FEATURED POST
General Hal Moore
By Steven Pressfield
Published: July 18, 2010
I met General Hal Moore a few years ago, at a dinner in his honor in Los Angeles, around the time the movie We Were Soldiers was released. Both Joe Galloway and General Moore signed a copy of their book We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young for me. General Moore added a note, citing a quote from my book, Gates of Fire, which he said reminded him of LZ X-Ray and his warriors in that fight. It was the quote about “Any army can win when it still has its legs under it; what counts is what they do when all strength has fled and they must produce victory on will alone.” That note means a great deal. Decades earlier, he and the 1st battalion, 7th U.S. Cavalry kept their legs under them during the battle of Ia Drang, and produced victory. And General Moore has continued standing strong since. A special thank you to Joe Galloway for providing the pictures accompanying this post.
Posted in Featured Posts
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WRITING WEDNESDAYS
Ambition
By Steven Pressfield | Published: July 28, 2010
Thirty-something years ago, I read a book that changed my life. The book was by Norman Podhoretz and it was called Making It. I can’t really recommend it as a read for today (I tried a month ago and couldn’t get through it) and I certainly find little to admire about Mr. Podhoretz’s current politics. But his book hit me like a box of dynamite. It overthrew everything I thought I knew about myself and turned my life around 180 degrees.
No, not Gordon Gekko (though I love the guy)
Making It is about ambition. Mr. Podhoretz’s thesis is that the “dirty little secret” of American life is not sex, but ambition. Lust for success, he said, is the love (the book was published in 1967) that dare not speak its name.
When I read Making It, I was living in a rented room in a halfway house in Durham, North Carolina, making $1.75 an hour delivering reconstituted orange juice, Salisbury steaks and frozen Crinkle-Cut French fries to restaurants and school cafeterias. But when I read Mr. P’s confessions (in a 35-cent used paperback picked up at the Goodwill Store), I thought, “That’s me.”
I didn’t dare breathe a word. And certainly nothing altered in my external life. But everything had changed inside me. Norman P. had obliterated denial. He had forced me to own up. I may be a bum, I told myself; I may be a loser, I may still have a long way to fall before I hit bottom. But the truth is I ain’t happy being a bum and a loser and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life at the bottom.
I hate what I’ve done to myself. I hate what my life has become. I want to do something great, and I want people to know about it. At the time I was years away from finding a job that anyone might call half-respectable and a generation away from making my first dollar as a writer. But that was only surface stuff. Inside, I had changed. Inside, I had taken the first step.
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Posted in Writing Wednesdays
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AGORA
Karzai’s Counterinsurgency Strategy
By Mac McCallister
Published: June 16, 2010
Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, explains that there exists a general perception among theorists and policy planners in the Pentagon’s policy shop that General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy has failed to sustain Hamid Karzai’s government in critical areas and is therefore destined to ultimately fail.
“This is not how the war is supposed to be going. . .”
So, why isn’t the war going as planned? Maybe we should assess the counterinsurgency effort from President Karzai’s perspective and focus less on our Americo-centric point of view.
What is President Karzai’s counterinsurgency strategy?
President Karzai’s “clear-hold-build-consolidate” approach to counterinsurgency is mostly political. Politics in counterinsurgency is about the distribution of power and political strategy all about influencing the will and actions of both your allies and adversaries.
Afghanistan is a place where you fear your friends as much as you fear your enemies.
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Posted in Agora
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THE CREATIVE PROCESS
General Sam V. Wilson
By Steven Pressfield
Published: July 9, 2010
I’m in awe of everything General Sam Wilson has done. His is a name that everyone should know. He’s accomplished more in his lifetime than many of us dare to dream about. He served as a reconnaissance officer with Merrill’s Marauders in Burma, during WWII; as a CIA spy-ring operator in Berlin, uncovering Soviet secrets; as a director of instruction at the U.S. Army Special Warfare School; as a civilian working with USAID in Vietnam and then in the personal rank of minister at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; and then back in the military, as a Special Forces Group Commander, followed by an assignment as the Assistant Commandant at the U.S. Army’s JFK Institute for Military Assistance (now the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School); then Assistant Division Commander for Operations in the 82nd Airborne Division; as chief defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow; as a director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; as Deputy to the Director Central Intelligence for the Intelligence Community; as one of the founders of the U.S. Special Operations forces and one of the creators of the Army’s Delta Force; and as a teacher and ultimately president of Hampden-Sydney College.
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