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Ken Chapman & Assoc. |
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Article Schwarzkopf
When U. S. Army General, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, was a colonel
stationed in Vietnam, he commanded the First Battalion of the 6th
Infantry, a unit previously known as the “Worst of the 6,” but which
he turned around with strong leadership.
After he improved the battalion, he was reassigned to a place
Schwarzkopf described as “a horrible, malignant place,” called the
Batangan peninsula. It was an
area that had been fought over for 30 years, was covered with mines and
booby traps, and was the site of numerous weekly casualties from those
devices.
Schwarzkopf made the best of a bad situation.
He introduced procedures to greatly reduce casualties and whenever
a soldier was injured by a mine, he flew out to check on the man,
evacuated him using his personal chopper and talked to the other men to
boost their morale.
On May 23, 1970, a man was injured by a mine and Schwarzkopf flew
to where he lay. While his
helicopter was evacuating the soldier, another man stepped on a mine
severely injuring his leg. The
man thrashed around on the ground screaming and wailing.
That is when everyone realized that the first mine had not been a
lone booby trap. They were,
in fact, standing in the middle of a mine field.
Schwarzkopf believed the injured man could survive and even keep
his leg, but only if he stopped flailing around.
There was only one thing Schwarzkopf could do.
He had to go after the man and immobilize him.
In his autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, Schwarzkopf
wrote, “I started through the mine field one slow step at a time,
staring at the ground, looking for tale-tale bumps or little prongs
sticking up from the dirt. My
knees were shaking so hard that each time I took a step, I had to grab my
leg and steady it with both hands before I could take another.
It seemed like a thousand years before I reached the kid.”
The 200-pound Schwarzkopf, who had been a wrestler at West Point,
then penned the wounded man and calmed him down.
It saved the man’s life and eventually, with the help of an
engineer team, Schwarzkopf was able to get him and the others out of the
mine field. Later that night when Schwarzkopf was at the hospital, three black soldiers stopped him in a hallway and said, “Colonel, we saw what you did for the brother out there. We’ll never forget that and we’ll make sure that all the other brothers in the battalion know what you did.” Until that moment, it had not occurred to him that the soldier he had saved was black. The Army had given Schwarzkopf the power to lead and his knowledge and skill had given him the ability to lead, but his demonstrated character and courage under the most difficult of circumstances, had earned him the right to lead.<End> |
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