We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (18 page)

For our party of American veterans and the ABC crews the journey was near an end. We flew to Bangkok, spent a night there, and boarded a plane for home, each with his own memories, old and new, of Vietnam the war and Vietnam the country. We had, all of us, been brought up short by old painful memories of combat in the Vietnam that was, and startled by the realities of what had happened to the country and the people since we left them. If we had come here seeking closure, seeking to consign those memories to some hidden dustbin of history, we had failed. Some things are not meant to be forgotten or easily tucked away. The vision of infantry combat, the sight of young men killing and dying at close quarters, is surely one of those things. Look at the old soldiers in Ken Burns’s 2007 World War II documentary
The War
and see them weep as they talk of what they saw and did in a war that ended more than six decades ago. There is no such thing as closure for soldiers who have survived a war. They have an obligation, a sacred duty, to remember those who fell in battle beside them all their days and to bear witness to the insanity that is war.

But we did find a measure of peace on our battlefields, a sense that the passage of years had at least allowed nature to heal war’s scars to the red earth of the Ia Drang. We could take heart, as Jack Smith did, in seeing that flowers now bloom in soil fertilized by the blood of thousands of men. We could press one of those flowers between the pages of memory to surprise and soothe us as we flip through those pages in the quiet hours of night.

ELEVEN

Lessons on Leadership

Show me the leader and I will know his men.

Show me his men and I will know their leader.

—ARTHUR W. NEWCOMB

I
am in the winter of my life now and have spent much of that life leading people, reading people, leading myself, being led, and studying leaders and leadership. I want to share with you what I’ve learned—the Dos and Don’ts—the principles and maxims that have shaped my life, and offer some examples of how I have applied these lessons during that life.

The date was February 12, 1940. I was on the last day of being seventeen, sick in bed recovering from pneumonia. Earlier I had decided that I wanted to try for an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in hope of becoming an infantry officer. In pursuit of that goal I had written my congressman and the two U.S. senators from Kentucky seeking that West Point appointment without success for two years. I had not given up hope.

Late that dark, cold February afternoon my dad came home and immediately came to the bedroom where my mother was tending me. He wasted no time. The local representative of U.S. Senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler had informed Dad that the senator had a patronage job opening in the Senate Book Warehouse in Washington—and it was mine if I wanted it. The pay was $30 a week. He needed an answer immediately, and if the answer was “yes” I would leave early the next morning. Dad said he would accompany me and help me find a room in D.C. and find a doctor to care for me.

Dad said the principal of my local prep school had agreed to allow me to graduate with my class in June if I could accrue the necessary credits in English and algebra from a Washington school.

Immediately and instinctively I knew that this offer was very likely the only real chance I had to obtain an appointment to West Point—there in Washington, where such plums are handed out, as opposed to begging letters mailed from the backwoods of Kentucky.

This was my first real challenge where I had to make an immediate, time-critical decision based largely on what my instincts told me. I said yes. My mother broke into tears and we packed a suitcase. My dad and I left Bardstown at five a.m. the next day, February 13, my eighteenth birthday. We spent the night in West Virginia and reached Washington, D.C., on February 14 in the afternoon.

We found a room for me in the home of an elderly couple, got me registered in night school, and visited a doctor for treatment of my pneumonia. Then I reported for work in the Senate Warehouse. My life had changed direction suddenly and drastically.

Later I realized I had
trusted my instincts
when I decided to accept that Washington opportunity. During the next three months I finished high school at night, studying alongside cabdrivers and government workers, got the credits transferred back to Kentucky for graduation, and registered for night school at George Washington University, which I attended for two years, year-round.

Every month I pored over the list from the War Department of unfilled West Point appointments and went knocking on the doors of senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill trying to persuade one of them to give me that appointment. I had no luck in the beginning, but I kept studying that list and walking the halls of Congress.

In short,
I NEVER QUIT
—a firm principle of self-leadership in any endeavor.

Nearly two years later, on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the world changed overnight. America went to war. Six months later President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation granting every senator and representative an additional appointment to both the Military and Naval academies. The wartime Army and Navy desperately needed commissioned officers as we began urgently expanding the military from fewer than half a million troops to 15 million.

I immediately went to Senator Chandler’s office and was told that he was appointing another young man to West Point. Next I visited my congressman’s office (Rep. Ed Creal, 4th District of Kentucky), and he told me that he had given his West Point slot to another boy. But the congressman told me that he would give me his appointment to the Naval Academy. I was surprised, as I had not asked for it. I thanked him and then a novel, instinctive thought hit me and I asked him: What if I can find another congressman who would appoint me to West Point in exchange for Representative Creal’s Naval Academy appointment?

Representative Creal was startled and surprised, but after a moment’s thought he agreed to that if I could pull it off. It took me less than a week to obtain my West Point appointment from Congressman Eugene E. Cox of the 2nd District of Georgia, in exchange for the Naval Academy slot I had in my pocket.

These events, truly a life-changing episode, and other such major turning points in my life in the years to come were the result of key decisions I made based on a number of principles, guidelines, and rules of behavior I was developing and thinking through for myself. Let’s take a look at them.

First, over two years earlier when my father told me about that Washington job offer, I
instinctively
knew that was my best chance of getting into West Point. I trusted my instincts then and have done so ever since.

