Galloway Goes for the Throat
One of the nice things about being one of the most repected war correspondents ever is that you get to tell Pentagon bigwigs to shove it where the sun don't shine. Check out this e-mail slugfest between We Were Soldiers Once... And Young author Joe Galloway, and departing Defense Department flack-in-chief Larry DiRita.
The whole thing started over Galloway's recent profile of Paul Van Riper, the iconoclastic Marine retired general. But it wound up hitting on just about every major issue facing the Pentagon today, from where to station forces to what kind of gear to buy. Along the way, DiRita and Galloway call each other lots of nasty things. Here's an excerpt, from Galloway's third response to DiRita. Check out the whole thing after the jump.
...this is not an army on the way up but one on the way to a disaster... so far it is the willingness of these young men and women to serve, and to deploy multiple times, and to work grueling and dangerous 18 hour days 7 days a week that is the glue holding things together.
all the cheap fixes have been used; all the one-time-only gains so beloved of legislators trying to balance a budget and get out of town.
the question is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? or will they leave town and head into a golden retirement as that army collapses for lack of manpower, lack of money to repair and replace all the equipment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fixing those problems because billions were squandered on weapons systems that are a ridiculous legacy of a Cold War era long gone (viz. the f/22, the osprey, the navy's gold plated destroyers and aircraft carriers and, yes, nuclear submarines whose seeming future purpose is to replace rubber zodiac boats as the favorite landing craft of Spec Ops teams, at a cost of billions). meanwhile, the pentagon, at the direction of your boss, marches rapidly ahead with deployment of an anti-missile system whose rockets have yet to actually get out of the launch tubes. at a cost of yet more multiple billions.
you say i blame your boss for things 3 or 4 levels below him that he can't possibly be controlling and quote accusations from present and former flag officers who he has never eyeballed personally. well the above items are things that he directly controls, or should; things he came into office vowing he was going to fix or change drastically. and in the latest QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dollar weapons systems that make no sense in the real world today. the same QDR quite correctly identifies an urgent need for MORE psyops and civil affairs and military police and far more troops who have foreign language training appropriate to where we fight. and we budget a paltry 191 million, i say MILLION, bucks to do all that. not even the cost of the periscopes on those oh-so-necessary submarines, or the instruments on one of those f22s.
this is what has my attention; this is what has me in a mood to question over and over and over, waiting for answers that never come, change that never comes, course corrections that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some specifics.
joe galloway
PS: those [tens of thousands of soldiers in fixed garrisons in germany who could not deploy] were called VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. they deployed. they formed the armored spear that penetrated kuwait and broke the republican guard. the garrisons were guarded, while they were gone, by the german army and police. they would have been so guarded in OIF too had we tried a bit of diplomacy instead of bitch-slapping Old Europe as your boss did at a crucial moment.
DaRita No. 1:
From: Di Rita, Larry, CIV, OSD
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 6:58 AM
To: Galloway, Joe
Subject:
Your column about gen van riper is just silly, joe. To tag the secretary of defense with being responsible for every sparrow that falls out of every tree is just ludicrous.
General Kernan, who was commander of the Joint Forces Command when van riper's wargame occurred, had very pointed things to say about van riper when van riper made his first notoriety on this whole thing.
To tag rumsfeld with a wargame when there were about three or four layers of the chain of command between rumsfeld and the wargamers just misunderstands the way the world works.
Let's at least be honest about this: there is a lot of change taking place, and that change forces people to re-examine the way we have always done things. That is bumpy, and that can make people anxious.
I don't have any idea what might have happened in van riper's experience with this wargame, but to blame the secretary of defense for it just sounds crazy.
You talk about "rumsfeld's fondest ideas and theories" as if you have the first clue as to what those are. I have worked with him side-by-side for five years, and I wouldn't even try to divine what his fondest ideas and theories are.
The debate about defense transformation was going on long before rumsfeld showed up at the pentagon. I'd wager that the war game van riper was so offended by probably began in planning before rumsfeld showed up.
Van riper has never even met the secretary to my knowledge. For him to make such sweeping comments as he did in your piece is just irresponsible.
As a journalist, don't you think you owe it to your readers to challenge when people say things like that as though they have firsthand knowledge.
Also, you ought to talk with Buck Kernan, who commanded JFCOM at the time.
You're just becoming a johnny one-note and it's only a couple of steps from that to curmudgeon!!
Best....
]From galloway in response to DaRita No. 1:
larry:
i am delighted that folks over in OSD continue to read my columns with great attention. Who knows, it might make a difference one day.
i've always understood that the guy in charge takes the fall for everything that goes wrong on his watch. this is why the u.s. navy court martials the captain of any ship that is involved in an accident or is sunk for whatever reason.
this is why a President, Harry Truman, always kept a sign on his desk in the oval office that said simply: The Buck Stops Here.
trouble with this administration is the buck never stops anywhere, on anybody's desk.
"victory has many fathers; defeat is an orphan"
--Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law in 1945
Last I knew Mr. Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. His is the ultimate responsibility. And I am damned if I can understand how you could work for the man for as long as you have without knowing what he likes and doesn't like in the way of strategy and tactics and fighting wars.
In the meantime, I hope you will take note of the fact that throughout the discussion of this and other columns with you I have never once implied that you were "silly" or "crazy" or "ludicrous" or even a "johnny one-note."
