I have written three books, the first of which was The Vietnam Primer, a little handy-dandy handbook, that told the grunt how to fight the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. The book was read by most of the grunts. But, unfortunately, most of the top brass did not read it. We know the results of what happened in Vietnam.

The second book was About Face. I was motivated to write the book because I wanted to tell the American people the truth about Vietnam. We lost the war, not because of the incompetency of the warriors we had on the ground, or the kids that were up in the helicopters, or the fighter aircraft. We lost the war because of the incompetency of the top brass, not only in uniform but those policymakers in Washington, D.C.

Another point I make in About Face was that I had learned about war from tough old sergeants and captains who had fought the big war. They believed that if you didn't get it right, you died. These soldiers had no problem thumping you in the back of the head with a two-by-four if you made a mistake. I came up from that kind of army - a highly disciplined army with mentors that were hard task masters. That army saw too many young people die in Guam, Saipan, Guadalcanal, and Normandy.

They were my teachers, and I thought they had taught me fairly well. I passed those lessons on to young people over the years in Korea and Vietnam. I wanted those lessons to be recorded because I realized that the lessons I had been taught came from some old sergeant that had fought in World War I. Some old sergeant that had fought in the Mexican War had taught him. It went right back to Jericho, when the walls came tumbling down. Too frequently, these lessons become lost.

I wrote the book with the intention of telling the truth about Vietnam: that we didn't win all the battles. We didn't lose the war because of bad soldiers. We lost the war because of bad politicians and bad generalship. The good thing about About Face is that since I wrote it, I have seen soldiers in tanks in Desert Shield reading it in artillery positions. There are people here tonight I had the pleasure of being with in Desert Storm.

Or if I go into the jungles of Cambodia with an Australian patrol, a guy will pull open his rucksack, and there will be About Face. I say, "I wrote that." Where ever I have turned, from battlefields in Croatia to Sarajevo, the French Foreign Legion is reading the book. It gives me a great thrill that the lessons learned are being passed on, and perhaps our young people will profit from the lessons of World War II, Korea, and all the way back to the Biblical times of war.

I wrote Hazardous Duty, my new book, which I did not intend to write, from all my notebooks of the military conflicts and affairs I had covered all through the years. It was not until Mogadiscio, October 3, 1993, when I understood what was going on in my country. At that time, it was brought home very personally, with the death of a young Ranger sergeant, who died with seventeen other of his comrades; a hundred more were wounded. His name was Sergeant Casey Joyce, and when he was a little boy, he played with my daughters in Germany. His father was a friend of mine. It brought it all home to me on a personal basis - the tragedy of what happened in Somalia.

Wen I examined what happened in Somalia, I realized we had made exactly the same mistakes we made in Vietnam. We had a very heavy dependence on fire power; we had a heavy dependence on technology. We had a total arrogance of what we could and could not do. We failed to have a good appreciation of what the enemy could do. We treated them as we treated the Viet Cong, just a bunch of guys running around barefooted that we could wipe out with a couple of bomb strikes. We had learned not one thing from that terrible war.

That was what gave me the motivation to record the history of all the post-Cold War events in order to allow the American people to understand what is going on with our military and why we need to make changes. When I looked at Casey Joyce's death, it brought home the point of all of the other grunts who have been wasted in battle and who were badly served.

I go back to the initial forces we sent to Guadalcanal in 1942. They were all ill-prepared, ill-trained, and carried the weapons their fathers carried in the previous war. Our marines on Guadalcanal carried the 0-3 rifle - the bolt action rifle made in 1903. They fired the Browning machine gun their grandfathers had fired in World War I. When my unit went to Korea, we carried a machine gun my grandfather had used in World War I and a Browning automatic rifle dated 1918 that was used in World War I.

We tried to stop Soviet tanks with a 2.36 bazooka, which was like throwing an ice cream cone at the tank, and the bazooka didn't have a big effect on them unless you hit the driver in the eye. This was the same bazooka that Jim Gavin's paratroopers used in 1943 when his regiment, the 505 parachute infantry regiment, was using to try to stop the German panzer tanks, and it didn't work.

Jim Gavin, a colonel, wrote a seething report. It said, "I look at my soldiers, and I see them dead, holding this bazooka on their chest and a German track mark across their crushed bodies. Why don't we have a better weapon?" Yet, seven years later, during the beginning of the killing fields of Korea, we were trying to stop Soviet tanks with that very same weapon. Look what we went into Vietnam with! The equipment was from the previous war. I can go forward to every kind of battle and explain the technical areas where we were deficient.

