Military Revolutionary Comentary

24 Pages·2021·0.25 MB·English

July 3, 2002

Soldiers For The Truth (SFTT) Weekly Newsletter

When we assumed the Soldier, We did not lay aside the Citizen.
General George Washington, to the New York Legislature, 1775

In this week’s Issue of DefenseWatch:
A Wartime July 4th

Page 1 of 24
SFTT DefenseWatch – July 3, 2002

Table of Contents

By David H. Hackworth

The 10th Mountain Division sure isn't the same tough outfit I saw in Northern Italy at the end of World War II or
the squared-away unit I spent time with during the bad days in Somalia in 1991 or the liberation of Haiti in 1994.

The 10th troopers still wear the Mountain tab - indicating they're mountain-trained - which the men of the division
sported so proudly in Italy when they were a superbly conditioned outfit fighting on one of the hardest U.S.
battlefields of World War II.

"We don't do mountains anymore," a division sergeant told me - which the out-of-shape battalions that fought
during Op Anaconda proved in spades.

"We saved their butts during Anaconda with close air support while they stumbled around with 100-pound rucks,
wheezing from the altitude, sucking up guerrilla mortar fire like magnets," says a Special Forces warrior. "No
wonder the Brit Marines were sent in. And then the 10th returns home, gets a parade and 170 medals for coming
under mortar attack?"

"Give me one (Special Forces) 'A' Team, and I could destroy a whole damned infantry battalion in this sorry
division with one arm tied behind my back," says a division captain who served serious enlisted time in Army
Special Forces. "The 10th Mountain was a great unit back when, but it's been slowly destroyed over the years by
leaders who are more concerned about haircuts than hard training."

"This is my first experience with a light-infantry division," says a division captain. "I'm in awe at how poorly trained
these troops are. In my two years here, we haven't done any mountain training even though there are world-class
training areas right nearby in Vermont. We don't go out in the winter except to do PT, and in the summer the

Hack's Target For The Week:

No Bad Units, Only Bad Leaders

National Guard uses most of our training areas. Our big deal is to go out twice a year for two weeks and train up
for the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk (Louisiana). All our training is geared toward passing the test
there. No deviations, no special situations, just the same old canned stuff we always do. It's like having a copy of
the exam and just memorizing that."

"After a recent battalion 5-mile run," according to a 10th soldier, "seventy-five soldiers fell out - including my 1st
Sergeant." He added that his unit has a history of substance abuse and AWOL problems and that "morale is in
the toilet" because heavy doses of political correctness and peacekeeping have dulled the division's combat
readiness. "We've done peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Sinai until we're blue in the face. This
combined with operations in Afghanistan has left only 30 percent of the division at Fort Drum (New York)."

Another problem is that junior leaders are promoted too fast. "The Army says they're short junior NCOs," reports
an old vet. "They're promoting when eligible, not when ready, and now we have the unqualified leading the
untrained."

"After 9/11 the top brass were going nuts trying to figure a way to get us into Afghanistan," says a division major.
"We finally sent one reinforced infantry battalion. A brigade commander told me, 'This is all about getting our boys
in the game.' Meaning this was a way to get that critical combat efficiency report and as many glory medals and
goodies as the careerists could grab."

Before their boots hit the ground in Central Asia, this lead battalion was joined by the "entire division staff and one
entire brigade staff," a senior sergeant says. "Never before have so few been so supervised by so many. The
ratio of shooters to staffers was amazing, and when they came back most were wearing combat patches and
badges."

When candidate George W. Bush was running for the presidency, he publicly stated that the 10th was not
combat-ready. The kinder and gentler folks who were then running and ruining our armed forces ate him alive.

"There's a series of issues that have caused this division to hit the skids," says a division leader. "Many of these
problems are infecting the entire Army, not just the 10th. There are great guys here in the trenches that are doing
the right thing. All they need is some old-fashioned senior leadership."

http://www.hackworth.com is the address of David Hackworth's home page. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179,
Greenwich, CT 06831. Look for his new book, "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts," (Rugged Land LLC, New York City).

