Hack Attack
"About Face" by David Hackworth
I finally finished reading the book “About Face,” about thirty years too late. I started reading it in the ‘90’s when my brother and I were renting my parent’s house. He had just gotten divorced and I was laid off from the oilfield and working as a jet mech for my Air Guard unit. (A pretty great year, drinking 40oz beers)
My brother has always had the ability to pick out great books at the library or the bookstore. (I paid actual money for “Battlefield Earth” and got through it. He read fifty pages and threw it against the wall to a resounding thud.) Growing up, I’d always just read what he read.
I didn’t finish Hackworth then for some reason, I went back offshore and was busy for 30 years. I bought the book when Jocko mentioned it on his podcast and finally read it over the holidays.
It’s several things in one. One of the best war memoirs from a hero who fought in Korea and Vietnam. As an NCO, then a platoon and company commander in Korea, then as a company commander and battalion commander in Vietnam, along with tours as an advisor to the ARVN. It is fantastic.
The book is also about leadership. Leading men in hard situations, taking responsibility, turning bad troops from duds to studs. Creating esprit de corps when none existed. He lays out what he did and how he did it, including his own warts and mistakes. It should be required reading for anyone in a leadership position in the military (or anywhere).
He also details his change of opinion, how he realized that we were losing in Vietnam and we should have gotten out much earlier, or never been there. During the Iraq war, Hackworth had a column “Hack Attack” that made many of the same points about Iraq and Afghanistan, he was right there as well.
For a wanna be writer who writes stories with military characters or themes, the book is essential reading. It is almost an encyclopedia of tropes with real war stories, written with a brilliance and immediacy that makes you feel the mud and the heat. The harshest conditions I experienced was when the beer at the airmen’s club was increased from 50 cents to 75 cents, or maybe working outside in the Gulfport heat in MOPP gear.
I can’t recommend the book enough. I only hope the people in charge have read it before the commit soldiers to any war
Thank you for recommending this book, Joe. I need to snag myself a copy.
Sadly, you can make certain books required reading, but you'll never insure that the officers reading it will understand its importance. The ones I served with focused on career, retirement, and the after-retirement sinecures offered in civil service and military contractors.
And, as far as politicians reading it, unless there's a price tag for not reading and applying that knowledge, nothing will ever change in the ways that the US enters/begins wars.
It requires a cultural change at the highest and lowest levels to stop the foolishness in warfare that is only temporarily overcome throughout US military history. 🫤