Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts by Robert D. Kaplan

Author:Robert D. Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307472694
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Army Maj. Larry Smith of Savannah, Illinois, whom I had met at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had lured me to Nepal—something that was easy to do given the country’s fascinating situation. When I had encountered Larry at Fort Leavenworth he wore a uniform; when I saw him again in Kathmandu he had on jeans, cowboy boots, and a flowing white kurta—an outfit he called “Texan-Hindustani”—and was surrounded by an extensive home library that included many Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu grammars.

Larry smoked a lot of cigarettes. He had grown up on a family farm in Illinois along the Mississippi River, near Ulysses S. Grant’s hometown of Galena. At sixteen, he spent a year as an exchange student in western Germany and learned German fluently. Now forty, he had been married for twenty-two years to a beautiful New Delhi–born Indian woman whom he had met at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois. They had a twelve-year-old daughter and a twenty-one-year-old son. The son was also in the Army, about to enter the Special Forces Qualification (Q) Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

After community college, Larry enrolled at Rockford College, near where he grew up. In October 1983, after hearing about the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, as he told me, “I got up and walked out of a class on French literature, went straight to the local recruiter’s office, and joined the Army as a buck private. I have nothing against French literature. But at the time, it didn’t mean much to me.”

Over the next five years, while working as a military policeman in Alabama and Germany, he rose to sergeant. Then he enrolled in the ROTC program at Illinois State University in Normal, graduating as a second lieutenant. Tours at Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Lewis, Washington; Fort Polk, Louisiana; and Fort Carson, Colorado, followed in succession, as he rose to the command of a military intelligence company. Next, he decided he wanted to be a foreign area officer for the Indian subcontinent. That led to a year of studying Hindi at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and a year of graduate school in subcontinental Asian studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

From Texas, Larry and his wife moved to southern India, where he spent a year at an Indian Army staff college. His impressions of it were mixed. Despite the extensive battlefield experience of his fellow students in Kashmir and along the Indian-Pakistani border, the Indian military, in his opinion, put “tremendous emphasis on form over substance, with an unwillingness to self-critique.” After-action reviews of the 1962 Indian-Chinese border war were still classified, and Indian generals expressed criticisms of military tactics and policy only in the most oblique terms, making for an academic straitjacket. There was, too, the usual problem of a third-world army—weak noncommissioned officers “who were essentially privates with seniority.” At Indian Army messes, enlisted men served tea to the officers. Larry, an officer who had once

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