“No Sonofabitch, No Commander”
"NO SONOFABITCH, NO COMMANDER"
Well, the Presidential Election is now a year past, and Donald Trump is now our new Commander-in-Chief. And a lot of people seem to think he is a sonofabitch.
I will address that issue later, but right now let’s look at the concept of being a sonofabitch, what it means to be one, and how it relates to the Christian man.
And no, I am not going to abbreviate it to “SOB.” We will face the term head-on.
I was raised by my grandfather, and he was a professional soldier and sergeant. In fact, his service went back to the old horse cavalry in the years before the Second World War. The Army of those days was a small, hard-bitten army of professionals; so small in fact that everyone pretty much knew everyone else. My grandfather personally knew many of the officers who later became famous: George Patton, Terry de la Mesa Allen, Matthew Ridgway and others. Those were the smart and tough men who transformed an army of untrained civilians into the greatest fighting force the world had ever seen.
One of the men he knew and greatly respected was Lucian K. Truscott, one of the toughest, most competent and effective generals the U.S. Army has ever produced. A superb horseman, Truscott was a powerfully built and physically impressive man, described by the historian Rick Atkinson as a gravel-voiced, barrel-chested man with “fingers like tent pegs” and “the arms and shoulders of a man with a three-goal polo handicap.” Note his picture above: he was even tougher than he looks.
(He was also the only man in the Army under General Patton's command who could back-talk Patton face to face. Patton respected him that much. There is a historically-accurate scene in the movie Patton where Truscott tells Patton that he is wrong, and gets away with it .)
But he was also a romantic who studied poetry and philosophy, kept fresh cut flowers on his field desk even in battle and wrote long love letters to his wife.
Go figure.
But more to the point of being a commander of men in battle, Lucian Truscott had a personal theory of effective command: “No sonofabitch, no commander.”
“Wars are not won by gentlemen,” was a point he made that is hard to argue with.
"NO SONOFABITCH, NO COMMANDER"
Well, the Presidential Election is now a year past, and Donald Trump is now our new Commander-in-Chief. And a lot of people seem to think he is a sonofabitch.
I will address that issue later, but right now let’s look at the concept of being a sonofabitch, what it means to be one, and how it relates to the Christian man.
And no, I am not going to abbreviate it to “SOB.” We will face the term head-on.
I was raised by my grandfather, and he was a professional soldier and sergeant. In fact, his service went back to the old horse cavalry in the years before the Second World War. The Army of those days was a small, hard-bitten army of professionals; so small in fact that everyone pretty much knew everyone else. My grandfather personally knew many of the officers who later became famous: George Patton, Terry de la Mesa Allen, Matthew Ridgway and others. Those were the smart and tough men who transformed an army of untrained civilians into the greatest fighting force the world had ever seen.
One of the men he knew and greatly respected was Lucian K. Truscott, one of the toughest, most competent and effective generals the U.S. Army has ever produced. A superb horseman, Truscott was a powerfully built and physically impressive man, described by the historian Rick Atkinson as a gravel-voiced, barrel-chested man with “fingers like tent pegs” and “the arms and shoulders of a man with a three-goal polo handicap.” Note his picture above: he was even tougher than he looks.
(He was also the only man in the Army under General Patton's command who could back-talk Patton face to face. Patton respected him that much. There is a historically-accurate scene in the movie Patton where Truscott tells Patton that he is wrong, and gets away with it .)
But he was also a romantic who studied poetry and philosophy, kept fresh cut flowers on his field desk even in battle and wrote long love letters to his wife.
Go figure.
But more to the point of being a commander of men in battle, Lucian Truscott had a personal theory of effective command: “No sonofabitch, no commander.”
“Wars are not won by gentlemen,” was a point he made that is hard to argue with.
In 1944, the Allies had landed on the coast of Italy at Anzio, against stiff German resistance. The commanding general was a man named John Lucas. A gentle, learned officer, Lucas looked more like a professor of history at a small college than a battlefield commander. He was a nice guy. Too nice.
Lucas was competent but did not have the right personality for the job. He was incapable of putting enough fire into his command to get them off that beachhead. As a result, they stayed there, immobile, literally between the devil and the deep blue sea, and got savaged for weeks by the enemy banging away at them from the surrounding hills.
Finally, Lucas was relieved of his command. Enter Lucian K. Truscott.
A sonofabitch, first-class, was now in charge.
