, no point in using men when firepower could do the job.”
Not only did Hackworth absorb these lessons, but he learned how properly to apply them. He learned, in his own words, “how to out G the G”—how to defeat the guerrilla at his own game. And he did it repeatedly. When Hackworth took over the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, he inherited a unit in “total disintegration.” There were rumors that Hackworth would be ragged. But he kicked ass, made the battalion secure its position (saving lives in the process), and not only turned the battalion around, but turned it into “Hardcore” Battalion and used it to out G the G, in one battle taking 113 enemy dead, with only four Hardcore casualties—all just slightly wounded. “We’d used their book of tricks to fight them on the ground and at the time that was to our advantage. The VG could not be destroyed by conventional tactics employed by the average US battalion in Vietnam. Only guerrilla tactics augmented by US firepower (and our tremendous air mobility when required) could defeat the enemy at a low cost in men and material.” But though Hackworth used these tactics with stunning success, they were never adopted by other units.
In his last assignment—as a senior adviser to the 44th Special Tactical Zone, near the Cambodian border, in 1971—demoralization set in. Never noted for his tact, Hackworth became a bit more dangerously insubordinate. He set up a massage parlor cum brothel for the men (he claimed it cut down on cases of venereal disease), disobeyed orders, misled his commanding officers, and generally operated as “a law unto himself” All that could be forgiven. For all his criticisms of the Army’s conduct of the war, for all the waves he made, he was now a full colonel, on track to become a two- or three-star general. But, frustrated and disgusted, Hackworth decided to go public, and given the opportunity to express his criticisms to the press, did so. It was the end of his career.
It is difficult to pass judgment on Hackworth and decide whether or not he did the right thing. It is hard to quibble with his own assessment:
Judge Cooney was probably right when he suggested that I could have had a greater impact on military reform and preparedness had I stayed in the Army rather than standing outside and criticizing. On the other hand, fine warriors like Hank Emerson and Hal Moore, who did stay in and fought from the inside, were both turfed out as three-stars by the clerks at the top when they still had plenty more to offer—Emerson, for criticizing the priorities of the Army’s procurement system, and Moore, for taking issue with having women in the combat arms and in certain Engineer and Artillery jobs with high combat vulnerability, as well as for opposing the Army’s lowering of recruitment standards (IQ and education) to meet recruitment goals. Many other talented warriors lost the day in similar circumstances; no doubt had I stayed in, a similar fate would have been mine.
Though Hackworth was not both an officer and a gentleman, and though many—though not all—of his current political ideas are wrong or muddle-headed, it would be a mistake to minimize the loss to American arms represented by men like him being forced out of the Army. General Creighton Abrams told Nick Proffitt of Newsweek, shortly after it had printed its interview with Hackworth, that “Colonel Hackworth is the best battalion commander I ever saw in the United States Army. We cannot afford to lose men of his caliber. If it continues, the damage to the Army will be irreparable.” I think General Abrams is right.
[About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, by Colonel David H. Hackworth and Julie Sherman (New York: Simon & Schuster) 875 pp., $24.95]
Leave a Reply