I will be leaving this town in three weeks, Larry, and there's a lot of people and places I will miss. You aren't exactly at the top of that list….
Joe Galloway
Darita No. 2:
That's not what you're describing, though, in your van riper piece.
I also served long enough to know that officers who hide behind anonymity and complain to you and other journalists about what they don't like are causing great harm to the institutions they serve and to the country.
Anyway, I think your columns have been representative of a school of thought within military circles that I don't believe is particularly widespread.
The army is so much more capable and suitable for the nation's needs that it was 5 or 10 years ago. To my mind, the voices your columns represent missed the forest for the trees.
I regret you took offense at our exchanges. Apparently people can tell a journalist the most damnable things about rumsfeld or myers or franks or the president and it's okay, but a little feisty email exchange in response you find offensive!!
Best wishes.
Galloway Response to DaRita No. 2:
Subj: Re:
Date: 5/3/2006 4:56:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:
To:
larry:
the army you describe as "so much more capable" than it was 5 or 10 years ago is, in fact, very nearly broken. another three years of the careful attention of your boss ought to just about finish it off. this is not the word from your anonymous officers; this is from my own observations in the field in iraq and at home on our bases and in the military schools and colleges.
you can sit there all day telling me that pigs can fly, with or without lipstick, and i am not going to believe it.
seemingly the reverse is also true.
one of us is dead wrong and i have a good hunch that it would be you.
you go flying blind through that forest and you are going to find those trees for sure. whether or not paul van riper has ever met Secretary Rumsfeld is not at issue. one does not have to be a personal acquaintance to find that a public figure's policies and conduct of his office are wanting.
Secretary Rumsfeld spent a good number of years as the CEO of various large corporations. He knows about being responsible for the bottom line in that line of work. So too is he responsible in his current line of work; actually even more so given the stakes involved.
So grasp that concept harder, friend Larry. Urge your boss to step up to the plate and admit it when he's gotten it wrong at least as quickly as he steps up to run those famous victory laps with Gen Meyer back in thespring of '03.
best
joe galloway
DaRita No. 3:
Subj: Re:
Date: 5/3/2006 5:09:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:
To:
Time will tell. The army is faster, more agile, more deployable, more lethals. At least that's what schoomaker thinks. The army of 2000 could not have sustained rotational deployments indefinitely.
Retention is above 100 percent in units that have frequently deployed. Would all those soldiers be rushing to join a "broken" army. Do you really believe we were better off with tens of thousands of soldiers in fixed garrisons, essentially non-deployable, in germany and korea?
I appreciate your depth of feeling. What bugs me though is your implication that rumsfeld doesn't care about it as much as you do.
Also, if van riper et al confined their "analysis" to the issue at hand, your comment would be valid. Their comments were ad hominem, and that is a neat trick for someone they never met.
Anyway, time will tell. Best..
--------------------------
Galloway response to DaRita No. 3:
larry:
[You say][the army of 2000 could not have sustained indefinite
deployments]
my response: neither can the army of 2003 or the army of 2005 or 2006. it is grinding up the equipment and the troops inexorably. recruiting can barely, or hardly, or not, bring in the 80,000 a year needed to maintain a steady state in the active army enlisted ranks....and that is WITH the high retention rates in the brigades. and neither figure addresses the hemorraging of captains and majors who are voting with their feet in order to maintain some semblance of a family life and a future without war in it. and what do we do about a year when average 93 percent of majors are selected for Lt Col in all
MOSs....and 100 plus percent in critical MOSs.
the army is scraping the barrel.
then there is the matter of 14 pc Cat IV recruits admitted in Oct 05 and 19pc in Nov....against an annual ceiling of 4 percent??? the returning divisions, which leave all their equipment behind in iraq, come home and almost immediately lose 2,000 to 3,000 stop-loss personnel. then tradoc goes in and cherry picks the best NCOs for DI and schoolhouse jobs. leaving a division with about 65 percent of authorized strength, no equipment to train on, sitting around for eight or nine months painting rocks. if they are lucky 90 days before re-deploying the army begins to refill them with green kids straight out of AIT or advanced armor training. if they are even luckier they have time to get in a rotation to JROTC or NTC and get some realistic training for those new arrivals. if not so lucky they just take them off to combat and let em sink or swim.
this is not healthy. this is not an army on the way up but one on the way to a disaster. we need more and smarter soldiers. not more Cat IVs.
so far it is the willingness of these young men and women to serve, and to deploy multiple times, and to work grueling and dangerous 18 hour days 7 days a week that is the glue holding things together.
all the cheap fixes have been used; all the one-time-only gains so beloved of legislators trying to balance a budget and get out of town.
the question is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? or will they leave town and head into a golden retirement as that army collapses for lack of manpower, lack of money to repair and replace all the equipment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fixing those problems because billions were squandered on weapons systems that are a ridiculous legacy of a Cold War era long gone (viz. the f/22, the osprey, the navy's gold plated destroyers and aircraft carriers and, yes, nuclear submarines whose seeming future purpose is to replace rubber zodiac boats as the favorite landing craft of Spec Ops teams, at a cost of billions) meanwhile the pentagon, at the direction of your boss, marches rapidly ahead with deployment of an anti-missile system whose rockets have yet to actually get out of the launch tubes. at a cost of yet more multiple billions.
