[Two Unsung Heroes as Role Models for the Air Force: James Robert
“Cotton” Hildreth and Daniel Hale.]
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DESTROYING THE TOWN IS NOT SAVING IT  
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William J. Astore
June 2, 2022
TomDispatch
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_ Two Unsung Heroes as Role Models for the Air Force: James Robert
“Cotton” Hildreth and Daniel Hale. _

,

 

Twenty years ago, I left the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for
my next assignment. I haven’t been back since, but today I travel
there (if only in my imagination) to give my graduation address to the
class of 2022. So, won’t you take a few minutes and join me, as well
as the corps of cadets, in Falcon Stadium
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Congratulations to all you newly minted second lieutenants! As a
former military professor who, for six years, taught cadets very much
like you at the Academy, I salute you and your accomplishments.
You’ve weathered a demanding curriculum, far too many room and
uniform inspections, parades, restrictions, and everything else
associated with a military that thrives on busywork
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enforced conformity. You’ve emerged from all of that today as
America’s newest officers, part of what recent
commanders-in-chief like to call
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finest fighting force” in human history. Merely for the act of
donning a uniform and taking the oath of office, many of your fellow
Americans already think of you as heroes
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of a hearty “thank you for your service” and unqualified
expressions of “support.”

And I must say you do exude health, youth, and enthusiasm, as well as
a feeling that you’re about to graduate to better things, like pilot
training or intelligence school, among so many other Air Force
specialties. Some of you will even join America’s newest service,
the Space Force, which resonates with me, as my first assignment in
1985 was to Air Force Space Command.

In my initial three years in the service, I tested the computer
software the Air Force used back then to keep track of all objects in
earth orbit, an inglorious but necessary task. I also worked on war
games in Cheyenne Mountain
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America’s ultimate command center for its nuclear defense. You could
say I was paid to think about the unthinkable
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the end of civilization as we know it due to nuclear Armageddon. That
was near the tail end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. So much
has changed since I wore gold bars like you and yet, somehow, we find
ourselves once again in another “cold war” with Russia, this time
centered on an all-too-hot war in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic,
instead of, as in 1962, a country in our immediate neighborhood, Cuba.
Still, that distant conflict is only raising fresh fears of a nuclear
nightmare that could well destroy us all.

What does this old light colonel, who’s been retired for almost as
long as he wore the uniform, have to teach you cadets so many years
later? What can I tell you that you haven’t heard before in all the
classes you’ve attended and all the lectures you’ve endured?

How about this: You’ve been lied to big time while you’ve been
here at the Academy.

Ah, I see I have your attention now. More than a few of you are
smiling. I used to joke with cadets about how four years at a military
school were designed to smother idealism and encourage cynicism, or so
it sometimes seemed. Yes, our lead core value may still be
“integrity first,” but the brass, the senior leadership, often
convinces itself that what really comes first is the Air Force itself,
an ideal of “service” that, I think you’ll agree, is far from
selfless.

What do I mean when I say you’ve been lied to while being taught the
glorious history of the U.S. Air Force? Since World War II began, the
air forces of the United States have killed millions of people around
the world. And yet here’s the strange thing: we can’t even say
that we’ve clearly won a war since the “Greatest Generation”
earned its wings in the 1930s and 1940s. In short, boasts to the
contrary, airpower has proven to be
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cheap, surgical, nor decisive. You see what I mean about lies now, I
hope.

I know, I know. You’re not supposed to think this way. You eat in
Mitchell Hall, named after General Billy Mitchell, that airpower
martyr who fought so hard after World War I for an independent air
service. (His and our collective dream, long delayed, finally came to
fruition in 1947.) You celebrate the Doolittle Raiders
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aviators who flew off an aircraft carrier in 1942, launching a daring
and dangerous surprise attack on Tokyo, a raid that helped restore
America’s sagging morale after Pearl Harbor. You mark the courage of
the Tuskegee Airmen [[link removed]], those
African American pilots who broke racial barriers, while proving their
mettle in the skies over Nazi Germany. They are indeed worthy heroes
to celebrate.

