I think Joe Galloway sums up my feelings on Bobby Strange perfectly.
First of all, for those who don't know who Galloway is, a bit of background:
Joseph L. Galloway is senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers, working in their Washington Bureau. He recently concluded a brief assignment as a special consultant to General Colin Powell at the State Department. Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine...
... During the course of 15 years of foreign postings, Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations. In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq...
...He is co-author, with Lt. Gen. (ret) Hal G. Moore, of the national bestseller We Were Soldiers Once…and Young---which has been made into a critically acclaimed movie, We Were Soldiers, starring Mel Gibson...
...On May 1, 1998, Galloway was decorated with a Bronze Star Medal with V for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang Valley, in November 1965. His is the only medal of valor the U.S. Army awarded to a civilian for actions during the Vietnam War.
Now, Galloway was personally and professionally very familiar with the VietNam war. Note in his comments he references David Halberstam. Halberstam was also quite familiar with the VietNam war and those who ran it:
At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.
Halberstam next wrote about President John F. Kennedy's foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War in The Best and the Brightest.
So, what did Galloway say that I agree with? I'll quote a bit and you can read it all here:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/71328.htmlBy Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)
Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.
McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.
Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McNamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.
Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara's comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.
The only disagreement I ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.
When McNamara published his first book — filled with those distortions of history — Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.
McNamara abandoned the tour...
McNamara was a lying, self-serving piece of crap; his ridiculous ROE got a lot of fine men killed. I do hope he is in the 7th level of hell with the other two clowns.