you say i blame your boss for things 3 or 4 levels below him that he can't possibly be controlling and quote accusations from present and former flag officers who he has never eyeballed personally. well the above items are things that he directly controls, or should; things he came into office vowing he was going to fix or change drastically. and in the latest QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dollar weapons systems that make no sense in the real world today. the same QDR quite correctly identifies an urgent need for MORE psyops and civil affairs and military police and far more troops who have foreign language training appropriate to where we fight. and we budget a paltry 191 million, i say MILLION, bucks to do all that. not even the cost of the periscopes on those oh-so-necessary submarines, or the instruments on one of those f22s.
this is what has my attention; this is what has me in a mood to question over and over and over, waiting for answers that never come, change that never comes, course corrections that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some specifics.
joe galloway
PS: those [tens of thousands of soldiers in fixed garrisons in germany who could not deploy] were called VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. they deployed. they formed the armored spear that penetrated kuwait and broke the republican guard. the garrisons were guarded, while they were gone, by the german army and police. they would have been so guarded in OIF too had we tried a bit of diplomacy instead of bitch-slapping Old Europe as your boss did at a crucial moment.
those bases in germany were paid for by germany; still are. and they are a good deal closer to the action at present and in the foreseeable future than fort riley, kansas. now we envision counting on rough and crude forward bases, occupied only occasionally, in places where we have such good friends and allies like the fellow who just ordered us to get out because we harumphed when he slaughtered a few hundred or thousand peaceful demonstrators against his theft of yet another democratic election.
you say that by doing this we are positioning ourselves better for the wars of the future. but what if, once again, a curtain of iron descends across Europe and once again the Fulda Gap must be guarded against the new Red Army of our good friend and ally Putin.
your boss is fond of saying that this or that thing is "unknowable." The most unknowable thing of all is who your enemy is going to be next time and where you are going to need allies and bases from which to attack or defend.
pulling out of europe and south korea may be one of the larger mistakes charged off against your boss five years from now or ten, if we are lucky enough to have a whole decade to repair some of the damage he has done while congress turned a blind eye, too busy doing earmarks for flea circus museums in dubuque and bridges to nowhere, alaska, to do the necessary oversight and questioning of cockamamy ideas with even more
dubious estimates of future savings of billions that begin dropping like a rock before the ink is even dry on the report.
all i can say is what the hell are you doing questioning my columns when you ought to be in there at the elbow of your boss reading those columns aloud to him every wednesday afternoon and urging him to pay attention to them.
best wishes
joe galloway
DaRita No. 4:
Thanks for these insights, joe. none of this is easy. Your perspective seems pretty fixed but I do appreciate the experience you bring to it.
Again, what bothers me most about your coverage is your implication that the people involved in all of this are dumb or have ill-intent or are so sure of what they know that they don't brook discussion. That's the part you're just way off on, friend.
This is tough stuff, and we're all hard at it, trying to do what's best for the country.
Best wishes.
Galloway response to DaRita No. 4:
i like to think that is what i am doing also, and it is a struggle that grows out of my obligation to and love for america's warriors going back 41 years as of last month.
there are many things we all could wish had happened.
i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, "You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don't quit now..."
Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty.
i could wish for so much.
i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time.
i could wish that Jackson's widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl.
those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war.
someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry.
Jg
DaRita No. 5:
I appreciate what you are saying but your continued implication that rumsfeld does not understand all that is at stake is wrong and offensive.
--------------------------
Galloway is using Ernie pyle's books (which he has the whole collection as a blueprint) to write,hes just changing the ww2 to Iraq,Vietnam,present day wars
http://hometown.aol.com/lzalbany65/myhomepage/
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
We Were Soldiers Once, and Honorable
[J.D. Henderson, Wednesday September 28, 2005 at 7:00pm EST]
This editorial from Knight-Ridder newspapers is worth reading. Before assuming that it is lefty-liberal anti-military speak, you should know it is written by Joseph Galloway, the author of We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.
If the lowest private fails, then others have failed in training, leading and directing that private. The chain runs from sergeant to lieutenant to captain to lieutenant colonel to colonel to one, two, three and four stars, on to the longest serving, most arrogant secretary of defense in our history, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and beyond him to the commander in chief, President Bush.
It's long past time for responsibility to begin flowing uphill in this administration. It's time for our leaders to take responsibility for what's being done in all our names and under our proud flag. It's time for Congress to do its job if the administration won't do its job.
Lt. Col Hal Moore: "I will leave no one behind" [DIGITALLY ENHANCED AUDIO!]
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechweweresoldiers7thcavalryaddress.html
Moore didnt know what he was doing in Nam, Killed his men.
MOORE LEFT SOME OF HIS DEAD TROOPS ON X-RAY!
Moore said he wouldnt leave any troop behind on the Battlefield dead or alive.
ArmChair General
"Didn’t you go back to the Ia Drang in March for Operation LINCOLN?"
Steven R. Hansen "Yes, we did return to the Ia Drang.
++In fact, we air assaulted back into XRay.
++It was quiet."
++The mission was to search for and retrieve the remains of some MIAs.( Missing in Action )
++We found them.
The battlefield had been cleaned up pretty good by both sides.
We found a scattering of stuff and I noticed the remains of one NVA soldier near the
"Ant Hill" that sheltered the command post during the battle.
Isnt it strange! Col. Moore said he brought every one back even the dead.
( page 198, We were Soldiers Once and Young.)Hardback
Moore said he wasnt leaving anyone on LZXRAY !
