The Good Captain

  AN AUSA BOOK

  Association of the United States Army

  2425 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia, 22201, USA

  Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2022 by

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

  1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

  and

  The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK

  Copyright 2022 © R. D. Hooker, Jr.

  Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-148-7

  Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-149-4

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

  The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books

  Typeset in India by Lapiz Digital Services, Chennai.

  For a complete list of Casemate titles, please contact:

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (US)

  Telephone (610) 853-9131

  Fax (610) 853-9146

  Email: casemate@casematepublishers.com

  www.casematepublishers.com

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (UK)

  Telephone (01865) 241249

  Email: casemate-uk@casematepublishers.co.uk

  www.casematepublishers.co.uk

  DEDICATION

  To my soldiers, who remain ever young.

  Understand this … when we lay our heads down out here, we’re all prisoners.

  CAPTAIN JOSEPH J. BLOCKER, HOSTILES

  Contents

  Foreword

  1Duty, Honor, Country

  2Strike Hold!

  3Geronimo!

  4Let’s Go!

  5H Minus!

  6Sky Dragons!

  7All the Way!

  Appendix 1: Resume of Service Career

  Appendix 2: Commander’s Combat Load Iraq (2005)

  Acronyms

  Foreword

  This book is memoir, not history, although I have tried to be as accurate and factual as memory and open sources will allow. In a long military career, I found myself at the center of great events occasioned by the breakup of the Soviet Union and by 9/11. Over 32 years of military service as a soldier and officer of parachute infantry, I served all over the world in peace and war: in the invasion of Grenada; in Somalia in humanitarian crisis and tribal strife; in Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide; with the first American unit to enter Bosnia and the first to enter Kosovo; as a peacekeeper in the Sinai desert; as a witness to the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11; at the height of the war in Iraq and, at the end of my career, with my son in Afghanistan.

  My life has been shaped and defined by war—as a child, as a career soldier, and even into retirement through my sons, both paratroop officers and combat veterans. As a young man I sought adventure and to lead troops in combat. I had my fill, and more. Along the way I served four presidents in the White House, struggling with the weighty questions of strategy and policy. I have come to believe that we fight too much, and win too little, with the costs of war falling only on a narrow slice of our society. But as a soldier, I acknowledge the right of the people and their elected leaders to make those decisions, though at times I regretted them. An Army that picks and chooses its wars has no place in a democracy.

  I feel profound gratitude for my West Point classmates and for the officers, sergeants, and troopers I was blessed to serve with. They made a difficult and dangerous life rich, full, and rewarding. Above all, I thank my beautiful and wise wife Beverly and my wonderful children. Their love and support made it possible for me to serve.

  At the top and in the trenches, our wars taught me much, but above all about American combat soldiers. Profane, independent, stubborn, and aggressive, they are also warm-hearted, intelligent, selfless, and always, always brave. As Churchill famously said, “Courage is the first of all the virtues, because it enables all the rest.” He was right. This, then, is my story, and theirs.

  CHAPTER 1

  Duty, Honor, Country

  I have made fellowships,

  untold of happy lovers in old song.

  For love is not the binding of fair lips …

  but wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong.

  WILFRED OWEN, “APOLOGIA PRO POEMATE MEO”

  In early February of 2017, I walked into the main dining room of the Army Navy Club on Farragut Square in Washington to have dinner with Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who had just been announced as President Trump’s national security advisor. With me was Major General Rick Waddell, soon to be selected as deputy national security advisor. My own appointment as special assistant to the president and senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council would follow soon after. The three of us were old friends, all graduates of West Point, and all veterans of years spent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our careers had intersected many times around an Army posted in far-flung places and almost constantly at war. The dinner was not festive, nor a joyous reunion. We had few illusions about what came next. Over our brandy, I admitted to Rick that despite my deep respect and admiration for him and for McMaster, I had serious misgivings about joining the Trump administration. I have never forgotten his response: “We are sworn officers of the Republic. When asked to serve, we serve.”

  My journey to Farragut Square and the White House began some 40 years before as an 18-year-old soldier, but its origins ran much deeper than that. People like to glorify their past, but so far as I can tell my family, on both sides, was of humble origins, coming to America long before the Revolution in search of a better life. My father’s family descends from an English colonist, Thomas Hooker, who immigrated to the Jamestown colony in 1620. His descendent, Samuel B. Hooker, was born in 1778 and served in a Tennessee militia regiment during the War of 1812. Many Hookers from southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi later served, mostly as private soldiers, in the army of the Confederacy. (The famous northern general, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, was born in Massachusetts and was probably not related.)

