Photo by Rocklin Lyons
Here’s a guest post from our very own Perry Gaskins. Perry was kind enough to school me a bit in copyrights, fair use, and protection of original expressions. I really appreciated that, and I try to walk with the angels in my posts. I can count on Perry to smack me if I stray.
It’s no secret the news media has its fair share of hustlers, scoundrels, and fools. Still, only rarely does the press cross over to taking on the military in a personal manner. In a recent piece in Salon the writer Lucian K. Truscott IV comments on the recent resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis with a story titled Good riddance to James Mattis, Trump’s last general:
According to Salon’s own bio, Truscott is a graduate of West Point. Woven into the Mattis hit piece are also minor factoids about how Truscott was also once a platoon leader which is apparently supposed to show Truscott’s bonafides as a member of the warrior clan and resident Salon expert on things military.
But here’s the thing: What the Salon bio doesn’t show is that Lucian K. Truscott IV did indeed graduate from West Point in 1969, and was stationed at Fort Carson for the next 13 months. Then when it apparently became likely that Truscott would be shipped to Viet Nam, our future Salon scribbler resigned his commission and received a discharge “under other than honorable conditions.” Evidently, and without putting too fine a point on it, when Truscott couldn’t be a REMF anymore, he decided to be a coward.
Such a biographical omission, at least it seems to me, makes Truscott’s hypocrisy in the Mattis piece remarkable. What the piece also does is point out that not all stolen valor posers are those wearing a blinged-out biker vest, a do-rag, and hugging an emotional support dog. Sometimes they can hide in plain sight.
And that would probably be more-or-less okay in the overall kharmic scheme of things, except that when the Army kicked Truscott to the curb, he didn’t fade into the background. Instead, he’s spent decades making a living by being a leftist press go-to guy for military issues. First at the Village Voice and now at Salon. Along the way, he’s also written six books. Most of those apparently having a military theme where Truscott is able to cash in on his West Point experience. Because, or so Truscott and Salon would apparently have you believe, being a graduate of West Point is the same as, like James Mattis, spending decades in active service.
My own view is that Lucian K. Truscott IV, on his best day, isn’t qualified to shine James Mattis’ shoes. And the real mystery is why Salon pretends otherwise.
General Lucien K. Truscott, 3D ID CG, VI Corps CG, Fifth Army CG, and one of the great commanders of WWII, turning over in his grave at what his grandson became: A COWARD!!!
I was thinking the same thing.
yeah, about 1400 rpm by now
Ok, that’s why the name sounded familiar to me.. yeah, sad how far from the tree some nuts fall.. just like that asshole SNL clown that attacked the Navy SEAL running for office (sorry, names escape me at the moment).. His hero father that died on 9/11 is probably at the same or similar RPM
He doesn’t deserve the honorable name, “Truscott”.
As Gomer Pyle might say,
“Surprise! surprise! surprise!”
When Lucien K. Truscott IV passes on to the Great Beyond, he and Pat Conroy can share a snivel beer together at the Cowards’ Club…
At least Conroy had the decency to finally confess his cowardice which I wrote about in this American Thinker piece a dozen years ago:
Good Enough to Die For
I have just read a mea culpa by Vietnam War protestor, novelist and poet, Pat Conroy, who possesses the literary skills to express what I am willing to bet many other older American males, his former brothers at the barricades, also feel, but lack the skills and the honesty to articulate. It is left to men like the politically born again David Horowitz and novelist Conroy to speak for these old troupers of the Left’s long-haired legions, to reveal their long hidden recognition that they were possibly misguided in their protesting but more often than most will ever admit, motivated more by fear of serving in combat than by any sense of moral/political rectitude.
For that reason this is an issue that reverberates only within the ranks of male protestors of that era. For the braless, hygiene and make-up challenged young women of the movement, there existed no threat of death or disfigurement in combat, so the purity of their motives is questionable only in the intellectual, not the moral sense. They may have been naïve fools but they weren’t hiding a blushing personal cowardice behind the skirts of world socialism. This then, is an issue of character only for these now old, greying men who, like Conroy, must eventually face the moral consequences of their actions in those turbulent days.
As someone who, like most of us, has experienced events in my life where I now wish that I had shown more moral and physical courage, more honesty, and most importantly, more unquestioning love and understanding of family, I know how those failures live with you long after the memories of trying to do so many things right have dimmed. Many of my lapses involved nothing more than minor events where I failed to speak up, or stand up and be counted, or even stand up and be knocked down; but regardless of their minor nature, it is these life events that forever remain active in my psyche. In my mid-sixties now, I have learned all too well that it’s not the fights you won or even the fights you lost that keep niggling away at the edges of your conscience: it’s the fights you failed to fight when you knew damned well that you should.
Deceased author John D. MacDonald, who wrote the wonderful Travis McGee mystery series, once explained through his fictional hero, McGee, the way to make correct moral decisions and it is a simple wisdom that has stayed in my brain, but not always exemplified by my behavior, through the remainder of my life. It is nothing more than this: do the hard thing. When faced with tough choices, look to that course of action which is the one you want least to follow because it appears to be the most difficult for you; it may hurt personally, but almost always, it is the right course for you to follow for the good of others.