He did!, then he sneaks back to retrive the ones he left behind on X-Ray.
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p=2785&page=1
Memories of Vietnam
Submitted by Stephane Moutin-Luyat
Steve Hansen
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p&page=1&p=2785&page=7
Memories of Vietnam
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 by Stephane Moutin-Luyat
Steve Hansen, two-tour veteran of the Vietnam war, shares his thoughts and experiences in
this fascinating interview.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/03-25-2002/vo18no06_hal_moore.htm
The Real Hal Moore
Interview of Lt. General Harold G. Moore by William F. Jasper
TNA: Both in the book and the movie, your commitment and your promise to
your men, to bring them all home, dead or alive, comes through very
strongly.
Was that Army doctrine or was that purely Hal Moore?
Moore: No, that was not Army doctrine.
I was very close to my men.
When we were ordered to Vietnam in August 1965, I had been training
my battalion for 14 months.
I knew all my NCOs, my sergeants.
We trained together intensely.
We trusted each other, knew our lives depended on each other.
We were a family of fighting men.
Before we left for Vietnam, I gathered all my men on the parade ground
at Ft. Benning, Georgia, just like in the movie, and I told them that were
going into battle far from home against a tough enemy on his own turf.
I told them: "Some of us are going to die ? maybe me, certainly some
of you.
But I promise you this: If you go down, I?m going to bring you back.
And if I go down, I hope you bring me back."
In later years, I?ve had many of my troopers tell me that that promise
meant a great deal to them and helped them in battle, because they
knew if they went down that they would not be left lying on the ground
for the vultures, insects, and weather, but would be brought back to
their families for burial.
And I never lost a man in two wars, Korea or Vietnam.
After the Ia Drang battle, I was promoted, made commander of a
brigade of 3,000 men.
We lost a man on the Bong Son Plain.
He got separated from his unit.
I turned out the whole brigade and we hunted for him for two days.
We finally found him; he was dead, but we brought him home.
MOORE LEFT SOME OF HIS DEAD TROOPS ON X-RAY!
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/articles.php?p&page=1&p=2785&page=7
» Home > Personal Stories, Front Page Features > Memories of Vietnam
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memories of Vietnam
Submitted by Stephane Moutin-Luyat
The NCOs that came in as replacements were drawn from Army units in the States and Europe and they were trained, capable men. So to were some of the lower graded soldiers. And of course we received some privates direct from Basic and Advanced training. Later in the war almost every replacement would be raw meat.
In December I went on R&R to Hong Kong. Most of the men wanted Bangkok. It had a reputation for being cheap and wide open. I wanted Hong Kong because I wanted an escape from Viet Nam and anything like it. And while Hong Kong was Asian it was also British and a very nice place to be. I enjoyed my self immensely.
Shortly after my return I was sitting in the NCO club we built with some friends and looked around. Almost all the faces were new. Those of us who had been together at Benning stayed connected. But we were more reserved about the replacements. Why make a friend just to see him die.
Read LTC Moore’s after action report in full here
All those new recruits would soon experience combat. In January, the 1st Cav launched Operation MASHER in the populated coastal province of Binh Dinh, the biggest search & destroy operation in Vietnam to date, and once again the 1/7 and 3d Brigade would find themselves in heavy fighting, especially around the hamlet of Phung Du north of Bong Son. It’s always been one of the most interesting operation for me, what can you tell us about it? it must have been a complete change of scenery from the Central Highlands.
When I returned from R&R I got a new job. Warren Adams, the company First Sergeant, pulled me up to Company Headquarters to be the field logistics sergeant. It was not a real job, in the sense of being authorized in the official Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E) but it was necessary function during operations.
D Company was not a maneuver element. The three platoons, Recon, Heavy Mortar, and Anti-Tank were combat support elements and their location and employment were usually established by the Battalion Operations Officer or S3. The D company CP was usually, but not always, collocated with the heavy mortars. One of our missions was to monitor the battalion command radio frequency and track the location of the other companies. By staying abreast of the situation we were ready to reconstitute the battalion Tactical Operations Center (TOC) if the principal TOC was overrun or lost during an air lift.
Bong Son was my first operation as a member of the company field headquarters.
We had operated in populated areas around Qui Nhon during our initial toughing up phase and while we were reconstituting after the Ia Drang. But we had not made any significant contact. And the populace, at least on the surface, seemed loyal to the South Vietnamese Government. At Bong Son we would engage NVA regulars again and much of the populace was openly hostile to us.
Having said this, I also must say that I did not participate directly in any combat at Bong Son. But I did monitor the radios and I was very aware of the intense fighting that was going on just a kilometre or two from our support locations. And, for a time, we were located at the airstrip and I saw the casualties come in. For me, it was kind of sureal. I was there but I was somewhat detached. I think it was a coping mechanism. A bit of guilt for being relatively safe and a bit of relief for not being at risk.
We operated on the Bong Son plain twice. In January 66 and again in March (my recal may be faulty). No matter what the higher ups called the operations there we called them Bong Son One and Bong Son Two. At reunions we still talk about them. Most agree that the actual combat was worse than anything at XRay even though the tactical situations never was,
At this time of my life the events of Bong Son One and Two run together.
Here are some things I recall.
