Alumni who have left the military recognize that much of what we learned about leadership in the Army is applicable in the civilian world. I spend time with business people sharing insights into leadership that come out of my research as an historian and, less often, my own experiences. Many of my civilian colleagues, most of whom don’t know any veterans personally, are skeptical about what they might learn from a soldier.
What follows is a blog posting, written for my civilian audience, that underscores why it’s critical for leaders and decision-makers always to put forth their best effort.
Years ago I spent nine weeks in the U. S. Army’s Ranger School, undergoing commando-style training in which students are deliberately stressed by food and sleep deprivation, strenuous days-long exercises and the pressure of constant evaluation. We took turns filling the leadership positions, but we were all leaders in training, mostly young officers and sergeants. Since it’s harder to lead miserable, cold, wet and exhausted soldiers than it is to lead well-fed and well rested ones, the thinking goes, practice here and you’ll be better prepared for combat.
When our patrol leader indicated that he found the spot, we set up a security perimeter—a big circle of armed men facing outward for enemy patrols that might have followed us. But we were all thinking the same thing: sometimes these supply drops included food. By this point we were subsisting on one or two rations a day while conducting extremely strenuous training. So even though we were in peak physical condition when we began, every one of us had lost weight: ten, fifteen, twenty pounds. We fantasized about food and sleep, sleep and food.
So while one man dug up the metal containers, the rest of us crowded round like greedy children, abandoning the perimeter and the ring of security we were supposed to maintain, dreaming about food. The man digging threw shovels full of sand until the top of an ammo can poked through. I must have stepped back, or looked behind me, because I didn’t see what happened next, but I heard it. There was a pop, followed by a shoosing sound as the air filled with a bright green cloud. It was a booby trap, only a smoke grenade, but real grenades, the kind that kill, work the same way.
“You losers are all dead,” one of the young Ranger instructors said, pointing to the five or six men closest to the hole. I slunk back to the perimeter, trying to look like I had stayed by my post. “Dig a grave,” another junior instructor said, “Big enough for those five.” The glum-looking casualties sat cross legged on the ground while we dug. Finished, we climbed out, waiting to be told to fill the hole. Then the senior instructor stepped in. He had been in the background, off by himself outside the perimeter, probably smoking, certainly watching. He was a Viet Nam veteran, a Master Sergeant with a full head of brush cut hair, sun-baked skin and an impressive scowl; his face was a war novel.
“All you people get in here,” he said, motioning us into a tight circle. We hesitated. One grenade can get you all. “Come here, I said.” Amazingly we found some hustle left in our tired bodies. The young instructors backed off. “You five, down there.” The five “dead” Rangers obeyed instantly, with none of the scuffling, mute resistance that might have greeted an order from the younger trainers. They flopped into the hole, curling around each other in the tight space, a frieze of dirty uniforms. Their eyes were open, looking up; they didn’t move.
I remembered a story about Marine Corps basic training in the sixties, when some Drill Instructors at Parris Island got drunk one night and took a bunch of recruits on a road march, drowning several in the dismal swamps. “Cover ‘em up,” the Master Sergeant said, reaching over and snatching the rolled poncho from a Ranger student’s rucksack, then throwing it into the hole. We pulled out two or three more and tossed them into the grave where the corpses covered themselves.
“Get out your handbook,” the senior instructor said, gesturing to me, the closest student. I scrambled to find my mud-splattered Ranger Handbook, our bible for everything from planning airborne operations and reconnaissance patrols to blowing up bridges. There were prayers in the back. Prayers over the dead. I read the Rite of Protestant Burial. As I read, the big sergeant kicked some dirt into the hole: it splattered bright orange on the slick green ponchos. When I finished, we stood in awkward silence.
“You men are going to be leaders,” the old man said, “responsible for other people. When leaders make mistakes, when you get sloppy or lazy, when you forget that you’re in charge, when you back off a decision—people are going to get killed. Sometimes, for some of you unlucky bastards, you’ll make the best decision you can—a good decision, even—and people are still going to die. And that’s bad. But if you’ve been screwing off instead of paying attention, it’ll be worse.” He paused; I found I was holding my breath. In almost a whisper, he said, “You’ll wish you’d never been born.” He turned and walked out of the perimeter, shuffling a bit, too old for what he was doing. Like many of the veterans one saw around the Army in those days, he was probably already old at nineteen, instantly aged on some no-name battlefield, on a day when the young men under the ponchos didn’t get up after the training was over.
from www.MyLeadersCompass.com
Uniformed Services University
Dr. Tracy Sbrocco, USUCHD Director of Research (center), President and CEO of the Steptoe Group, LLC, Ronald Steptoe (right); and C.J. Jordan, sign a partnership agreement to develop an interdisciplinary educational training program.
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