thedrifter
06-13-06, 08:10 AM
06-02-2006
From the Editor:
Rick Huck --The Unluckiest General in the Marine Corps
By Roger Charles
Maj.Gen. Richard A. "Rick" Huck, would never have made it in Napoleon's army. Bonaparte wanted lucky generals, and of all the things Rick Huck may be, lucky ain't one of them. (Full disclosure -- I served with Rick in 2d Battalion 4th Marines on a Western Pacific (WesPac) tour from August 1975-September 1976.)
http://sftt.org/JPG/MajGenHuck_300.jpg
Maj.Gen. Richard A. "Rick" Huck
From February 2005 to February 2006, Rick commanded the 2d Marine Division as the ground component commander under II Marine Expeditionary Force - Forward, which was commanded by Maj.Gen. Stephen T. Johnson. Washington Post announced on June 1 that Johnson's promotion to lieutenant general has been placed in a pending status due to the recent controversy swirling around conduct by some 2dMarDiv Marines in the Iraqi village of Haditha last November.
Using a mix-master approach, the Marine Corps assigns units from all three active Marine divisions (plus the Reserve division) to rotate into the meat-grinder of ground combat in Iraq's Al Anbar province in a bewildering array of combinations. It's a violation of every Marine tradition that stresses training and fighting as a team, introducing confusion into a chain of command that badly needed coherence and unity. It also made Rick's job even that much harder.
For example, 3d Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, is the unit whose troops are alleged to have murdered innocent civilians in the current hottest media story, the Haditha "event." But, this battalion was serving under the command of the 2d Marine Division's unlucky general. (3d Battalion, 1st Marines, was not, while in Iraq last November under the command of either its parent regiment or the 1st Marine Division, both of which were back at Camp Pendleton -- notwithstanding what the Washington Post wrote!)
The Haditha incident was not fate's first opportunity to knock Rick off balance while he commanded the 2d MarDiv in Iraq. In the spring of 2005, the case of Marine 2dLt. Ilario Pantano was rocking the headlines daily. Did this former enlisted Marine veteran of Desert Storm shoot two Iraqis in the back in cold blooded murder a year earlier, as alleged by a disgruntled sergeant, or was it self-defense?
Rick's difficulty with making a decision from Iraq about how to proceed was embarrassingly obvious as time drug on. An Article 32 was conducted at Camp Lejeune, and still no resolution of matter. Then, an autopsy proved the fatal rounds were fired from the front, as Pantano claimed. Rick's good luck, in the form of the autopsy findings, seemed to have returned and augured well for the coming months atop 2dMarDiv and the restless Anbar province.
But, on June 23, Rick's bad luck hit, and hit hard. A convoy carrying female security screeners was attacked while on a "milk run" from their security & screening work site back to base. Three US female troopers were killed and 11 wounded in the suicide-vehicle-bomb attack. (Two male Marines also died in the attack.) For days, the headlines and cable talk shows were full of just what the price can be for GI Jane on the mean streets of today's Iraq. Little attention was paid to the tactical soundness of repetitively using the same route, at the same time, for what was known to be a HVT - high value target -- American female troops.
On August 1, yet more bad luck. Somehow six of Rick's Marines from a Reserve infantry battalion were killed under circumstances that have yet to be fully explained. The enemy captured their weapons and gear, and made a video of their successful operation, including gruesome close-ups of some of the Marine victims.
Rick was to get no respite, and the run of bad luck continued. Only 2 days later, 14 more of his Marines died in an IED attack on an Assault Amphibious Vehicle. AAV's had run thousands of miles over Iraqi roads, but Rick had the bad luck to have this devastating loss take place on his watch.
In terms of large losses of his Marines, Rick's luck appeared to have finally changed. His good luck held, but only until December 1, when a Marine unit using an abandoned flour factory was hit by a booby-trap -- Rick had 10 Marines killed in this one blast. More bad luck, or did repeated use of the same building offer too tempting a target?
As we now know, Rick's luck had actually changed a bit earlier, and not for the better. On November 19, there were more mass casualties, but in this case, they were not US Marines. Instead, they were unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha.
Media reports describe a just-about-finished investigation whose focus is not on the crime scene, but rather how far up the chain of command guilty knowledge may have gone, or at what level some commander should have asked some tough questions about conflicting information as to the events in Haditha. At best, it's a mess, and a black eye for the Corps.
In a final irony, it appears it won't be the bad luck in losing large numbers of Marines as KIA's that will derail Rick's career. (The 2dMarDiv memorial service on April 24 recognized 265 Marines, Sailors & Soldiers who died while serving under Rick's command.) That seems to be an acceptable cost of our nation's efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. It's the loss of a small number of Iraqis that appears likely to cost Rick his next promotion.
I have no doubt that if anyone was glad to leave Iraq, it was Rick, but it doesn't seem that Iraq is ready to leave him.
