Hackworth was tougher than the Army in his day

By KEVIN HORRIGAN
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
David Hackworth was one of those guys who seemed immortal and talked like it, too. In 26 years as a soldier, he had escaped death a dozen times. If he was going to die, surely it would be on a battlefield.
Instead, retired Army Col. David Haskell Hackworth, 74, died May 4 at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, where he was being treated for bladder cancer. He did five tours in Vietnam -- and not, as he would have been the first to tell you, in a comfortable billet in the rear, but out in the mountains and the rice paddies. Given the herbicides he was exposed to, maybe he should be counted as a casualty of war.
I first met Col. Hackworth -- he insisted that you call him "Hack" -- in 1990. He had just returned to the United States from a self-imposed exile in Australia, where he had gotten rich running a restaurant and a duck farm and was hawking his memoirs, a book called "About Face." It had become a best-seller to everyone's surprise but Hack's. The man never lacked for confidence.
The book, like Hack himself, was full of war stories told in profane and purple prose. In Hack's world, machine guns were "buzz saws cutting into my platoon." The smell of cordite always hung in the air. Slugs splattered hard. Hack was always the hero, taking over when lesser men quaked. A tank commander in Korea was "just not with it, and I considered shooting the sorry son of a bitch right there, diving into his tank and taking command."
A lot of hardware
The thing is, as Dizzy Dean once observed, "If you done it, it ain't braggin'." Hack won a battlefield commission at 20 and had chest full of decorations: eight Purple Hearts, nine Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars and two Distinguished Flying Crosses, among other hardware. Three times, he had been nominated for the Medal of Honor, the last time for flying in under fire on a helicopter skid to rescue a trapped unit.
At 14, he had bribed a bum to pose as his father so he could enlist in the Merchant Marine. A year later, he faked his way into the U.S. Army. In Korea, he commanded a unit of the Wolfhound Raiders. In 1965, he volunteered for Vietnam and became the almost mythical "Steel Six" (his radio call sign), serving as an AirMobile commander and then the commander of the Hardcore Battalion, the 9th Division's legendary 4/39th.
Hack liked to say that he was the inspiration for the character of Col. Kurtz, the renegade commander in "Apocalypse Now." Others saw him more as the movie's Col. Kilgore, the AirMobile commander who wore a cavalry hat and loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
The Army never knew quite what to do with Hack, a pure warrior and a first-class pain in the butt. Gen. Creighton Abrams, the last U.S. commander in Vietnam, called Hack "the best battalion commander I've ever seen" but later tried to court-martial him. This was in 1971, after Hack charged onto ABC's "Issues and Answers" to say Vietnam was hopeless and that the North Vietnamese flag would be flying over Saigon by 1975.
The Army investigated and discovered what everyone already knew: Hack never followed the rules. He was retired, narrowly escaping court-martial. The North Vietnamese flag began flying over Saigon in April 1975.
After his memoirs were published, Newsweek gave him a forum for his pro-soldier, anti-Pentagon views. He lost that gig in 1996 after discovering that Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jeremy "Mike" Boorda was wearing medals for valor that he hadn't earned. Adm. Boorda committed suicide before the story was published.
Not silenced
Undaunted, Hack moved to the Internet. Hackworth.com became a forum not only for promoting his books and his rants about the "perfumed Pentagon princes," but also for e-mail correspondence from front-line soldiers complaining about supply shortages and self-serving officers. Some of the first complaints about body armor and Humvee armor shortages in Iraq were posted on Hack's Web site.
Hack once wrote, "If we want to save ourselves militarily, we must destroy the way the U.S. military is run. That means shutting down the Pentagon. It is a corrupt, bleak place filled with many people whose mind-set is warped by traditions that are as obsolete as the sword."
That was 12 years ago. The Pentagon survives. You might think that soldiers like Hack are the ones who are obsolete until you read the mail on his Web site and are reminded that they're still out there, bearing the burden.
Hack's ashes will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery the day after Memorial Day with full military honors. God knows he earned them.
X Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.