In Desert Storm we had inadequate equipment - when we knew we were facing an opponent with a major capacity to deliver massive, lethal, chemical and biological weapons. I looked at the gas masks the kids were wearing, and it was all stamped 1950. This was the same gas mask I carried forty years before in Korea. In Somalia, I saw the Rangers fighting with a rifle, a machine gun, and with other equipment their fathers carried in Vietnam.

When Casey Joyce was killed, he had a protective vest on. There was nothing in the back. The slug went in the back and hit the vest in the front turned around and came back and took his life. It is always the grunt that is the lowest priority. It is always the one of dying age - about nineteen or twenty - that pays this terrible price. It is crazy to me that we send the warrior into the arena with the lion, and he invariably goes in with a broken sword and a worn out pair of sandals.

It seems like we never learn. We make the same mistakes again and again on every battlefield. It is a kind of disease that affects the high brass of the military. Now it has a medical definition; it is called C.R.S.: "Can't Remember Shit." We make the same mistakes again and again.

These mistakes are in the area of leadership, equipment, and national policy. The only improvement I have seen for the past fifty-one years as a warrior or a reporter of warriors is we have a better body bag today. It now has a zipper. We go into the field with both flawed policy and equipment because of bad politics - pork that drives buying the wrong equipment and greed on the part of a lot of military industrial contractors. We puff up our enemies list in order to puff up our weapons list.

Today we have all this really great equipment you saw displayed in Desert Storm. Everything seems to be Stealth. Everything seems to be gold-plated. Everything is exotic and has bells and whistles on it. I would not be surprised if the pilots wore Stealth shorts. But, meanwhile, the grunts of dying age go into war with the same gear their fathers or grandfathers had.

I have seen mistakes in military policy made from Korea to Bosnia to, this week in Iraq. We never seem to get it right. We have not won a war since World War II. We had a draw and a bunch of losses, but we haven't had a win. It is because we moved away at the top - the kind of leadership that tells it like it is, and is straight-shooting, knows what is going on, and is not afraid to tell the boss what the truth is. This leadership is not afraid to put the truth over their career. We have developed many people at the top who are self-serving. This came about, I believe, because of the Vietnam War when we had people rush in, command a unit for six months, and rush out. Nobody was concerned about what was going on down at the bottom.

Real leadership would have taken Saddam Hussein out in 1991. We went to a great amount of effort, spent billions of dollars, seven months of time and deployed 600,000 of the finest warriors this country has ever produced to Saudi Arabia to move into Iraq. We had Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard on the ropes, ready to go down for the count. Just when it was time to finish him and win, the president says, "I think we should back off now; the war is getting a little bloody." Not that war is not always bloody.

The president turned to Colin Powell, his military adviser - Powell is not a warrior but a military and politically correct individual. Powell chose to go along with the president. Powell called Schwarzkopf up and said, "Let's end the show." A hundred- hour show is a good logo. It has a certain resonance to it. The Hundred-Hour War. Schwarzkopf, instead of saying, "To hell with this; Let me talk to the boss and tell him we have gone to all this effort," and said, This guy Saddam Hussein is another Adolf Hitler. He has mass weapons of destruction that he will use. He has used them against the Iranians and the Kurds. He is one bad hombre with the fourth largest army in the world. We have got to take him." Then, if the president refused what "Stormin Norman" used as a good argument, had I been the Commander, I would have just unplugged the phone and gone in and kicked his ass and finished him off. That is the kind of leadership we need in America.

We are talking about the dorks that make policy in America. They don't have to necessarily wear a uniform. They can be decked out in a civilian suit.

In November of 1995, I was asked by Newsweek to write a major piece on the consequences of our going into Bosnia. I chose to follow the three elements of infantry fighting: the weather, the terrain, and the enemy. When I addressed the issue of the enemy, I said one of the biggest hassles we were going to run into was in Yugoslavia, which was a battlefield I knew well. I had been there four times for Newsweek, and I had grown up there fifty-one years ago as a little kid, confronting Yugoslavia when they were trying to kill all the Italians north of Trieste. So I understood the Yugoslavians' minds.

I wrote the piece. In the piece, I explained that booby traps and mines were a serious problem. We had to be prepared for that. Off I went to Germany and joined the First Armored Division. I talked to the troops. I went to Bosnia and joined an infantry battalion. That is the way I always operate. I go to the bottom level, a platoon company and stay with them for a month or so, and they forget I'm a reporter, and they treat me like the old sarge.

They start asking me if this is the best place to put the machine gun. What do you think the avenue of approach is? That way they forget I am there, and I start seeing the truth, and I start seeing how effective their chain of command is. Are they being looked after? Are they being fed? What kind of treatment are they receiving from their leadership? I have to say our military today is the finest I have ever seen.

