The private war of Chuck and Tom Hagel

After saving each other's lives in combat, Chuck Hagel, the future Republican senator of Nebraska, and his brother Tom fought about Vietnam and Iraq -- until they finally saw eye to eye.

By Myra MacPherson

Read more: George W. Bush, Congress, John McCain, Politics, Vietnam, News, Iraq, Chuck Hagel, 2008 election

April 30, 2007 | In 1968, through a fluke that remains a mystery, Chuck Hagel and his younger brother Tom became the only known American siblings to serve in the same infantry squad in the Vietnam War. The future Republican senator from Nebraska and anti-Iraq war maverick, then 21, fought side by side with his little brother in the steaming jungles of the Mekong Delta. They walked point together, they watched comrades get ripped in half by land mines, and they sent five Purple Hearts home to their mother. They also saved each other's lives.

Tom, two years younger than Chuck, saved his older brother first. Normally the Hagel brothers walked point, but one morning in 1968 they had rotated to the rear as their column of soldiers crept through the jungle. The soldier who took their place that day met instant death as he stepped on a huge land mine. Flying shrapnel ripped through the squad. It hit Tom's arm, but a bigger chunk lodged in Chuck's chest. Ignoring his own wound, Tom frantically wrapped compression bandages around Chuck's chest to stop the fountain of blood, praying his older brother would live long enough to make it out of the jungle.

A month later, their roles were reversed. Chuck saved Tom. During fierce combat, Chuck dragged an unconscious Tom out of a burning armored personnel carrier just before it blew up, turning his own face into a mass of bubbling blisters. Blood poured out of Tom's ears and now it was Chuck's turn to pray. Later, as he himself lay in a makeshift hospital close to death with severe burns, Chuck Hagel reflected on the horror of combat. "I vowed then to do what I could to stop wars," he told me years ago. "There is no glory in war."

When Chuck and Tom returned home to Nebraska, however, their similar experiences did not translate into similar politics. Their divide mirrored the deep ideological split of the nation. Tom thought Vietnam was a horrible waste. Chuck thought Vietnam was a noble cause gone wrong. Their disagreement over Vietnam led to shoving matches and fistfights.

In the years after Vietnam, Tom became a law professor and passionate liberal, Chuck a wealthy entrepreneur and senator and equally committed conservative. It took the brothers decades to reach a rapprochement about Vietnam, as Chuck gradually accepted some of Tom's arguments about the waste of American lives. When it came to the Iraq war, however, it took only a fraction of that time for their shared experiences to bring the brothers to similar conclusions, and to turn Chuck Hagel, as he proved again on April 26 with his vote for withdrawal, into the most visible Republican opponent of President Bush's Iraq policy.

Tom and Chuck Hagel were always opposites. In Roman Catholic school in Columbus, Neb., a town of 12,000 an hour and a half west of Omaha, Chuck managed to be both popular and the teacher's pet. He was a class leader, the homecoming king and a member of the football team. And he was always profoundly ambitious and interested in politics. Friend Dave Kudrow claims that when Hagel ran for student council, he had a campaign staff. "He made the prediction when in high school that he would someday be a senator." In college Hagel even signed a letter to an aunt "your nephew and United States senator."

Tom, on the other hand, was the rebel and class clown who did imitations of the nuns until he got kicked out of St. Bonaventure High. But he was so popular that after his expulsion, many of his classmates followed him out the door to public school.

But they both grew up poor. As their father bounced from small job to smaller job, the six-member Hagel clan moved from one little Nebraska town to another. One summer the four Hagel brothers, Chuck, Tom, Mike and Jim, even slept in a chicken dormer with chicks; another time they briefly lived in the furnace room of a hotel.

In that long ago other world, when the Hagels were living in Ainsworth, 7-year-old Chuck would awake in the dark, stuff wire cutters into his pockets and trudge to the nearby railroad station. Few passengers ever disembarked in a Sand Hills cattle town so remote that it proudly called itself "The Middle of Nowhere." Bundles of the Omaha Herald were tossed onto the platform from the still-moving train. In the winter, Chuck's hands would grow numb as he took off his mittens to cut the wire bundles, then deliver the paper around town with his sled.

Charles, the elder Hagel, had been a tail gunner in the Pacific during World War II and, on his return to Nebraska, was a hit at the Veterans of Foreign Wars halls. But professionally he was thwarted by his own father, the proprietor of a lumberyard chain. Charles moved from town to town working as a financial troubleshooter at the family stores until he quit. "His dad even told him once, when he had gotten a job someplace else, 'If you leave, I will disown you,'" recounted Charles' widow, Betty Hagel Breeding. Disillusioned by life, Charles doted on and transferred all his aspirations to his eldest son and namesake, Chuck. And he went on drinking binges that devastated the family.

Some years ago, sitting in a crimson silk high-back chair in his Senate office, Chuck Hagel told me about the tension that would build when his father did not show up for dinner. "Mom would have to get the car and go to the bar and get him." There was no money for a baby-sitter and so the whole family went, the three youngest sitting with wide eyes in the back seat. "I remember it as if it was yesterday," recalled Mike Hagel, the third-oldest brother. "Sitting there. Cold as hell. Waiting for Mom to come out of the bar with Dad. You try to block those things out. When kids in the neighborhood would say, 'Your dad's a drunk' -- that would hurt. But when he was sober he was the greatest guy with a great sense of humor."

With their mother holding up their father in the front seat, Chuck, who could barely see over the steering wheel, would get in the driver's seat. Said the senator quietly, "I'd have to drive the car home. At 11 years old."

When he was drunk, Charles took out his anger on his second-oldest son, Tom. "For some reason, the focus of his anger was me," Tom recalled. It didn't matter that Tom was the one who looked like Charles. He sought in vain the same approval that Chuck got without trying. "Oh, man, it was not good," Tom said. "Either something I did would trigger it, or I would be the outlet. I spent my life waiting for the shoe to drop. 'Is he going to come in, going to be sober, what's going to happen?' ... I could see it in my mother, right on the edge, very tense."

As he got older, it became Chuck's job to defend Tom. When he stepped into the fights, he too started taking blows from his dad.

"How it affects you," he continued, after a pause, "is that you're just hoping that tomorrow night is not one of those nights your dad goes on one of those. Because it's just a terrible thing. To see your brothers crying, to see your mother upset, it's a terrible thing that families go through."

Charles was out drinking on the last night of his life, Christmas Eve, 1962.

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