Who nearly died in Vietnam; Won our last war; called for rightful interventions & denounced others?

In August 1995, the general—three stars, working as J-5 for the Joint Chiefs—went to Bosnia as part of the negotiating team Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had put together to end the civil war that had resulted in the massacre of as many as eight thousand Muslim men and boys at the town of Srebrenica the month before.

In Belgrade, Clark had met for the first time Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was sponsoring the Bosnian Serbs. Now the team had to travel to Sarajevo. Told that the airport in Sarajevo was too dangerous to fly into, the team decided to drive and asked Milosevic to guarantee its safety on a road held by Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic did not, and so the team wound up taking a fortified Humvee and an armored personnel carrier on a pitched, narrow, winding mountain road notoriously vulnerable to Serb machine-gun fire. Clark and Holbrooke went in the Humvee, the rest in the APC.

In his book, the general describes what happened this way: "At the end of the first week we had a tragic accident on Mount Igman, near Sarajevo. were killed when the French armored personnel carrier in which they were riding broke through the shoulder of the road and tumbled several hundred meters down a steep hillside."

It is not until one reads Holbrooke's book, To End a War, that one finds out that after the APC went off the road, Clark grabbed a rope, anchored it to a tree stump, and rappelled down the mountainside after it, despite the gunfire that the explosion of the APC set off, despite the warnings that the mountainside was heavily mined, despite the rain and the mud, and despite Holbrooke yelling that he couldn't go. It is not until one brings the incident up to the general that one finds out that the burning APC had turned into a kiln, and that Clark stayed with it and aided in the extraction of the bodies; it is not until one meets Wesley Clark that one understands the degree to which he held Milosevic accountable.
http://www.rapidfire-silverbullets.com/2007/01/who_fits_the_profile_in_courag.html

The Award for Silver Star reads, "As the friendly force maneuvered through the treacherous region, it was suddenly subjected to an intense small arms fire from a well-concealed insurgent element. Although painfully wounded in the initial volley, Captain Clark immediately directed his men on a counter-assault of the enemy positions. With complete disregard for his personal safety, Captain Clark remained with his unit until the reactionary force arrived and the situation was well in hand. His courageous initiative and exemplary professionalism significantly contributed to the successful outcome of the engagement. Captain Clark's unquestionable valor in close combat against a hostile force is in keeping with the finest traditions of the military service and reflects great credit upon himself, the 1st Infantry Division, and the United States Army." http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Wesley_Clark

It would take him another year of rehabilitation to recover from his injuries, which doctors had warned him would leave him with a permanent limp due to the large amount of muscle lost to his right calf. Clark refused this prognosis, teaching himself to walk again and to use his injured hand. He would go on to occasionally receive perfect scores on his physical fitness tests throughout his career. http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Wesley_Clark

People at his speeches can be heard to remark, "He's small" when he glides to the stump, but he's not really; he's around five ten and not so much diminutive as compressed, like a man who never exhales. His stride is at once jaunty and athletic and somewhat artificial, like the stride of a man who has devoted time to teaching himself how to walk . . . as, in fact, he has, after getting shot four times in Vietnam. Taught himself to walk again, without a limp, despite the fact that a quarter of his calf muscle was gone; taught himself to shake hands manfully, despite the loss of the muscle around his right thumb. He had to learn those things because, as his wife says, he was desperately afraid of being profiled out of the Army.
The only thing he couldn't do was teach himself how to play basketball again, because no matter how many hours he spent alone in the gym practicing his foul shots, he couldn't stabilize the ball. . . .
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030801_mfe_clark_2.html

How "They" Tried to Smear Wes Clark and how it didn't Work!
This is a follow post on a story that I have followed since January of this year on the attempted smear against Wes Clark by the "Powers that Be". We should recall that Wes Clark dared to discuss those uncomfortable issues that are deemed "Taboo", i.e., "Third Rail" in our politics; the powerful affects of the AIPAC lobby on our politics extending to both sides of the aisle.
Read the three articles at the links that I have posted below to find out how Wesley Clark changed the dialogue for the better with some steadfast courage, sacrifice, and a little help from some likemind bloggers.
http://www.rapidfire-silverbullets.com/2007/03/how_they_tried_to_smear_wes_cl.html

REGARDING ACXIOM:

