CHAPTER ONE
9th Infantry Division Headquarters, Dong Tam, Vietnam
15 January 1969
"It's a pussy battalion, Colonel. I want tigers, not pussies."
I had to hand it to Major General Julian Ewell. Twenty-five years after his kick-ass command in Bastogne, the old paratrooper was still firing for effect. He had sent stateside for me to fix one of his busted units -- 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry of the 9th Division -- right then out in Indian country getting its clock cleaned.
"The 4/39th is the worst goddamn battalion I've ever seen in the Army, Hackworth. It couldn't fight its way out of a retirement home."
He thumped the desk in front of him.
It took some doing to keep a straight face. As a lieutenant colonel with over two decades of my life invested in the Army, though, I wasn't about to piss off General Ewell. You didn't spend a day in green without learning about his reputation for ruthlessness. He swung his ax with a high-pitched war cry: "You're gone. You're history." And you were.
We sat in his office in Dong Tam, half an hour by chopper from Saigon. The 9th Infantry Division's flagpole was planted -- as if anything but rice could be planted in the Mekong Delta -- just outside the general's window. Ewell's flagpole. Ewell's division. And Ewell's reputation at stake. And the poor, sorry 4/39th was letting him down.
He unconsciously jiggled his hand in a tight semicircle, thumb and pinkie extended like the hands of a watch, ticking off the points he wanted to emphasize.
"Pussy battalion." Tick, tick.
"I want tigers...." Tickety, tock.
His hand gyrated like a whirligig.
I'd known Ewell for years, a combat veteran gone long in the tooth, his days as a warrior behind him. Sure he was steamed, but if you looked closely you could see that the heat hadn't taken the creases out of his immaculately ironed fatigues. But before the starch, Ewell had earned a formidable reputation as a battalion and regimental commander with the 101st Airborne in World War II, serving under the legendary General Maxwell Taylor. After the war, he hooked himself to Taylor's coattails and took a peacetime trip up the chain of command to collect a shoulder full of stars. Right now he was a tightly wrapped, thin-lipped, hard-charging West Pointer who meant to drain the Delta before the Delta pulled the plug on him.
General Ewell and I were not alone. And the man standing a dog bone's throw behind him did nothing to improve my mood. Ira Augustus Hunt was a tall, good-looking bird colonel, as polished as a new Rolls-Royce and -- with his Ph.D. in engineering -- about as useful in combat. The Army considered him one of its best and brightest. And just as Ewell had ridden upward in Taylor's jet stream, so Hunt was cruising in Ewell's, having served under him as commander of his engineer battalion in Germany and now as the 9th Infantry Division's chief of staff. The two made quite a pair. Between them they had more naked ambition than a Harvard Law School third-year hustling the Supreme Court for a clerkship.
My take on Hunt? A whiz with a slide rule and a dunce with a sidearm, or any other kind of weapon. I met him in Italy right after World War II, when I was Private Hackworth of the 351st Infantry Regiment and he was Lieutenant Hunt of the command's engineer company. Even then he was a piece of work. We were TRUST soldiers (Trieste United States Troops), so tightly disciplined that if a private even blinked at a sergeant he'd find himself running around the parade field with his rifle over his head shouting "I'm a big-assed bird" until he dropped. In Italy, I learned that exacting even-handed discipline is crucial when the bullets start flying, but Hunt worked overtime inventing infractions, gigging good troops and basking in his power. The GIs I knew who felt his lash or sting thought he was a first-rate bastard. Now he was General Ewell's consigliere.
I'd been back in-country less than three hours. Earlier that morning I'd stepped off a commercial charter jet in Saigon. The Army's own FTA flight, free trip to Asia. All expenses paid by the Department of Defense of the United States of America. Three times before 1969, I'd made the same eighteen-hour trip across the Pacific to Southeast Asia. Nothing had changed. The plane was full of FNGs, fucking new guys -- nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, pink-cheeked, dry-mouthed, wide-eyed, eager but scared -- one more load of fresh meat for the Vietnam grinder. I couldn't help wondering which of them the KIA Travel Bureau would be bagging up for the return trip home. Even the lucky ones, the ones who made it out alive, would never be the same.
At Tan Son Nhut, the U.S.-controlled air base in Saigon, customs greased me through like a four-star general, and I went directly to the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) helicopter pad, where a 9th Division chopper waited. The bird rose and veered to the southwest, Saigon fading behind under its haze of camphor smoke. I watched the chopper's shadow racing above rice paddies where tiny figures worked -- men and women in black pajamas with naked children in tow, a few followed by the dark silhouette of a water buffalo.
Thirty minutes later, the bird circled Dong Tam. From the air, the place looked like a huge, dirty, nineteenth-century Nevada mining town squatting in its own tailings -- prefab wooden buildings with tin roofs, dusty roads and miles of green sandbags, the bunkered 3rd Surgical Hospital, a PX and an outdoor movie theater, one short runway of perforated steel planking and a huge helicopter pad. Home away from home to rear echelons of ten infantry battalions along with aviation, signal, engineer, artillery and military police outfits and every other kind of logistical ash and trash.
To build the place, U.S. Army engineers had brought in a monster machine that sucked several square miles of silt from the bottom of the Mekong Delta to create enough solid land for the 9th Division to set up shop. Four hundred acres in all with the rest heaped into an earthwork berm that gave the perimeter the look of an ancient Roman encampment -- twentieth-century innards surrounded by second-century ramparts.
As the chopper dropped toward the pad, under the whump, whump, whump of the rotors, I saw a World War II-style ammunition dump in the middle of the base. Great call. One enemy mortar round, and the whole place would be history. I walked off the pad and jumped into a jeep with a kid behind its wheel waiting to run me over to General Ewell's headquarters.
The ride was an eye-opener. Nearly ten thousand rear-echelon motherfuckers -- REMFs to the grunts out on the line -- were stationed in Dong Tam surrounded by all the creature comforts. I saw a miniature-golf course and a swimming pool. I caught a glimpse inside a barracks, decked out with clean beds under mosquito nets. These guys pulled down the same combat pay as the young soldiers in the bush who lived in the mud, watching their feet rot, burning leeches out of their crotches and laying down their lives.
Dong Tam crawled with Vietnamese civilians, doing chores, changing the sheets on the beds of the generals and colonels, shaving the brasses' jowls, ironing fatigues and shining shoes. It took only one sympathizer to report every U.S. burp and fart to the Vietcong. But what really got my heart pounding was that ammo dump. What kind of commander would squat on top of his own powder keg?
General Ewell's briefing lasted half an hour, with Colonel Hunt bobbing his head in agreement every time Ewell spun his hand to make another point.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
After that, they sent me on my way.
I left that meeting unsure of myself, anxious. I wasn't sweating a sick unit or leading troops. I'd enlisted in the military before I finished puberty and in the two decades since, I had commanded two inf