About Face by Colonel David H. Hackworth

“Care for your men. Maintain discipline. Always set the example. You take fewer casualties attacking than retreating. ‘Your job is not to die for your country but to make the other son of a bitch die for his.’ Once engaged, give no quarter. Drill, drill, drill. Stay alert, stay alive.” -Hackworth

I first heard of About Face around eight years ago while following the Jocko guy. What drew me to the book was the title. I still had a very much peasant education at the time, so when I heard the title, it reminded me of the expression “lose face,” which is when you suffer humiliation and lose respect among your peers. It was an expression from honor and shame culture. So I saw this book as something related to face. Turns out that About Face means something different. It means, in military terms, to turn around. Nevertheless, I enjoy this book and highly recommend. I reread it just recently.

The subtitle of About Face is “The Odyssey of an American Warrior.” And the book is very much that, an odyssey. Homer’s Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus’s long journey home after the Trojan War. All the mishaps he suffered and endured along the way. You can say About Face is similar. It’s the autobiography of Colonel David Hackworth who enlisted in the US Army at the end of the Second World War, underage at sixteen. To his dismay, the war ended before he could get through training. The book spans his entire military career, from his very beginnings where he is trained by seasoned WWII vets to the War in Vietnam where he “About Faces,” and everything in between.

His book shows the transformation of the United States from republic to empire through his experience in the army from being part of the “old army” and watching it become the new army that we all know today. Why should you care about Hackworth and what he has to say? He was known by the time of Vietnam as “Mr. Infantry,” and started to become a legend that even he began to believe in. He represented the old American type that we admire. While he was interested in figuring out how to beat the Vietnamese, his peers, and leaders only cared about “ticket punching,” getting to the next rank, and collecting medals. More than anything of that, he was real. He was a hero in the ancient sense of the word. A man who did amazing things, but was by no means a moralfag like our modern superheroes.

He came to oppose the Vietnam War, but not in the way the hippies opposed Vietnam. He wasn’t interested in peace and love, man. He opposed the Vietnam War because the US wasn’t fighting it to win. The commanders didn’t know how to win and when he showed them the way to beat the Vietcong, he was ignored wholesale. He saw it as a massive waste of American lives. Draftees weren’t being trained right. They were unnecessarily burning through taxpayer money with misuse of their firepower. On top of this, the people they were trying to “save” were either helping the Vietcong or, if they were part of the Vietnamese military, trying to soak up as much wealth as they could from the US.

Enough about Vietnam, let’s talk about Hackworth

“The men of the 4/39 had no unit identity, and no pride in themselves. As a first step toward rectifying this I decided to call my hard-luck battalion ‘the Hardcore,’ and the troops ‘Recondos’ (the latter being just the nickname of the 1st Brigade, 9th Div, of which the 4/39 was a part.) Just as I had in the 3/3 at Fort Lewis, I insisted on an ‘Airborne/All the way’ greeting between the 4/39 soldiers and their officers: when a soldier saluted an officer he said, ‘Hardcore Recondo, sir!’ And when the officer responded it was with a heartfelt ‘No fucking slack!’” -Hackworth

What makes About Face isn’t Hackworth’s commentary and progressive dislike of the war. Hackworth was a soldier’s soldier. What he teaches you in About Face is the importance of leadership. What does it take to lead men into battle? He’s got a keen understanding of what makes a man tick and how you can motivate that man to be a warrior. One aspect of Hackworth’s leadership was the ability to help his men feel pride about their unit and want to win. He did this by often walking into units, seeing how they had gay names, so he changed them to something endearing.

He walked into a “Fox Company,” and changed it to “Fighter Company.” Later in Vietnam, he was chosen to lead a “hard-luck battalion” that had no unit identity or pride. He made it into the Hardcore Battalion. This same unit which had no identity and pride learned how to beat the Vietcong under Hackworth. They showed how the Vietcong could be beaten. These lessons, however, fell on deaf ears.

When I said About Face isn’t far from Homer’s Odyssey, I was not swinging into the wind. Hackworth goes back and forth from waltzing into one war to losing his mind in peacetime as he watched the old army die after Korea. There are some qualities about the man that would turn off the moralfags that try to read him. He enjoyed women. Cheated on his wife. He also had many opinions that would make him a certified BOOMER. He raged at racism where he saw it and complained about Germans who said they didn’t know the holocaust was happening. At certain points, I was like “No, Hack, nooo!”

Through Hackworth, you get to experience the change from republic to empire. He starts in the old army which cared about what worked, what got the job done. You moved up based on your merit, and your skill. Hackworth got a battlefield commission in Korea, for example, but was told that if he wanted to stay in the army after the war, he had better get a degree. The army stopped caring about getting men of power and leadership into command positions. It chose instead for the intellectuals and ticket punchers. The warrior was abandoned.

He clawed his way through the adversity of the new army. Got his degree. Took bad assignment after bad assignment. They wanted him in the war college, which would have been his ticket to a star. But Hackworth turned it down. He wanted to lead an infantry battalion. He wanted to lead men into battle. To fight and win for the glory of his country and people. Yes, you must read this one.

"But in war, the purpose is to strike your enemy, not to sit back and wait for him to strike you. You defend only long enough to reach out, attack, and clobber your opponent. And you have to be prepared to do it confidently, at a moment's notice." -Hackworth