© 2002 David H. Hackworth

Table of Contents

By Ed Offley

He was born in 1738 into the land-owning gentry of planters and traders who dominated colonial Virginia's rural
economy and political system. Yet Thomas Nelson Jr. of Yorktown would die 51 years later so deeply in debt that
his sons were forced to bury him secretly in an unmarked grave so that his creditors could not seize his remains
as collateral for their unpaid loans.

Special Report: A Wartime July 4th

FROM THE EDITOR:

From Landed Gentry to an Unmarked Grave

It was no mere crop failure, business collapse or natural disaster that brought Nelson down. It was his conscious
decision that American freedom was more important than his own personal gain.

Confronted by an intolerable system of British imperial edicts that American colonists perceived as a political and
economic tyranny that threatened their very existence as a people, Nelson was typical of the small group of
leaders who gambled their lives, pocketbooks and futures to win American independence and set the young
nation on its course to become the modern United States.

The nation observes the July 4 holiday this week locked in conflict with a 21st-century terrorist network dedicated
to the murder of Americans and the physical destruction of American society - and the devolution of the world to a
form of Medievalism that is the antithesis of freedom. It is appropriate this week to remember that this is not the
first time we as a nation have been confronted by hard choices between freedom and security, and between self-
interest and the national welfare.

The generation of Americans who came of age in the 1760s and 1770s faced an equally daunting challenge, as
Thomas Nelson's own experience attests.

The eldest son of a wealthy planter and trader whose family had turned Yorktown into the second-largest seaport
in the Old Dominion, Nelson at the age of 14 was already earmarked by his family to carry on its legacy of
leadership. He was sent to England for education at the elite Eaton school, and later graduated from Cambridge
University, returning to Virginia in 1761 at the age of 22.

Even while still aboard the sailing ship enroute to Yorktown, his family engineered his election from York County
to the colonial House of Burgesses. The following year, he married Lucy Grymes, the daughter of another landed
gentry, receiving from his father, William Nelson, the marriage gift of a landed estate. They would raise a family of
11 children. His plantations covered thousands of acres of lush farmland, and his personal wealth ranked him in
the top handful of powerful families who directed the affairs of their colony under the suspicious eyes of the British
royal governor in Williamsburg.

Like most colonists who later rose in rebellion against King George III, Nelson's transition from gentry to rebel
began with the infamous 1765 Stamp Act passed by Parliament in London that assigned a tax on every official
document created in the colonies. (The colonists' fury over the tax was that it was imposed by the British
government with input from the Americans it affected, sparking the slogan, "No taxation without representation.")

Soon thereafter Nelson, like many other prominent colonists, joined the Virginia Convention (a precursor of the
Continental Congress) and offered the first formal proposal to create an independent Virginia militia. This little-
remembered legislative ploy is recognized by most historians as Virginia's first major turning point away from
compromise and toward outright revolution against the British Empire.

The following year, Nelson became one of Virginia's seven delegates to the Continental Congress and signed the
Declaration of Independence authored by his friend and fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. As the history, The
Centennial Book of the Signers, Nelson was proud to have signed because of his particular background:

"He admitted proudly that he was the only person out of nine or ten Virginians that were sent with
him to England for education that had taken part in the American Revolution. All the rest were
Tories."

Many colonial-era Americans, even of high social status, failed to leave detailed personal histories, diaries or
correspondence for future study, and Nelson was one of them. However, the physical and mental strains he
suffered during the seven years of the American Revolution are well known to historians. In 1777, while
continuing to serve in Congress in Philadelphia, Nelson was stricken "with a disease of the head, probably of a
paralytic nature," and was forced to return home and resign his seat.

When he recovered his health, Nelson in 1778 would receive a more important appointment: commander of the
Virginia militia. In addition to leading the volunteer force in several engagements, Nelson himself advanced
money to supply and arm his soldiers. When the Congress appealed to men of financial substance in the colonies
to form troops of light cavalry, Nelson, at his own expense, raised and trained a unit.

