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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Col Hackworth Dies |
| 2005-05-06 |
| Posted by:Mercutio |
| #8 Whatever he did recently, his take on Vietnam is the best I've read (About Face). He was a stud. |
| Posted by: Spot 2005-05-06 22:29 |
| #7 I agree with OS and CS. One of the things to be aware of, having been in the military, is seeing it all in the terms of your own service and time. He was an infantry officer, of the 1940ies-1950ies cohort, so I think he strained everything about the military through the seive of that specific experience... anything outside of that... Well, does not compute. I never met him, never interviewed him,but I edited an interview he did for AFKN in 1994 or thereabouts. (I would take the audio track of various AFKN-TV interviews and re-edit them for the AFKN-Radio news program, "Seoul Source")It was a wonderful interview: he was coming back to Seoul when it was this huge, cosmopolitan city, with a subway and skyscrapers and all... when the first time he had seen it, it was in ruin, with rats nibbling corpses in the streets, and he and his patrol the only people alive in it, save for the Communist snipers in the mountains around. It's another crashing stupidity to be laid at the door of Robert Macnamera, to loose the dedication of someone like Hackworth. |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2005-05-06 22:02 |
| #6 He was all infantry and only infantry. He failed to understand the combined arms battlefield and had a lousy grasp of logistics. On the other hand, he was one of the most formidable warriors that America has ever produced and a real American hero. Ten Silver Stars, just to begin the list. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2005-05-06 21:11 |
| #5 Thanks OS. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-05-06 18:43 |
| #4 Hack was a battle-god in his time, but unfortunately started believing his own press clippings - and even worse, kept up the automatice naysaying crap long past the time it deserved it. He comitted the one cardinal sin a military strategist cannot do: he refused to change, and continued to reflexivly fight the last battles instead of the next war. Hack saw everything through his Vietnam goggles. And was dead wrong much of the last decade because of it. Hack was right about Vietnam, and wrong about damn near everything else militarily since 1991. Don't take me wrong on this: Hack was a hell of a soldier and commander in his day, and much of the eternal truths about soldiering he rediscovered and popularized were incorporated into the Army in the 80's to produce the forces we have now that perform so brilliantly. Sorry to see him die leaving a trail of drooling stupidity behind him in his last years. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-05-06 18:29 |
| #3 I have been down on Hackworth for a while now. He became a professional curmudgeon who seemed more interested in promoting himself. His appearance in the CBS phony documents story opining that President Bush was AWOL really rubbed me the wrong way, and reading that he was really harsh to Mike ''Blackhawk Down'' Durant back in 1993 sealed the deal for me. I honor him for his service to the country, but his rep will always be tarnished in my eyes when he started to believe his own hype. |
| Posted by: Tibor 2005-05-06 17:18 |
| #2 On the other hand, Tamerlane, if it's you dying it makes a bit of difference, even if it is 35 years later. |
| Posted by: Elmaque Speanter8040 2005-05-06 16:48 |
| #1 Article: The cause of death was a form of cancer now appearing with increasing frequency among Vietnam veterans exposed to the defoliants called Agents Orange and Blue. He died at 74. That Agent Orange stuff (active ingredient - dioxin) sure was lethal - finally killed him after 35 years. Yushchenko, who ingested the largest dose of dioxin ever recorded, will probably die in a few decades as wll. Such are the dire effects of dioxin. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-05-06 16:37 |