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7 Research Partners lOW I AM SPEEDING through downtown EI Paso again on my way to the airport, only this time I do not have a plane to catch. I am heading to meet a plane and pick up someone and my mind is filled with a prickly uncertainty. Because that someone knew S. L. A. Marshall far better than I ever did. That someone is my father. He is coming here to help me with my research in the library. At least that is what is supposed to happen. And that is what I hope will happen. But I have doubts, grave doubts. For one thing, my father seems to have become absolutely ob, sessed with this Marshall controversy. Retired now, with few de' mands, he has turned the defense of his father into a new full,time job. He counterattacks with letters and telephone calls. He is de, manding an accounting-or better, a mea culpa-from those who have committed grievous sins against his father, those responsible for what he has taken to calling "the slanderous travesty." His resolve to smite the enemy has resulted in a laborious anal, ysis of the 6,400-word article in American Heritage, a complete tab, ulation of words anti,Slam and pro,Slam, the bitter fruits of his find, ings presented to the magazine's editors in letters that are minutely detailed and acutely contentious. My father has also fired off some high,explosive rounds at Col. David H. Hackworth, Marshall's assis, tant during one of his Vietnam trips, his new Westover before Hack, worth's bitter split with the Army. Hackworth, who likes to be called "America's most decorated living soldier," had devoted a chapter of his best,selling autobiography, About Face, to the savaging 62 RESEARCH PARTNERS 63 of S. L. A. Marshall, even including his failure in bed with a Saigon prostitute. "General have many things in head but nothing in dick,"! the prostitute reported later, according to Hackworth. "All I can say," my father had written Hackworth, "is that you are an absolute ingrate. You know that, in his entire association with you, Slam had no interest but enhancing your associations, persona, and career. Yet, you write and spit on him. Shamefull" I may share some of my father's outrage, but I do not share his approach. Maybe I cannot be objective after all in this controversy, maybe I would rather help defend my grandfather. But I can be fair, I can be scrupulous about seeking facts, can avoid trading in halftruths and innuendoes, as Marshall's critics have done. So, as I near my rendezvous with my father, I am wary about his vitriol coloring my attitude, tainting my research. And one other matter is adding to my apprehension now-my relationship with my father. We are not close. We are, in many ways, strangers to one another. The number of days we have spent together since my father drove me off to college in 1965 do not total a month. This prompts some regret for us, but mainly relief. Because there were so many times of storm and stress and slammed doors, these drag-out arguments fueled by some strange fires within us, disputes over matters great or small with so many bitter words we would rather have back. There were arguments over my passing by a penny on the sidewalk, over the Alabama girl I was so sure I would marry when I was seventeen; over the F that I received in freshman biology at Virginia ("why don't you just quit college now," my father snapped); over something said on a street comer in Vail, Colorado; over the decision of my first wife and I not to have children; and over the Army and Vietnam, so many of the worst arguments over the Army and Vietnam. I may not have discussed Vietnam with my grandfather, but I did discuss it with my father, ad nauseam. I seemed to suffer from an insatiable urge to play student provocateur with my father, to confront him with my great insights into America gained in college, mostly with his money. I still have one of his letters from those antagonistic 1960s' days, a response to one of mine where I expressed my disappointment in my Infantry assignment and also enclosed, for his study I guess, an AtlantiC Monthly article on the military-industrial 64 RECONCILlATlON ROAD complex. My father pressed his pen to...

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