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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

thedrifter
06-13-06, 08:11 AM
Marine Veteran on Gen. Huck



Editor's note: The following message to DefenseWatch is from Rick Eilert, a Marine veteran of Viet Nam who was wounded in November 1967, and has had over 50 surgeries to date in a continuing battle to save his leg. Rick is the author of "For Self and Country," a great book about the ward at Great Lakes Naval Hospital where he recovered for seven months from the immediate effects of his wounds. Sad to say, Rick's story has once again become a very timely one; I loaned my copy to a Marine lieutenant wounded in Ramadi last October. Rick's son is serving today with a Marine infantry squad in Iraq.

Thanks Roger, I read your article about Gen. Huck earlier.

I really do sympathize with him and all the Commanders. America has returned to the Banana Wars and in a long line of Police Actions we have tried to cross-pollinate Warriors, Managers, and Diplomats, with the Politically correct and Feel Good Spin Doctors of morally uninvolved.

In WAR, I want the snake eaters and ravenous killers between me and my community. During my training, I always assumed that I would be directed to take some mythical beach and rid it of a voracious enemy. I believe my son felt the same way. I guess that's why Kipling is such a popular Author with military folks. I Know he wrote "Tommy" a long time ago, but it may well have been written this morning.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Something changed during WWII, the Western Allies became the only ones held to the moral high ground and ever since then, no matter who we get in a tussle with, it's our morality that's questioned. You could fill a phone booth with the number of Muslims who have been thankful to us, for anything. There were no Iraqi's voting here that said thanks, they may just as soon dip their middle finger in the voting dye and extended it over their heads, than hear a thank you.

So I guess the great irony is that whatever true evil was done in Haditha, by so very few, for whatever reason, more Marines lives are in Jeopardy and more people will die because of it.

No wonder men study war, but the answer isn't in Caesar's Commentaries or Clawswitz or Napoleon.

It seems to me it's imprinted on these young Marines, like the blood type on their helmets, perception, reality, and expectation. I just can't believe these Marines went into that town looking for murder.

Thanks, Rog.

s/f,

Rick