Trust your instincts.
They are sometimes called a hunch, a gut feeling, intuition, or a sixth sense, and they are part of every person’s makeup. They are the product of your personality, education, experience, reading, training, observations, and the environments in which one has lived and worked.

When seconds count and time is critical, instincts come into play in judgment and decision making. Instinct can provide a caution light; a heightened focus; an early-warning system. It is a distillation of what you know and who you are, and on occasion can lead you to a far better decision than one based on a logical process that considers all the pros and cons. In a quickly developing situation when a leader must act fast, the decision is largely based on instincts. Hunches are often more accurate or predictive than the analytical reasoning—a time-consuming exercise you no longer have time to conduct when seconds count.

When time permits, I use both intuition and analysis. I get all the information, look into the pros and cons of the options, then back off for a few hours or overnight using one or both of two approaches. One is to reach a tentative decision at day’s end but not announce it. Instead I sleep on it and see how it feels the next morning when my mind is fresh. The other approach I have found valuable is to go to the gym for a good hard workout. I am not medically qualified to explain how and why, but new ideas and thoughts and often a better decision come to me when I exercise and break a sweat.

A helpful rule of thumb that I learned at West Point from a trusted mentor is
“If there’s a doubt in your mind, there’s no doubt at all.”
In other words, if you have any reservations at all then the answer is “no.” But if my head tells me one thing and my gut another—I will usually go with my gut, listen to my instincts.

When Representative Creal offered me that appointment to the Naval Academy, I immediately thought about that possible swap. I didn’t know if the congressman would be willing, or even whether such an idea could be carried out under the rules on the Hill. It took only seconds for me to exercise what would become another useful lesson during my life. In situations like this,
Never say no to yourself. Make the other guy say no.

The successful outcome of my search for a West Point appointment also illustrates another principle I have found useful:
There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor—and after that one more thing, and after that….
The more you do the more opportunities arise.

At age twenty, having just arrived three months before at West Point, I learned two great lessons that I have applied throughout my life. I had worked hard for over two years to get there—working days, going to school nights, and walking the halls of Congress in search of my dream. Finally, I made it and reported to West Point on July 15, 1942.

By the end of October my name was on the list of cadets severely deficient in grades in solid geometry and advanced algebra. I was in grave danger of flunking out, being dismissed from the Academy in December, seeing my dream go down in flames unless I brought those grades up. I was shocked and frightened that I might lose everything I had worked so hard to obtain.

From that point on, for three tough academic years, I was glued to my advanced math textbooks every night from 7:30 p.m. till lights out at 11:00 p.m.—and after lights out I moved to the nearby restroom down the hall from my room, where I sat on a toilet under a 40-watt lightbulb and continued studying until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. If I didn’t understand the advanced, arcane math and bewildering engineering, physics, and chemistry, I could at least memorize the procedures.

I made it through the academic trials and tribulations and graduated in 1945 very near the top of the bottom 20 percent of my class. I may not have mastered mathematics at West Point but I learned how valuable those two lessons are in life:
Never quit!
And:
There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor!

Another example that illustrates that principle came as I prepared for my entry into West Point. I was reading the Army booklet on West Point appointments and requirements for admission and learned that the Army would give an aspirant a preliminary physical exam that could reveal any problem that might bar admission. I took such a preliminary physical at Walter Reed Hospital and learned that I was “red-green color-blind” in the fainter shades of those colors and that I also needed some dental work done.

I had my teeth fixed and got a copy of the Army’s color perception test book and memorized it. When I took my final physical at Fort Knox for admission, they didn’t use the test I had memorized; they asked me to identify the colors of various pieces of yarn, and that I passed without a problem.

I also found out that an applicant could be admitted without taking the written examination if his high school and college grades were high enough and comprehensive enough to eliminate the need of a written exam. I submitted my grades and was excused from taking the written exam.
One more thing!!
Stack the deck!!

A leader must find or make the time to detach himself from an ongoing critical situation or daily life and ask and answer these two questions:

• What am I not doing that I should be doing to influence the situation in my favor?
  
• What am I doing that I should not be doing?
  

By asking and answering those questions frequently in a crisis you begin to shape the battlefield or the playing field in your favor; you begin to get ahead of the curve.

A senior executive is paid to do three things:

• Get the job done and get it done well.
  
• Plan ahead. Be proactive and not reactive. Create the future.
  
• Exercise good, sound judgment in the doing of it all.
  

To get the job done, you must have a clearly defined goal or goals and a clear understanding of what it takes to achieve those goals. You will do well to give thought to a wide variety of factors that may have an impact on your chosen course for good or ill. A good leader will continually tell and retell his people what those goals are and what their roles are in attaining those goals.

Leaders must have a workable plan, and a system of measuring progress. Subordinate leaders must understand the goal, the plan, and their role in its execution. A very important part in planning is to think through the positive and negative what-ifs before they occur and how they should be handled if they arise—especially the negative ones.

In the Korean and Vietnam combat zones while creating a plan for an operation, and after it kicked off, I always thought through the what-ifs and had my operations and intelligence officers do the same. What if this happens? What if the enemy does that? What if this subordinate leader is wounded or killed? The best leader in any enterprise anticipates problems and has plans if problems arise. He also has thought through ways to take advantage of positive openings that often occur in fleeting windows of time.

A critical part of success for any work unit is teamwork and motivation. There’s a mentally reinforcing connection between discipline and confidence that results in motivated, smooth-running teamwork. By discipline I do not mean punishment or admonitions.