Riding by truck all night from An Khe, down Highway 19 to Qui Nhon and then up Highway 1 to Bong Son, immediately boarding Hueys and making a combat assault. My understanding is we did this because Bong Son was to far from An Khe to stage the assault from there. But the Hueys could fly empty from An Khe and arrive with enough fuel to stage the assault. In so doing, we achieved tactical surprise. It was a well conceived and brilliantly executed maneuver.
Walking in sand, sleeping in sand, eating sand, trying to dig in in sand, hating sand.
Watching a Charlie model Huey gun ship coming in with fuel streaming out of it. The left side opened up like a shark bite and the gunner dead and hanging by a strap. Aparently one or more of the rockets in the missing pod had detonated on launch or been hit by ground fire.
Going to the S1 tent to pick up replacements. Most were 82nd Airborne veterans of the Dominican Republic. On the way back we passed by Charlie Med. There were more dead GIs wrapped in ponchos there than the 82nd had lost during their entire mission in the DR.
Learning Sergeant First Class Kennedy, a C Company hero in the Ia Drang, had been killed by friendly fire. Fire from a 106 in our own Anti Tank platoon.
Hearing an explosion nearby and finding out one of our 82nd Airborne replacements had snagged a grenade when he was setting his 81 mm mortar bipod down. It blew his arm off and he died almost immediately in front of me.
Seeing a senior NCO (not a D Company man) throw his boots down a well and reporting them stolen while he slept.
Seeing Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky and his wife in matching black flight suits walking among the ordinary soldiers and thanking them for their service.
Showing no interest in seeing Nancy Sinatra put on a USO show.
Seeing those damn pictures in Life magazine and feeling guilty and relieved all over again.
====================================================================
Didn’t you go back to the Ia Drang in March for Operation LINCOLN? not sure 1/7 was involved in this one, but after Bong Son the Cav was known as the "swing" division, alternating between the coastal plain and the Central Highlands. How was your perception of the war at that time after several months in country? I guess morale was pretty high in the 1st Cav, did you have the feeling that you were turning the tide in Vietnam, were you told anything about the big picture?
Yes, we did return to the Ia Drang. In fact, we air assaulted back into XRay. It was quiet. The mission was to search for and retrieve the remains of some MIAs. We found them.
The battlefield had been cleaned up pretty good by both sides. We found a scattering of stuff and I noticed the remains of one NVA soldier near the "Ant Hill" that sheltered the command post during the battle.
====================================================================
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We Were Soldiers Once and Young written from WW2 Ernie Pyles books
Joe Galloway has all of Ernie Pyle's books.
A blueprint Galloway follows to the T.
Joe Galloway has been living the life of Ernie Pyle, He took over Pyles Idenity in
1963, Talk about idenity theft, He writes like him, He talks like him, everything
Pyle likes and dislikes Galloway dose also.
Pyle loved the Infantry,so dose Galloway.
Pyle hates War, so dose Galloway
everything that Pyle did in WW2, Galloway did in Vietnam.
+Plagiarism mainly consists of borrowing whole passages from another writer
without giving that writer credit.
From the works Ernie Plye
+There no one will lie to you; no one will try to put a spin on the truth.
+Those for whom death waits around the next bend or across the next rice paddy have no
+time and little taste for the games that are played with such relish in the rear.
+No one ever lied to me within the sound of the guns.
Galloway replaces WW2, with Vietnam.
+It may also entail in a more sophisticated scam borrowing someone else’s ideas
or structure without attribution.
When you read We Were Soldiers Once and Young, It's like reading Ernie Pyles
"Here Is Your War"!
Joe Galloway Military reporter VITENAM co author of We Were Soldiers Once and Young,
has been PLAGERIZING the works of Ernie Pyle and merroring Pyles life,
We Were Soldiers Once and Young has Ernie Pyle's style of writing in it.
Joe Galloway has the complete works of Ernie Pyle.
Joe Galloway took this from Ernie Pyles works as true, But even Ridgway got it
wrong.
Joe Galloway took Ernies stament as fact as it is in Ernie Pyles works and makes an entire
speech about a untrue statement.
From Ernie Pyles War. by James Tobin 1997
Hardback page 107
Softback page107
As Ernie and his friends listened, Ridgway recited a favorite passage from
memory. It was Kiplings tribute to war reporters:
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
Joe Galloway from
The Military and the Media:One Man's Experience below
"I would leave you with these lines from Rudyard Kipling in which he tried to
explain his relationship with the British Army. They explain something of what I feel:
I've eaten your bread and salt,
I've drunk your water and wine;
The deaths ye’ve died I've watched beside,
And the lives that ye’ve led were mine.
But the verse is to Departmental Ditties, Not reporters
Prelude
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/kipling_ind.html
Prelude
(to Departmental Ditties)
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
Was there aught that I did not share
In vigil or toil or ease, --
One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?
I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise -- but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.
Rudyard Kipling
There are more Plagerised Ernie Pyle in this speech
Click HERE for Media Relations page.
The Military and the Media:
One Man's Experience
Joe Galloway, Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report
Prepared for delivery 22 October, 1996 at the Commandant's Lecture Series,
The Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
Thanks to Mr Galloway for permission to use it here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I can think of no place more appropriate than the Air War College to share the following bit of personal data which was left out of the very kind introductory remarks by the General: I want you to know that I have personally been bombed, rocketed, strafed and napalmed by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Aviation and the air forces of sovereign states of South Vietnam, India and Pakistan, and maybe a couple more I don't even remember now.
