While in Germany, he attended the Army's Russian Institute, and launched what his biography calls a "secondary career field" - as a soldier with a solid academic background and exposure to the civilian and foreign scholars. Hickey's first Army posting was as a captain with the Seventh Cavalry in Schweinfurt, Germany, and he rose quickly through the ranks as an infantry officer. #Colonel saddam hussein capture professional#Scott Bellevue, a member of the VMI class of 1983, said Hickey was focused on being a professional soldier, so much so that he took the unusual step of going to Ranger school while he was a VMI cadet. Ranger training is special operations and, I believe, the highest you can obtain in the entire armed forces." "He was one of the few people that I know of that by the time he graduated, Jim had completed the following qualifications - airborne school, helicopter assault school and then finally Ranger training. "The one thing that sticks out in my mind is after he went to VMI - he'd come back and was so proud of being a northern boy who could cut it at VMI," Rezek recalled.ĭennis Maguire, a Newton resident and former classmate at VMI, said Hickey was a standout among about 1,300 cadets. He loved the military," said Rezek.Īfter high school, Hickey went to Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., where he was commissioned an Army second lieutenant by 1982. "He was a very good student, very respectful and a conscientious kid. There, his love for history and military matters was nurtured by his history teacher, Tom Rezek. Laurence High School, a private boy's school in Burbank, Ill., where Hickey played varsity soccer and was an honor student who also ran for the student council. "That really cemented him in the foundation that he wanted to pursue a military career." Hickey and his three brothers, Patrick, Kenneth, and Shawn, attended St. #Colonel saddam hussein capture movie#"My father took him to see the movie `Patton,' " Moran recalled. Hickey, 42, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Hickory Hills, where as a youth he filled his room with toy army tanks, GI Joe action figures, and suspended model aircraft from the ceiling. "He's a guy with tremendous military qualities and the Army is clearly grooming him for bigger things." "Hickey is not an average soldier," said Thomas Keaney, executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where Hickey received a master's degree in the early 1990s. Hickey, a scholar-soldier with 20 years in the Army and advanced degrees in diplomacy from Georgetown University, public policy from Johns Hopkins, and Russian from the Army's Russian Institute, helped devise the intelligence plan that targeted Hussein and the high-tech tactics that brought him in. Since Easter, when Hickey arrived in the region, the 3,000-soldier brigade he commands and the rest of the "Iron Horse Division" from Fort Hood, Texas, have been rooting out Ba'ath Party loyalists and searching for Hussein. "It pretty much went off as we had planned, and we got the guy we were looking for," Hickey said in an interview with Don Imus on MSNBC yesterday. Pulling back a carpet on the dirt, they peered into a hole and discovered Saddam Hussein. "He was the second of six children born to Irish immigrant parents, and he was the only one who came out of the womb wearing combat gear," said Maureen Moran of Naperville, Ill., Hickey's sister.ĭuring a Saturday night raid outside of Tikrit, Iraq, Hickey was at a mobile command post about 150 meters away when several of his soldiers from the First Brigade of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division spotted something suspicious.
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