Time to play some golf and do some fishing Sir! (Col Farr is a member of Professionalsoldiers.com.)
After 46 years, storied military career closes
By Howard Altman | Tribune Staff
Published: April 25, 2013
During a career that began in the battlefields of Vietnam, Army Col. Warner “Rocky” Farr helped revolutionize special operations medicine, prepared for a Soviet invasion of Germany and found himself quoted by writer Noam Chomsky for his research into the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
Today, in a ceremony at MacDill Air Force Base, Farr retires after 46 years and four days in uniform, the third-longest serving soldier in the Army and one of only 13 of more than a half-million on active duty who served in Vietnam.
“I worked very hard to come up with a career progression path for special operations doctors,” says Farr, 64, who has been the command surgeon of U.S. Special Operations Command Central since 2009, coming over from the same role at U.S. Special Operations Command. “Now it is time for me to get out of the way.”
In the spring of 1967, Warner Dahlgren Farr was attending Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe. Lyndon Baines Johnson was in the White House, a gallon of gas cost 33 cents and the United States was at war in a place called Vietnam.
Farr, 18 at the time, was able to avoid the draft by going to college.
“I made good grades, but I didn’t know what I wanted to major in,” Farr says. “I was somewhat clueless.”
Knowing that he would be subject to the draft after graduating, Farr says he decided to “go ahead and get it over with” by enlisting.
For Farr, a career in the military wasn’t a stretch.
His father, Charles Farr, an Air Force colonel, devised the concept of an aerial gunship during WWII.
“He flew C-47s and was tired of his kickers [the crew pushing out supplies] getting shot by the Japanese,” says Farr. “So he put .50 caliber machine guns on the planes and invented the gunship.”
Farr became a Green Beret, leading to a brief encounter with the famous 1968 John Wayne movie.
“When I went to paratrooper school at Ft. Benning in October 1967, they were filming that, or just finishing up filming The Green Berets,” Farr says. He later went on to serve with some of the soldiers who acted in the movie.
Farr’s first foray into combat came with the storied Military Assistance Command Vietnam - Studies and Observation Group, known as MACVSOG for short, which was a partnership of Special Forces and the CIA.
Farr was assigned to a small group conducting reconnaissance on the Ho Chi Mihn Trail, where the North Vietnamese were bringing supplies to the south. Living in Vietnam and working in Cambodia, his recon team was tasked with stopping the flow of supplies, capturing the enemy and trying to rescue Americans taken captive.
“We were in very small numbers,” Farr says. “Two to three to five people. We would find targets, call in air strikes.”
But in addition to toting a rifle, Farr also carried a medical kit.
“I was a combat medic,” he says. “In Special Forces, we don’t put a Red Cross on our helmet. We shoot.”
Continued:
http://tbo.com/list/military-news/af...es-b82482192z1
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