Ellis Henican on Col. David Hackworth:

David Hackworth is one of the most celebrated soldiers in modern U.S. history. He joined the merchant marine at 14, the Army at 15, and he's never looked back. He was the youngest U.S. captain in the Korean War, the youngest colonel in Vietnam. As a soldier and later a war correspondent, he's been on a dozen battlefields, hot and cold. And he never became a Pentagon bureaucrat. Of all the medals that have been pinned to his uniform, it's the Combat Infantryman's Badge he's proudest of.

Now his country is tilting toward war again.

"Having thought long and hard about war with Iraq," Hackworth told me, measuring his words carefully, "I cannot find justification. I don't see a threat. They are not Nazi Germany. This is not the Wehrmacht. In no way does the situation in Iraq affect my nation's security. That is the bottom line of analyzing threats. 'Does this country threaten my country's security?' In this case, absolutely not."

The awesome risks of this war, he said, far outweigh the potential rewards.

"Focus on protecting the American homeland, which is not adequately defended," Hack said. "Nine-eleven proved that. All of the machinations that have gone on since then are more lip service and crowd-pleasing than real. Our borders are still wide open. Our ports are vulnerable, too. And there are plenty of sleeper cells - Middle Eastern terrorists living among us, waiting to do their thing."

...

And finally, what about all the anti-American sentiment this war will generate? "One and a half billion Muslims, who don't like us anyway. Now they're gonna look and say, 'Here come the crusaders again.'"

From their ranks rise the terrorists of tomorrow.

As he travels across the country, Hackworth told me, the vast majority of military veterans he meets see this war as a rotten idea.

"They've been there," he said. "They know war is not a blood sport, as cable news make it out to be. Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld - they've never stood and faced the elephant. These are the people who gush for war."

But don't expect the generals and the admirals to raise their own private doubts.

"Through the long eight-year bloodbath of Vietnam, not one general sounded off and said, 'Bad war, can't win it, let's get out.' They went along to get along. It's true again. The top generals are head-shakers."

As for the public, just watch how quickly the pro-war sentiment will evaporate.

"My parachute brigade was the first to go to Vietnam," Hackworth recalled. "Eighty-five percent of Americans were saying, 'Hey, hey, all the way with LBJ.' We were there a year, shipping body bags back home as fast as we could. Suddenly, the American public, which is so fickle, did a 180. 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?'"