And yet shouldn’t we airmen also reflect on the bombing of Germany
during World War II that killed roughly 600,000
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but didn’t prove crucial to the defeat of Adolf Hitler? (In fact,
Soviet troops deserve the lion’s share of the credit there.) We
should reflect on the firebombing of Tokyo that killed more
than 100,000 people
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among 60 other sites firebombed, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki that, both instantly and over time, killed an
estimated 220,000 Japanese
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War, our air forces leveled North Korea and yet that war ended in a
stalemate that persists to this day. During Vietnam, our air
power pummeled Vietnam
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Laos, and Cambodia, unleashing high explosives, napalm, and poisons
like Agent Orange against so many innocent people
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rhetoric that the only good Communist was a dead one. Yet the
Vietnamese version of Communism prevailed, even as the peoples of
Southeast Asia still suffer and die
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the torrent of destruction we rained down on them half a century ago.

Turning to more recent events, the U.S. military enjoyed total air
supremacy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other battlefields of the war on
terror, yet that supremacy led to little but munitions
expended, civilians killed
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tens of thousands of deaths by airpower, because, sadly, there are no
such things as freedom bombs
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missiles.

If you haven’t thought about such matters already (though I’ll bet
you have, at least a little), consider this: You are potentially a
death-dealer. Indeed, if you become a nuclear launch officer in a silo
in Wyoming or North Dakota, you may yet become a death-dealer of an
almost unimaginable sort. Even if you “fly” a drone while sitting
in a trailer thousands of miles from your target, you remain a
death-dealer. Recall that the very last drone attack the U.S. launched
in Afghanistan in 2021 killed 10 civilians
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including seven children, and that no one
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the chain of command was held accountable. There’s a very good
reason, after all, why those drones, or, as we prefer to call them,
remotely piloted aircraft, have over the years been given names like
Predator and Reaper. Consider that a rare but refreshing burst of
honesty.

I remember how “doolies
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had to memorize “knowledge” and recite it on command to
upper-class cadets. Assuming that’s still a thing, here’s a phrase
I’d like you to memorize and recite: _Destroying the town is not
saving it._ The opposite sentiment emerged as an iconic and
ironic catchphrase
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the Vietnam War, after journalist Peter Arnett reported
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U.S. major saying of devastated Ben Tre, “It became necessary to
destroy the town to save it.” Incredibly, the U.S. military came to
believe, or at least to assert, that destroying such a town was a form
of salvation from the alleged ideological evil of communism. But
whether by bombs or bullets or fire, destruction is destruction. It
should never be confused with salvation.

Will you have the moral courage, when it’s not strictly in defense
of the U.S. Constitution to which you, once again, swore an oath
today, to refuse to become a destroyer?

TWO UNSUNG HEROES OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE

In your four years here, you’ve learned a lot about heroes like
Billy Mitchell and Lance Sijan
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Medal of Honor recipient who demonstrated enormous toughness and
resilience after being shot down and captured in Vietnam. We like to
showcase airmen like these, the true believers, the ones prepared to
sacrifice everything, even their own lives, to advance what we hold
dear. And they are indeed easy to respect.

I have two more courageous and sacrificial role models to introduce to
you today. One you may have heard of; one you almost certainly
haven’t. Let’s start with the latter. His name was James Robert
“Cotton” Hildreth and he rose to the rank of major general in our
service. As a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam, Cotton Hildreth and his
wingman, flying A-1 Skyraiders, were given an order to drop napalm on
a village that allegedly harbored enemy Viet Cong soldiers.
Hildreth disobeyed that order
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dropping his napalm outside the target area and saving (alas, only
temporarily) the lives of 1,200 innocent villagers.