I am with a rifle company, and it is getting late at night. The rifle company has cleared a path through a minefield. I decide to leave A Company, which I was with, and spend some time with D Company, who was across the mine field. So the first sergeant was giving me the honor of being the first guy to zip down the mine field after it was cleared. I was all set to go. They had these sniffer dogs and the dogs sniffed the fields to determine whether there were mines there. They had all this fancy equipment to detect the mines, and engineers removed them. The third echelon had these huge tanks which were about 60 tons a pop and had a one ton roller on them. They rolled back and forth, and they didn't roll the road once; they rolled it three times.

The first sarge said, "O.K. Hack, you can pop over there now." I couldn't get my Japanese 4-wheel drive out of the mud. It was stuck. They were trying to pull me out. While they were trying to do that, they ran the M-60 tank recovery vehicle down the road, and they got about half-way down the road and hit this huge mine and tore the tank apart and ripped it off the track. I was thankful I didn't go down that road.

I left there, and three weeks later I went to Newsweek, and I found a letter on my desk. It was glowing. It was from the White House. I opened the letter. It was from the National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake. It said, "Dear Colonel Hackworth: I have read your piece in Newsweek, and I would like to tell you that you are completely all wet about mines and booby traps." He said, "We have these dog sniffers that can sniff a mine. We have these super mine-detectors that can find a mine. We have got these rollers that can roll over the mine and blow them up, so you wrote all this stuff about mines, and you do not know what the hell you are talking about."

Here I am with fifty-one years of tripping around mind fields, and the first guy I ever saw die was a captain in Italy in 1946, who tripped on a mine, and it turned him into purple mush. We put him into a body bag, which was a mattress cover and flung him into the back of a truck. Since that time I have seen mines for three years in the Korean War, for five years in Vietnam, and also in all the little wars I have seen as a reporter. Plenty of mines all over the world - 120 million of them, as a matter of fact.

I know a little about mines. I even went to the special Warfare, Mines, and Demolition Course, which is one of the finest in the world. I got this dork in civilian clothes who has never worn a uniform telling me about mines. I start thinking, "Wait a minute, this is the same guy that is telling the president about getting into places like Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti, and all the other hot spots that we stumble in and we get clobbered." No wonder we get clobbered. We have people at the top advising the main man and, they don't know what is going on, both in uniform and in civilian gear.

Another part of the flawed strategy is we get sucked into wars by the tube. The tube shows Haitians in the middle of a killing field, Somalians starving, Bosnians in a blood bath, and suddenly we have to rush in there and do something when our national security is not involved. The weapons acquisition, which brings us equipment we don't need, is brought about by senators, congressmen, and congresswomen who are into pork, and people who make those weapons who are into greed. Many of them have nothing to do with national security. Most of these weapons are high tech, extremely expensive, and do not work, despite the film you saw during Desert Storm.

We now have a General Accounting Office (GAO) study that says 97 percent of the bombs dropped on the Iraqi position were the same old, tired iron bombs that were dropped on Berlin and Tokyo during World War II. Of the 3 percent of the high tech stuff, about 70 percent, including the Patriot missile, didn't work a lick. The ironic thing is that about 90 percent of our costs were for these high tech munitions. We are really not getting "the bang for the buck" you think we are getting.

We are spending billions and trillions of dollars on weapons we do not need because it is good for the military industrial complex. Has anybody thought this past week why the principal bomber that we used to bomb the positions in south Iraq was a B-52 that was forty-five years old? The bomber was being flown by the grandchildren of those who flew it before and during the Vietnam War. Has anybody asked, "Where was the B-1 bomber?"

You spent $39 billion for that bomber. Where was it during Desert Storm? It could not get off the ground. Carter killed it, and Reagan brought it back because he said it was good for America and also good for the California defense industry. But it hasn't worked; it cost you $39 billion.

We are now building B-2s and Dole and Gingrich want to build thirty more in addition to the twenty we have already built. We have spent $70 billion on the B-2s, but I didn't see any B-2s assisting us in the last campaign. We have Dole wanting the B-2; we have Clinton wanting the Sea Wolf submarines. Between the two of them, they would cost us about $10 billion a year. I have a solution to this. Take the 8,000 workers in Palmdale that build the B-2 and send them to Hawaii. Take the 10,000 workers at the electric boat company in Connecticut and send them to Hawaii. Put them up at the Hilton Hotel. That is 18,000 people. Give them all their wages for a year. Let them have a luau whenever they want it. Let them have Don Ho for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. An open bar, and when it is all over it will cost the taxpayer about a half a billion dollars, and we will save $9.5 billion and not build equipment we do not need.

