Army Veteran Draws a Bead on the Military in Vietnam : ABOUT FACE : The Odyssey of an American Warrior <i> by Col. David H. Hackworth (U.S. Army, ret.) and Julie Sherman (Simon & Schuster: $24.95; 875 pp.) </i>

At age 15, David Hackworth lied about his age and joined the post-World War II Army, at 20, he won a battlefield commission in Korea, and at 40, a full colonel, but weary, embittered and demoralized after four tours of duty in Vietnam, he handed in his papers and went off to live in Australia--”the farthest place I could find from the United States and still speak English.” In a quarter-century of service he had fought heroically in two wars; become the Army’s most decorated living soldier (100 medals, 78 of which, including eight Purple Hearts, were combat-related); made himself an expert on guerrilla warfare, and offended numerous colleagues and senior officers with his open contempt for careerist “ticket punchers” and his impatience with cautious orthodoxies. In the end, pretty much a burnt-out case, Hackworth narrowly escaped a court-martial and, he suggests, possibly even assassination after bucking the official line and going public with his informed assessment of America’s strategic and tactical failures in Vietnam.

His memoir is the story of a boldly adventurous life spent in the service of his country and at the same time an indictment of an institution that he loved but eventually found he could no longer abide. To a degree it is the kind of expose of the Army that every reasonably literate recruit dreams one day of writing. With anger that still flares brightly 18 years after he resigned, Hackworth describes some of the crimes, follies, flagrant inefficiencies and shoddy breaches of faith that he saw and experienced in the course of his full and honorable career. In a straightforward narrative, heavily salted with the language of the barracks and the battlefield, Hackworth relates what it’s like to prepare for combat, to live for sustained periods under fire, to endure the frustrations produced by equipment that fails and orders and plans that sometimes make no sense, to carry on despite gut-churning fear and numbing wounds.

This is not a book for the squeamish, or for those who may still believe that a general’s stars are proof enough that their wearer must know what he is doing. Here once again in vivid detail are the sad and sordid stories of the blunders and cover-ups committed by higher echelons, of the inability of commanders to learn from repeated costly mistakes, of the failure in Vietnam to understand even as late as 1971, after six years of heavy involvement, the real nature of the enemy and of the conflict that was being fought.

Here, naming names, are accounts of commanders who controlled the lives of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of men, but who never understood--because they never took the trouble to learn--exactly what it was that they were calling on their troops to do. Throughout the whole of the American involvement in Vietnam, Hackworth writes, he heard of only one general who ever actually went into the field at platoon or company level to experience for himself what the war was all about. That general was a foreigner, Israel’s Moshe Dayan.

Above all, though, this is a story of successful military leadership, an extended account of the development of that rare and mysterious gift that allows one man to earn, and not simply demand by reason of rank, the respect, trust and loyalty of those who serve under him. Hackworth was an instinctive natural leader, whether at the squad, platoon, company, battalion or brigade level. He was a leader because he was remarkably innovative, imaginative and adaptive, but most of all because he cared about the welfare and the survival of his men.

The first requisite of a leader is to get the task done, but as Hackworth knew, before that can even be attempted the men sent to do the job must be adequately trained and equipped. One of the most appalling failures in Vietnam proved to be that men were sent there without being properly trained for the conditions they would encounter. Once again, the Army found itself with troops and units trained to do battle on the plains of Central Europe or in the mountains of Korea, but not in the jungles and swamps of Indochina. Hackworth, who knew along with the Duke of Wellington that “wars are not fought in grassy meadows on sunny afternoons,” made sure that the men under his command became jungle-smart.

Hackworth also knew that a good leader most of all leads by example. That talent was facilitated in his case by what seems to have been an almost pathological disregard for his own safety. He was by no means immune to fear in battle, but he also found exhilaration in its dangers. He was consummately--it is his own favorite description--a warrior, fierce, courageous, reliable.

He is also, as the epilogue to this memorable book shows, a reflective man who continues to worry about where the nation’s armed forces are today, especially in the quality of their training, equipment and most of all leadership. He has seen in two wars how the United States paid a heavy price for not being up to the mark in all these areas. This autobiography is in no small measure a chronicle of what those deficiencies cost. It’s also a convincing argument that there are men around who can do things far better.