  My mother’s family was better documented, and we know that Abraham Macklemore, a merchant and tradesman, emigrated to the New World from Ayrshire in Scotland in 1668. By the early 1700s, he owned more than 700 acres in North Carolina, and as younger sons moved westward the family continued to prosper. By 1860, Abraham’s great-grandson John Dabney McLemore was established in Carroll County, Mississippi; the 1860 census valued his net worth at more than $700,000, a stupendous sum for the time. Both his sons, Price and Jefferson, enrolled at the University of Mississippi and, at the outbreak of war, joined the entire student body in enlisting in Company A, 11th Mississippi Volunteer Infantry, the famous “University Greys.” Jefferson appears on the roll as “Third Lieutenant,” but he transferred to the cavalry where he fought at First Manassas and was badly wounded, shot through the hip, outside Atlanta in 1864. Price, my great-great-grandfather, was called “The Prince” by his friends. He served throughout the war as company first sergeant and was captured at High Bridge, in Virginia, only two days before the surrender at Appomattox.

  Price, it would seem, had a war that was both glorious and terrible. His regiment fought in most of the major engagements in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, participating in Pickett’s Charge at the battle of Gettysburg, where the 11th Mississippi suffered 100 percent casualties, penetrating more deeply into northern positions t
han any other. Price suffered a serious head wound that day (he would be wounded four times during the war), and the 11th would show only 13 original members at war’s end. There is a pretty story, probably apocryphal, telling of his arrival at home on sick leave the same day that a telegram arrived announcing his death in action. Price cannot have enjoyed good health afterwards. Settling in Tennessee after the war he lived only 11 more years, dying at 37. Nor did his family’s wealth survive the war. In a petition for amnesty filed in 1865, his father claimed debts of $300,000. He and the southern planter class he represented bore much of the responsibility for this, the most terrible of America’s wars, and one fought for the worst of all causes, to preserve the institution of slavery. Sam Houston, still governor of Texas in 1860 and an experienced general, had warned the South that it would likely lose. “Let me tell you what is coming,” he prophesied. “After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence, if God be not against you, but I doubt it … the North is determined to preserve this Union … they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche.” Houston was right, and it was perhaps not unjust that John Dabney’s portion was mutilated sons and financial ruin.

  Like many southern families, the McLemores held fast to their memories of antebellum life in the south and especially their Civil War service (Price’s widow lived until 1922). During visits to my grandmother in the 1960s I would often hear tales of veterans she had actually known; of the burning of Meridian, her home, by Union troops during the war; and of course, of the redoubtable Price. While the Hookers never rose to any social prominence, the McLemores seemed to have at least partially recovered after Reconstruction. Most of the men were educated and prosperous, and the family plantation in the Mississippi Delta was still a going concern in the 1920s.

  That ended in the Great Depression, when Price’s grandson Baskerville lost the “Arrowhead” plantation house, and all but 200 acres of the family land. Neither family appeared to play a significant role in the World Wars.1 My grandfather Arco Hooker, like Baskerville too young for World War I and too old for World War II, served as a skilled aviation mechanic, while his younger brother John Thomas fought in the Pacific as a sailor. Baskerville died of heart failure in 1941 leaving only daughters.

  Through World War II my family members had thus served, like so many Americans, only as volunteer soldiers in time of war. My father, Colonel “Dick” Hooker, was the first professional soldier to arise in either family. Graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1957, the year I was born, he was commissioned into the infantry. While in college he married my mother Bonnie, a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority girl and Price’s great-granddaughter. Posted to the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, he served in North Carolina and in Germany and commanded a paratroop company. In the early 60s, our family grew to three children, including my two sisters Dorothy and Mary Anne, in a life dominated by peacetime Army routine—field exercises, cocktail parties, genteel poverty and regular moves. Some of my earliest memories are of driving to the drop zone with Mom to watch the men jump, the skies filled with parachutes and the drone of big transport planes. Her life, and ours, changed forever with the outbreak of the Vietnam War.

  Selected for advisor duty in 1963, my father endured a year of Vietnamese language training before deploying to South Vietnam in 1964. As a young captain he served with a Vietnamese infantry battalion, along with an American sergeant and two radio operators. 1964 was not a good year, for Dad, or for the South Vietnamese. Domestic coups, endemic corruption, a resurgent enemy (blooded and experienced after winning the First Indochina war against the French) and a shoestring American effort had him eating dog, carrying an M1 carbine and dodging mortar rounds for six months. By then, his team had been killed or wounded and he was out of a job.

  With rare language skills, he was next posted to Saigon as General William C. Westmoreland’s junior aide de camp. As commander Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), Westmoreland directed U.S. military forces and presided over the transition from an advisory war to a full-blown conflict that at its height included 500,000 American soldiers and Marines. Dad’s job was to travel with Westmoreland, coordinate troop visits, translate for him, and arrange for his personal security. A rare opportunity for a junior officer, the experience gave him unique insights into the war effort and into the heady atmosphere of a four-star wartime headquarters.

  In 1965, Dad came home with a Bronze Star and the coveted Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Loading the family into his Dodge Rambler, he drove from the Mississippi gulf coast to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he would serve for the next few years as an instructor, preparing young officers for their initiation to combat in Vietnam.

