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On the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, I trudged into my office in Midtown Manhattan, still shellshocked from having watched the Twin Towers collapse to the ground the day before from the roof of my apartment building in the West Village. I was an editor at Maxim, at the time king of the so-called lad mags. I walked past the wall covered in R-rated reader submissions for our “Found Porn” section, photos of coeds sitting in tubs of Jell-O, a Gatling gun that fired rubber bands, and cases of booze that PR agencies sent us hoping for a little ink somewhere in our pages. When I reached my desk, there was a single blinking message on my phone. I knew exactly who it would be from. I hit play and the familiar, gravely voice of retired Col. David Hackworth came through the earpiece: “Well, we tried to warn them, but they didn’t listen.”
Thirteen months earlier, a story co-written by Hackworth and his writing partner and edited by me ran in the August issue of Maxim. Titled “WWIII,” it predicted threescenarios most likely to draw the U.S. into its next major military conflict. One of those scenarios was a coordinated multicity attack on American soil carried out by Osama bin Laden.
The story was an unlikely collaboration. I was an ex-frat boy who had only written trivial items like “How to Scam a Free Beer” and never spearheaded a feature. Hackworth was known as the most decorated living American soldier. During his 26 years in the military he earned 91 medals, including eight Purple Hearts, one of which was awarded when a bullet pierced his skull on one side and came out the other. Since then, he’d become a bestselling author and renowned war correspondent.
I hadn’t spoken to Hackworth in more than a year, but the worst-case fiction we created brought us back together when it became a grim reality. The terrorist attacks bonded us in a way I never could have imagined and started a friendship that lasted until his death.
I’D FIRST SEEN Col. Hackworth on CNN in 1991. He was in Saudi Arabia covering Operation Desert Storm for Newsweek and regularly appeared on the network as a military analyst. During one segment, he was being pressed to agree that two RAF airmen who were shot down, captured, and then trotted out bruised and battered on Iraqi state TV had been tortured. Hackworth would only say something along the lines of, “This is what can happen to your face when it goes through a canopy while ejecting.” His unwillingness to bullshit stayed with me.
It was early May 2000 when I had the idea for my big story. I was originally hired as the magazine’s managing editor, a strictly administrative position, but had recently transitioned into the creative role of senior editor. For the first few months into the job, most of my pitches were rejected. But “WWIII” got the go-ahead. It was my first long-form piece, and if it didn’t go well I feared my career would suffer a major setback. Google was three years old by this time and with its help I was able to find Hackworth and email him through the website for his veterans’ organization, Stand for the Troops. Then I went down a biographical rabbit hole.
The legend of “Hack” began in 1951 during the Korean War, when the 20-year-old led a particularly lethal special forces unit called the Wolfhound Raiders. In Vietnam, he commanded a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division — and was said to have inspired the character of Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. Most infamously, he transformed a fire support base deep in-country filled with draftees wearing “love beads and peace symbols” into a hardcore military outpost with brothels and gambling dens.
I never had any interest in meeting freelance writers but had a man-crush on Hackworth and so invited him to the Maxim offices to discuss my idea. Although aged 69 by then, he still had the build and presence of a man who had no trouble taking care of himself. There was a glint of Johnny Reb in his eyes and his foreign-correspondent uniform of boots, jeans, and khaki chore jacket gave off a sense of casual world-weariness.
“Col. Hackworth, hello,” I offered, extending a hand in our lobby. I’d never before shaken the hand of a man who’d killed someone with his bare hands. “Call me Hack,” he shot back with a booming voice. He introduced me to his writing partner, Tom Mathews, his former editor at Newsweek, and I promptly led them to our owner’s empty corner office. The three of us chopped it up for a minute and then I explained the concept of my story: We’d lay out heightened fictional scenarios for military conflict, but rooted in real intel and Hackworth’s expertise. I theorized that China’s ominous claim to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea or narco-terrorism in Colombia could be two possible flashpoints.
Hackworth leaned back and then exchanged an amused glance with Mathews. “You’re missing the big one,” he said. “The U.S. is going to war after Osama bin Laden attacks New York. And it’s going to happen pretty soon.”
I’d never heard of bin Laden, but Hackworth was convincing. We agreed such an audacious operation would be our lead storyline. Hackworth promised to speak to his intelligence sources in D.C. and gather some specifics.
“BIN LADEN’S GOING to attack the Towers again,” Hack declared on our conference call a week later. I was dubious. The 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center had caused relatively little damage and “only” six fatalities. Why would terrorists hit the same target? Hack stressed again and again that a second assault would adhere to the standard military doctrine of achieving a known objective. Still, the feature in my head, the one I thought my career was resting on, needed to be more fantastical to capture the imagination of our readers. Having recently read that atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) in the former Soviet Union may have fallen into the wrong hands, I thought a portable nuke destroying the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge with 30,000 runners on it at the start of the New York City marathon would be a much more dramatic scenario. Hack relented on another WTC bombing after I told him that a Soviet general claimed some 100 ADMs were unaccounted for.
