....A reputation won on the battlefield made it impossible to dismiss him when he went on the attack later as a critic of careerism and incompetence in the military high command. In 1971, he appeared in the field on ABC's Issue and Answers to say Vietnam "is a bad war...it can't be won. We need to get out." He also predicted that Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese within four years, a prediction that turned out to be far more accurate than anything the Joint Chiefs of Staff were telling President Nixon or that the President was telling the American people.
With almost five years in country, Col. Hackworth was the only senior officer to sound off about the Vietnam War. After the interview, he retired from the Army and moved to Australia.
It was Col. Hackworth who was responible for the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos getting to "60 Minutes II" last year. He also warned about the return of the draft.
Col. Hackworth was an outspoken and early critic of the Iraq War:
Our first New Year's resolution should be to find out if the stated reasons for our pre-emptive strike Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's connection with al-Qaeda constituted a real threat to our national security. Because, contrary to public opinion, the present administration hasn't yet made the case that Saddam and his sadists aided and abetted al-Qaeda's attacks on 9/11. We also need to know why our $30 billion-a-year intelligence agencies didn't read the tea leaves correctly, as well as what's being done besides upgrading the color code to prevent other similar strikes.
Two more quotes from the obituary linked above:
"He was perhaps the finest soldier of his generation," observed the novelist and war correspondent Nicholas Proffit, who described Col. Hackworth's combat autobiography About Face, a national best-seller, as "a passionate cry from the heart of a man who never stopped loving the Army, even when it stopped loving him back."
..."Hack never lost his focus," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth. "That focus was on the young kids that our country sends to bleed and die on our behalf. Everything he did in his retirement was to try to give them a better chance to win and to come home. That's one hell of a legacy."
R.I.P. Colonel Hackworth.