  Those days at Fort Knox seemed endless and carefree, but eventually the call came again, and Dad left as a major for his second tour, this time serving as a staff officer and sharing an office with Gordon Sullivan, later the 32nd chief of staff of the U.S. Army. Vietnam was different now. By 1968, the big war was raging, with hundreds of casualties every week, non-stop coverage in the media, and an increasingly virulent and angry anti-war movement. My mother had moved us to Green Cove Springs, Florida, about 25 miles south of Jacksonville near St. Augustine and the St. John’s River. Green Cove was supposed to be a nice place for officers’ wives to congregate while the men served their tours. The naval base in Jacksonville provided convenient base shopping and medical care, the beach was nearby, the climate was balmy, and the cost of living was low. In fact, Green Cove was an island of lonely, scared young women. Every week, news of a death, wounding, firing or affair would send shock waves through an already traumatized pool of wives. Long before the days of “Family Support Groups,” Skype, or email, these young women struggled to raise their children in a desperate atmosphere of fear and separation.

  My childhood was a blur of Army posts: Bad Kreuznach, Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Ord, Fort Knox, Fort Leavenworth. Like most Army kids I have only hazy childhood memories of my father. He was gone long before my sisters and I began the day. For months each year he would be in the field, and beginning in 1964 he deployed for the first of three tours to Vietnam. I can remember the interludes between combat tours, and crew-cut young men in Bermuda shorts and white T-shirts, sitting in cheap lawn chairs in the front yards of post housing, smoking unfiltered Kent cigarettes, drinking cheap Falstaff beer, and grilling steaks. The wives were there too, in their 60s hairdos and frocks, always it seemed with a drink in their hands, smoking, chatting, and slightly wild-eyed. Their men were home, for a brief while, before returning to the fight, a fight which seemed to have no foreseeable end. The weeks and months passed in a frantic round of promotions, commands, reassignments, awards, reliefs, divorces, wounds, and death.

  Even as a child I wondered at the curious convention which assumed that once children were put to bed, they could not hear the women’s loud voices downstairs. As a 10-year-old I found myself reasonably up to date on the love affairs, scandals, future plans, finances, hopes and dreams of any number of young wives and mothers, but always there was their fear. Fear of loss, fear of abandonment, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, all gripped these women in a fearful embrace. They lived their lives not knowing whether their men would return or return whole. At the time, I thought they were all desperate, damaged women. Today I think maybe they were the true heroes.

  If all this was hard for mothers, it was doubly hard for the kids, who understood dimly or not at all what the war was about, and when or if their fathers would return. Today it is hard to recall that, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Vietnam in the peak years of 1965–70 saw literally thousands killed and wounded each month. Hanging in our house were pictures of Major Bernie Dibbert, Dad’s former company commander, gravely wounded in Korea and later killed in Vietnam, and Lieutenant Colonel Bob Carter, his close friend and recipient of two Silver Stars, also killed in action. As a seventh grader these fears were acute and magn
ified by the absence of familiar family and friends—there were no grandparents or cousins to soften or distract us from the images and impacts of an increasingly brutal war. For my sisters and me, the best time of day was the final few minutes before sleep. No harbinger had come that day, and morning was far off. For those few moments, we were free.

  Dad’s return in 1969 filled us with joy and relief, but he already knew his stay would be brief. Within a few weeks he was back in Vietnam to assume command of an infantry battalion, with an accelerated promotion to lieutenant colonel. Dad went through the motions of consulting with Mom, but it was clear what his answer would be. He was a professional soldier, there was a war on, and he was being asked to lead in combat. That is what infantry officers do.

  His decision, and sudden departure, threw us all back into a welter of depression and unhappiness. None of us, even Mom, understood or accepted his decision. It didn’t occur to us that to say no would be to renounce his calling, not to mention any hope of further advancement. It didn’t seem fair, or right. By then, it was hard to see how the U.S. could emerge from Vietnam with anything that might look like victory. We felt anger and mistrust, at Dad, at the Army, and eventually even at each other. From then on, we were all a bit different. My mother became harder, more distant, and less joyful about the small things. At 12, I seemed to have stopped being a boy almost overnight. Until now, we had coped. By 1970, and Dad’s third tour, the war had become our own private nightmare.

  Dad took command of the 1st Battalion, 50th Infantry operating in the central highlands. On his flight out to the combat base to take command, his helo was hit by ground fire, crash landing at the airfield in front of the reception party. By 1970 the Army had begun to devour itself. Few draftees wanted to be among the last to die in Vietnam. Drugs, alcohol, race riots and “fragging”—the murder or attempted murder of officers and sergeants, often with a fragmentation grenade or “frag”—had become almost commonplace. After six years of “big” war, the country had largely turned its back on the war effort and on the soldiers who served in it. The challenge of command under these conditions must have been tough indeed. Years later, Dad shared two anecdotes that characterized his tour.