RIP for a soldier

Former Army Col. David Hackworth has died at 74.

He was no pacifist, no peacenik; he was a soldier, a combat veteran of three wars. More importantly, however, he was an honorable man who recognized military stupidity and bureaucratic indifference to the common soldier and wasn't afraid to make a big stink about it.

And he believed that wars should only be fought for good and necessary cause, which lead him to be one of the first senior military officers to publicly oppose the Vietnam War as well as to oppose the invasion of Iraq.

"Most combat vets pick their fights carefully. They look at their scars, remember the madness and are always mindful of the fallout," Hackworth wrote in February. "That's not the case in Washington, where the White House and the Pentagon are run by civilians who have never sweated it out on a battlefield."

His public opposition to Vietnam nearly got him court-martialed before he retired in 1971 and gave up his medals in protest of the war. (They were later reissued.)

Even in death, he managed to throw a punch on behalf of grunts: His website said that his

cause of death was a form of cancer now appearing with increasing frequency among Vietnam veterans exposed to the defoliants called Agents Orange and Blue.

Besides, anyone who considered Donald Rumsfeld an "asshole" couldn't have been all bad.