Ellie
From the Editor:
Rick Huck --The Unluckiest General in the Marine Corps
By Roger Charles
Maj.Gen. Richard A. "Rick" Huck, would never have made it in Napoleon's army. Bonaparte wanted lucky generals, and of all the things Rick Huck may be, lucky ain't one of them. (Full disclosure -- I served with Rick in 2d Battalion 4th Marines on a Western Pacific (WesPac) tour from August 1975-September 1976.)
http://sftt.org/JPG/MajGenHuck_300.jpg
Maj.Gen. Richard A. "Rick" Huck
From February 2005 to February 2006, Rick commanded the 2d Marine Division as the ground component commander under II Marine Expeditionary Force - Forward, which was commanded by Maj.Gen. Stephen T. Johnson. Washington Post announced on June 1 that Johnson's promotion to lieutenant general has been placed in a pending status due to the recent controversy swirling around conduct by some 2dMarDiv Marines in the Iraqi village of Haditha last November.
Using a mix-master approach, the Marine Corps assigns units from all three active Marine divisions (plus the Reserve division) to rotate into the meat-grinder of ground combat in Iraq's Al Anbar province in a bewildering array of combinations. It's a violation of every Marine tradition that stresses training and fighting as a team, introducing confusion into a chain of command that badly needed coherence and unity. It also made Rick's job even that much harder.
For example, 3d Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, is the unit whose troops are alleged to have murdered innocent civilians in the current hottest media story, the Haditha "event." But, this battalion was serving under the command of the 2d Marine Division's unlucky general. (3d Battalion, 1st Marines, was not, while in Iraq last November under the command of either its parent regiment or the 1st Marine Division, both of which were back at Camp Pendleton -- notwithstanding what the Washington Post wrote!)
The Haditha incident was not fate's first opportunity to knock Rick off balance while he commanded the 2d MarDiv in Iraq. In the spring of 2005, the case of Marine 2dLt. Ilario Pantano was rocking the headlines daily. Did this former enlisted Marine veteran of Desert Storm shoot two Iraqis in the back in cold blooded murder a year earlier, as alleged by a disgruntled sergeant, or was it self-defense?
Rick's difficulty with making a decision from Iraq about how to proceed was embarrassingly obvious as time drug on. An Article 32 was conducted at Camp Lejeune, and still no resolution of matter. Then, an autopsy proved the fatal rounds were fired from the front, as Pantano claimed. Rick's good luck, in the form of the autopsy findings, seemed to have returned and augured well for the coming months atop 2dMarDiv and the restless Anbar province.
But, on June 23, Rick's bad luck hit, and hit hard. A convoy carrying female security screeners was attacked while on a "milk run" from their security & screening work site back to base. Three US female troopers were killed and 11 wounded in the suicide-vehicle-bomb attack. (Two male Marines also died in the attack.) For days, the headlines and cable talk shows were full of just what the price can be for GI Jane on the mean streets of today's Iraq. Little attention was paid to the tactical soundness of repetitively using the same route, at the same time, for what was known to be a HVT - high value target -- American female troops.
On August 1, yet more bad luck. Somehow six of Rick's Marines from a Reserve infantry battalion were killed under circumstances that have yet to be fully explained. The enemy captured their weapons and gear, and made a video of their successful operation, including gruesome close-ups of some of the Marine victims.
Rick was to get no respite, and the run of bad luck continued. Only 2 days later, 14 more of his Marines died in an IED attack on an Assault Amphibious Vehicle. AAV's had run thousands of miles over Iraqi roads, but Rick had the bad luck to have this devastating loss take place on his watch.
In terms of large losses of his Marines, Rick's luck appeared to have finally changed. His good luck held, but only until December 1, when a Marine unit using an abandoned flour factory was hit by a booby-trap -- Rick had 10 Marines killed in this one blast. More bad luck, or did repeated use of the same building offer too tempting a target?
As we now know, Rick's luck had actually changed a bit earlier, and not for the better. On November 19, there were more mass casualties, but in this case, they were not US Marines. Instead, they were unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha.
Media reports describe a just-about-finished investigation whose focus is not on the crime scene, but rather how far up the chain of command guilty knowledge may have gone, or at what level some commander should have asked some tough questions about conflicting information as to the events in Haditha. At best, it's a mess, and a black eye for the Corps.
In a final irony, it appears it won't be the bad luck in losing large numbers of Marines as KIA's that will derail Rick's career. (The 2dMarDiv memorial service on April 24 recognized 265 Marines, Sailors & Soldiers who died while serving under Rick's command.) That seems to be an acceptable cost of our nation's efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. It's the loss of a small number of Iraqis that appears likely to cost Rick his next promotion.
I have no doubt that if anyone was glad to leave Iraq, it was Rick, but it doesn't seem that Iraq is ready to leave him.
Ellie