A Sept. 12 Style article about Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore incorrectly said that he is the commander of the Army's 1st Division. He is commanding general of the First U.S. Army.
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The Category 5 General
Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, surveying damage from a helicopter, is known as a no-nonsense guy.
(By Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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Retired Army Gen. Dennis Reimer, who served as Army chief of staff from 1995 to 1999, is hearing much that is familiar from his days commanding Honore.
"When he shoots from the hip, it's always based on experience, and his experience is where the rubber meets the road," Reimer says.
Among other positions, Honore served as commander of the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea, as vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as commander of the Standing Joint Force Headquarters for Homeland Security, part of the U.S. Northern Command. He saw action in Iraq and Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. He holds a master's degree in human resources management.
One episode that is vintage Honore occurred in 1998, Reimer remembers. Honore was addressing a group of military acquisition officials, speaking about new weapons systems.
His speech became well known to Army brass and was memorable for a particular line quoted in the journal Inside the Army: "You are fielding pieces of crap. Is that clear enough to you?"
Now Honore brings that pointed, no-nonsense sensibility to an unprecedented humanitarian disaster that requires a tough leader, Reimer says.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission," Reimer says. "What Russ has done is understood what his role is and understood the broad mission. He will make somebody mad. He will step on somebody's toes and probably do some things wrong," albeit very few things wrong, Reimer said.
Switching to a sports analogy, albeit a tortured one, he says: "His batting average will be in the 90th percentile, and that will work in the major leagues any day."
Imagine it: He was the college kid at historically black Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, La., in the late 1960s who had a horse named Big Dan, who worked on a dairy farm and who planned, when graduation came in 1971, on being a farmer.
That's how he was raised -- on his father's farm in Lakeland, La., amid a large mixed-heritage Creole clan (the "Ragin' Cajun" nickname in the Army is a misnomer) in a rural region called Pointe Coupee Parish north of Baton Rouge. He had 11 siblings that included a straight line of eight boys, of which he was the youngest. They grew sugar cane, cotton and corn and had pigs and cows, too.
"I grew up poor, but we had a good family" and a grounding in the Catholic faith.
He describes his father as a "master of provisions, of providing for the family." That skill, he says, was an early influence on his character, along with what he learned of "making the most of all your assets," a lesson gleaned from the dairy farm where he worked during college. After serving in the ROTC while in school, he entered the military and made it his life, much to his father's dismay.