It wasn’t pretty, but Truscott put the Fear of God into the Germans and the Fear of Truscott into his own men. They got off that damned beach and up into the mainland where at least they could fight instead of sitting there like tin cans being plinked at by the Germans.
No Sonofabitch, No Commander.
I have some personal experience in this sort of thing. Not to that grand extent, but I think I understand this business of being a sonofabitch when the issues are severe.
As a young Army officer, I was on the staff of a battalion stationed in West Germany. Rumors were floating around that one of the units within that battalion was in deep trouble and some big changes were in the wind.
One day, the battalion commander called me in. I reported and he told me to sit down.
“You may have heard that the company up north is in trouble,” he told me. “It’s true. I have relieved the commander. You are going up there to take command and straighten out that mess. I will give you and the wife a little time to make arrangements, but you will have to be quick. We don’t have much time before that place blows up.”
Uh, what just happened?
Now, command is a very big deal for an officer in the Army. If a captain wants to make major, he must not only have been a commander, but it must have been a “successful” command. Now, just exactly what constitutes a “successful” command is something of a mystery known only to the Gods of the Army, but you have to have one. If you don’t have one, the Army in short order will thank you for your service, wish you the best of luck in your new career, and show you the door.
This mess up north did not sound particularly career-enhancing to me.
I made some gentle references about that to my boss, but he wasn’t having any. “I need a sonofabitch to put that place back together,” he said. “And you’re the sonofabitch.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, but as we said in the Army, “FIIGMO.”
“Forget” It. I Got My Orders.
Okay. I didn't say, "Forget" it.
Well, a mess it was. The former commander was a nice enough guy, but apparently too nice. The morale was awful, the discipline was worse, and there were some other things going on under the surface that I couldn’t quite pin down.
When I first got there, I tried the middle road. Having once been an enlisted man myself, I was wary of the scream-and-rant style of command. I was firm, but mostly a cheerleader. Let’s pull together, team. We are all in this together. We can do it. Rah, Rah, Rah…
Try as I might, nothing seemed to work. To my great annoyance I found out that the only thing I had accomplished was to earn the nickname, “Captain Feelgood.”
Then I found the real problem. In fact, that unit was on its way to creating one of the biggest military scandals in decades. Unless something happened fast, I was about to become the center of attention for the NBC Nightly News and every other reporter in the country with nothing better to do.
The problem was this: some of the sergeants, the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in that unit had a few downright criminal enterprises going on, one of them being organized sexual abuse of new female soldiers.
Got that? Fathers and mothers were entrusting their daughters to my command, and my sergeants were trying to run a cat house with them.
They called it the “Boot Knocking Club.”
This small group of corrupt NCOs had created a system by which they would take brand-new female soldiers – soldiers under their responsibility – and bet who could have sex with them first, then try to pass them around for fun and profit. They called it “knocking boots together.”
I knew what had to be done. No matter what, this stops now. This absolutely must not be allowed to continue, and it is not going to continue no matter what it takes.
Goodbye, Captain Feelgood.
Starting that very day, I brought a reign of terror to that unit like the very Wrath of God. I dealt with those criminal NCOs by hunting them down like the dogs they were. I became best friends with the Army Criminal Investigation Division. (Army CID is sort of like the Navy NCIS, but with Dobermans and Rottweilers as agents. Those people do not play around.) I spent a good amount of time in courts-martial, and the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (aka, The Big Army Prison) got new guests from us. I spent the rest of my time bringing that unit back into the By-God United States Army by any and all means necessary. I made it my goal that they would be so terrified of me that they would have neither the time nor the energy to screw up.
This is the United States Army, and I am in command of this unit. This is not a cheap New Orleans whorehouse nor a pawn shop nor your Uncle Fudd’s spare room. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in for disappointment. Try me and see what happens.
Indiscipline of any kind was not tolerated. In particular, I brought in new, quality NCOs and gave them the authority they needed. Sergeants are the backbone of any army, and I made sure they put backbone back into my soldiers. I also had a new First Sergeant, the senior NCO in the unit, the Top Kick, the Six-Striped NCO God that Walks, the fearsome entity that really runs the unit whilst I merely command it. And he was up to the task. The term sergeant in that unit suddenly meant nothing less than someone who sat to the right hand of the Almighty, which was me. Smarting off to one of my sergeants now brought the offender in front of my desk, and if the offense was genuine the penalty was automatically the maximum I could impose: busted in rank, loss of pay, extra duty, and lots of both, all of which to be administered in a very unpleasant manner.