How could Hildreth have possibly disobeyed his “destroy the town”
order? The answer: because he and his wingman took the time to look at
the villagers they were assigned to kill. In their Skyraiders, they
flew low and slow. Seeing nothing but apparently friendly people
waving up at them, including children, they sensed that something was
amiss. It turns out that they were oh-so-right. The man who wanted the
village destroyed was ostensibly an American ally, a high-ranking
South Vietnamese official. The village hadn’t paid its taxes to him,
so he was using American airpower to exact his revenge and set an
example for other villages that dared to deny his demands. By refusing
to bomb and kill innocents, Hildreth passed his “gut check,” if
you will, and his career doesn’t appear to have suffered for it.

But he himself did suffer. He spoke about his Vietnam experiences in
an oral interview after he’d retired, saying they’d left him
“really sick” and “very bitter.” In a melancholy, almost
haunted, tone, he added, “I don’t talk about this [the war] very
much,” and one can understand why.

So, what happened to the village that Hildreth and his wingman had
spared from execution by napalm? Several days later, it was
obliterated by U.S. pilots flying high and fast in F-105s, rather than
low and slow as Hildreth had flown in his A-1. The South Vietnamese
provincial official had gotten his way and Hildreth’s chain of
command was complicit in the destruction of 1,200 people whose only
crime was fighting a tax levy.

My second hero is not a general, not even an officer. He’s a former
airman who’s currently behind bars, serving a 45-month sentence
because he leaked the so-called drone papers
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military’s drone strikes killed far more innocent civilians than
enemy combatants in the war on terror. His name is Daniel Hale, and
you should all know about him and reflect on his integrity and
honorable service to our country.

What was his “crime”? He wanted the American people to know about
their military and the innocent people being killed in our name. He
felt the burden of the lies he was forced to shoulder, the civilians
he watched dying on video monitors due to drone strikes. He wanted us
to know, too, because he thought that if enough Americans knew, truly
knew, we’d come together and put a stop to such atrocities. That was
his crime.

Daniel Hale was an airman of tremendous moral courage. Before he was
sentenced to prison, he wrote an eloquent and searing letter about
what had moved him to share information that, in my view, was
classified mainly to cover up murderous levels of incompetence. I urge
you to read Hale’s letter
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which he graphically describes the deaths of children and the trauma
he experienced in coming to grips with what he termed “the
undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated” while serving as an Air
Force intelligence analyst.

It’s sobering stuff, but we airmen, you graduates in particular,
deserve just such sobering information, because you’re going to be
potential death-dealers. Yet it’s important that you not become
indiscriminate murderers, even if you never see the people being
vaporized by the bombs you drop and missiles you’ll launch with such
profligacy.

In closing, do me one small favor before you throw your caps in the
air, before the Thunderbirds roar overhead, before you clap yourselves
on the back, before you head off to graduation parties and the
congratulations of your friends and family. Think about a saying I
learned from Spider-Man. Yes, I really do mean the comic-book hero.
“With great power comes great responsibility.”

Like so many airmen before you, you may soon find yourself in
possession of great power over life and death in wars and other
conflicts that, at least so far in this century, have been all too
grim. Are you really prepared for such a burden? Because power and
authority, unchecked by morality and integrity, will lead you and our
country down a very dark path indeed.

Always remember your oath, always aim high, the high of Hildreth and
Hale, the high of those who remember that they are citizen-airmen in
service to a nation founded on lofty ideals. Listen to your
conscience, do the right thing, and you may yet earn the right to the
thanks that so many Americans will so readily grant you just by virtue
of wearing the uniform.

And if you’ll allow this aging airman one final wish: I wish you a
world where the bombs stay in their aircraft, the missiles in their
silos, the bullets in their guns, a world, dare I say it, where
America is finally at peace.

_Copyright 2022 William J. Astore_

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John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
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_WILLIAM J. ASTORE, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor
of history, is a TomDispatch regular
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the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical
veteran military and national security professionals. His personal
blog is Bracing Views [[link removed]]._

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