But by early 1781, Virginia was in dire straits. Attacked several times by powerful British raiding parties led by
turncoat Gen. Benedict Arnold, the colony was economically bankrupt and its leadership scattered in to the
western foothills when then-Gov. Thomas Jefferson's term came to an end and the legislature elected Nelson to
succeed him on June 12, 1781. Within several days of his appointment, Nelson and the rest of the state
government were forced to flee again, from Charlottesville to Staunton, when British Col. Banastre Tarleton led a
surprise cavalry raid deep into Virginia seeking to capture them and decapitate Virginia's leadership.

But the tide was about to turn, and Nelson would play a major role. A combined Franco-American army consisting
of French troops under the Compte de Rochambeau and Gen. George Washington marched south from New
York state into Virginia in an attempt to intercept Gen. Lord Cornwallis as his British force marched north from
Charleston, S.C.

As commander of the Virginia Militia, about one-third of the American troops under Washington, Nelson marched
down the Virginia Peninsula through deserted Williamsburg to join the siege of the British force at Yorktown, his
home town and family seat.

He was a brigadier general commanding soldiers many of whom wore rags as uniforms and muskets paid out of
his own dwindling fortune, and the stress of simultaneously managing a bankrupt state government and
organizing a final military blow against Cornwallis, apparently caused a relapse in his health. Historians note that
Nelson vanished from sight for two weeks in the summer of 1781, presumably because of his illness.

By September, Nelson was forced as governor to make emergency decrees for arming and provisioning his
soldiers that exceeded the formal limits of his power, a step that would come back to haunt him later. But by the
middle of that month, it scarcely mattered: He left Richmond for the last time and joined Washington,
Rochambeau and the Marquis de Lafayette at the siege camp outside of Yorktown.

On Sept. 27, 1781, the allies with a combined force of 16,000 troops moved into position, digging trenches and
laying artillery in a semi-circle around the town, and on Oct. 9, a combined artillery force of 52 cannons opened
fire, forcing the 7,200 British and Hessian defenders to take to ground.

One of the more fascinating incidents in the Yorktown battle concerned a stately, two-story brick mansion that
dominated the town skyline - then and now. When word came to Gen. Washington that Cornwallis had moved his
headquarters into the house, Nelson reportedly recommended to his commanding general that the allies bring
heavy artillery fire upon the new target. As one history recounted, the two men held a brief conversation:

"Whose house is that?" Washington asked.

"Sir, it is my house," Nelson replied.

Ten days after the firing began, Cornwallis surrendered his army to the allies, and the Revolutionary War fighting
came to an end (formally concluding with the Treaty of Paris nearly two years later in 1783).

Victory did not bring a return to prosperity and contentment to Nelson and his family. In fact, it brought economic
ruin as the debts he had co-signed or sponsored to fit and feed the Virginia militia - including one personal note
for $2 million - came due. To add insult to injury, Nelson's political enemies in 1782 accused him as governor of
impressing supplies for the revolutionary Army without constitutional authority. After an ailing Nelson personally
pleaded that his acts were from "the necessities of war," the legislature formally indemnified him of any liability -
and failed to compensate him for the personal fortune he had spent arming his men.

But in one of the few direct statements on record, Nelson later responded to a friend who asked if the effort had
been worthwhile, "I would do it all over again."

His health failing, Nelson and his family retired to a small family farm in central Virginia, where he died at the age
of 51 on Jan. 4, 1789.

One of the few things that Nelson proudly kept in his later years was the memory of this praise from George
Washington, his military commander at Yorktown:

"The General would be guilty of the highest ingratitude, a crime of which he hopes he shall never be
accused, if he forgot to return his sincere acknowledgements to his Excellency, Governor Nelson,
for the succors which he received from him, and the Militia under his command, to whose activity,
emulation, and bravery, the highest praises are due."

A physical reminder of Nelson's dedication and sacrifice to win his nation freedom, can be seen today at his
restored family home in Yorktown, where several cannon balls still lodge in the brick exterior 221 years after the
siege. Of course, the greater symbol of Nelson's commitment rests in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.,
where the original Declaration of Independence carries his signature and that of 55 other men who pledged "their
lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor" for American freedom.

Ed Offley, Editor of DefenseWatch, is the 5th great-grandson of Thomas Nelson Jr. of Yorktown. He can be
reached at