About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior

Rating:
Summary: Eye Opener
Review: Hackworth has produced a well written and provocative book concerning his time in the USA Army beginning with his enlistment at the end of WWII. His thoughts on the Vietnam War and the Army's command structure and bureaucracy created a lasting impression with me. Obviously he writes from his own perspective, but many of his ideas are worth discussing and giving more thought. A great book about one person's Vietnam experience.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing and Insightful--But Disturbing
Review: About Face is an odessey to read. Like battle itself, it is full of pages of sheer terror separated by long passages of nervous boredom as Hackworth sought to find some identity apart from battle. The Army made him a man, and as long as there were wars to fight he honored "his mother" the military with an almost unbelieveable string of courageous achievements in battle. But when the time to kill was over, Hackworth lost himself, as he more or less admits. He candidly admits not only his many adultries but his fundamental inability to honor his wife and children. He admits constant theft, and tolerated any immorality that would help his unit. Through two thirds of the book you want to enlist to be a stud like Hack. In the last pages you want to slap him in the face for betraying the Army. He was a law unto himself (as the title to the penultimate chapter confesses), both as a maverick in the Pentagon or as the quasi-warlord of a fire base in Vietnam. Many, including Hack, have suggested that he was the model of Colonel Kurtz in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Whether or not this is true, the comparison is chillingly apt, only Hackworth may be more frightening. Hackworth was genuinely patriotic, undeniably courageous and damn effective in killing Chinese in Korea and Vietcong. But this same warrior spirit refused to bow to any moral principal except his own concept of loyalty to and conern for his troops. "The horror, horror." He saw clearly that guerrilla warfare required a guerilla-style response from the Army (a lesson of continuing significance in modern political battles like Afganistan), and he clearly understood the political nature of the Vietnam War. But the moral relativism of his "platoon-as-tribe" principles could not be extended to a wider audience precisely because they were unprincipled. Hackworth's tactical advice is still needed, and his war stories are as good as they get. But he unwittingly embodies the horror and paradox of the modern warrior: To serve the highest principles of man, such as freedom and justice, while destroying men, and perhaps himself, in the process.

Rating:
Summary: A born warrior
Review: A juvenile delinquent, Hackworth, flees from his confinement and joins the Merchant Marine. Later, he pays off a wino to sign a fraudulent affidavit, as Hackworth's "father" (he was an orphan), that allows him to enter the Army at the age of fifteen. This is the beginning of this book, which ends with this man, now a Colonel, venting condemnation of America's tactics in Vietnam in the press, and his subsequent persecution by Army investigators, in a harrowing, white-knuckle ending.
A man is lucky to find his calling, and Hackworth was born to be a warrior. In a way, this book is an inspiration. It makes one want to be as good in one's profession as Hackworth was in his. And no matter what one's occupation is, one can identify with Hackworth's frustration with and anger at the "perfumed princes" who rose to the top in the Army he knew, and whos' equivalents exist in every field of endeavor. Don't you know people who don't give a grape-skin about the higher goals of their profession, and who live only to feed their ambition? Reading this book is like sitting down and listening to somebody who knows the score.