And my female soldiers had nothing to fear from my new NCO’s but good leadership.
I brought in superb new junior officers – lieutenant platoon leaders – who worked fantastically well with their sergeants to train and take care of their soldiers.
Then, I made them all earn their pay. I started an intensive training program. I kept them out in the bush as much as possible, training for their wartime jobs, and I made the training tough and dirty and long.
That wasn’t all, but it worked. They had gone from Hawkeye and Nurse Houlihan grab-assing around in MASH back to the real Army, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that things had changed and who was in command.
But I did other things, too.
My legendary ass-chewings were frequent, but never personal. I attacked the issue, never the individual. When I “tore someone’s face off” (as one of my lieutenants put it), I tried to always catch the victim doing something right later and let them know I saw it and that the storm was over and forgotten.
I had a personal rule. When you dress someone down, you are taking some of their dignity, and that hurts. It may be necessary to take it to get their attention, but it is not yours to keep. Unless you want them to hate you, you have to give it back.
I never held an honest mistake against a soldier, NCO or officer. I never – not once – put one of those absurd, career-ending letters-of-reprimand in a soldier’s file for a simple mistake. Some commanders did that to cover their own butts, but I detested the practice. The troops may have feared me, but they had no need to fear failure if they learned from it.
I removed some of the things I called “phony” discipline, things that might look good but really didn’t matter. I held a formation and told them all that all of them had volunteered to be there, that no one had been drafted, so that whether they were in for four years or a career, right then they were professional soldiers and I would treat them as such. I removed the requirement for Army Green blankets and Army Green furniture in their barracks rooms. I allowed them to decorate their rooms – within reason – to make things a little more “homey.”
“You are professionals,” I told them, “and that makes this your home. I see no reason not to let it seem like one. But understand this: this may be your home but it is my goddamned house. We do it my way.” The troops kept their end of the deal, and things improved.
After a time, some amazing things happened. I could feel the unit getting traction. The discipline problems dropped off to almost nothing. I could see a definite personal pride coming back.
And at one point, I even asked them to stop writing on the latrine walls.
Like any other public restroom, the walls of an Army latrine are the great, secret message board, the place where it all gets let out. But I wanted it stopped.
My First Sergeant – the Senior Sergeant of the unit, the Top Kick, the Six-Striped NCO God that Walks, the man who ran the unit whilst I merely commanded it – thought I was nuts. I trusted that man’s advice with nearly everything, but this time I held firm.
“Okay, people,” I told them. “The latrines look like they are in a bus station. You want to send a message? I am starting a company newsletter. You want the unit to know something, I have a locked box downstairs where no one can see you put anything into it and I have the only key. You put it in, I will publish it, word for word, even if you want to tell me to screw off.”
Well, I didn’t say “screw.”
But I did exactly that, and you know what? They actually stopped writing on the walls and I never got a message from any of my soldiers that wasn’t politely written about a legitimate subject. “Dear Sir: We, the concerned soldiers of Second Platoon, would like to bring the following issue to your attention…” That box was a gold mine, a distant early warning system for problems. And the troops never let me down with it.
(One of my fellow commanders visited me once and commented on the spotless latrine walls. “How the hell do you manage that,” he asked. I replied, “I just asked the troops not to do it anymore, and they stopped.” He walked away mumbling to himself.)
Eventually, I even allowed them to have beer in the barracks. No matter what the blue-noses would prefer, soldiers are going to drink beer. Better, I thought, to let them have some “at home” rather than have them getting in trouble downtown.
Okay. No more than one six-pack and six-empties per soldier at any time, and my sergeants are going to do a lot of surprise inspections. Do that and we are good. The first drunk and disorderly in the barracks will be the last.
Naturally, my sergeants kept a tight grip on it, the troops policed themselves, and we never had a problem.
I stopped the ass-chewings. They were no longer necessary. The Reign of Terror ended, and good riddance. The unit started to run like a Rolex. I made the decisions, the lieutenants worked the details, the First Sergeant and the NCO’s ran the show and the soldiers made it happen. The astonishing thing was how polite everyone had become to each other, soldier to soldier and even NCO to junior soldier. Nobody yelled at anyone because it wasn’t necessary. You could feel it, and it felt good.
That career-killing assignment I had feared became the easiest Army job I ever had. And I had my “successful” command.
