Colonel Hawk Kiefer's maternal great-grandfather, Andy Burt, enlisted at Lincoln’s first call. He fought in the Civil War, the Indian Wars and the Philippine Insurrection, commanding a Buffalo Soldier regiment. His son was a member of the West Point class of 1896. He served in the Insurrection and twice in China, the last as the commander of the 15^th Infantry “Can Do” Regiment in the mid-thirties. Hawk’s father enlisted in 1916 thinking he would serve with Pershing in France. Instead the Army sent him to West Point as a member of the class of 1920. He played end on the football team but his real claim to West Point fame was the fact that he won both the heavyweight boxing and wrestling championships on the same day. He served in World War I, World War II and Korea. One of Hawk’s sons retired as an infantry lieutenant colonel and his daughter retired from the Air Force reserve at the same rank. His other son served four tours in Iraq with the CIA.

Hawk’s West Point class graduated into the Korean War and matured in Vietnam, where he commanded a battalion in War Zone C during the Tet Offensive. That offensive began against one of Hawk’s fire support bases. In 1967 he had moved his battalion to the Cambodian Border. Then his Division ordered him to set up a second base farther east, astride a major North Vietnamese infiltration route. Division allowed Hawk to name the new base, and he called it Burt, after his great-grandfather, who had commanded a similar base on the Bozeman Trail. A week later Tet started with an attack on Burt at midnight, when two North Vietnamese Regiments and one Viet Cong began a series of human wave assaults that lasted until dawn. Several times they broke through and there was hand to hand fighting before they finally ceased. No one at Burt that night will ever forget what happened. One of the soldiers there who was wounded early on but could not be evacuated until dawn was Oliver Stone. He later wrote and directed the Oscar-winning movie Platoon based on what happened that night.  Hawk’s wars were Korea and Vietnam. He remembers them this way: “My friends and I were boys who became men as we marched toward the sounds of the guns. In our youth we were clear-eyed and confident. Some of us even sang as we marched. That changed in the first furious fire-fight against our fierce and determined foes. The enemy came at us like a flash flood in a mountain storm: Koreans from the hills south of the Yalu, Chinese from Outer Mongolia, Vietnamese from victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. They attacked mostly at night, in waves of hundreds, driven by the whistles, drums, bugles, lights, and shouts of their leaders. As they did we used artillery, mortars, mines, machineguns, grenades, rifles, Claymores and bayonets to kill them by the hundreds, eventually by the thousands. After the war the North Vietnamese told us that we killed more than a million of them. The number made no difference, for they had an apparently inexhaustible supply of expendable soldiers. Our guys were neither plentiful nor expendable, but in the ten years of ground combat in Korea and Vietnam, in places like the Chosin Reservoir and the Ia Drang Valley, we lost a hundred thousand of America’s finest. In the process, the gleams in our guys eyes changed to blank, unfocused stares, and they wanted only to live one more day and eventually go home, hopefully in one piece and not in a box.

“Why were we there? Back then Washington said we were saving fifteen, maybe thirty, million Koreans and Vietnamese from communism. Today I answer that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. Occasionally I wonder about the intentions of those who sent us to fight in the Far East. At West Point, my military history professor told me that we must never wage a land war in Asia. It has too much space and too many expendable soldiers. I recall that a few months before the North Koreans attacked, the American Secretary of State announced in a major speech that Korea was not in our national interests. Did he induce the attack? Later, another Secretary of State forecast that if South Vietnam were to fall, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes. Was he a shill?

“I cannot answer those questions, but I can tell you that America’s real adversary in East Asia was and is China. The Chinese almost killed my father at the Chosin Reservoir. They twice shot down my West Point roommate over Hanoi. We know that the Chinese and the Vietnamese have been fighting each other for a thousand years. Sometimes late at night when the world around me is silent, asleep, I play the game of ‘what if’ and I wonder why someone in Washington didn’t find a way to use the Vietnamese hatred of China against the Chinese? Would that have saved fifty-eight thousand American lives? And what if Truman had not relieved MacArthur? Would we now have a nuclear nut case in North Korea? And what if Congress had not cut off funds for the South Vietnamese after we withdrew our soldiers? Would that have saved a million boat people? 

“Now and then when I am awake with some anonmyous ache, I pray for more wisdom in Washington than I have seen in the past, and I ask that our leaders refrain from casually committing citizens to combat in faraway countries. My hope is that fifty years from now, another old colonel will not have to mourn the deaths of another hundred thousand American soldiers.”