Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 14

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on June 28, 2002

Colonel David Hackworth
Author, Steel my Soldiers Hearts

Hello. I see a lot of old friends out there around the room and a lot of new friends we'll enjoy in years to come, and I'm very privileged to be here. I'm a native of Santa Monica and I know a lot about terrorism because I was Santa Monica's original terrorist and that's why I joined the service at fourteen. It was either end my terrorism or go to jail.

What I'll talk about today, in the next 24 minutes and 11 seconds, is a bit about terrorism, a bit about the war of the future that we're now involved in, and a bit about my wife and my most recent book, which is called Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, so probably a good thing would be to start there. My primer for this whole sounding off and being a little bit different was probably the water of Ocean Park, California, in the 1930s, which was very difficult to get because we hadn't hijacked it from up North at that time. It's that rebel attitude that kind of stuck with me throughout my life.

When I lobbed into Italy right after the end of World War II, I was in a reconnaissance battalion visited by a Dwight David Eisenhower. For some of the younger folks here that haven't had American history, he was a general in World War II and subsequently became the President. He popped in front of me and I was like — oh, maybe 5'2" or 5'3", something like that — the criteria for going into the U.S. Army at the time was lifting up a 9.5 M-l rifle, and I must have passed that test at the Santa Monica Post Office. He said to me, "what do you think of the chow?" and I said, "it stinks." Now, those of you who have ever been in the military, it kind of goes there's a five star, four star, three star and then stinks, stinks, stinks. Then he said, "Why?" and I said, "all we eat is Spam" – SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM [echoed] across the room, and then he said, "Why?" and then there was this long silence. The four star didn't know, the three star didn't know, the two star didn't know, but finally some little brave major said, "All we've got left over from the war is Spam and it's in the warehouses and we're trying to get rid of it," and Ike said, "Stop it! Feed these guys proper A-rations." He was punching me in the chest at this point in time, and so what I realized that all you had to do was go to the boss and bitch.

So I've been kind of bitching ever since. I find that in writing it's a good thing to do and, too, having an Irish mother. I always wanted to write, which brings us to Steel My Soldiers' Hearts. It was something I didn't want to do; I'm sure I was America's most reluctant author. I didn't want to go there. My wife, my darling wife right here in the front row — all three feet of her — my wife said, "You will write this book." I said, "No, no, no." She said, "Yes, yes, yes." The end result was that after some persuasion, and I felt a cold metallic thing in the back of my head, and I reached back there and realized there was a Remington shotgun.

The reason Eilhys felt that the book had to be written was that we have an annual reunion of the boys that were in this battalion and they meet every year and have for the last 12 years. What Eilhys saw was something I didn't see. I saw nineteen-year old boys in fifty-year old faces that I loved, and we just caught up. We told about the way it was and the good times, but never talked about the bad times — just the good times. My wife saw incredible pain, incredible lack of closure. She saw a huge bag full of old stuff that these guys were towing and she saw the same thing that I had, which was a whole bunch of little doors that were nailed shut. They never wanted to open those doors, and so after I got the word that I was going to write this book with her the first thing [to decide] was the approach, how would we do it.

I had notes and journals like most commanders have, and I went to the National Archives and I got all the records. A ship, army unit, or Marine unit keeps a daily log, begins at zero-zero-one and ends at twenty-four hundred hours and every shot and every burp on the battlefield is mentioned in this log, so it made it really neat going through that and bringing back memories and so on. Then the next thing was we had the nucleus of folks that helped contribute to the writing of the book that met at our annual reunion, and from then it grew and grew and grew until we had a database of around three hundred folks. These folks were infantry, squad leaders, machine gunners, a helicopter pilot, the guy that drove the truck that brought up the bullets, the medics, the artillery guys, everybody's voice was kind of collected, and the collection of this was interviews.

My wife said, "What we'll do is we'll just call them up." I said, "that's a great idea." And she said, "you'll just interview them, since you know the military and you know the vocabulary and the boys know you and all of that." So, it kind of went like this: "Vincent, this is Hack."

"Yes, Colonel. Why are you calling, sir?"

"Well, Vincent, please don't call me Colonel. Please call me Hack."

