What would Hack do?
Prior to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you had to look back a bit to find role-models of green-army combat leadership. Really this meant the Falklands and Vietnam. And if you dig into leadership in the Vietnam War, it won’t be long until you come across Colonel David Hackworth.
Hack, as he was known, earned over 90 military awards, including two DSCs, ten Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, eight purple hearts and thirty-four Air Medals. He was also put in for the Medal of Honor three times. That’s a lot, even by American standards. General Creighton Abrams, the overall commander in Vietnam, called him “the best battalion commander I ever saw”. To fully understand the gravity of that accolade, remember what General Patton in turn had said of Abrams: “I’m supposed to be the best tank commander in the Army, but I have one peer — Abe Abrams. He’s the world champion.” Multiply those two comments together and you get a sense of what an incredible combat leader Hack was.
There are many officers who love their men; there are many who love killing the enemy; there are others who know their profession inside out; and there are a few who are comfortable telling their superiors to fuck off. What distinguishes Hack is that he was all of these things.
Hack’s life reminds us some of the the immutable laws of leadership:
- Taking care of soldiers is the foundation of everything
- Leadership is not a popularity contest; what is best for soldiers (discipline) is not at all what they want
- Because of that, good leadership is lonely
- The chain of command is not always right, and deciding how and when to disobey is one of the toughest challenges a leader will face
Every young infantry leader should read Hack’s work. The point is certainly not to emulate him, because he was truly one of a kind. But in a climate of risk aversion and zero-defect military careers, we should all inject a bit of Hack into our leadership styles.
Even the sun has spots
Hack was very, very far from perfect. So let’s get the bad stuff out of the way up front:
- Many believed that he was a glory hound
- He was certainly immodest, claiming (correctly, it seems) to be America’s most decorated living soldier
- He was selective about which regulations to follow (for instance, he allowed a brothel on camp to protect his men from STIs)
- In 1971, disillusioned with the war, he spoke out against it in uniform and on TV
- Abrams subsequently threatened to court-martial him, although he was eventually allowed to retire with honour
- He became an anti-war activist
- In the twilight of his life he attacked the generals (“perfumed princes”) with such ferocity one wondered which side he was on
- As a journalist he discovered that CNO Admiral Mike Boorda was inappropriately wearing Combat Vs on two of his decorations; the very popular Boorda subsequently committed suicide
The terrible 4/39th
Hack’s crowning achievement in Vietnam was transforming an infantry battalion. The 4/39th was in a terrible state when he inherited it, even by draftee standards:
“Worst battalion I’ve seen in twenty-six years of service,” [said the brigade commander].
From my vantage point coming in from Dong Tam [Hack writes], the [base] looked normal enough, but when I landed, I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my nose. The whole base smelled of raw shit and rotting morale. Toilet paper blew across the chopper pad, machine-gun ammo was buried in mud, and troops wandered around like zombies, their weapons gone red with rust.
These were the sloppiest American soldiers I’d ever seen, bar none. Unkempt, unwashed, unshaven, their uniforms ragged and dirty, hippie beads dangling alongside their dog tags, their helmets covered with graffiti.
Far worse than the appearance of the battalion was its performance: in six months it had suffered 32 killed and 307 wounded, “the equivalent of nearly 40 percent casualties without ever meeting a single significant enemy force in open combat. Rockets, mortars, booby traps and friendly fire had done most of the damage.”
Becoming hardcore
The first thing Hack did upon arriving was order his men to fill in all their scrapes and build better fighting positions. Doing this in the jungle is no joke, and by his own admission his soldiers instantly hated him: “[At first I was considered] the original GI Joe lifer sent from Hell to burn their hides with fire and brimstone.” But like all good commanders, Hack underpinned his tough love with regard for his men:
A few days later, after finding a very small soldier who told me his feet were killing him because he couldn’t get any boots to fit him — they are all too big — I had a little discussion with the good S-4.
“Hack went ballistic,” Johnson recalls. “He chewed out his chain of command from his squad leader to his company commander and then he got ahold of me. He made it very clear that I better get the man a pair of boots or all kinds of horrible things were going to happen to me. The Army did not make a men’s boot small enough to fit this little guy. We scavenged the country and found a pair of women’s boots that fit the bill. This taught all of us an important lesson, that Hack cared for the lowest of soldiers and he expected his commanders and staff to damn well look after them.”
