[Mb-civic] The Category 5 General - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Category 5 General
There's a Big Job to Be Done in New Orleans. Russel Honore Measures Up.

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 12, 2005; Page C01

NEW ORLEANS

There's the swagger, and that ever-present stogie. There's the height 
and heft of his physique. And that barking voice with its font of 
perhaps impolitic obscenities ("That's b.s," he famously asserted on 
national TV), not to mention his penchant for not suffering fools, as is 
the prerogative of a three-star general.
 
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, 57, is the kind of commander you 
don't mess with, you don't cross, who punctuates pronouncements with 
barked questions like "Everybody got that?" And he's so steeped in 
military culture that he ends his televised sound bites as if ending an 
army radio transmission: "Over."

But it's for something far less idiosyncratic, far more visceral, that 
the troops on the battered streets of New Orleans hold him in high 
regard: He's a soldier's soldier, the man you want in the trenches with 
you, the kind of man who'll cover your back.

As he strides through a command center set up outside the shuttered and 
storm-battered Harrah's casino here on Saturday, that is why the troops 
want to shake his hand, look him in the eye and thank him even as he 
thanks them for their work.

He's wrapped his big mitts around the hand of Spec. Amy Firestone, a 
member of the quick reaction force from the 1345th Transportation 
Company of the Oklahoma National Guard. She served in the dreaded 
Superdome, packed with evacuees and mayhem.

"Did you see any murders?" the general asks her sympathetically.

"I seen some stabbings, sir," she confides, her voice dripping with 
regret over what she witnessed.

He pats her on the shoulder, saying, "Thank you for being a good 
soldier," and palms a 1st Army medallion into her hand as a keepsake as 
he moves on to the crowd of troops and cops who have gravitated to him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/11/AR2005091101484.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050912/3178d9ee/attachment.htm