Chuck Hagel, Vietnam Vet

[frigidmagi]

CSM

For Chuck Hagel, the day he reported for duty in Vietnam as a young private first class is seared in his memory. It was December 1967, and the heat was oppressive. So, too, were the smells.

“I’ll never forget, ever, the feeling I had walking off that plane,” Mr. Hagel told biographer Charlyne Berens. “The humidity and the stench – I was physically sick to my stomach.”

Then there was latrine duty, Hagel’s first job in his tour. He collected the 50-gallon barrels from the latrines, to burn the waste. “You can imagine that smell,” Hagel told Ms. Beren, author of 2006's "Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward" and an associate dean at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “I didn’t exactly spend my first day as a great warrior.”

These are the sort of wretched jobs that enlisted troops tend to recall as an almost-pleasant prelude to the fighting they must later do. For Private First Class Hagel, the ferocious combat was soon to come.

“Both of us,” Hagel’s brother told an interviewer in 1997, “were very, very good at killing.”

President Obama’s nominee to be the next secretary of Defense, if confirmed, would be the first Vietnam veteran to head the Pentagon. Hagel would also be the first enlisted soldier to hold the job.

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His combat experience intrigues many current veterans, who believe it could make Hagel one of the more qualified defense secretaries America has ever had.

“It’s a total game-changer,” says Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive officer of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who was a first lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader serving in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. “It’s hard for civilians to understand what that means. If you think of enlisted and officers, it’s the difference between union and management. To have someone come up as a private is like someone coming up through a mail room – he understands it, and every level in between.”

Moreover, Mr. Rieckoff adds, “being an enlisted infantry grunt is one of the single most dangerous jobs in a war – it’s the backbone of the Army.

“He knows what it’s like to pull the trigger, to write letters home from a foreign land, to see his friend killed. I think it’s an indispensable quality to a country finishing two long wars.”

One night at a remote jungle outpost in Vietnam, Hagel recalls waking two fellow squad members with his hands on their mouths to keep them from making a sound before they crawled away on their hands and knees to escape Viet Cong patrols just feet away.

The US military had night-vision telescopes at the time, but the enlisted soldiers weren’t allowed to take them deep into the jungle – commanders feared that they might fall into enemy hands if US troops were captured. Much like troops in the early days of the Iraq war, Hagel grappled with the frustrations of limited equipment.

Just a couple of months later, in March 1968, Hagel would learn, again and again, what it meant to endure the wounds of war. It was north of Saigon that Hagel and his brother Tom’s squad was ambushed, and the brothers were subjected to their first battle scars.

Hagel was hit with shrapnel from a mine explosion. His brother came to his aid.

“I could see blood on the front of his shirt, and I tore his shirt open and that’s when geysers of blood went up,” Tom Hagel, who was peppered with shrapnel himself, later recalled to Berens.

One month later, the brothers were back to fighting, and next it was Tom – the turret gunner at the time – who was gravely injured when a roadside bomb blew up under his armored personnel carrier.

Hagel was sure his brother had been killed. He was “dead weight, blood pouring out of his ears,” he recalled in a 1997 interview with the Washington Post.

As Hagel tried to get his brother and others out to safety, ammunition stored in the vehicle blew up in his face.

The brothers took their second trip to the hospital together, where Tom recovered and Chuck received salve and bandages for his face. It took a decade for the wounds to heal fully. Hagel still cannot grow a beard.
Speaking his mind

Hagel's experience in war will bring a vital perspective in relating to veterans of America’s current wars, Mr. Obama argued in announcing Hagel’s nomination this week.

“My frame of reference is geared toward the guy at the bottom who’s doing the fighting and the dying,” the president said at a press conference announcing the nomination Monday.

Those who have worked with him agree. “He understands personally the ugliness and horror of it,” says biographer Berens, in an interview with the Monitor.

That will make him a better leader for a country whose troops are recovering from two long wars, Rieckhoff adds. “When you can walk into a room and say, ‘I’ve been through basic training, I was wounded myself,' that gives you a visceral understanding of those responsible for executing the orders.”

As deputy head of the Veterans Administration (VA) under President Ronald Reagan, Hagel resigned in 1982 after 10 months on the job because the director, Robert Nimmo, had compared the chemical defoliant Agent Orange to “teenage acne” and complained that Vietnam vets were “a bunch of crybabies,” Hagel told biographer Berens.

In 1987, Hagel took over the USO (United Service Organizations), which he took from bankruptcy in February of that year to a surplus by December.