Hack recognised that the cornerstone of esprit is hard work and success: “You can’t make a unit proud by praising it and you can’t make a soldier proud by telling him how tough or good he is. That’s the superficial stuff. No pain, no gain. They had to earn it.” But equally, Hack knew the value of a little showmanship, particularly in building the cohesion that comes with being part of a distinct tribe:
… I brought back saluting, a sign of military discipline that had been swallowed up by the rice paddy mud. Then I added a twist. When a soldier saluted, I required him to sound off with a loud “Hardcore Recondo, sir” — to which the officer would reply, “No fucking slack” …. Bob Press hired a machine shop in Saigon to make small black metal Recondo arrowhead pins, which the men quickly began wearing …. all outgoing mail was stamped with the Recondo logo …. All of this said, We’re different, we’re not just plain old infantry, we’re the best.
And discipline. Lots and lots of discipline:
Hardcore soldiers wouldn’t look like bums anymore, either. They’d shave every day, wear their gear properly and always be in camouflage when on ops. And the leaders made it happen by setting the example and being hard but fair …. Without absolute discipline, you lose …. I used every second of every day to train and instill discipline, beginning with something as basic as making sure every man worse his steel pot and carried his weapon at all times … I wanted those soldiers to roll into a firing position or take counterambush action even in their sleep.
The rules were simple: Check weapons, check feet, show that you care and let the troops know if we get into deep shit, help will be on the way.
Loneliness of command
What is most striking about Hack’s experience of transforming the 4/39th — though unsaid by him — is the sheer loneliness. He took over the battalion when he was 38 years old, and had been in the army for 23 years (he enlisted when he was 15). His soldiers were draftees who generally had less than one year of service. His senior NCOs were “shake and bakes” with just a few years of experience. Even his company commanders, after Hack fired most of the incumbents, were really just platoon commanders with a couple of years in uniform*. And as described above, they were all in shit state. And they were based in a FOB. And they hated him — to start with, at least.
The scale of that transformation is stunning. And Hack basically did it alone. It got so bad that the brigade commander heard rumours of rebellion and flew out to the FOB to offer Hack some undercover agents to root out malcontents. Hack declined. But the loneliness must have been crushing**.
Getting on great with the boss
Transforming a battalion might not have been so tough if Hack had a normal relationship with his chain of command, but … you can probably guess where this is going.
The US military was trapped in a bodycount strategy in Vietnam, and Major General Ewell was one of its leading exponents. Applying massive firepower to maximise dead bodies was the order of the day, leading to Ewell’s sobriquet as “the butcher of the Mekong Delta”. Ewell’s chief of staff Colonel Ira Hunt was a chip off the block, and when the micromanaging Hunt stood in for an absent Ewell the scene was set for a meltdown.
The spiral started one morning when Hunt appeared on Hack’s radio net to order Hardcore soldiers to dig up old VC graves to increase the bodycount. Hack responded by ordering his subunits to switch to a pre-arranged frequency to stop Hunt interferring (“skip rope”). Later that day Hack’s battalion doctor kicked Hunt out of the surgical theatre when Hunt ordered him to allow an interrogation of a grievously wounded VC soldier. To cap it off, that afternoon Hunt changed Hardcore subunits’ ambush positions — and put two in the same AO by mistake. Hack changed them back.
Cue the meltdown:
Hunt came thundering up screaming that no one, but no one, could cancel his orders and we went face-to-face …. Once we got outside, I told him exactly what I thought of him and how his constant interference in my unit’s operations put my men at risk. “You don’t issue orders directly to my subordinate units, and I’ll be damned if I take your shit.”
Hunt stormed off, but when Hack was summoned to Hunt’s HQ soon after he knew he was headed for a court-martial.
The LRRP rescue
When Hack arrived at the TOC he was informed that one of the division’s LRRPs (long-range reconnaissance patrols), comprised of Rangers, were in heavy contact, with 16 of 18 men wounded. A rescue helicopter had also been shot down. They were 40km away and lost in a 4km2 patch of jungle. And the only aviation available was a single Loach (Little Bird).