Robert O’Harrow, the Author of "No Place to Hide" thinks well of Clark
Robert O'Harrow Jr. is a reporter for the Washington Post who wrote the Book "No Place To Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society"

Here is a partial reveiw of that book from Publisher's Weekly which I obtained at Amazon.com:

"The amount of personal data collected on ordinary citizens has grown steadily over the decades, and after 9/11, corporations that had been amassing this information largely for marketing purposes saw an opportunity to strengthen their ties with the government. But what do we really know about these data collectors, and are they trustworthy? O'Harrow, a Pulitzer finalist who covers privacy and technology issues for the Washington Post, tracks the explosive growth of this surveillance industry, with keen attention to the problems that "inevitable mistakes" along the way have created in mainstream society, from victims of identity theft who have been placed in financial jeopardy to travelers detained at the airport because of the similarity of their names to those of criminal suspects. O'Harrow gives the government's push for increased surveillance heavy play, but he effectively presents the story's many sides, as when he juxtaposes the perspectives of a Justice Department attorney, a civil liberties activist and Senator Patrick Leahy in the first chapter."

As for O'Harrow and Clark, they appeared together at a Center for American Progress Conference sometime in 2005. O'Harrow said this about Clark and Acxiom at that event:

"...There is a guy that I think many of us in the room respect and admire deeply, General Clark, and he serves as a great example of someone who was deeply involved in representing a company called Axiom. And Axiom was one of those companies that responded with – I know that from my reporting – very patriotic motives. They had a lot of that as a marketer and they shared it and they shared it to good effect; it helped. They also saw ways that they could change their business model and become part of the security industrial complex. And one of the people that was helping open doors for Axiom in Washington was General Clark. The reason I raise that is because I kept finding that General Clark got to places before I did and people spoke admiringly of his ability to say what he knew, to say what he didn’t know, to play it straight, and to in every case do it in the smart way, which is why people respect him."

Clark speaking to O'Harrow at that event:

"Can I just say one more thing about this impulse to privacy that you’ve mentioned, Bob, because when I was doing this – and I want to say this because Nuala is here, because when the government starts working programs and it does know where they go and where they going they are always cautious because everybody knows that these programs that do data are very sensitive. Before the government could even get a grip on some of these programs, when the word comes out on them they are blasted before people even understand it. So on the one hand, I understand exactly why there is an impulse for privacy. People – companies like Axiom were told, “Look, you just can’t compete for this contract if you talk about this to the press because we don’t know what the program is and we want to have – we want to be able to –“ this is – I’m speaking for the government – “We want to be able to see what data you have available. We want to figure out if we can use it, and we don’t want to have to answer a million enquiries from the press about it until we get it done. Then we’ll run it through.”

You know, my instinct on it was a little bit different than the government’s, but I didn’t have any influence on them. I mean, my instinct would have to bring in the ACLU and to say, “Please create a group that’s sort of like a trusted group that we can bounce ideas off of and we want to run these ideas by you. And if you have strong objections, we want to hear them. We want to hear them right upfront. What we ask is that you will work with us in a collaborative sense so that – you know, you tell us before you run out to the Washington Post the next day and we have got (unintelligible.)” So, you know, we are just exploring ideas. We want to try to put this together and I do think there is a need for that. There is a need for enough privacy in governmental decision-making that the government can come out with programs and then have a chance to explain them, not to take anything away from the press because that balance is a dynamic balance. It’s fought by and maintained by hardworking reporters who make a lot of phone calls and get turned down a lot, but it’s a very important public duty.

So I am not sure if the balance is right is what I am saying. I don’t know if it’s right and that is one of issues we ought to explore."


Taken from:
“NO PLACE TO HIDE: WHERE THE DATA REVOLUTION MEETS HOMELAND SECURITY”

MODERATOR:
P. J. CROWLEY, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS

FEATURING:
GENERAL WESLEY K. CLARK
JAMES X. DEMPSEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY
NUALA O’CONNOR KELLY, CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICER, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
ROBERT O’HARROW, JR., REPORTER, WASHINGTON POST; AUTHOR, NO PLACE TO HIDE
“NO PLACE TO HIDE: WHERE THE DATA REVOLUTION MEETS HOMELAND SECURITY”
http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/0504transcript.pdf