And then came to the payoff. I was still keeping up the pressure in the normal Army way, but it was time to give those troops a chance to show what they had become.
Every year the Army held an exercise in that region. In it, a very well-known Army special operations unit is pitted against a regular unit. It is a free-play exercise; that is, no scripts and no particular rules. Each side goes against the other and whatever happens, happens. Now, what is supposed to happen is that the Super-Soldiers beat the crap out of the poor, everyday regular troops, and they go on to greater glory.
To hell with that.
No balls, no Air Medals, as the helicopter pilots say.
I volunteered my unit, and we went to “war.”
What actually happened was that the Super Soldiers underestimated my people, badly. My folks were now well-trained, knew their jobs, were confident and were now extremely disciplined soldiers. The best kind of discipline. Self-discipline. I didn’t have to tell them how to do anything. I just gave them the mission and they carried it out.
The exercise was supposed to last three weeks. The referees had to stop it after about five days. My people had captured their safe houses, code books, and a good number of their people. We had overrun their drop-zones while they were still in their parachutes, seized their supply caches and generally wrecked their plans. There was a stack of their equipment sitting outside my headquarters shed, higher than a man’s head, rusting in the rain.
After sorting it out, they restarted the exercise, but the damage was done. Even with a new set of rules favoring our opponents, the rest was just a long slide to a stalemate. The prey had become predator. We had beaten the Super Soldiers, and my troops knew it.
That was the payoff. No soldiers in the Army walked taller than mine after that.
Even so, this was not exactly what the Army had in mind. The point of the exercise was for the Super Soldiers to maintain their certification as combat-ready, and they had lost it. Now the Army had a big hole in its special operations ranks, and it would take months for them to get it back. Rumor had it that this went all the way to the Secretary of Defense, who was future vice-president Dick Cheney at the time, and he was not amused. Heads rolled among the Super Soldiers, and I was not exactly popular in those circles.
But I sure was proud, proud of those magnificent young soldiers, NCO’s and officers.
Those were great days, but in all of that time the most important thing to me was that I never lost a soldier, or even had one hurt beyond the usual scrapes and bruises that are the natural result of military training. Even in peacetime the Army can be a dangerous place and people can get maimed or killed. What keeps people alive training in the dark among all that heavy equipment and live ammunition is discipline, and that we had.
I took a lot of soldiers into that unit from loved ones around the country. I sent every one of them back home alive and in one piece. If nothing else, I earned my pay that way.
But in the end, I got one of the highest compliments I ever received in the Army, and it came in the form of a complaint from the battalion personnel officer.
It seemed that I was screwing up his reenlistment program. Lots of soldiers wanted to re-up, but many would do so only if they could come to my unit.
I’ll be damned… I had no idea.
And before you think I wound up as a beloved figure among my soldiers, I did not. I doubt that I was aver particularly popular. I was probably hated by a few, feared by more, and if I was lucky, respected by the rest. I hope so. But that doesn't matter. That wasn't a beauty pageant and I wasn't running for Miss Congeniality. American soldiers do not want to be coddled. They do not want their commanders to be nice. They want them to be effective. They want to be soldiers, and I guess we had built a place for them – discipline, hard training, and all. They will do anything if properly led and respected by their leaders. If I gave them that, that was all that mattered. I will admit it now: that “complaint” from the personnel officer brought tears to my eyes.
Therefore, this story is not important because of me. I myself actually had the smallest part of the success of that unit. The soldiers did the work. I really did only a few smart things.
First, I recognized the problem.
And then I recognized the solution: No Sonofabitch, No Commander.
But I like to believe that I taught myself how to be an effective sonofabitch, and, maybe more importantly, when not to be a sonofabitch at all. That is the key.
After that, I just let good soldiers do their jobs. The rest was cake.
So there it is. The Manly Art of Being a Sonofabitch.
Which brings us back to The Donald. Is he really a sonofabitch? Only time will tell. If he is, I think it is possible to be effective as one, if you can do it smart. We must all pray to make it so. He is going to be our Commander-in-Chief, and that job is the most important in the world.
And what of the Christian man as a sonofabitch? Is that a contradiction in terms?
I think not, not necessarily.
True, the Army is not the daily life of the rest of the world, but it is not on a different planet, either. People everywhere have their strengths and weakness. Situations everywhere have their advantages and challenges. Ultimately, people are people and you have to deal with them as such.
