The Vietnam War scarred me more severely than any of the eight Purple Hearts I'd received during almost eight years of combat. Up to Vietnam, I'd always been a Don Quixote-like idealist who believed that those who served our country as professional military officers did so only from the point of view of DUTY, HONOR, AND COUNTRY. But during Vietnam I finally got a look inside the inner circle of the Army's top brass -- and witnessed corruption and evil so great it broke my heart and arc-lighted my belief system.

In Vietnam, I also discovered that most of those at the top were concerned only with themselves, and few senior leaders understood the nature of the war or had a clue about the impossible mission with which they had tasked their soldiers. Most generals and colonels were there only to get combat command assignments and the right glory medals that would punch their ticket. Few cared about their men or the mission, most cared only about clawing their way up the promotion ladder. All but the brain-dead among them knew that it was a bad, unwinnable war that had no military objective; yet not one serving general stood tall and told the American people this truth. Instead, they just went-along-to-get-along, lining up our young men to become the pulverized filler for bodybags.

After observing this obscenity first-hand in the trenches of Vietnam for almost five years, I told the American people -- while in uniform and from Vietnam -- that the war was not winnable, they were being lied to and we should get out now. This act caused a General William Westmoreland-led counter-attack to destroy my credibility. The generals and their synchophants employed every dirty trick in their slimey attempt to silence me (for details, see About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, Simon & Schuster 1989). They had to prove that I was wrong and they were right, and in so doing they violated every principle that makes America a free land.

Disgusted with the US Army and disillusioned with my country, which my forefathers had settled in 1622, I went to Australia in self-exile. There, I made a new life and tried to forget Vietnam, but I couldn't shake that nightmare. It wouldn't go away not only because of bad dreams but also because Westmoreland and his followers launched a deceptive campaign of disinformation to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War. Their propaganda insisted that we lost the war not because of their poor leadership, but because of: THE PEACENIKS, THE COMMIE PRESS AND THE WEAK-KNEED POLITICIANS. They started the lie: "We won all the battles, but THEY lost the war."

I knew this was a lie, and this lie is what caused me to write About Face so that present and future generations would know and learn from the truth. Since About Face was published and I began my new career as a defense reporter, I sadly discovered that most of today's senior military leaders' values are frighteningly similar to these generals of the Vietnam era who sold their men and their country down the bloody drain. Most of the present crop of senior leadership are all into ME, ME, ME -- which explains the Somalias, Haitis, and Bosnias (for more details see Hazardous Duty, William Morrow 1996).

For most of the 2.5 million Americans who fought there, Vietnam was a bad trip. For me, it became the launching pad of the journey I'm still on today -- to do everything in my power not to let that sort of bloodbath happen again.

Vietnam gave me a new mission: To speak the truth and not let my children or your children or our country be doomed to repeat the horror, the waste and the futility of Vietnam.

Thus began my crusade to wake up the American people.

David Hackworth Home Page

Richard Manning salutes David Hackworth

As a former NYC teacher (P/T), Youth Board Gang Worker and Police Dep't Detective (Special Frauds Bureau) who went to Vietnam in 1967 as a Plans and Operations Officer with the CIA : I confirm what Hackworth says is the absolute truth concerning the wholehearted selfishness of our 'leadership', BOTH military and civilian. The exceptions were, like Hackworth, those few, most rare, men who had the moral courage to put honest loyalty to America and humane values for the slaughtered Vietnamese BEFORE their personal whims, vices, crimes AND careers. Vietnam was unusual, for it was a most SENSUAL, and SEXY, war for the upper-echelon leadership; not just the average high tech violence done to so many another yellow-skinned (or brown or black) inferiors in our history.

Most of the above leadership in Vietnam were - besides being moral cowards - also physical cowards who never had to defend themselves or their men with a weapon facing our 'enemy'. This double cowardice is the 'why?' behind their support of a techno war; one using twice the total WW-II tonnage of bombs against a 3rd World country - an agrarian country with almost no industry and few viable military targets; and none to speak of after 1968.

Due to this, Hackworth's comments should be understood as even more strongly applicable to the US Navy and US Air Force - push-button jet jockeys dropping everything from napalm, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, chemicals and high explosives on an almost exclusively civilian population. Returning afterwards to their hot showers, clean white sheets and Playboy R & R machismo hobbies. Hackworth may have been an officer but he was something much more than a grunt with shoulder insignia, for in facing the enemy on the ground he learned the truth, and then had the wholly GREATER moral courage it takes to step out of line and tell it to the people he really served - the US public. It takes that kind of hero to go around his disloyal military brass and his dishonest Presidents.

Least we forget, let's not leave out the CIA : for it was their Col. Lansdale and his illegal and totally immoral coterie of little boys playing top secret spooky games who actually started the war beginning in 1954. We must remember, it was the CIA, using mostly detached military personell, who invaded and attacked the Vietnamese, both North and South. Neither the so-called 'north' Vietnamese nor the old Viet Minh in the 'south' ever did anything against America or any American until they had been tortured and assassinated to the tune of over 200,000 dead and wounded (by 1960), mostly civilians with the wrong sympathies.

So there were only a very few, like Hackworth, McGehee and I (presuming to put myself in their good company), who had the awareness and balls to go against the Pentagon's and The Company's lies and cover ups and murder and torture while we were in-country.

Richard Manning
Ass't Operations Officer, Phan Thiet; Plans Officer, Nha Trang; Op & Plans Officer, Ba Ngoi (Cam Ranh)

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