My belief is that a lot of Vietnam War protestors were rightfully fearful of the physical perils of combat, as were all those of us who chose to serve there; but where we tamped down those fears and continued the mission, they wrongfully used a contrived moral outrage against the war as convenient cover to conceal their cowardice. To buttress that theory one simply has to look at how the huge, angry protests diminished, and ultimately disappeared in a remarkably short time once Congress ended the military draft. As young, draft-age men, all those angry protestors were able at the time to righteously rationalize away their true motivation until Congress stole their alibi, and only now, with the awareness and self-accounting that comes with age, are they, like Pat Conroy, facing the truth of their personal cowardice. Sadly, too late, they have come to realize the truth of Conroy’s most perceptive quote:
“America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.”
I believe those are words worthy of being carved into every war memorial in America. And I am thankful that I and all my brothers and sisters at arms who served then, and those who serve now, possessed then and now, but even in our callow youth, the intrinsic wisdom to recognize that truth. All Americans must die, but those who understand this fundamental reality about this very unique nation will die with their chins held just a few degrees higher than those who didn’t realize it when they should have, but now do, like Conroy and his legions, and sadly, those young people of today who still do not.
I’m reminded of a quote by Shakespeare:
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
The Pat Conroy quote was frpm his book “My Losing Season” There is a bit more context that should be given it so here is a more complete C&P
When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth’s house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.
“Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator.”
“That’s what I heard, Conroy,” Al said. “I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right.”
“Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you,” I said.
On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn’t know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears).
When Al awoke, he couldn’t move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he still can’t recall how much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey took three months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors. As they moved farther north, infections began to erupt on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches picked up while crossing the rice paddies.
At the very time of Al’s walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time, it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about 150 to Beaufort’s waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted marines present that if they get sent to Vietnam, here’s how they can help end this war: Roll a grenade under your officer’s bunk when he’s asleep in his tent. It’s called fragging and is becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who know this war is bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion.
At that very moment my father, a marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was serving America’s interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia.
In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Viet Cong traded him to North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he trained himself to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls. Following the U.S. air raids, old women would come into the huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. After the nightmare journey of his walk north, Al was relieved when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp in Hanoi and the cell door locked behind him.
It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate and before long was misidentified as the oldest American soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie among fellow prisoners that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al, and did so in time to save his life.
When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing “God Bless America.” It was those bombs that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs, including my college teammate. When he told me about the C-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American flag painted on the plane’s tail. I stopped writing as Al wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on that morning, during that time in the life of America.
It was that same long night, after listening to Al’s story, that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War. In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the ’60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act. But in the 25 years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria. As I lay sleepless, I realized I’d done all this research to better understand my country. I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I see America’s flaws? Of course. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart’s content–the same country that produced both Al Kroboth and me.
Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish I’d led a platoon of marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on marine bases where I had watched the men of the corps perform simulated war games in the forests of my childhood. That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony. My mother and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely.
I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.
I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to my teammate’s house. I wanted to come to the single right thing, a true thing that I may not like but that I could live with. After hearing Al Kroboth’s story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America could point to and say, “There. That’s the guy. That’s the one who got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend on.” It had never once occurred to me that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth’s house in Roselle, New Jersey: an American coward spending the night with an American hero. ”
It would seem Shakespeare was correct.
I think it might be that self-reflection on one’s own cowardice that fuels some of the valor thieves.
“when it apparently became likely that Truscott would be shipped to Viet Nam, our future Salon scribbler resigned his commission and received a discharge”
Reminds me of two Norwich Acadamy graduates that resigned within 90 days of graduation.
And proud of it.
IMHO Lucian K. Truscott IV isn’t even worth a squirt of a deployed Private’s piss or an MRE fart! The Village Voice and now Salon? If he resigned his Commission that quickly to avoid going to Vietnam, I bet he was likely such a pissy excuse of a Leader that he was heavily worried about getting fragged as well as his own cowardice, IMHO he’s a lower form of life than John “Lurch” Kerry.
“And the real mystery is why Salon pretends otherwise.” You know the answer. It’s so that readers obtain the wrong impression about Truscott and, in doing so, assign undue weight to his views.
There was some additional information that could have been added to this post about Truscott including a gushy New York Times piece from 1979 about how Truscott 4.0 and his ex-wife were like the reincarnation of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. In it, he cheerfully admits to having been a problem troop threatened with assignment to RVN. I didn’t include the link because of the Times’ metered paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/19/archives/successful-writing-couple-become-a-hot-property-an-illustrious.html
The term “fawning” is inadequate…
Believe I read that he wrote an article about heroin addiction which rubbed the brass wrong, and says he was threatened with Vietnam in retaliation, so he resigned. Would love to see that article; would bet money he said something flamingly intemperate. And what West Point grad of the time would NOT expect to go to Vietnam? One suspects he is probably like Che-boy from West Point.
