Posted on 09/04/2010 10:55:33 AM PDT by bareford101
From his hospital bed Captain Howard Prince had a clear view of the TV screen as President Lyndon Johnson came on to address the nation. It was March 31, 1968, and the war in Vietnam was going badly. Prince knew. He’d been downrange, fighting in the rice paddies and marshes of Southeast Asia.
When his commander-in-chief started speaking, Prince forced himself to sit up. Johnson’s address lasted just six minutes, at the end of which he announced something only he and Lady Bird knew beforehand — that he would not seek re-election. The war, he seemed to Prince to be saying, had been a mistake. The news landed like a mortar, and for Prince, it cut deeper than all the shrapnel that surgeons had pulled from his body. “I was really angry at Johnson,” Prince remembers. “I felt betrayed. People I knew had been killed and wounded in Vietnam. I was in the hospital and didn’t know if I would ever walk again, ever use my right hand again.” .
The first time Howard Prince jumped out of a helicopter and landed on the battlefield of Vietnam, he was on a hair trigger. Officers who have never seen combat feel incredible pressure to prove themselves, particularly when the men they’re supposed to be leading have often done several tours. As he jumped off the helicopter, Prince mistook the door gunner’s covering fire for incoming and ducked down. His battle-hardened sergeant strolled over, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him everything was OK, sir. It didn’t take long for Prince to establish himself on the battlefield. Bob Child was a lieutenant under Prince at the time. “Sometimes we got a captain who was kind a jerk and was never out there with you,” Child says. “Howard was not a yeller. He was very competent; he was well trained and well respected. He wouldn’t ask you to do anything he wouldn’t do.” Typically, Bravo Company, a group of about 100 men that Prince commanded, made two air assaults a day. Groups of six helicopters, each carrying a pilot, a co-pilot, a door gunner, and seven men, would fl y into an area, hover for a matter of seconds while the seven jumped out, then fl y back to pick up the next wave of 42. Once on the ground, the troops secured the immediate area and got organized. This was where Prince ran the show. He had to find the enemy, determine how best to attack, and direct the assault. The resulting battles could last two hours or two weeks. Whenever it was over, it was on to the next site. “We were always moving,” Child says. Juan Gonzales served during Vietnam as a pathfinder, an elite airborne soldier who specialized in aviation and helicopter warfare, and got to know Prince in late 1967. “Prince came in, he was a West Point grad, and he was good,” Gonzales remembers. “When Captain Prince talked, everyone listened.” As a pathfinder, Gonzales could walk with whichever company he wanted. Almost always, when Bravo Company moved out, he did too. On Jan. 30, 1968, in violation of a mutually agreed-upon ceasefire, the North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet Offensive, surprising the American military and capturing the coastal city of Hue. Marines south of the city counter-attacked and reached the citadel, where they became bogged down in urban fighting. On Feb. 8, the 5th Battalion of the 7th Cavalry regiment moved into the woods north of Hue to help relieve the Marines caught in the city’s center. “It was a true hornet’s nest we were dropped into there,” Child says. On Feb. 21, the Army, tried to punch through the enemy’s main stronghold on the northern perimeter. The battalion commander, who had come to rely on Prince, made Bravo Company the tip of the spear. To attack meant leaving the woods and crossing an open area, an infantryman’s worst nightmare. Prince’s forward platoon made it across under cover of darkness, and at daybreak, the Battle of Ti Ti Woods commenced. Needing to see what was going on, Prince, Child, and three radio operators moved up into the open to assess the situation. The only cover they could find were a few Vietnamese burial mounds. There they were, a cluster of troops crouched among graves, with three radio antennas sticking up. They were a ripe target. Prince doesn’t remember hearing the mortar that landed next to him, but he remembers a cloud of dirt and manure raining down on him. Shrapnel from the explosion ripped open his entire right side and shattered his eardrums. His body mostly shielded the others from the blast. One of Prince’s radio operators was also wounded, but Child, lying only feet away, escaped unscathed. Somehow Prince managed to crawl back to the treeline, where, broken and bleeding, he passed out. “I didn’t think he was going to live,” Child says. “There was so much blood. He was wide open.” Prince needed an evacuation if he was going to survive, but the fi refight raged on. The pilot of the medevac helicopter didn’t want to land. Gonzales, hearing the pilot’s reluctance over the radio, grabbed the receiver and told him to land or he would shoot the helicopter down himself. Then Gonzales did something incredible: he told the pilot to follow him in and proceeded to sprint into the clearing. “I remember they were shooting at me, and I could see the bullets hitting the dirt,” Gonzales says. The helicopter came in, Gonzales lifted Prince inside, and off it went. “He looked like he was dead,” Gonzales remembers. “He was totally out of it, covered in blood and limp. It hit me hard. I had a lot of respect for that man.”
What Prince heard and felt that day spurred an interest in leadership and ethics that would come to define his career. Four decades later, Howard Prince, PhD ’75, teaches ethical leadership at the public policy school named for Johnson. There is perhaps no greater expert on leadership development in the country. No one has more profoundly altered the character and leadership training of the modern United States Army.
Bump - because it should be read.
Some good perspectives on leadership. Leaders are not all born but can be developed by other leaders.
As a true Teasip though Prince has some liberal leanings though not terrible.
thank you. I couldn’t figure out the place to post it, so all help is appreciated.
‘62 CAN DO
when Prince was at West Point, people thought he was a liberal. Now, at UT, people KNOW that he is a conservative.... :) I guess it’s relative...
This is theater. Everyone with an Internet link and a printer can burn the Koran in the privacy of their own homes, as well as in public.
I wonder if erasing it from your hard disk — a digital burn, so to speak — is also a forbidden activity. Or if overwriting a file that once contained it with a downloaded porn movie is a sacrilege. Will someone please ask the Imam?
Burn the koran? Over Vietnam????
Oops, posted to the wrong article, so sorry.
But then again, any excuse, no matter how lame....
Could be a pretty good excuse.
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