Hack extracted his pound of flesh: “Colonel Hunt, if I get these people out, you will never fuck with my battalion again. You just tell me what you want and when you want it done, but keep off my ass when I am doing it. Do you understand me?”
When Hack arrived above the encircled Rangers, what he saw was not good:
I’d been in fights like this before with the 101st, but never in a situation where I couldn’t talk to a leader or RTO on the ground. A commander’s in serious shit when he can’t commo with the guys in the fight. The scene below was surreal — red and green tracers arcing in the sky underneath us, the mangled chopper with its blinking red beacon, gun flashes all around the bird.
Hack located an LZ for one of his companies and was starting to adjust artillery fire when his Loach ran out of fuel. He decided to land in the middle of the firefight.
“No way, sir [said the Loach pilot]. I’m not gonna land. I refuse to land.”
The man was no coward — just a smart kid who didn’t want to barge in uninvited to a VC barbecue where he could very well end up as the main course turning slowly over a very hot grill.
“Think again,” I said.
I laid the end of my pistol against the side of his helmet. “You’re going to land this sonofabitch right now. Park this fucking thing or I’ll blow your brains out.”
… We went down like a runaway elevator, flared and hovered above and to the side of the downed Huey. Slugs zipped around the LOH like lightning strikes. When we got to maybe six or seven feet off the ground, hands started desperately reaching for and grabbing the skids as a few survivors tried to pull our little bird from the sky. They were actually shaking the bird. Both Chum and I started kicking them away.
Hack and Chum jumped out of the Loach and into the small group of Rangers. Chum started walking in the artillery fire while Hack set about getting a grip of the soldiers:
I’d seen such fear before, especially during the bad days of the Korean War. If we didn’t got a old of these guys, get a little discipline and a defensive perimeter going in a hurry, we might find ourselves very dead. Very soon …. I grabbed the Rangers and aircrew by the back of their jackets and seat of their pants, shouting and pulling and pushing until we had a half-assed 360-degree perimeter around the downed bird. Almost every man was wounded, but they were game. On the battlefield when things are bad it takes only a few brave men to turn things around. It’s been my experience in battle that out of ten men, only one or two are natural fighters. But once a fighter shouts “Follow me” and charges, the rest are inspired to follow. In this instance, the Rangers — even bloodied — remained fighters to the man.
With a perimeter set up, Hack returned to coordinating fire support as Huey gunships arrived. He then faced the problem of landing his company in an LZ the size of a small parking lot, in a firefight, in the dark, with blacked-out helicopters, and with indirect fire going in. He walked to the centre of the LZ, put a strobe light in his upside-down helmet, held it up, and then directed the Hueys in one by one over the radio. As his soldiers landed, Hack extracted the Rangers in an orderly fashion. “After that it was a yawn.”
What would Hack do?
The LRRP rescue captures Hack’s essence perfectly: the fearlessess and indomitability, and the juxtaposition between absolute professionalism and disregard for the chain of command. Hack always led from the front: at one point he climbed onto the strut of a helicopter, landed on top of an enemy position and hauled to safety the point elements of a company pinned down and in danger of getting wiped out.
Therein you can also see the seeds of Hack’s downfall. He only cared about the grunts and winning. As the army’s agenda drifted from those two fundamental elements, Hack was destined to blow up and wash out of the system. It would have been the same outcome in Afghanistan (although one can easily imagine him happily skippering a battalion in Iraq prior to Obama’s disastrous, short-sighted intervention).
No one could or should emulate Hack — he was truly one of a kind. But implicitly he brings a philosophy we should all replicate: he cared about his career, but not too much. He regularly made decisions he believed in, even though he knew they would probably result in getting sacked or court-martialed. Real integrity means we should all be prepared to walk away when the system stops doing the right thing.
Whenever we face a tough challenge, particularly an ethical one, we should ask, “What would Hack do?”
* In the US Army, companies are commanded by captains and bn HQ is staffed by majors, whereas in the British Army this is reversed.
** This is very reminiscent of the fantastic Platoon Leader by James McDonough (link), another Vietnam classic.