You will note that I am not an inconsiderable target and yet I am here today, unscathed, unscratched and ready to talk. I hold no grudges; I'm just eternally grateful that in those few instances some guys couldn't shoot worth a s--t. I hasten to add that in literally hundreds of other instances, when the chips were really down, close air support kept me and a lot of other more deserving guys alive.
My one enduring image of what air power really means is one that I have carried in my mind and in my heart for more than 30 years. In the Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965 1 found myself with a battalion of the lst Cavalry Division, surrounded by two regiments of North Vietnamese regulars, 400 Americans versus 2,000 enemy. We were clinging desperately to a small clearing called Landing Zone X-Ray. On the morning of the second day we were under attack from three sides. Wave upon wave of enemy soldiers seemed to be literally growing out of the elephant grass. On the southeast perimeter, no more than 50 meters from where I lay, two platoons had been overrun and the line was wavering and cracking. The sergeant major came over, kicked me in the ribs and invited me to get up, make use of my M-16 and defend myself. Our forward air controller, Air Force Lieutenant Charlie Hastings, set aside his rifle and spoke into his radio the code word Broken Arrow. It signaled: "American unit in danger of being overrun."
With that, every available air resource in South Vietnam was diverted to our control. They came by the dozens and scores: Air Force, Navy, Marines. Old Spads, F-100's, F-4s, A-6,s. Charlie Hastings stacked them up over our heads in layers a thousand feet apart from 7,000 to 35,000 feet and they literally built a wall of steel and napalm around us. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
In the middle of all this dust, smoke and confusion a tragic friendly fire incident occurred: A Supersabre unloaded two cans of napalm right into the command post area. They burst no more than 15 meters to the right of the command group and one scared reporter. Several American GI's were engulfed in the flames. I helped carry one of them out of the burning grass and I can still hear his screams and feel the bare bones of his ankles where the flesh had cooked off rubbing in the palms of my hands to this day. Then I witnessed something very important; something that placed it all in perspective: Lieutenant Charlie Hastings stood, heartstricken and trembling, before the battalion commander and tried to apologize for the terrible error. The commander looked him in the eyes and said: "Don't worry about that one, Charlie. Just keep ‘em coming."
Charlie Hastings kept them coming and that air support was the difference between life and death for the rest of us. That day, just one day past my 24th birthday, I learned that war is a hard and terrible business. Mistakes are made, but you must put them behind you and deal with the job at hand. By the way, Charlie Hastings served 30 years with the Air Force and retired a colonel three years ago. He's living the good life down in Arizona, trying hard to catch up on a list of Honey Do's that somehow accumulated over about 30 years. Charlie never forgot what it's like down there in the mud with the foot soldiers; and none of us ever forgot what it's like to holler HELP and have it rain down from the skies. Nobody ever won a battle or a war all by himself. It demands teamwork. If they teach you nothing else here and at the Army and Navy War Colleges, I pray to God they teach you that.
I was asked to give you my reflections on the Military-Media Relationship. That's awfully high-toned for someone who got his start covering Marine platoons in Vietnam in early 1965, worked his way up to Infantry companies and the occasional battalion-size operation and has always felt slightly uncomfortable with anything larger than that. I will confess, right up front, that I am partial to the Infantry; always have been. Some might find that puzzling if not perverse; that a civilian reporter, given a choice, would choose the hardest and least glamorous part of any war as the part he wishes to cover.
But there is method in that madness, and I would recommend it to my younger colleagues who may one day be called on to cover war. There, in the mud, is where war is most visible and easiest understood.
------------From Ernie Plye works also+
+There no one will lie to you; no one will try to put a spin on the truth. Those for whom death waits around the next bend or across the next rice paddy have no time and little taste for the games that are played with such relish in the rear.
+No one ever lied to me within the sound of the guns.
---------------
=There, at the cutting edge of war, you find yourself welcomed and needed --- welcomed by the soldier as a token that someone in the outside world cares about him and how he lives and dies; Needed for the simple reason that an Infantry company or platoon in combat always needs another set of hands to carry ammo or haul water to the wounded or to pick up a rifle when the chips are really down. There you earn the sort of friendship that cannot be acquired in any other field of human endeavor --- there you forge bonds that will endure for a lifetime.
A few years ago I shook hands with one such battlefield friend and brother, agreeing on the terms by which we would jointly author a book. The lawyer who was negotiating the deal with the publisher asked to see the contract between us. We explained that there was no written contract; just that handshake. He looked horrified; we looked at him with pity. "You see," my buddy explained, "We have trusted each other with our lives; this is just a little matter of some money."
There is no secret in all of this. In every war there are always correspondents who walk this road; men and women whose fear of death is overcome by a fear of never having known the truth of war. The numbers are always disproportionate and they grow more so as rules and pools and fools proliferate.
When I look back at the military/media experience in the Gulf war it is with sadness for lost opportunities on both sides of the equation. Because of poor planning, paranoia and over-control, the details of a great victory of American arms were virtually lost to history. The crucial Army tank battles took place far from the lens of any camera; the Navy was over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind; and although the Air Force contributed all that nifty smart bomb film the vital human element of the Air Force story was largely missing, and we were left with the false image of a Nintendo War. The only thing the Pentagon had to hide in the Gulf was the finest military force this country has ever put into the field, and it did that very efficiently.
