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Posted on 10/28/2001 5:01:35 PM PST by Pokey78

Colonel David H Hackworth, America's most decorated soldier, does not mince his words. "I would be reluctant to jump into a battle zone with any conventional American unit. I would hate to take them into battle - they ain't ready, they are not 'good to go'."

With British and American ground troops poised to take the war against the Taliban into a new, perilous phase, Hackworth's appraisal of the army he once served will do little to calm nerves in the corridors of power. And his verdict on "crack" American troops such as those likely to be deployed in Afghanistan, is scarcely more complimentary. The soldiers of the vaunted 82nd Airborne are only "a little better" than ordinary infantry. And of the supposedly fearsome 10th Mountain Division, he says, "I hear a lot of rhetoric about the famous 10th Mountain Division. In World War II it was unquestionably America's finest unit - trained for three years, made up with men from Colorado, Montana, Idaho, really tough men, experts in mountain fighting. What we have now in the 10th Mountain Division is a bunch of kids that are better qualified to play computer games than they are to fight in that kind of terrain."

Confronted by the sudden prospect of putting their training to the test in Afghanistan, more than a handful of American soldiers show signs of agreeing with Hackworth's dismal assessment. "A large number of them have been submitting release from active duty requests, feigning that they're conscientious objectors, which is exactly what we went through in Vietnam," he says.

It is difficult to envisage anyone now emulating Hackworth's record even if they took on the Taliban during an extended campaign. After lying about his age, he managed to enlist, aged 15, in the second world war, "winding up on the Morgan Line around Trieste, trying to keep the Yugoslavs and the Italians from wasting each other".

Thereafter, in Korea and Vietnam, he was awarded a brace of Distinguished Service Crosses, 10 Silver Stars, four Legions of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross and a remarkable eight Purple Hearts - meaning that he was wounded, on average, in each of the (almost) eight years that he was in combat.

Commissioned in the field in Korea, he became the army's youngest captain; less than 20 years later, as its youngest colonel, he condemned America's involvement in Vietnam. It was, he said, "a bad war... it can't be won. We need to get out." He also predicted that the North Vietnamese flag would fly over Saigon within four years - a prediction made no more palatable to his superiors by being right.

Hackworth's critics might like to dismiss him as a battlefield dinosaur; most are wise enough not to try. After his public denunciation of the Vietnam war, he left the army and headed to Australia, where he gave his medals away to a class of 12-year-olds, burned his uniform, lived under the stars and smoked - and inhaled - a little dope. Nearly 20 years later, after making himself a fistful of money by selling a Brisbane restaurant and starting Australia's first Peking Duck farm, he returned to the US.

During his years of self-imposed exile, he had become an anti-nuclear campaigner but that proved no bar to re-establishing contacts with friends in the army, who were invaluable allies in his next career as a war reporter.

He discovered that - with some admirable exceptions - most of his new colleagues "wouldn't know a tank from a Range Rover or a B-52 bomber from a Valujet". During the Gulf war, he sensed that it was "almost as if frightened reporters who knew nothing about military realities wanted to inflate the war to inflate themselves". He decided on a new mission: to educate and inform his countrymen about those "military realities". Several years before he had co-authored the Vietnam Primer, which became a classic. On his return from Australia, he wrote About Face, a chronicle of his war experiences. It became a best-seller, as did three further books, the profits from the last two of which have been ploughed into Soldiers For The Truth, Hackworth's non-profit foundation dedicated to military reform.

But that reform, he says, will only come after America has suffered "a terrible performance in battle. Then we'll see maximum attention to re-establishing discipline and getting standards up". This, though, will come too late to make a difference in Afghanistan. Hackworth recently watched three weeks of basic training at Fort Jackson and left "appalled at the lack of discipline, the lack of hard training". The American military, he argues, is undermined by twin evils - a culture of grotesquely profligate, misdirected expenditure and by a toadying, self-serving caste of senior officers interested only in securing their own advancement.

But most corrosive of all, he says, has been the almost comic absurdity of making the forces politically correct. "There is now something called 'Consideration for Others' training," says Hackworth. "That's where Joe and Jane will get along and live in harmony. One, Joe and Jane shouldn't be in the foxhole together; two, harmony is not the name of the game; the name of the game is killing your enemy." (He is kinder about their British counterparts. "The Brits that I have found - the units that I've seen as a reporter in ex-Yugoslavia and so on - are not suffering as badly as the Americans from political correctness. It seems that your standards haven't been so lowered.")

Such idiocies, argues Hackworth, could have been prevented "if the top brass had opposed the politically correct leadership which was engendered and supported by Bill Clinton". "Do you think Clinton would have appointed any leader that would say, 'We've lowered the standard, we're not training our people hard enough or fierce enough'? No: the guys who get promoted are the guys who go along to get along. They are the Perfumed Princes."

But the "perfumed princes" are in for an unsettling ride, he says. "We are in round one - which is not even over - in a 30-round fight. I think my grandkids, who are five and eight, will be in college before we're in round 30. It's going to be a very long war, not like a war we've fought before. We will win, as long as everybody realises that it is not going to be a Desert Storm, wham-bam, thank you mam."

Last August, Hackworth made another prediction. Outlining three scenarios of future terror, he described a terrorist gas attack at the Indianapolis sports arena, killing 4,000. Hackworth set the date at June 4 2005; the terrorist responsible? Osama bin Laden. He concluded: "The chances are eight out of 10 that we will see a devastating terrorist attack from abroad within the next 10 years. Up to now we've been relatively lucky. But this kind of luck can't last... This dude [Bin Laden] ain't gonna give up. Neither will a thousand fanatics like him. It's a mistake to believe you can stop a terrorist movement by taking out its leader. You can cut off the head, but the body will still live on."

Consequently, Hackworth does not get overly excited by Bin Laden's fate. "He's got many, many fall-back positions, but he's a hard guy to hide. He's going to come in, in his Mercedes or his four-wheel drive; if people in the local village know he's there, the word is going to go out. He's got 30m bucks on his head; if you're an Afghan or Yemeni and you're making a dollar a week, $30m is a hell of an enticement. I wouldn't want to be in his sandals. But he's more the figurehead than the principal military planner; it's like getting rid of Saddam Hussein - there are other rattlesnakes that are even worse."

Hackworth has yet to get to Afghanistan to see the situation for himself; in the meantime, he is urging people to read a paper written by Richard Kidd, a West Point graduate who spent two years in Afghanistan working in the UN's mine clearance programme. Kidd argues in favour of giving the Northern Alliance "a big wad of cash so that they can buy off a chunk of the Taliban army before winter. Second, also with this cash I would pay some guys to kill some of the Taliban leadership, making it look like an inside job to spread distrust. Third, I would support the Northern Alliance with military assets, but not take it over or adopt so high a profile as to undermine its legitimacy."

Hackworth urges people to "burn [Kidd's] words and advice into your brain". He believes that they have been heeded in the White House, which he praises for its handling of the campaign so far. Hackworth says Washington should leave the fighting to groups like the Northern Alliance, confining British and American troops to an advisory role. As for the tens of thousands of American troops wondering if they could soon find themselves face to face with the Taliban, Hackworth suggests they should not expect to experience real combat any time soon. "I see them only in a defensive, perimeter role, because that's what they've got experience doing in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo: standing behind a wall of sandbags and peering out into the darkness. That's what they're very good at."

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