He cut the staff and gave raises to those who remained. “One woman I interviewed said that everyone was just astounded. He told them that he wanted to keep the really good people, so the ones he thought were making essential contributions, he gave them extra money so they’d stay,” Berens said in an interview.

“My impression of him after spending many hours interviewing him and people around him is that he sets high expectations – he wants people to do their best and more – but that he’s quite cheerful about the whole thing and very quick to compliment people when they do well.”

Such management experience is important, says Rieckhoff, who points in particular to Hagel’s championing of the new GI bill. “But there are few management jobs more important than leading an infantry squad in combat,” he adds.

Hagel's military service during a time of war also taught him to speak his mind, Reickhoff believes. “When you’re alone on issues doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

Hagel opposed the 2007 "surge" of US troops in Iraq, a product, many believe, of struggling to come to terms with the sacrifice of his fellow troops in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. “I got a sense that there was just so much dishonesty in it,” he said later about the US government during the Vietnam era. “And it was chewing these kids up.”

Many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appreciate that first-hand acknowledgement of the cost of war, Rieckhoff adds.

“I don’t want to create levels of citizenship – this isn’t 'Starship Troopers,' ” he says. “But there is a different level of connection that you have to this country once you’ve been asked to die for it.

I honestly think Chuck Hagel is a good choice.

[Dark Silver]

It's almost hilarious, because Conservatives are saying that Obama picking Hagel is proof positive that he wants to cut out defense funding by unprecedented levels.

[rhoenix]

because Conservatives are saying

See, that's the point in any article when I should be putting my feet up on my desk, and reaching for the popcorn.

Conservatives in the US have become Luddites, Do-Nothings, and reactionary bigots as a party, due to their fear that nearly everything around them is a secret plot - so much so that they create the very circumstances they're afraid of.*

As for Hagel himself, I don't know too much about him, but from what I do know, he's stuck to his principles more than most US politicians have, and his principles seem sensible from what I've seen.

I've listened and watched Paul Rieckoff speak a few times, mostly on Rachel Maddow's show, and I've always been glad he has stepped up to offer his perspective, and those of vets who've returned home. His thoughts on Hagel's nomination made me think, especially the part about Hagel being the first enlisted soldier to take this role, something that I can definitely see heartening many veterans when it comes to decision-making.


EDIT: *: I should mention that though I am certainly generalizing here, I have met and still know some people who call themselves Conservative that I get along with very well. To be fair to them, they don't agree with most modern Conservative thought either, so take that for what it's worth.

To be very clear, I don't think they're all unsalvageable human beings or any such nonsense. Probably just Newt Gingrich in that category, anyway. However, people do stupid shit when they're scared, and they don't tend to think as much.

Seeing the few people who tried to speak up and say "hey, you guys are pulling the +1 crazy card here" get ostracized from the Republican party, such as Chuck Hagel, makes it much more amusingly ironic to see him come back into the spotlight like this.

[Dark Silver]

Unfortunately I'm in a area that is positively flooded with Ultra-NeoCon style Conservatives who are wedded to what comes out of Brierbart Media, FoxNews and it's spinmasters, and anything else that bolsters their opinion that Liberals are the absolute worst possible thing and we intend to destroy this country and turn it into a Nazi-style dictatorship.


To be fair, I'm about to the point where I'm starting to think the best possible thing would be to eliminate everyone and start over fresh.

Like, the entire world.

Fuck 'em all.

[Josh]

Heh, and I'm the cynical one?

The world has been mired in the commonweal since day one, and most people have crappy opinions because most people don't think about their opinions. They devote their thoughts to other matters of interest and use tribal affiliation and gut instinct to guide their politics.

Is it annoying as fuck? Sure. But it's the way things have always been, for the better and worse parts of history. (Also, I don't think we're in a bad era, I think we're in a kick-ass time and heading for great shit.)

The current batch of conservatives have declined into a rut that the true believers will probably never dig out of, but there'll be new movements and new approaches that arise. We're progressing so fast right now that the old school just hasn't had any chance at all to adapt- we went from the likes of Don't Ask/Don't Tell being regarded by many parties as a reasonable compromise in the nineties to being unconscionable and shameful in the aughts. Gay marriage went from being unthinkable in 1990 to being something that we're rapidly eroding the opposition to now. The pace of technological development has blown away a lot of barriers and changed both the way we live and the way we present ourselves. For example, a porn consumer in 1990 was a sleazy guy who went to that dirty store on the bad side of town. Now it's just something that the majority of net users have exposure to.

The speed of progress in the past two decades has basically broken some minds on the right, and hence you get the Bachmann/Santorum/Huckabee version of Luddism. This too shall pass.