The Boston Globle ran a really nice front page tribuite to Col. David Hackworth on Monday. Hackworth died last week.

Hackworth was a vocal war critic (nonpartisan, too — he went after our meddling in Kosovo and Bosnia as well as criticized the war in Iraq). What I didn’t realize is that he’s also one of the most decorated veterans in U.S. history:

That started a career that led him to Korea, where he survived a gunshot to the head, and a whopping four tours of duty in Vietnam, where his daring and swagger became the inspiration for Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore character in the movie “Apocalypse Now.”

[...]

He earned a a chestful of medals, including two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.

Hackworth gave voice to troops serving in futile wars who couldn’t otherwise express their frustrations. For that he was loathed by the top brass, none of whom is expected to attend his funeral.

To the very end, however, the military brass treated him with disdain for his biting criticism of insufficient training, equipment, and pay. There were deeper grievances as well, including his role in 1996 in exposing the fact that the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. ”Mike” Boorda, wore combat ribbons that he did not earn.

The Globe notes that while hundreds, perhaps thousands are expected as his funeral this week, his biggest supporters won’t be able to attend.

But while Hackworth was an unyielding critic to generals, admirals, and defense secretaries, he was a father figure to thousands of grunts. Some held memorial services for him in between hunting for Iraqi insurgents, his family said.

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An active-duty Army major recalled how Hackworth, on a recent fact-finding trip to Iraq, insisted on lending him his state-of-the-art body armor.

[...]

Last year he set off a media storm when he reported that an automatic pen was affixing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s signature to condolence letters to families of dead soldiers; the defense chief was forced to personally sign each of them.

[...]

He even took a three-star general to task in 2002 for prohibiting American soldiers in Germany from drinking beer. ”Can you imagine George Patton cutting off the grog just before D-Day?” he wrote.

And here’s a tail of gallantry:

Hackworth ordered his helicopter to land directly where the wounded were lying. With bullets flying, the colonel leaped off the aircraft and ran through a wall of fire multiple times to reach his men, dragging each aboard the helicopter. As the aircraft left the scene, overloaded, he stood on the skids, clinging to a bulkhead.

Hackworth has been recommended for the nation’s highest medal, the Medal of Honor, for that day, but it has been held up by what the Pentagon called administrative snags, according to his family and those in his organization. They say he’s being punished for expressing his views.

Visit Hackworth’s popular website here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 at 7:13 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.