Steel My Soldiers' Hearts The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation of 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, United States Army, Vietnam

CHAPTER ONE9th Infantry Division Headquarters, Dong Tam, Vietnam15 January 1969"It's a pussy battalion, Colonel. I want tigers, not pussies."I had to hand it to Major General Julian Ewell. Twenty-five years after his kick-ass command in Bastogne, the old paratrooper was still firing for effect. He had sent stateside for me to fix one of his busted units -- 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry of the 9th Division -- right then out in Indian country getting its clock cleaned."The 4/39th is the worst goddamn battalion I've ever seen in the Army, Hackworth. It couldn't fight its way out of a retirement home."He thumped the desk in front of him.It took some doing to keep a straight face. As a lieutenant colonel with over two decades of my life invested in the Army, though, I wasn't about to piss off General Ewell. You didn't spend a day in green without learning about his reputation for ruthlessness. He swung his ax with a high-pitched war cry: "You're gone. You're history." And you were.We sat in his office in Dong Tam, half an hour by chopper from Saigon. The 9th Infantry Division's flagpole was planted -- as if anything but rice could be planted in the Mekong Delta -- just outside the general's window. Ewell's flagpole. Ewell's division. And Ewell's reputation at stake. And the poor, sorry 4/39th was letting him down.He unconsciously jiggled his hand in a tight semicircle, thumb and pinkie extended like the hands of a watch, ticking off the points he wanted to emphasize."Pussy battalion." Tick, tick."I want tigers...." Tickety, tock.His hand gyrated like a whirligig.I'd known Ewell for years, a combat veteran gone long in the tooth, his days as a warrior behind him. Sure he was steamed, but if you looked closely you could see that the heat hadn't taken the creases out of his immaculately ironed fatigues. But before the starch, Ewell had earned a formidable reputation as a battalion and regimental commander with the 101st Airborne in World War II, serving under the legendary General Maxwell Taylor. After the war, he hooked himself to Taylor's coattails and took a peacetime trip up the chain of command to collect a shoulder full of stars. Right now he was a tightly wrapped, thin-lipped, hard-charging West Pointer who meant to drain the Delta before the Delta pulled the plug on him.General Ewell and I were not alone. And the man standing a dog bone's throw behind him did nothing to improve my mood. Ira Augustus Hunt was a tall, good-looking bird colonel, as polished as a new Rolls-Royce and -- with his Ph.D. in engineering -- about as useful in combat. The Army considered him one of its best and brightest. And just as Ewell had ridden upward in Taylor's jet stream, so Hunt was cruising in Ewell's, having served under him as commander of his engineer battalion in Germany and now as the 9th Infantry Division's chief of staff. The two made quite a pair. Between them they had more naked ambition than a Harvard Law School third-year hustling the Supreme Court for a clerkship.My take on Hunt? A whiz with a slide rule and a dunce with a sidearm, or any other kind of weapon. I met him in Italy right after World War II, when I was Private Hackworth of the 351st Infantry Regiment and he was Lieutenant Hunt of the command's engineer company. Even then he was a piece of work. We were TRUST soldiers (Trieste United States Troops), so tightly disciplined that if a private even blinked at a sergeant he'd find himself running around the parade field with his rifle over his head shouting "I'm a big-assed bird" until he dropped. In Italy, I learned that exacting even-handed discipline is crucial when the bullets start flying, but Hunt worked overtime inventing infractions, gigging good troops and basking in his power. The GIs I knew who felt his lash or sting thought he was a first-rate bastard. Now he was General Ewell's consigliere.I'd been back in-country less than threeHackworth, David H. is the author of 'Steel My Soldiers' Hearts The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation of 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, United States Army, Vietnam', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743246132 and ISBN 0743246136.