Exactly.
Why should telling someone they might deploy be a “threat”?
If you view a combat deployment as a thing to be avoided…Military service ain’t for you.
Definitely not as an officer.
What a shit this guy is.
Well, well, well. Especially paragraphs 7-9.
https://afflictor.com/tag/lucian-truscott-iv/
Apparently he’s also a descendent of Thomas Jefferson. Pathetic. (Paragraph 3)
https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Lucian_Truscott_IV/
Salon… says it all. TMZ, Salon, Hello Giggles and several others… better content on Yahoo or Huffpo. And that ain’t saying much.
Never went to a salon, I stick to Barber shops that aren’t real clip joints with high prices.
You don’t know what you’re missing.
Isn’t there a minimum service obligation for the free USMA education? Or is that why the OTH discharge?
Seems to me that Uncle Sam should get more than 13 months out of a four year investment during a time of war.
True, I always thought that USMA Graduates were obligated to a minimum of five years of Service after Graduation. To me it’s quite obvious that Lucian K. Truscott IV got his appointment at least partly due to his family lineage and made himself about as worthy of respect as “Hanoi Jane” Fonda by resigning his Commission to avoid going to Vietnam.
He totally gamed the system and the manner in which he did it smacks of pre-planning.
I believe the obligation is five years active and three inactive reserve after graduation from a Service Academy or ROTC. Cutting that short should have consequences. Any O’s on board to confirm?
Not sure about now, but that was the basic obligation during that time frame for the Academies. My background is Navy but I think the same rules applied to Army and Air Force. There were two types of ROTC students then, Regular and Contract. Upon graduation, Regulars were commissioned as USN and had a 4 and 2 obligation (4 yrs. active, 2 yrs. reserve). Contract middies received a USNR commission and had a 3and 3 obligation. Acceptance into some programs requiring additional schooling (e.g. nuclear and aviation) obligated the officer for additional active duty time. Hope this helps.
Thanks!
Minor quibble: I’m pretty sure that when Truscott the Unwilling graduated from West Point that the AD requirement was 5 active/1 reserve if commissioned RA, and 3 active/3 reserve if commissioned USAR (possible, but quite uncommon). The total military obligation when one signed on the proverbial “dotted line” was only 6 years until the latter part of 1980.
There’s also the possibility that Truscott had to repay part of the cost of his education if he was released early UOTHC. Given the success of at least one of his novels, that wouldn’t have been much of a problem financially.
So this snotnosed mistake on his mother’s part didn’t want to go to Viet of the Nam?
Gee whiz, according to Wardogs:
7,484 women (6,250 or 83.5% were nurses) served in Vietnam.
Seems to me that these WOMEN had more guts than Lucian K. Truscott IV. In fact, I think it’s plausible that WOMEN serving in the military in general, and in war zones NOW have more intestinal fortitude – including my Army nurse niece at Baghdad – than this asswipe.
He is not fit to tie their shoes, never mind even look at them.
He should resign his position as a member of his family and stop puffing himself off as an expert on anything other than being a stank ass slacker metrosexual slug.
What a waste of time he is for the effort his father made in cranking out sperm.
What a waste of time he is for the effort his father made in cranking out sperm.
I’m thinking that line will find its way to the log of insults maintained on this site.
4.0 is a member of the Monticello Association and a great-great-great-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson. Truscott apparently inherited some of TJ’s literary skills but none of his patriotism.
When I realized Truscott went to IOBC at Ft Benning, Ga in the summer of 1969, I emailed him. I started 1 Feb 1970 and we discussed some of the events there.
He said he lived off post, and got beaten up one night using a pay phone. He also mentioned at West Point he would fall asleep at the chalk board. After graduation and before IOBC, he also covered the Stone Wall riots in NYC as a freelance, June 28, 1969.
Also I think he mentioned drug use contributed to his ultimate discharge as a Platoon Leader at Ft Carson, Co. My two cents.
Lucien is just another gutless REMF (stateside, no less) who couldn’t man up and do combat arms soldiering like he was trained to do. Anyone doubt he was given his West Point appointment because of who his grandpa was? I served with and under some West Point officers, but none were as big a pussy as Lucien. And yes, Lars, I am entitled to criticize him because I received my RA commission only about a year before he received his; and I went to the Viet of the Nam and did all the infantry stuff he was apparently unwilling and afraid to do, in violation of his oath. So, I am likely better qualified to judge General Mattis, than he is. But after all, it is Salon and their proggy readers who value his worthless opinion.
I concur, circle and initial.
By the Law of Averages you’d think that the commies could find at least one bona fide warrior to help them with their world view.
Even if the bastard was fighting for t’other side…
Where do cowards go for their reunions? Harvard?
I wonder if his great grandfather Lucian Truscott of WW2 is rolling over in his grave at the antics of his progeny?
The original Lucian King Truscott was known as the man without fear when he commanded troops in the European Theater of operations..
Damn. Quite a read.
Arlington Cemetery Link