And at times, the Christian man in daily life may face a situation under their responsibility, and that situation may be one that absolutely must not continue. A moral and ethical dilemma that may be bigger that you think you can handle, that society may tell you to ignore, that may even destroy you if you face it squarely and don't do it right.
If it happens to you, you will probably have a different situation and different tools, but the same responsibility to make it work.
If it happens, you must not shirk your responsibility. You cannot let popularity or opinion or fear or what people may say about you stop you from doing what must be done. If it has to be done, you must do it. Just do it to the best of your ability and with all the wisdom you can bring to bear. God brought it to you for a reason, so pray and seek His counsel.
I did not enjoy doing the rough things I had to do. Anyone who does enjoy that sort of thing will probably fail. Ultimately it was all an act, and I had to be very careful to make sure that it stayed an act. The only way it will work is if you are an effective actor. It got away from me a few times, and the result was never what I wanted. I knew other commanders who were professional screamers, intolerant jackasses who terrorized everyone around them for no reason or perhaps just because they enjoyed doing it. They all failed. They failed because that approach does not work.
Even General Patton, who was famous for his rages, was really acting and doing it for effect most of the time. The one time he let it get away from him - when he slapped a soldier in Italy - it almost cost him his career.
Jesus commands us to love our neighbors, and that especially includes those under our responsibility. That is a leadership position just as real as the one I faced. I came down hard the way I did because I loved my soldiers and because failure was simply not acceptable. The minute I learned what was really going in that unit I resolved that I would burn the place down and my career with it before I allowed another soldier under my command to be abused like that, or allow that environment to continue. It wasn’t bravery or genius on my part; there was simply no other way to do it and I knew I could never live with myself if I failed and let it go on. It was a desperate situation that called for desperate measures, but I tried very hard to apply the hard solutions in a measured way.
No Sonofabitch, No Commander?
Yes, sometimes. Rarely, but sometimes.
The trick is knowing who the sonofabitch really is.
I wish I had been under God’s grace then. It would have been easier. But God taught me a lesson in that place and time, and I am grateful for it.
Lucas was competent but did not have the right personality for the job. He was incapable of putting enough fire into his command to get them off that beachhead. As a result, they stayed there, immobile, literally between the devil and the deep blue sea, and got savaged for weeks by the enemy banging away at them from the surrounding hills.
Finally, Lucas was relieved of his command. Enter Lucian K. Truscott.
A sonofabitch, first-class, was now in charge.
It wasn’t pretty, but Truscott put the Fear of God into the Germans and the Fear of Truscott into his own men. They got off that damned beach and up into the mainland where at least they could fight instead of sitting there like tin cans being plinked at by the Germans.
No Sonofabitch, No Commander.
I have some personal experience in this sort of thing. Not to that grand extent, but I think I understand this business of being a sonofabitch when the issues are severe.
As a young Army officer, I was on the staff of a battalion stationed in West Germany. Rumors were floating around that one of the units within that battalion was in deep trouble and some big changes were in the wind.
One day, the battalion commander called me in. I reported and he told me to sit down.
“You may have heard that the company up north is in trouble,” he told me. “It’s true. I have relieved the commander. You are going up there to take command and straighten out that mess. I will give you and the wife a little time to make arrangements, but you will have to be quick. We don’t have much time before that place blows up.”
Uh, what just happened?
Now, command is a very big deal for an officer in the Army. If a captain wants to make major, he must not only have been a commander, but it must have been a “successful” command. Now, just exactly what constitutes a “successful” command is something of a mystery known only to the Gods of the Army, but you have to have one. If you don’t have one, the Army in short order will thank you for your service, wish you the best of luck in your new career, and show you the door.
This mess up north did not sound particularly career-enhancing to me.
I made some gentle references about that to my boss, but he wasn’t having any. “I need a sonofabitch to put that place back together,” he said. “And you’re the sonofabitch.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, but as we said in the Army, “FIIGMO.”
“Forget” It. I Got My Orders.
Okay. I didn't say, "Forget" it.
Well, a mess it was. The former commander was a nice enough guy, but apparently too nice. The morale was awful, the discipline was worse, and there were some other things going on under the surface that I couldn’t quite pin down.
When I first got there, I tried the middle road. Having once been an enlisted man myself, I was wary of the scream-and-rant style of command. I was firm, but mostly a cheerleader. Let’s pull together, team. We are all in this together. We can do it. Rah, Rah, Rah…
Try as I might, nothing seemed to work. To my great annoyance I found out that the only thing I had accomplished was to earn the nickname, “Captain Feelgood.”