"Yes, sir, I won't call you Colonel, sir, I'll just call you Hack, sir."

And that's the way it went and I couldn’t get a bloody word out of them except this Pavlovian military response. Finally, Eilhys said, "Get out of here," and she took over the interviews after I gave her basic training — this is a rifle, this is a squad, and so on. The end result was the minute she talked to the boys — "hi, Vincent. How's your wife, how are the kids?" — suddenly Vincent is telling her stories that he would never tell anyone, and opened up all of these little doors which all got into transcripts, which all found itself in the story. It was this rich weave, this yarn, that went through the story, about a draftee battalion which, in 1969, was considered the most hopeless battalion in the United States Army, but became within a few months what was called "the hard-core battalion in the United States Army." [It was] a battalion that achieved the finest combat record of any in the U.S. Army, and I dare to say, boys, [of any] U. S. Marine unit in Vietnam. An incredible record.

Now, were these guys regulars, were they fellows who had been in he same organization for a long time? No. They were all draftees. One hundred percent draftees. They were draftee soldiers, they were draftee squad leaders, draftee platoon leaders. The lieutenants and the sergeants went to school for a few weeks and they became instant sergeants, instant lieutenants. Normally a good sergeant takes eight to ten years. They were sergeants in eleven weeks. Normally, for a good officer, George Patton said, "an officer is not worth a bucket of spit until he's had 10 years' service." These guys had it in 26 weeks. This was the leadership of this battalion, and they became the most effective fighting battalion in the United States Army at that time.

Now, these boys were very noble because in 1969 the war in Vietnam had been going on for four years, so for four years they had watched blood pour out of the television set, morning, lunch and dinner, onto the living room floor. They had seen their brothers return, shy a leg, shy an arm. They'd seen the little star, gold star, in the window across the way if somebody didn't come back, and they had heard Walter Cronkite in 1968 say "this war is not winnable, we are being lied to, Westmoreland's light at the end of the tunnel simply doesn't exist"…. So the American people switched south of all of that, but yet when Uncle Sam said to these boys, "I want you. Get on the bus. Go to the induction center and report for your infantry training or whatever," they did just as their fathers did. They reported for duty.

The fathers, when they returned, were called "the Greatest Generation," and they were welcomed home and feted and praised and all of that. Well, these boys ended up with this incredible battle record and when the fight was over, when the Army decided that it had won in Vietnam and Kissinger and Nixon announced peace with honor and we had won the war and we were going to start returning troops to the United States, the first battalion to go back to America was the 4^th Battalion, 39^th Infantry. They went to Hawaii and got off the airplane [and] they were greeted by a band and generals giving speeches and little girls running up giving all the boys a lei, which is a flower that goes around peoples' necks — the Army was not that broadminded at the time — and then they patted them all on the head and they scratched their bellies and they deactivated them.

Now, what made them this incredible battalion was certainly that they were not hard-core Marines that went over with a regular unit and had trained together. They came as individual replacements. What made them like they were, were the techniques they developed, the tactics they developed and how they were able with their very low skill levels to be able to outfight the enemy. As a illustration, to show you the level of experience, in 1966 I commanded a parachute battalion in Vietnam, in a battalion that had been together for ten years. NCOs could spot a water can at 1,000 meters and say, "that's mine," and that dent got in there. They had been together for ten years and they were total pros.

In one particular fight, A Company lost all of its officers, all of its platoon sergeants, its first sergeant, it was leaderless. It had no one left to take over that unit. They were surrounded by the enemy; they had probably 30 wounded, twenty dead. It was getting dark and I was so worried about them because we couldn't get to them that I got on the horn – that is the radio – and I said, "form up a perimeter," but they had no leader so I said, "is there an NCO left?" There were maybe 80 soldiers left, and this little voice came up and said, "Sgt. Simpson, Third Squad, Third Platoon." I said, "Simpson, you think you could take that lash up and form a tight perimeter and command that Company tonight and get them squared away, and once it's dark and the sun sets in get your men back and get your wounded out, take care of your dead and all of that?" He said, "Affirmative, sir. I've been preparing for this job for ten years." That's the kind of depth we had in that unit.

