John
Alexander Hottell, III, USArmy, Major ...
A SOLDIER'S OWN OBITUARY
John Alexander
Hottell, III, graduated from West Point in 1964, tenth in a class of 564.
He was a Rhodes scholar in 1965. In Vietnam he earned two Silver Stars as
commander of Company B, First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry, First Cavalry
Division (Airmobile.) He later became aide to the First Cavalry commander,
Major General George W. Casey. Both were killed in the crash of a
helicopter on July 7, 1970. Major Hottell was 27 years old at the time of
his death, which occurred about one year after he wrote his own obituary
and sent it in a sealed envelope to his wife, Linda.
I am writing my own obituary for several reasons,
and I hope none of them are too trite. First, I would like to spare my
friends, who may happen to read this, the usual clichs about being a
good soldier. They were all kind enough to me, and I not enough to them.
Second, I would not want to be a party to perpetuation of an image that is
harmful and inaccurate: "glory" is the most meaningless of
concepts, and I feel that in some cases it is doubly damaging. And third,
I am quite simply the last authority on my own death.
I loved the Army: it reared me,
it nurtured me, and it gave me the most satisfying years of my life.
Thanks to it I have lived an entire lifetime in 26 years. It is only
fitting that I should die in its service. We all have but one death to
spend, and insofar as it can have any meaning, it finds it in the service
of comrades in arms.
And yet, I deny that I died FOR
anything - not my country, not my Army, not my fellow man, none of these
things. I LIVED for these things, and the manner in which I chose to do it
involved the very real chance that I would die in the execution of my
duties. I knew this, and accepted it, but my love for West Point and the
Army was great enough -- and the promise that I would some day be able to
serve all the ideals that meant anything to me through it was great enough
- for me to accept this possibility as a part of a price which must be
paid for all things of great value. If there is nothing worth dying for -
in this sense - there is nothing worth living for.
The Army let me live in Japan,
Germany and England with experiences in all of these places that others
only dream about. I have skied the Alps, killed a scorpion in my tent
[while] camping in Turkey, climbed Mount Fuji, visited the ruins of
Athens, Ephesus and Rome, seen the town of Gordium where another Alexander
challenged his destiny, gone to the opera in Munich, plays in the West End
of London, seen the Oxford-Cambridge rugby match, gone for pub crawls
through the Cotswolds, seen the night-life in Hamburg, danced to the
Rolling Stones and earned a master's degree in a foreign university.
I have known what it is like to
be married to a fine and wonderful woman and to love her beyond bearing
with the sure knowledge that she loves me; I have commanded a company and
been a father priest, income-tax adviser, confessor, and judge for 200 men
at one time; I have played college football and rugBy: won the British
national diving championship two years in a row, boxed for Oxford against
Cambridge only to be knocked out in the first round, and played handball
to distraction - and all of these sports I loved, I learned at West Point.
They gave me hours of intense happiness.
I have been an exchange student
at the German Military Academy, and gone to the German Jumpmaster school.
I have made thirty parachute jumps from everything from a balloon in
England to a jet at Fort Bragg. I have written an article that was
published in Army magazine, and I have studied philosophy.
I have experienced all these
things because I was in the Army and because I was an Army brat. The Army
is my life, it is such a part of what I was that what happened is the
logical outcome of the life I loved. I never knew what it is to fail, I
never knew what it is to be too old or too tired to do anything. I lived a
full life in the Army, and it has exacted the price. It is only just.