I am here to argue for more openness, more contact, more freedom between your profession and mine. In this one instance I believe familiarity would breed not contempt but trust and respect. My knowledge of and respect for you was born on the battlefields of Vietnam, learned alongside men like Lt. Charlie Hastings. That respect was reinforced by my experience in the Gulf, where I was the exception that proved the rule. There were around 1,000 correspondents accredited in the Gulf; 140 were permitted into the combat pools. There was precisely one reporter who went to war with a personal recommendation from General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in his hip pocket, and you're looking at him.
How this came to pass is just another war story. In 1965 in Vietnam I marched along some bad roads in the Central Highlands with a Vietnamese Airborne battalion and made the acquaintance of a young Army adviser, Major Norm Schwarzkopf. The battalion commander who taught Charlie Hastings and me some important lessons in the Ia Drang Valley in November, 1965, was a splendid combat commander named Hal Moore. Long before that, Hal Moore taught infantry tactics to hundreds of young cadets at West Point, including one named Norm Schwarzkopf. He even persuaded young Schwarzkopf to choose the Infantry as his branch, against the best advice of his father who warned him that he would be forever giving up any hope of making the rank of general as a mud-foot Infantry officer.
I dealt fairly and honestly with both those men, as I have always tried to do with all men, and what goes around comes around. Life may be short but memories are long.
Thanks to that trust, I was sent down to the 24th Mech two weeks before G-Day. On my first night there the Division CG called me to his TOC and pulled the cover off the battle map. What he said, as my eyes followed the arrows and the hair stood up on the back of my neck was this: I trust you because Schwarzkopf trusts you; but more than that, I trust you because you're coming with me. I never heard a more compelling argument for operational security in my life.
During the days before G-Day I visited every brigade and battalion in the division; saw the preparations; checked on the OR rates of the equipment; ate a lot of really bad chow; got lost traveling at night in the desert about fourteen times. Did a lot of listening and looking. And then we rode to battle together. I emerged from that experience with a damned good story of an American armored division at war .... and with something far more important: A whole new crop of comrades-in-arms and friends-for-life. We had trusted each other with our lives.
My regret, and one that I believe is now shared by the more thoughtful military leaders today, is that there was not an experienced team of reporters, photographers and cameramen traveling with every Brigade which crossed the berm into Kuwait and Iraq; stationed with every Air Force squadron which saw action; and on the bridge of every Navy ship offshore. Too much of the war either went uncovered, or the pooled dispatches and film took so long to reach the rear that the war was over and the stories never saw the light of day. More importantly, I think we will all have cause to regret the fact that a new generation of correspondents was not free to accompany a new generation of captains and majors of all the services to war --- to learn the ropes, earn the trust and build the bonds that last a lifetime.
Some of you seated here today --- the best and brightest of our nation's defenders --- are convinced that the press is your enemy. In any similar gathering of reporters there would, no doubt, be some who believe the same thing of you. This is a national tragedy.... and one that each of us has an obligation and a duty to do everything we can to repair and heal. There is more than enough blame and fault to go around, but that is not the point. Somehow my mind keeps going back to what my old friend Hal Moore tried to explain to that lawyer: once we have trusted each other with our lives .... everything else is small change.
Since Vietnam, I've thought long and hard about the relationship between your profession and mine -- professions that the founding fathers of this nation thought so important that they included specific definitions of our duties and responsibilities and rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
A generation of officers emerged from that searing, bitter, orphaned war looking for someone to blame for the failures manifest in our nation's defeat in Vietnam. Many chose to blame the media: Walter Cronkite lost the war; Dan Rather lost the war; Peter Arnett lost the war. By choosing the easy way out they obviated the painful need to carefully examine the root causes of our failure to win. By placing full blame and responsibility on the press they could avoid delving deeper, peeling to the underlying layers of the onion and exposing the more important failures of political leadership at home and military leadership right down the chain of command from the Joint Chiefs to the commander, U.S. Forces Vietnam and on down to Corps and Division.
How much easier it was to simply shoot the messengers. This red herring was dragged through the 0 Club bars of a thousand posts for a decade and more after the end of the Vietnam war. It became an article of faith for a generation of officers, and that led directly to the over-control and the spin control that allowed the Gulf War to be fought in a near-vacuum. Note that I say NEAR VACUUM, because nature abhors a vacuum.
For all the faultless planning and flawless execution of the plan, for all the success at locking the media out of the loop, locking them up in hotel briefing rooms far to the rear, in the end it was two very public television events that had much more to do with shaping the end of that war than all of the actions on or above the battlefield.
Those two events both occurred three days into the war. One was Gen. Schwartzkopf's Mother of All Briefings, a masterful exposition of what had occurred and why. Near the end of that briefing, flush with the feeling that he had knocked the ball over the fence, the general was asked a simple question: Have you achieved your objectives? He sang beautifully about how he had not wanted this war, had hoped to avoid fighting it, didn’t like seeing people dying in combat, and, yes, he supposed that his prime objective, the liberation of Kuwait, had been achieved. In short, my old friend allowed his bullfrog mouth to overload his tadpole ass. An hour later his phone began ringing with calls from the White House: Wasn't it time to begin working out the cease fire? No, said the general, he was still 48 or more hours away from completion of the plan; his tanks were still engaged heavily with units of the Republican Guard; the 24th Mech was only now pulling into place to close the sack behind the enemy in the Euphrates Valley. The voice on the phone responded, "General, that's not what you just told a worldwide TV audience of more than two billion people."