In this unit, B Company, just one company but it had a young West Point lieutenant as company commander, total service in 1969 was 16 months and his next senior sergeant had fourteen months total service. That was the depth of experience, but these were the guys who were able to develop tactics and techniques to destroy enemy formation after enemy formation. At the end they had killed 2,500 enemy soldiers, at the loss of 25 Americans. Ho Chi Minh could never pay that kind of price of one to one hundred. He had said publicly, "I can pay one to ten, but never one to one hundred." So if every one of the hundred U.S. battalions in Vietnam had replicated the tactics and techniques of this unit we would have been successful technically on the battlefield. We'd never have been successful strategically in the battlefield, because to win the war you had to win the hearts and minds of the people and the people in Saigon were crooks, mostly Catholic crooks, who were interested in taking the money that was coming in and whipping it to the Bank of France and didn't care about the mainly Buddhist people. It was a Buddhist country being controlled by a bunch of Catholics and the people weren't with them. When they deactivated those battalions all the lessons were lost and they were sent home. When they arrived back in the United States of America they didn't get the greetings that their fathers received. They were spit upon; they were called "Nazis"; they were never treated with any respect. And here we are thirty years later. They have yet to be welcomed home. So, what Eilhys saw was the need to welcome them home and after she interviewed perhaps half of the lads, and I still call them "lads," she said, "you know, these are holy men. These guys went and served their country."

The book is not only devoted to the Fourth Battalion, 39^th Infantry of the 9^th Division, to salute them, to salute everyone that served in Vietnam — 2 ½ million people — who attained great guilt for why they were there, and why they weren't welcomed home by a grateful nation. But there are also 14 million folks that served in Panama, that served in Japan, that served in Germany, that stopped the Soviet hordes, that feel terrible guilt because they didn't get a leg blown off, because they didn't get a bullet in the gut or didn't get killed, because they didn't go. Then there are 15 million folks, like my wife, who ran around with flowers poking them in rifles, who ran around with placards saying, "Let's get out of Vietnam," who were chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many did you kill today?" So that's 70 million folks who are carrying this incredible guilt, so I'm hoping that we will end up through this effort, which I feel is the most significant thing that I've ever written — I think my wife feels the same way — that will be a contribution to bringing these wonderful men back home and all of us welcoming them.

Then, too, the lessons that are learned were the purpose of the book. And 9/11 came along when the book was almost finished, but I thought after reading the manuscript, "my God, these lessons learned are so applicable. We can use them in Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, the Philippines." They're the same things that were used to boot out the British in 1776. There's nothing new there, but they tend to be forgotten because the top brass suffer from a terrible, terrible disease called CRS, which is not only particular to the United States military but most organizations such as your police forces, your Lockheeds, your Hughes Aircrafts. That is the top executives Can't Remember Stuff: CRS. So, hopefully, this book will end up with these lessons that will be transferable to their sons who are now serving in Afghanistan, who are now serving around the world, and their grandsons who'll be fighting in this long war. They think, "Wait a minute. I went there, got blown apart, suffered like I did, and it was all in vain." Many Vietnam veterans feel that it was in vain, and most won't even tell you they were there. When I traveled in Europe after Vietnam I said I was a Canadian because I talk funny…and the end result is that it wasn't in vain because they'll be able to keep their sons and grandsons alive in a war that is going to go for the next 30 years.

We are in Round One of this war. It is not over, Round One, and it's a Thirty-Rounder and my grandchildren who are five and eight years old will be soldiers before we get to Round Thirty. This is the most critical war we've ever fought since Adolph Hitler and the Imperial Japanese became our enemies. Although it doesn't have a sky full of airplanes or sea full of ships or mass armies, their purpose is exactly the same — the destruction of our civilization, the returning it to the tenth century where they are, the destruction of Christianity and the destruction of Judaism. We ain't going to let that happen, and it won't happen. But if we don't learn from the past, and we don't have a very good memory about the past, then we're going to pay one hell of a big price before we get to Round Thirty. That's my great concern and that's one of the great spin-offs from the book. So now my 24 minutes and 11 seconds are all used up, but I've got time to answer questions about the book, Vietnam, or the war on terrorism that we have.

I thank you very much for the privilege to be here today.