About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Colonel David H. Hackworth served in the military for twenty-five years and received 110 medals for his service. He is the author of About Face, Hazardous Duty, The Price of Honor, and Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. He died in 2005.

Jocko Willink is author of Extreme Ownership, a decorated retired Navy SEAL officer, and cofounder of Echelon Front, where he is a leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. Jocko spent twenty years in the US Navy SEAL Teams, starting as an enlisted SEAL and rising through the ranks to become a SEAL officer. Jocko returned from Iraq to serve as Officer-in-Charge of training for all West Coast SEAL Teams. During his career, Jocko was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and numerous other personal and unit awards. In 2010, Jocko retired from the Navy and launched Echelon Front where he teaches the leadership principles he learned on the battlefield. Jocko is also the author of the children’s book Way of the Warrior Kid and the New York Times bestseller Discipline Equals Freedom.

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Chapter 1: 6 February 1951

1 6 FEBRUARY 1951

We called him “Combat” because on training maneuvers he’d go up the goddamn hill standing up and shooting. The whole platoon harassed him for not using cover, but on the next problem he’d do the same thing. Hack was an eager guy. He did things—he didn’t sit back and wait.

Captain Steve Prazenka, USA, Ret.

Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon Sergeant Trieste United States Troops (TRUST), 1947–50

WHEN I first saw them, about a thousand yards to our front, the enemy looked like little black ants racing from the village toward snow-covered hills. It was a clear, cloudless morning; the temperature hovered around zero as the tanks kept rolling, closing on the ants and the hills set astride the road dead ahead.

My squad was riding piggyback on the lead tank. It was no honor being first in the grim parade; we’d already ravaged the tank’s toolbox and knocked off some rations to eat on the way, and now our only comfort was the motor of the M46, which belched welcome heat over our near-frozen bodies.

The tank commander relayed Lieutenant Land’s order to dismount. I got the guys off like a shot and hit the ground running as the tank rolled on beside us. But when I looked behind me, I saw that the rest of the 3d Platoon had not dismounted. Maybe I’d heard wrong. Maybe I was just overeager. But it’s damn near impossible for infantrymen to reboard a moving tank, so there was no choice but to keep running, and hope I hadn’t blown it too badly with the Lieutenant.

I didn’t see the ants again for what seemed a lifetime, but I sure as hell knew where they were. In an instant, the familiar roar of the tanks was drowned out by the deafening sound of incoming—machine gun, mortar, artillery, and self-propelled antitank (AT) fire. Like a buzz saw, the deadly cross fire was cutting into my platoon.

There were at least a dozen enemy machine guns on the high ground on both sides of the road. My guys, still running alongside our maneuvering tank, were totally shielded; the other squads, on the exposed decks of their tanks, were hard hit. By the time we made it to the side of a rice-paddy wall and set up a base of fire, most of what was left of 3d Platoon was scattered across the frozen ground.

The tanks pulled off the road and rolled into position on line. Once there, they froze. Earlier, in the assembly area, a tank commander had told me his unit, the 64th Tank Battalion, hadn’t seen much hard combat. I believed him: as soon as they were fired upon, these tankers became paralyzed. They plumb forgot all their training and just sat there in those great big armored hulls, while the enemy went on throwing everything at us but the mess-hall wok.

I jumped on the back of the platoon leader’s tank, and thumped on the hatch with the butt of my rifle. The lieutenant opened the hatch a crack. “Hey, Lieutenant,” I yelled, “get some fire going at the enemy! Get the big gun going! Get the machine guns going!”

The Lieutenant was not with it. It seemed as though he had no comprehension of the fix we were in. Slugs were splatting hard on the side of the tank. The self-propelled AT fire, which was screaming down the valley, dug deep furrows all around us, and yet the tanks still sat there silently, like big, fat clay ducks at a shooting gallery. “Sergeant,” the Lieutenant finally said, in a shell-shocked kind of daze, “look… you see that out there on the ice?” Yes, I saw: it was a pile cap, a little fur ball on the ice amid my platoon’s dead and wounded, the bullets and the blood. “That’s my cap,” he said. “Would you get it for me?”

I considered shooting the sorry son of a bitch then and there, climbing inside his tank and taking command. Fortunately, reason prevailed: I just grabbed him and shook him until he looked as if he was back to the real world. Then I instructed him to have three tanks concentrate on the self-propelled AT fire to our front, and use the others to start placing main-gun fire on the hills. To give him a bit of encouragement, I manned the tank’s. 50-caliber turret machine gun and blasted one of the hills myself, until I’d used up all the ammo and the commander got his men into action.

Once the 90-mm guns got going, we were on our way to gaining fire superiority. The amount of incoming decreased as the tankers started to remember why they were there. But the tank commanders stayed buttoned up inside their turrets. No one was using the .50 calibers. I just couldn’t believe it—eight inches of steel between them and the chaos outside, yet they didn’t have it in them to help the sun come out for the guys stopping slugs with their field jackets. I went from tank to tank, pounding on the hatches and blasting away on each of the .50s until all the ammo was exhausted. This little exercise had its effect; the tank commanders got the word and started doing what they should have been doing all along. When no further spoon-feeding was required, I returned to my platoon.

There were dead and wounded everywhere. Slugs were ricocheting off the ice; we could see sparks where they hit. Jim Parker’s 2d Platoon had successfully silenced an enemy machine gun to our left, so the pressure was off enough for us to get our wounded behind the protection of the tanks and paddy walls, where they could be patched up. Our progress was hampered, though, because the tank crews kept moving their tanks. They didn’t stop to think they were exposing our wounded all over again; they were too busy trying to save their own armor-coated skins. I told the tank lieutenant, whom I’d come to view—and treat accordingly—as a recruit at Fort Knox, that the next time a tank moved and exposed our guys I’d fire a 3.5 bazooka right up its ass. There was no more movement.

I saw a soldier prone on the ice. He’d been there a long time; I thought he was dead. But then I saw movement, and rushed out to get him. My God, I thought, it’s Deboer.

Private Henry C. Deboer had been with George Company since early in the war. He was one of the few survivors from the original 3d Platoon, basically because in those first hard months of combat he had not seen one good firefight. He had an uncanny sixth sense: he could always tell when the platoon was in for a major bloodletting, and invariably he’d find an excuse to be somewhere else. Normally that excuse was going on sick call, which by regulation he was allowed to do, and you couldn’t stop him even though you knew the only thing that was wrong with him was a chronic case of cowardice. Deboer himself even admitted he was a coward, and we hated him for it. He was an outcast from the platoon; we even had a little song about him, which we’d all sing in unison: “Out of the dark, dreary Korean countryside comes the call of the Deboer bird: Sick call, sick call, sick call.” He’d pulled his stunt only yesterday, as we were saddling up for this very operation. He’d sensed the bloodletting all right, but hadn’t figured that the foggy overcast covering the battlefield would not lift and the attack would be postponed. He’d returned from the doc last night (with a clean bill of health) most surprised to see us; the rest of the platoon took great pleasure in the fact that his malingering little ass would be in the thick of things in the morning.

Now Deboer was ashen-faced, hit...