While we haggled over imaginary details I thought would never come to pass, the “planes operation,” as it was known among Al Qaeda leadership, first conceptualized at a meeting in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden in 1996, was well and truly underway. Only months earlier, on Jan. 15, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom were on American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon, had arrived in Los Angeles from Bangkok. Around the same time, in Germany, 9/11 pilots Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi began shaving their beards and wearing western clothes to avoid drawing unwanted attention. Several months later in Venice, Florida, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah enrolled in Accelerated Pilot Programs at two flight schools. On the other side of the world, Al Qaeda operatives in Dubai were wiring them tens of thousands of dollars to finance the brewing plot.
Two weeks after our call, Hack and Tom’s first draft came in. My heart sank. The narrative was just plain flat. I replied with detailed notes, saying the piece needed to read like a Tom Clancy novel, not a college term paper. But the second draft wasn’t much better. I offered to meet Tom in person to work on the piece, and he invited me to his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island. When I got there, we spent several hours discussing and debating every line of all three scenarios.
Hackworth called me the next day for a sitrep. I told him I was confident Tom’s next version was going to be on target. Then our conversation began to drift. Unlike many Vietnam vets who are reluctant to speak about their exploits in battle, Hack was an open book, and talked about combat with the same matter-of-factness one might about buying a six-pack. “Do you remember the first time you killed someone?” I asked. “I can never forget it,” Hack instantly replied. A two-minute story followed about how he saw a North Korean soldier hurrying along a berm. Hack quietly ran the man down and tackled him. While marching the POW back to his squad, a bunch of North Korean soldiers appeared out of the trees. In a panic, Hack flung the guy to the ground, put a trench knife to his neck, and covered his mouth. “The enemy’s footsteps were getting louder, and as they were about to pass,” Hackworth continued, “the guy began to yell out, so I cut his throat.”
TOM’S THIRD DRAFT was a revelation and envisaged clear and present dangers: Narco-terrorism is coming to Main Street, U.S.A.! China is about to invade Taiwan! Holy shit — Osama bin Laden is going to bring America to its knees! The story was perfectly over-the-top, which was right on-brand for Maxim. Our editor-in-chief was thrilled with my final edit.
Two weeks later, several boxes of the August 2000 issue arrived in our office. The cover featured Izabella Miko and Tyra Banks, who were promoting their upcoming movie Coyote Ugly. (Cameron Crowe used images from the shoot for the fictional lad magazine Tom Cruise’s character runs in Vanilla Sky.) I felt a deep sense of pride and knew my nascent career in journalism was secured. But reading “WWIII” in high gloss, it struck me for the first time that such terror could actually happen.
I called our CEO and suggested we take out a full-page ad in The New York Times, saying something like “President Bush, Al Qaeda is about to attack the United States — what are you going to do about it?” He liked the idea and told me to look into it. But Hack’s feature had been the most expensive ever commissioned, and the additional $70,000 cost for the ad proved prohibitive.
Alas, it was now on to the next issue.
OUR “WWIII” STORY was a distant memory when, three months later, on Oct. 12, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Yemen’s Aden harbor.
Eleven months after that, I was sleeping in on a Tuesday, trying to ignore all the beeps on my answering machine. When I finally hit the messages button a little after 9 a.m., all five exclaimed the exact same thing, “Turn on the TV!”
Even as I watched the Towers fall, I couldn’t reconcile what was happening with Hackworth’s prescient piece. Of course, he wasn’t the only one who knew what was coming. Many people at the top levels of government had been urgently trying to warn the Bush administration about an impending terrorist attack.
Richard Clarke, who chaired the Counterterrorism Security Group, told Condoleezza Rice in a January 2001 memo that Al Qaeda was an “active, organized, major force” which potentially posed a “first order threat” to the U.S.
In June, the State Department had issued a threat advisory about a “spectacular” and “imminent” Al Qaeda attack.
George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, told the 9/11 Commission that “the system was blinking red” and could not “get any worse.”
No action was taken.
Too late.
On Sept. 18, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz sent a memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decrying the “failure of imagination” to foresee the threat of suicide pilots.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after my first visit, I returned to Sag Harbor to see Tom and talk about our friend. “Hackworth was flawed, sure — but brave and honest,” Tom reminisced. “He understood war like few others. The Maxim piece wasn’t perfect, but it was prophetic. It was an exercise in imagination that journalism badly needed.”
Hackworth died of cancer at the age of 74 on May 4, 2005. Everyone who loved and knew the man attended his funeral at the Old Post Chapel in Arlington National Cemetery. Tom Mathews was there, sitting next to celebrated war correspondents Kevin Buckley and Ward Just. Gen. Hal Moore, who wrote We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, as well as the likes of G. Gordon Liddy, crowded the pews.
At the start of the service, a family member played John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Apparently, the man who spent the prime years of his life fighting for his country yearned for a world where there was nothing to kill or die for. Gen. Hank Emerson was set to eulogize Hackworth, but upon approaching the lectern said he first wanted to acknowledge a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient in the congregation. All eyes turned to Hackworth’s longtime friend, Senator Bob Kerrey. He had served on the 9/11 Commission and was now sitting beside Hackworth’s wife, Eilhys England. Everyone in uniform stood and saluted the former Navy SEAL Team Leader who, only three months into his first tour in Vietnam in 1969, lost his lower right leg during a fierce battle on an island in Nha Trang Bay. After a moment, Kerrey stood and returned the salute.