Then I found the real problem. In fact, that unit was on its way to creating one of the biggest military scandals in decades. Unless something happened fast, I was about to become the center of attention for the NBC Nightly News and every other reporter in the country with nothing better to do.
The problem was this: some of the sergeants, the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in that unit had a few downright criminal enterprises going on, one of them being organized sexual abuse of new female soldiers.
Got that? Fathers and mothers were entrusting their daughters to my command, and my sergeants were trying to run a cat house with them.
They called it the “Boot Knocking Club.”
This small group of corrupt NCOs had created a system by which they would take brand-new female soldiers – soldiers under their responsibility – and bet who could have sex with them first, then try to pass them around for fun and profit. They called it “knocking boots together.”
I knew what had to be done. No matter what, this stops now. This absolutely must not be allowed to continue, and it is not going to continue no matter what it takes.
Goodbye, Captain Feelgood.
Starting that very day, I brought a reign of terror to that unit like the very Wrath of God. I dealt with those criminal NCOs by hunting them down like the dogs they were. I became best friends with the Army Criminal Investigation Division. (Army CID is sort of like the Navy NCIS, but with Dobermans and Rottweilers as agents. Those people do not play around.) I spent a good amount of time in courts-martial, and the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (aka, The Big Army Prison) got new guests from us. I spent the rest of my time bringing that unit back into the By-God United States Army by any and all means necessary. I made it my goal that they would be so terrified of me that they would have neither the time nor the energy to screw up.
This is the United States Army, and I am in command of this unit. This is not a cheap New Orleans whorehouse nor a pawn shop nor your Uncle Fudd’s spare room. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in for disappointment. Try me and see what happens.
Indiscipline of any kind was not tolerated. In particular, I brought in new, quality NCOs and gave them the authority they needed. Sergeants are the backbone of any army, and I made sure they put backbone back into my soldiers. I also had a new First Sergeant, the senior NCO in the unit, the Top Kick, the Six-Striped NCO God that Walks, the fearsome entity that really runs the unit whilst I merely command it. And he was up to the task. The term sergeant in that unit suddenly meant nothing less than someone who sat to the right hand of the Almighty, which was me. Smarting off to one of my sergeants now brought the offender in front of my desk, and if the offense was genuine the penalty was automatically the maximum I could impose: busted in rank, loss of pay, extra duty, and lots of both, all of which to be administered in a very unpleasant manner.
And my female soldiers had nothing to fear from my new NCO’s but good leadership.
I brought in superb new junior officers – lieutenant platoon leaders – who worked fantastically well with their sergeants to train and take care of their soldiers.
Then, I made them all earn their pay. I started an intensive training program. I kept them out in the bush as much as possible, training for their wartime jobs, and I made the training tough and dirty and long.
That wasn’t all, but it worked. They had gone from Hawkeye and Nurse Houlihan grab-assing around in MASH back to the real Army, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that things had changed and who was in command.
But I did other things, too.
My legendary ass-chewings were frequent, but never personal. I attacked the issue, never the individual. When I “tore someone’s face off” (as one of my lieutenants put it), I tried to always catch the victim doing something right later and let them know I saw it and that the storm was over and forgotten.
I had a personal rule. When you dress someone down, you are taking some of their dignity, and that hurts. It may be necessary to take it to get their attention, but it is not yours to keep. Unless you want them to hate you, you have to give it back.
I never held an honest mistake against a soldier, NCO or officer. I never – not once – put one of those absurd, career-ending letters-of-reprimand in a soldier’s file for a simple mistake. Some commanders did that to cover their own butts, but I detested the practice. The troops may have feared me, but they had no need to fear failure if they learned from it.
I removed some of the things I called “phony” discipline, things that might look good but really didn’t matter. I held a formation and told them all that all of them had volunteered to be there, that no one had been drafted, so that whether they were in for four years or a career, right then they were professional soldiers and I would treat them as such. I removed the requirement for Army Green blankets and Army Green furniture in their barracks rooms. I allowed them to decorate their rooms – within reason – to make things a little more “homey.”
“You are professionals,” I told them, “and that makes this your home. I see no reason not to let it seem like one. But understand this: this may be your home but it is my goddamned house. We do it my way.” The troops kept their end of the deal, and things improved.