In the field, the commander of the 7th Corps armored phalanx had not heard Schwarzkopf's briefing. Gen. Fred Franks now knows that he should have had his TOC wired to receive CNN and he should have had a smart iron major sitting there monitoring it minute by minute. If he had done that, he would have known that the war plan he was following had just accelerated from late middle game to end game. When he supervised the rewriting of Field Manual 100-5, the successor to Air-Land Battle, Gen. Franks was careful to include that recommendation for the benefit of the next generation of commanders.
The second very public event was the broadcast of film of the so-called Highway of Death and its scenes of miles and miles of shattered and burning wreckage strewn along Highway 8. With the help of J-STARS imagery and the on-the-ground firsthand knowledge of a young Army major who months before had driven that highway and made careful note of the natural choke points, the Air Force had hit those choke points at the head and tail of the long retreating column of Iraqis fleeing Kuwait City. The film of the Highway of Death, unanalyzed, gave the impression that thousands and thousands of Iraqis, innocent and guilty alike, had been slaughtered. Even General Colin Powell believed that what had happened was a turkey shoot, and, in his words, Americans don't indulge in turkey shoots. He increased the pressure on General Schwarzkopf to conclude arrangements for an immediate cease fire.
Had there been even one or two reporters and cameramen on the ground, to take a firsthand look at that highway, we would have known then and there that the Highway of Death was, in fact, a Highway of Dead Toyotas. That when the choke points were closed and the column ceased movement all the drivers and passengers instantly knew what was coming, and instantly got out of their vehicles and beat feet out into the desert. That the casualties in the great turkey shoot were perhaps no more than 150 or 200 killed.
By locking out the media, by cutting them off from timely communication of their reports to the rear, the commanders in Riyadh and Washington had perhaps taken a certain amount of revenge for perceived sins of the media in covering Vietnam, but they had without doubt outsmarted themselves. A perfect example of what our British cousins call: Too clever by half.
I've since made a couple of other deployments, including Korea and Haiti, and closely watched the deployments to Somalia and Bosnia. Some of the lessons learned in the Gulf seem to be being applied with a good deal more foresight and planning by the new generation of commanders. There have been bobbles and missteps on both sides but nothing that I consider fatal.
But there is still that underlying suspicion: Your peers tell you that I, and people like me, are YOUR enemy. My peers tell me that you, and people like you, are MY enemy. The correct answer to both groups is: Bullshit! I much prefer to MAKE my own friends and enemies the old-fashioned way. I EARN them, and I am proud of them. I stubbornly refuse to inherit them. And I recommend that course to you as well.
What I am telling you is that familiarity far more often a breeds respect and friendship. Because of my experience in battle in Vietnam, when I was younger and skinnier and much dumber, I have been given the honor and privilege of open access to your tightly guarded world. When I boarded a Huey and flew away from Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley on 16 November 1965, 1 left knowing that I was alive to tell this story only because 79 young Americans had given their lives to save mine, and in that same effort 130 others had been shattered by terrible wounds. I knew that I owed them, and those like them, a lifelong obligation to try to understand their world and to tell the their story to a country that too easily forgets the true cost of war.
Someday, some of you in this room will wear stars and carry the heavy responsibility of high command. Inevitably the day will come when you must lead your young lieutenants and captains into the horror that is war. When that day comes, or in the days before it comes, the phone will likely ring and some public affairs puke will be on the line asking you how many media pukes you want to take with you. When that day comes, the right answer is: yes sir, yes sir, I’ll take three bags full, but send me the brightest and best ones you have. Then farm them out with your lieutenants and captains and let them go to war together. The experience of war will create bonds between them that cannot be broken; the young reporters will learn to love the soldiers and airmen just as you and your lieutenants have learned; and in the end 99 percent of the coverage that flows from this experience will be entirely positive.
I want you to do this because it is right, and I ask you to do this so that there will be others like me thirty years down the road who know and love your profession and can translate it for the American public. I ask this because my time as a combat correspondent has, sadly, come to an end. All these years I have been free to go to wars, to do the .really dumb stuff that I always tried to conceal from my mother and my insurance agent, because I had a strong, loving wife at home to take care of our young sons if anything ever happened to me. She had all the ticket punches of a military wife, 11 moves in 22 years, sudden disappearances of her husband for long periods of time, living with the knowledge that a phone call or a knock on the door could bring news that she was a widow. She handled it all perfectly. Last January, after a brief, brutal battle with cancer, my wife, Theresa died. I am now trying to be father and mother to two boys, 16 and 18, and I find I am no longer free to grab my rucksack and my helmet and instinctively head for the sound of the guns. My obligation and promise to her and to our sons must take precedence.
I thank you and all those like you for sharing your world with me. You have shared the last two sips of water in your canteen on a hot jungle trail; you've shared the only cup of hot coffee in a hundred miles on a cold desert morning in the Euphrates Valley; and always you have shared what is in your hearts. Your world, your profession, has given me the best friends of my life and both the greatest happiness and greatest sorrow I have ever known.
+I would leave you with these lines from Rudyard Kipling in which he tried to explain his relationship with the British Army. They explain something of what I feel:
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
God bless you and God bless our country.
Posted by: Russell l. Ross at January 11, 2007 12:20 AM