[Vision2020] A Southern General More to My Liking

[Tom Hansen]

Greetings Visionaires -

>From today's (September 12, 2005) Washington Post - 

Here is a southern general, more contemporary than Robert E. Lee (a local
hero of sorts), I would have proudly served under if I had the privilege. 

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The Category 5 General 

There's a Big Job to Be Done in New Orleans. Russel Honore Measures Up. 

By Lynne Duke 
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Monday, September 12, 2005; C01 

NEW ORLEANS 

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. 

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." 

But it's for something far less idiosyncratic, far more visceral, that the
troops on the battered streets of New Orleans hold him in high regard: He's
a soldier's soldier, the man you want in the trenches with you, the kind of
man who'll cover your back. 


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. 

Mayor Ray Nagin called Honore (pronounced ah-NOR-ay) "one John Wayne dude"
when the general arrived here after the storm and started taking charge. It
seemed the city had spiraled out of anyone's control when the 6-foot-2
general with the pencil mustache and caramel skin appeared from obscurity
and threw his weight against the mayhem. 

"He's got the power to make things happen," Firestone says. Nearby, Honore
is pledging to a volunteer that the Army will find a way to retrieve 1,000
pounds of meat the man wants to donate for the troops. "It's awesome that he
came here," Firestone says. "He's the first general I've seen come down
here." 

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?" 

That's the general, the farmer turned career military man of 36 years,
speaking his mind, propriety be damned. 

Yes, he offers in an interview aboard his Black Hawk, his wife of 34 years,
Beverly, has admonished him from time to time about that intimidating public
manner, about "using the word 'b.s.' on TV," he says. (The recent usage came
when a reporter told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that a
Louisiana politician had complained there was too much red tape facing
victims. Before Chertoff could answer, Honore snapped: "That's b.s.!") 

But he also believes that "it takes a big personality to command the army
east of the Mississippi River." 

That's the region of the Army's 1st Division, and he is its commanding
general, based in Atlanta, overseeing the preparations of units being
deployed to Iraq. As leader of the Joint Task Force Katrina, he now commands
all active-duty troops from all military branches devoted to the storm
recovery operation. As of Saturday, those troops numbered 20,800, and more
are coming. (National Guard troops number 50,000, but they are not under
Honore's command.) And yes, he says he is a John Wayne fan, has seen all his
movies. But he asserts that the troops in general are taking the battle
(recovery) to the enemy (Katrina's destruction). 

"This ain't about me," he says, there amid the troops. "This is about us." 

With his leadership of U.S. armed forces in the post-Katrina operation, he
burst onto the public stage with broadcast images of him deploying troops on
New Orleans streets and growling, "Lower your weapons!" 

A few days later, when he is heard barking at a soldier to "sling it"
(meaning his M-16), he explains, "It's a zero-threat environment" and he
doesn't want soldiers' demeanor to suggest "that the city is under siege." 

And yet the water-logged streets of New Orleans are filled with troops,
police, firefighters, FEMA recovery officials. With the vast majority of New
Orleanians evacuated since the storm, the beleaguered city is one huge work
zone. 

In the thick of the recovery, a typical day (Saturday, for instance) took
Honore from Camp Shelby to the USS Iwo Jima, anchored on the Mississippi
River in New Orleans, where he met with other military leaders to strategize
on the remaining search-and-rescue or recovery operations. He met also with
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, the newly appointed lead federal
representative here following the recall to Washington of embattled FEMA
Director Michael Brown. 

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." 

Retired Army Gen. Dennis Reimer, who served as Army chief of staff from 1995
to 1999, is hearing much that is familiar from his days commanding Honore. 

"When he shoots from the hip, it's always based on experience, and his
experience is where the rubber meets the road," Reimer says. 

Among other positions, Honore served as commander of the 2nd Infantry
Division in Korea, as vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and as commander of the Standing Joint Force Headquarters for Homeland
Security, part of the U.S. Northern Command. He saw action in Iraq and
Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. He holds a master's degree in human
resources management. 

One episode that is vintage Honore occurred in 1998, Reimer remembers.
Honore was addressing a group of military acquisition officials, speaking
about new weapons systems. 

His speech became well known to Army brass and was memorable for a
particular line quoted in the journal Inside the Army: "You are fielding
pieces of crap. Is that clear enough to you?" 

Now Honore brings that pointed, no-nonsense sensibility to an unprecedented
humanitarian disaster that requires a tough leader, Reimer says. 

"It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission," Reimer says. "What
Russ has done is understood what his role is and understood the broad
mission. He will make somebody mad. He will step on somebody's toes and
probably do some things wrong," albeit very few things wrong, Reimer said. 

Switching to a sports analogy, albeit a tortured one, he says: "His batting
average will be in the 90th percentile, and that will work in the major
leagues any day." 

Imagine it: He was the college kid at historically black Southern University
and A&M College in Baton Rouge, La., in the late 1960s who had a horse named
Big Dan, who worked on a dairy farm and who planned, when graduation came in
1971, on being a farmer. 

That's how he was raised -- on his father's farm in Lakeland, La., amid a
large mixed-heritage Creole clan (the "Ragin' Cajun" nickname in the Army is
a misnomer) in a rural region called Pointe Coupee Parish north of Baton
Rouge. He had 11 siblings that included a straight line of eight boys, of
which he was the youngest. They grew sugar cane, cotton and corn and had
pigs and cows, too. 

"I grew up poor, but we had a good family" and a grounding in the Catholic
faith. 

He describes his father as a "master of provisions, of providing for the
family." That skill, he says, was an early influence on his character, along
with what he learned of "making the most of all your assets," a lesson
gleaned from the dairy farm where he worked during college. After serving in
the ROTC while in school, he entered the military and made it his life, much
to his father's dismay. 

"He was not too hot on this Army thing," Honore says. 

But he found it to be a calling. 

"The Army gave me open sky. 

"I got in the military and I liked what I was doing and the opportunity to
be judged by your performance as opposed to other measures." He is talking
about race, but he does not want to elaborate. Rather than talk about the
racism of those days, he says, "I'm more about the future than the past." 

But his past as a farmer lives on. At his home in Atlanta, he is known for
the vegetable garden he maintains down the street, where he harvests
potatoes, peppers, okra and corn. It's his form of relaxation and exercise,
he says. 

"He's a very kind person and brings back vegetables from his garden," says
Col. Robert Minor, a neighbor, who's received tomatoes and cucumbers from
the general. 

Honore has raised four children, including a son, Michael, who is an Army
sergeant in Baghdad. His youngest child, Stephen, is only 15, and Honore is
hoping he'll chose the military too. He jokingly calls it "the family
business." 

"But that'll be his choice," Honore says. 

One of his daughters, Stephanie, lives in Florida. The other, Kimberly,
lives in New Orleans. She was out of town when Hurricane Katrina struck, but
her pets were stranded for several days in her Jefferson Parish apartment.
She asked her dad to save them. 

But he was so busy, what with the city descending into mayhem and evacuees
being moved by scores of thousands out to cities and towns around the
country and troops pouring in and the rescue of humans still underway. 

But this week, 10 days into their abandonment, Kimberly's pets were finally
on his agenda. Honore found himself with a bit of downtime. As he tells it,
he chuckled at what he knows may sound silly to some. It was "a cat and
hamster rescue," he says, freeing Gumbo and Hammie from their own
post-Katrina hell. 

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This country so very desperately needs more people like Russel L. Honore. 

Take care, 

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil
and steady dedication of a lifetime." 
 
--Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.