A month ago, Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth addressed nearly 800 generals and admirals assembled from around the world in Quantico, Va. for the occasion. He declared an end to “woke garbage” in the military.
Afterward, some military officials warned “of Trump and Hegseth sycophants replacing outgoing military members who disagree with the so-called warrior ethos mentality,” reported Nick Mordowanec on military.com.
“Hegseth essentially said, ‘I want you all to be killers,’ ” Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, told the reporter. “ ‘I want you to be killers under all circumstances where I give you orders to go to war or to do something that I’ve given you an executive order for. I want you to be that kind of person.’ ”
I was never a soldier. A student deferment and then a high number in the 1969 draft lottery spared me from facing participation in a war I opposed. I did, however, become close to one general: John Holloway Cushman, who graduated from West Point on D-Day in 1944 and went on to serve three tours in Vietnam and command the 101st Airborne Division. He was my first father-in-law.
I wonder what he would have made of Hegseth’s gathering.
Gen. Jack Cushman was a tough customer. He was in some of the fiercest fighting in Vietnam, helping to oversee the defense of Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive. His courage under fire won him an Air Medal, a Bronze Star, a Distinguished Flying Cross, and two Silver Stars for saving scores of his soldiers’ lives with his brilliance and daring, according to the Washington Post.
He was the commander of Fort Devens when I first appeared at his door with his daughter Kathleen. My initial encounters with him did not go well. My politics were suspect, and my hair was too long. But he welcomed me to his home and questioned me with sharp curiosity.
Kathleen and I were young and full of plans. I went to Gen. Jack one day and asked him to bless our wish to marry. I was 20; Kathleen was 19. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I am appalled.” We did it anyway. The general did not hold that against us.
Jack Cushman was famous for his intelligence and strategic thinking and for sometimes clashing with superiors. At the Command General Staff College, he fought with the commander, Gen. William DePuy. “The fundamental difference between the two men,” wrote military historian Thomas Ricks, “was that DePuy was teaching the Army how to fight while Cushman … was teaching Army officers how to think about fighting.” Cushman told Ricks that DePuy’s methods would create “a generation of idiots who all know how to clean a rifle but who don’t know why we have an Army.”
Gen. Jack Cushman, a heroic and profoundly decent American, died on Nov. 8, 2017 at 96. His voice and presence returned to me when I read Col. Wilkerson’s words about Hegseth’s speech: it was the “most bizarre thing I’ve seen in my time on Earth.”