Washington Post:
There's the swagger, and that ever-present stogie. There's the height and heft of his physique. And that barking voice with its font of perhaps impolitic obscenities ("That's b.s," he famously asserted on national TV), not to mention his penchant for not suffering fools, as is the prerogative of a three-star general.The Democrats need to get that message. The President needs to go down and pin a medal on this guy and help him get that message out.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, 57, is the kind of commander you don't mess with, you don't cross, who punctuates pronouncements with barked questions like "Everybody got that?" And he's so steeped in military culture that he ends his televised sound bites as if ending an army radio transmission: "Over."
...
As he strides through a command center set up outside the shuttered and storm-battered Harrah's casino here on Saturday, that is why the troops want to shake his hand, look him in the eye and thank him even as he thanks them for their work.
He's wrapped his big mitts around the hand of Spec. Amy Firestone, a member of the quick reaction force from the 1345th Transportation Company of the Oklahoma National Guard. She served in the dreaded Superdome, packed with evacuees and mayhem.
"Did you see any murders?" the general asks her sympathetically.
"I seen some stabbings, sir," she confides, her voice dripping with regret over what she witnessed.
He pats her on the shoulder, saying, "Thank you for being a good soldier," and palms a 1st Army medallion into her hand as a keepsake as he moves on to the crowd of troops and cops who have gravitated to him.
... Every day, he's there -- or somewhere: New Orleans, the Mississippi-Alabama coast, or Camp Shelby up near Hattiesburg, Miss., where Joint Task Force Katrina is based. From there he commutes via Black Hawk helicopter after each day's Battle Update Briefing, where his pronouncements are punctuated with choice phrases like one that bursts from his lips during a brief tirade Saturday over another commander's statements about weapons status for Joint Task Force Katrina: "It ain't his [expletive] job! I mean, how the [expletive] did he do that?"
...
He has spoken to the media so often that he has honed his message, his preferred lines (which his aides say he devised himself). He repeatedly says, as he did in an appearance with Allen, that "the storm turned back technology 80 years" in the region by knocking out all communication systems and that the region's first responders were themselves victims.
And, fending off early criticism of the federal government's response to the crisis, he says, "It's like the first quarter of a football game. You're losing 25 to nothing. What in the hell is the coach gonna do?
"You can beat [the players] up and tell them how stupid and dumb they are and degrade them," he continues, or you can take a new tact, find new approaches and remember "there's still three quarters of the game left."
There is much more.
Comments
Post a Comment