Always the troops are being short-changed. The nation is broke; we can't afford to buy weapons systems we don't need. We have this huge, bloated military apparatus that is going to destroy us - exactly as the Soviet Union went down with their huge, bloated military apparatus that died by its own weight. We have to reform the United States military just like a civilian corporation reforms itself. It has stockholders, and if they don't like the way the CEOs are doing things and the stock does not show a good appreciation, they fire the CEO.

The problem with the Pentagon is they perceive we have deep pockets, and we can reach in our pockets whenever they whip up a scare. In the future, defense dollars are going to be critical and limited. What worries me is that when I look at the Pentagon, all I see are more flagpoles going up and down. At the fighting edge, I see fewer and fewer warriors. The Marine Corps, an institution I have a lot of time for - they are a fine, fine fighting organization. The Marine Corps has cut 40,000 warriors since Desert Storm. They just added twelve generals. They have twice the number of generals in 1996 than they had in World War II when they had ten divisions. We have twice the number of generals and admirals throughout our military today with a military strength of 1.5 million than we had in World War II, when our strength was 13 million.

With each flagpole, you get limos, choppers, airplanes, and aides. In my army career, I have never seen a flagpole shoot a cannon ball. We are spending $300 billion a year on defense, 18 cents from your tax dollar goes to the Pentagon, and I reckon about half of that is flat wasted. We have no real enemy out there, and now is the perfect time to reorganize our military from the bottom up.

I say combine the two ground forces, the marine corps and the army, whack them into one and call it the Marvi, if you want. Take the four air forces and merge them into one, and get rid of the redundancy of what is in the armed forces because there are four of everything. There are four air forces, chaplain corps, legal corps, data command corps, personnel corps, medical corps, and so on. We have got to cut that redundancy and kill the inter-service rivalry that it breeds. Why we have allowed the Pentagon to have this endless amount of money thrown at it is because of fear. The Nazis are coming! The Japanese are coming! Most of our lifetime we have had the Soviets coming. Now we are going to have the Montana Militia coming. Somebody is always coming to gobble us up.

When I was a little kid in Ocean Park, my grandmother, in order to get me home before dark, would say, "the bogey man is coming." Now I am sixty-six years old, and I still look over my shoulder for the bogey man. We have got to blow away this fear. We need to realize the Pentagon uses it for propaganda. We have the same military organization basically that George Washington had when he paddled across the Delaware, except that we have an air force. I think we need to copy corporate America and get lean, cut the blubber, get rid of what we don't need.

We are going to need a strong military for the twenty-first century. We are going to have Soviet Union II. We are going to have a China with billions of people and an incredibly high tech capability. It won't be like the Chinese we fought in Korea in 1950. They will have all the modern things that can bring a lot of smoke on us. Also, we are going to have low intensity conflicts right here in the cities - Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago. We have to have one fist of steel that can fight high tech and one fist that can fight the low tech fights that we are going to find in our cities.

The key to making this work is to change the leadership. If President Dole or President Clinton or President Perot or President Nader gets in, he has got to kill this sacred defense cow that's been milked so well for the last fifty years. We need a leader who will provide the courage and vision to make the necessary changes to reform our military. I think in Election 1996, and that's where you come into play, we can do something about it.

You don't hear one word about military reform being discussed today in San Diego, in Chicago, or Gettysburg, wherever the parties are meeting, even though it is taking a lot out of your pocket. It has certainly proven very wasteful. We hear about tax reform, welfare reform, abortion, medical reform, but we don't discuss how we defend this country. I think it needs to be an election issue. We need to return to warrior leaders like George Patton, Jimmy Doolittle, Chester Nimitz. People that would have told the president of the United States in 1991 when he made the bad call not to eliminate Saddam Hussein, "Hey, boss. You are making a mistake. Let's take this guy out." People who will put their country first. They all, as young lieutenants, swore to defend the Constitution of the United States against foreign and domestic enemies. They seem to forget that as they go up higher in ranks.

We must stop the welfare defense state. If we don't stop all the waste that's going on that very waste will stop America as it did ancient Rome, ancient Greece, the Soviet Union yesterday and modern Great Britain. We have got a $5 trillion debt out there. A lot of that is caused by the military-industrial complex. We have to get more effective. Eisenhower warned us of this in 1960 in his swan song when he said the military-industrial Congressional complex and his speechwriter said to take out the Congressional because you will upset a lot of people. So he called it the military-industrial complex. It's gone on for thirty-six more years.

It is up to you and me, and that's why I wrote Hazardous Duty. I wrote it to rile up the American people, to stop the waste, and get smart about defending America wisely. You can bet your boots you are going to have some enemy coming down the track somewhere in the future. To resolve this is up to you and to me.