Francis Hamit

Author, playwright and award-winning screenwriter shares current interests and more than 50 years of writing.

Hegseth's ideological war on truth and military education damages the nation.

I grew up in the Army. My father, Colonel Harold F. Hamit MD, FACS, was drafted in World War Two. He was a medical student at NYU and ordered to stay and complete his degree. He was very smart, published some scientific papers before the Army drafted him, and knew how to do research. He got a taste of combat as the Regimental Surgeon for the 12th Philippine Scouts at the end of the war, and afterwards was part of the Occupation Forces in Japan.

This was after I was born. Mother had to give up her own nursing career. This was part of the morals of the time.

Having no money to buy a medical practice, Dad stayed in the Army and began a series of surgical residencies at various Army hospitals. We moved from post to post every two to three years, a traumatic event for my mother, my sister, and me, every time, because we had to always start over in a new place. The needs of the service came first. Dad served in Korea as Commanding Officer of the 1st M.A.S.H. Yeah, the one they made the funny movie and television series about, based on a book written by one of his fellow doctors.

It wasn’t funny for him. He came back a changed man. Looking at my own PTSD symptoms, I believe he was also a sufferer but could not admit it. In the 1950s any suggestion of mental illness would have been career ending. So would have been any political activity. Army officers served the nation, but they didn’t vote and expressed no political opinions. Dad became impatient, quick to anger, demanding, and a bully. His free time was consumed by a series of research papers. He drew and lettered his own charts and graphs, a painstaking process. During his surgical residency in Denver, the Army tasked him to get a Masters degree in biochemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder. We then transferred to Washington DC, where he was assigned to the Army Surgeon General’s office to administer research contracts. He had quite a few, and traveled a lot to projects at various universities and corporations that made medical gear and developed new medicines and therapies.

Two of these projects stand out. They had major impacts upon not just American but global society. The first was a method for treating heart attacks at the moment they happened. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, or CPR — quickly adapted worldwide, saving millions of lives. The second was for “bone glue”, originally intended as a quick fix for fractures, and then discovered to stick anything back together with amazing speed and strength, including soft tissue. Thus was born Superglue! A very useful product. And created with a few thousand dollars of government money.

Dad’s part was to approve the payments. Nothing more. But it was the combination of surgical residency and his Masters in Biochemistry that gave him the knowledge to supervise that research.

Let me depart from my family history, and explore some examples from military history. Army involvement in scientific and technological research goes back to the days of Thomas Edison. Officers with advanced degrees are commonplace, and becoming a General now requires a Doctorate or multiple Masters or both. We have the most educated, intellectual military in the World. It is part of our soft power. This is part of what our very insecure and jealous Secretary of Defense seeks to undermine.

In 1942, a Lt. Col. named Jimmie Doolittle planned a daring raid on Japan with B-24 bombers flying from an aircraft carrier. It was a daring demonstration, but one based in science and engineering. Doolittle had a PhD in aeronautical engineering from M.I.T. He was a famous aviator in the 1930s and helped design the new generation of bombers. He knew it could be done. He’d done the math. But it was his military education, discipline, and leadership that got it done, and propelled him up to General’s stars on his shoulders.

Few officers are selected to study at civilian universities. The Defense Department has its own schools in abundance, many of which offer advanced degrees in topics seldom taught elsewhere. Strategy, Logistics, and Intelligence are some of them, although a few civilian institutions now also offer such degrees to satisfy an increasing demand. A high-tech military needs high-tech leaders, both military and civilian.

After the Vietnam War, General William E. DePuy determined that we lost that war because many of our officers simply didn’t have the smarts that went with advanced education to win it. Yes, we won every battle, but still lost the war. Why? Because we underestimated the enemy, because we did not know him. We had a distorted primitive view of his culture, resolve, and political will. We didn’t understand the situation. and that started with Westmoreland himself, trapped in his own nostalgia for the big battles of World War Two.

DePuy was part of the “never again, no more Vietnams” faction in the Defense Department that thought the next war would begin with a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe though the Fulda Gap. I served in Frankfurt then, and that was the thinking. The Soviets had better tanks and more of them.

In 1973, DePuy created the Training and Doctrine Command or TRADOC. It became the largest university in the world, incorporating courses from many civilian institutions. This only makes sense. Why create a MBA degree when Harvard has the best one in the World? Forget about “woke” or political considerations. You want your logistics officers, all of whom interact with the civilian sector, to walk the same walk and talk the same talk. It saves time and money, and provides new careers for retiring officers and NCOs. It puts everyone on the same page.

A comfortable retirement is the goal of almost every American military officer intent on a career. Those multiple assignments are building blocks to acquire knowledge and expertise. They test people and gradually weed out the ones less able or less willing. Career decisions are family affairs. I’ve known officers to leave mid-career when their spouse said, “enough, it’s me or your career.” The usual tour is two or three years, before you move on to a new assignment and make room for someone else. The maximum is five years. My father had that as Chief of Surgery at Brooke Army General Hospital in San Antonio near the end of his 26-year career. He was a Colonel by then. Before that, he worked on a research project at Baylor University Medical School with famous surgeons Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley. He was their equal then, and teaching other doctors the delicate art of surgery.

This carefully planned system of education and practical knowledge acquired over 20 or more years is what Hegseth messed with when he blocked four promotions from Colonel to Brigadier General. Two are Black and two are women. Hegseth’s overreach is based on his well-known bigotry. It is “command interference”. Way below his pay grade. There is an informal rule in our military. You don’t break another man’s (or woman’s) rice bowl. Not without certain cause, based upon violations of trust or the regulations.

Stopping a career because of prejudice disrupts military planning. It makes the organization less intelligent, and reinforces bigotry that the US military has been trying to eliminate since 1948. Sentimental appeals of “heritage” based upon the Lost Cause mythology of Neo-Confederates, and the desire to keep women “barefoot and pregnant” at a time when human capital is at a premium, is another part of the Christian Nationalist agenda being advanced at every level of society. Hegseth glories in this identity.

He fired the top Army chaplain not just because he is Black and a Baptist, but because he resisted Hegseth’s interference in matters of Faith. Like politics, religion is supposed to be free of command interference. The firing of the leader of the Training Command is another effort to impose ideology on the force. Hegseth’s culture war extends to military dependents’ high school libraries. He has done the same for those at other military schools. He has been sued for violating the civil rights of children. An ignominious first. The goal is to suppress thought and discourse at a time when our soldier scholars are rethinking tactics, strategy and the military of the future. Hegseth seems to have no idea about this. He postures and he preaches, but he does not lead.

Hegseth’s public religious services and prayers are obscene, and seek to override decades of military culture and law. He is already a probable war criminal, and his excuse that he is just following policy set out by President Trump simply puts our Criminal-in-Chief in the dock with him.

Hegseth wants to turn back the clock to a hundred years ago when Jim Crow laws and terrorism ruled many communities. Suppression of Civil Rights deprived the nation of many talented workers in both our military and civilian workforce.

Hegseth’s military career ended because his bigotry labeled him an insider threat and cancelled his security clearance. It denied him higher rank. In his own words, the Army “spit him out”. Trump’s selection of him as Secretary of Defense was a bad joke, except no one is laughing. Hegseth is advocating war crimes and creating a quiet mutiny among the flag rank officers he despises.