After a time, some amazing things happened. I could feel the unit getting traction. The discipline problems dropped off to almost nothing. I could see a definite personal pride coming back.
And at one point, I even asked them to stop writing on the latrine walls.
Like any other public restroom, the walls of an Army latrine are the great, secret message board, the place where it all gets let out. But I wanted it stopped.
My First Sergeant – the Senior Sergeant of the unit, the Top Kick, the Six-Striped NCO God that Walks, the man who ran the unit whilst I merely commanded it – thought I was nuts. I trusted that man’s advice with nearly everything, but this time I held firm.
“Okay, people,” I told them. “The latrines look like they are in a bus station. You want to send a message? I am starting a company newsletter. You want the unit to know something, I have a locked box downstairs where no one can see you put anything into it and I have the only key. You put it in, I will publish it, word for word, even if you want to tell me to screw off.”
Well, I didn’t say “screw.”
But I did exactly that, and you know what? They actually stopped writing on the walls and I never got a message from any of my soldiers that wasn’t politely written about a legitimate subject. “Dear Sir: We, the concerned soldiers of Second Platoon, would like to bring the following issue to your attention…” That box was a gold mine, a distant early warning system for problems. And the troops never let me down with it.
(One of my fellow commanders visited me once and commented on the spotless latrine walls. “How the hell do you manage that,” he asked. I replied, “I just asked the troops not to do it anymore, and they stopped.” He walked away mumbling to himself.)
Eventually, I even allowed them to have beer in the barracks. No matter what the blue-noses would prefer, soldiers are going to drink beer. Better, I thought, to let them have some “at home” rather than have them getting in trouble downtown.
Okay. No more than one six-pack and six-empties per soldier at any time, and my sergeants are going to do a lot of surprise inspections. Do that and we are good. The first drunk and disorderly in the barracks will be the last.
Naturally, my sergeants kept a tight grip on it, the troops policed themselves, and we never had a problem.
I stopped the ass-chewings. They were no longer necessary. The Reign of Terror ended, and good riddance. The unit started to run like a Rolex. I made the decisions, the lieutenants worked the details, the First Sergeant and the NCO’s ran the show and the soldiers made it happen. The astonishing thing was how polite everyone had become to each other, soldier to soldier and even NCO to junior soldier. Nobody yelled at anyone because it wasn’t necessary. You could feel it, and it felt good.
That career-killing assignment I had feared became the easiest Army job I ever had. And I had my “successful” command.
And then came to the payoff. I was still keeping up the pressure in the normal Army way, but it was time to give those troops a chance to show what they had become.
Every year the Army held an exercise in that region. In it, a very well-known Army special operations unit is pitted against a regular unit. It is a free-play exercise; that is, no scripts and no particular rules. Each side goes against the other and whatever happens, happens. Now, what is supposed to happen is that the Super-Soldiers beat the crap out of the poor, everyday regular troops, and they go on to greater glory.
To hell with that.
No balls, no Air Medals, as the helicopter pilots say.
I volunteered my unit, and we went to “war.”
What actually happened was that the Super Soldiers underestimated my people, badly. My folks were now well-trained, knew their jobs, were confident and were now extremely disciplined soldiers. The best kind of discipline. Self-discipline. I didn’t have to tell them how to do anything. I just gave them the mission and they carried it out.
The exercise was supposed to last three weeks. The referees had to stop it after about five days. My people had captured their safe houses, code books, and a good number of their people. We had overrun their drop-zones while they were still in their parachutes, seized their supply caches and generally wrecked their plans. There was a stack of their equipment sitting outside my headquarters shed, higher than a man’s head, rusting in the rain.
After sorting it out, they restarted the exercise, but the damage was done. Even with a new set of rules favoring our opponents, the rest was just a long slide to a stalemate. The prey had become predator. We had beaten the Super Soldiers, and my troops knew it.
That was the payoff. No soldiers in the Army walked taller than mine after that.
Even so, this was not exactly what the Army had in mind. The point of the exercise was for the Super Soldiers to maintain their certification as combat-ready, and they had lost it. Now the Army had a big hole in its special operations ranks, and it would take months for them to get it back. Rumor had it that this went all the way to the Secretary of Defense, who was future vice-president Dick Cheney at the time, and he was not amused. Heads rolled among the Super Soldiers, and I was not exactly popular in those circles.
But I sure was proud, proud of those magnificent young soldiers, NCO’s and officers.
Those were great days, but in all of that time the most important thing to me was that I never lost a soldier, or even had one hurt beyond the usual scrapes and bruises that are the natural result of military training. Even in peacetime the Army can be a dangerous place and people can get maimed or killed. What keeps people alive training in the dark among all that heavy equipment and live ammunition is discipline, and that we had.
I took a lot of soldiers into that unit from loved ones around the country. I sent every one of them back home alive and in one piece. If nothing else, I earned my pay that way.
But in the end, I got one of the highest compliments I ever received in the Army, and it came in the form of a complaint from the battalion personnel officer.
It seemed that I was screwing up his reenlistment program. Lots of soldiers wanted to re-up, but many would do so only if they could come to my unit.
I’ll be damned… I had no idea.
And before you think I wound up as a beloved figure among my soldiers, I did not. I doubt that I was aver particularly popular. I was probably hated by a few, feared by more, and if I was lucky, respected by the rest. I hope so. But that doesn't matter. That wasn't a beauty pageant and I wasn't running for Miss Congeniality. American soldiers do not want to be coddled. They do not want their commanders to be nice. They want them to be effective. They want to be soldiers, and I guess we had built a place for them – discipline, hard training, and all. They will do anything if properly led and respected by their leaders. If I gave them that, that was all that mattered. I will admit it now: that “complaint” from the personnel officer brought tears to my eyes.
Therefore, this story is not important because of me. I myself actually had the smallest part of the success of that unit. The soldiers did the work. I really did only a few smart things.
First, I recognized the problem.
And then I recognized the solution: No Sonofabitch, No Commander.
But I like to believe that I taught myself how to be an effective sonofabitch, and, maybe more importantly, when not to be a sonofabitch at all. That is the key.
After that, I just let good soldiers do their jobs. The rest was cake.
So there it is. The Manly Art of Being a Sonofabitch.
Which brings us back to The Donald. Is he really a sonofabitch? Only time will tell. If he is, I think it is possible to be effective as one, if you can do it smart. We must all pray to make it so. He is going to be our Commander-in-Chief, and that job is the most important in the world.
And what of the Christian man as a sonofabitch? Is that a contradiction in terms?
I think not, not necessarily.
True, the Army is not the daily life of the rest of the world, but it is not on a different planet, either. People everywhere have their strengths and weakness. Situations everywhere have their advantages and challenges. Ultimately, people are people and you have to deal with them as such.
And at times, the Christian man in daily life may face a situation under their responsibility, and that situation may be one that absolutely must not continue. A moral and ethical dilemma that may be bigger that you think you can handle, that society may tell you to ignore, that may even destroy you if you face it squarely and don't do it right.
If it happens to you, you will probably have a different situation and different tools, but the same responsibility to make it work.
If it happens, you must not shirk your responsibility. You cannot let popularity or opinion or fear or what people may say about you stop you from doing what must be done. If it has to be done, you must do it. Just do it to the best of your ability and with all the wisdom you can bring to bear. God brought it to you for a reason, so pray and seek His counsel.
I did not enjoy doing the rough things I had to do. Anyone who does enjoy that sort of thing will probably fail. Ultimately it was all an act, and I had to be very careful to make sure that it stayed an act. The only way it will work is if you are an effective actor. It got away from me a few times, and the result was never what I wanted. I knew other commanders who were professional screamers, intolerant jackasses who terrorized everyone around them for no reason or perhaps just because they enjoyed doing it. They all failed. They failed because that approach does not work.
Even General Patton, who was famous for his rages, was really acting and doing it for effect most of the time. The one time he let it get away from him - when he slapped a soldier in Italy - it almost cost him his career.
Jesus commands us to love our neighbors, and that especially includes those under our responsibility. That is a leadership position just as real as the one I faced. I came down hard the way I did because I loved my soldiers and because failure was simply not acceptable. The minute I learned what was really going in that unit I resolved that I would burn the place down and my career with it before I allowed another soldier under my command to be abused like that, or allow that environment to continue. It wasn’t bravery or genius on my part; there was simply no other way to do it and I knew I could never live with myself if I failed and let it go on. It was a desperate situation that called for desperate measures, but I tried very hard to apply the hard solutions in a measured way.
No Sonofabitch, No Commander?
Yes, sometimes. Rarely, but sometimes.
The trick is knowing who the sonofabitch really is.
I wish I had been under God’s grace then. It would have been easier. But God taught me a lesson in that place and time, and I am grateful for it.
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