Generally Speaking (14 page)

When I took command of the Staff and Faculty Company at Fort McClellan in 1973, my first sergeant, Betty Benson, became my first important mentor in the Army. She was a career soldier who spoke in the clipped, 1940s radio show inflections of Eve Arden. But she was a serious professional. After a few days in that unfamiliar orderly room, I took First Sergeant Benson aside for a frank discussion.

“What is it exactly that I do, First Sergeant?” I asked, genuinely trying to understand our respective roles.

She summed up the difference in our functions this way: “Basically, ma'am, you command the company, and I run it.”

She was reinforcing what I had heard from my senior officers at WAC Center, who all advised us: “Listen to your NCOs.”

But First Sergeant Betty Benson was far from the uncertain leader that had become too prevalent among Army NCOs in the years after the Vietnam War. She believed in the future of the All-Volunteer Army, and she knew she could play her role in building it, even at the company level. From her I learned that the commander set the course of action—reestablishing Army discipline in our barracks, for example—and that the first sergeant would implement it. She led the effort in restoring discipline to the barracks. And she had her own connections to the Military Police that allowed us to implement that policy on a practical basis. As we struggled week after week to solve this problem, I came to realize that, despite our differences in rank and years of service, we were forming a tight-knit team that stood shoulder to shoulder to regain control of the company. We were working toward a common goal, and she was the more experienced soldier, so I was learning valuable lessons from her. Decades later, I have often reflected on this effort. When faced with tough problems, young executives in the civilian workplace with degrees from prestigious business schools might do well to forget about their MBAs and seek advice among their organization's equivalents of Betty Benson, whom they can find on the shop floor or among the anonymous line engineers' cubicles.

Certainly First Sergeant Benson taught a priceless lesson about the value of decisiveness. In October 1973, the Women's Army Corps underwent a dramatic expansion with the creation of a training center at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and related reshuffles and organizational upheavals at Fort McClellan. With no warning, I was ordered to move my company out of their old barracks and into newer quarters in concrete buildings that had formerly housed WAC student officers. First Sergeant Benson attended the organizational meeting about this move on a Friday and came back to the company office to announce that we had until the following Friday to move all our people, furniture, and equipment, while, of course, maintaining our normal duty schedule.

“Actually, ma'am,” she said. “We've got a very good deal.”

We'd been allotted a modern three-story building in the area of the post known as WAC Circle. All three floors were identical, with each two comfortable bedrooms sharing a family-style bathroom. There were none of the open, bunk bed troop bays and multicommode latrines that gave normal barracks life such an institutional atmosphere. The barracks were more like a college dorm than traditional military housing. “The soldiers are going to love it,” the first sergeant said.

There was only one problem. When we sat down and counted bedrooms against our roster, it immediately became obvious that we would have to make our new barracks co-ed. To my knowledge, we would be among the first units attempting such an experiment. But we weren't about to lose these splendid new quarters based on this point.

We informed WAC Center that we intended to move the entire company, men and women, into the new barracks. Word soon came back that such a move would be considered “inappropriate.” But First Sergeant Benson knew how to jingle the bells of Army bureaucracy. The post needed room for incoming WAC trainees; that's why they needed us to consolidate. “If you want more room for your new trainees,” First Sergeant Benson informally told her counterparts in WAC Center, “let us move.”

I trusted her and thought the idea of a co-ed barracks was quite sound. This was probably the classic case of a junior officer thinking she was in charge when in fact it was the NCO calling the plays. In any event, we heard nothing further from WAC Center. Apparently, there was no regulation
against
quartering troops under the same roof, provided men and women did not sleep in the same room or share the same bathroom. But how could we make this experiment-cum-expedient work on a practical level? Once more, she advised me well.

She knew our people, and I trusted her judgment. Her plan was simple but based on thoughtful consideration. During phase one, the men would stay in their own barracks while we intensified the effort to weed out the most ill disciplined through the Army discharges available to us. In this phase, we would assign the younger, less experienced women to an all-female top floor. Then, in phase two, the younger, less experienced men would be assigned to the all-male bottom floor. The older soldiers, both women and men, generally NCOs with good behavior records, would share the second floor.

“What do you think WAC Center will say about this room plan, First Sergeant?” I asked.

“They're the ones who ordered us to move, ma'am,” she said with certainty, closing the subject. In fact, she had good contacts among the NCOs at headquarters and correctly guessed that our senior officers would support us after receiving a thorough briefing on the rationale for the room assignments in the gender-mixed barracks and making certain all standards of propriety had been met. The move made a lot of sense. In the new barracks, people would have greater privacy and dignity. They could lock the doors of their bedrooms and bathrooms. This provided much greater security for their possessions, and many of the soldiers invested for the first time in expensive stereos and record collections. Having this privacy also gave them a greater sense of autonomy, which came in large part through the knowledge that the Army trusted them to act maturely.

I addressed this issue directly just before we began the move. “We're being given the chance for a big improvement in quarters,” I told the soldiers. “So, I'm expecting you to act in an unusually mature manner.”

As they enthusiastically loaded up the trucks with their foot-lockers and furniture for the unprecedented move to the co-ed barracks, I felt good, in part because First Sergeant Benson was there every step of the way. “You've done the right thing, ma'am,” she assured me. “People act differently when you treat them better, when they have their own room. They won't let you down.”

She was right about that, as she was about so many things. Predictably, a few at WAC Center made some noise about the controversial move, but did not try to rescind it. As a young commander, I was fortunate to have First Sergeant Benson as my mentor.

She taught me a lot about assuming the responsibility of command. Another senior noncommissioned officer, Master Sergeant Davenport, with whom I worked at the All Source Intelligence Center at Yongsan near Seoul, Korea, in 1977, was probably the most skilled teacher of analysis I had as a young officer. Unlike so many American soldiers who had served fleeting one-year assignments to Korea, Master Sergeant Davenport had accumulated multiple tours of duty there. He knew the tactical and strategic situation intimately and had a rich base of personal experience—his own living memory—on which to draw whenever a single source of intelligence suggested yet another crisis along the DMZ was at hand.

Again, the fact that I was an officer and he held enlisted rank meant nothing in terms of our comparative professional expertise. I was the student and he was the expert teacher. I learned a lot simply by watching him work. We had a young private first class ELINT analyst named Barringer working in the shop. One day his task was to type up a simple administrative disposition form. But the young PFC made repeated typing errors. Sergeant Davenport, however, let PFC Barringer make his mistakes and learn as he did so. Davenport was right, of course. Within a few weeks, the young soldier had mastered his typing skills. Had I given in to my impatience and asked Davenport to type the form, I would have deprived Barringer of his chance to learn.

Master Sergeant Davenport's mentoring style was friendly and relaxed. He never explicitly took me aside and said, “Let's do it this way.” Instead, he led by quiet example.

I observed him when some complex analytical problem arose, as they so often did involving SIGINT traffic in the region. One of the eager young soldiers would present a solution to the veteran NCO. But Master Sergeant Davenport, a Marlboro 100 dangling from his lips, would rise slowly from his desk with a sleepy expression on his face. “Well now,” he'd drawl, “let's see about all this.”

He would go to his filing cabinets and retrieve several reports from similar past incidents, then spread them on our worktable. Speaking slowly and deliberately, and using his cigarette as a pointer, he would patiently walk us all through the proper analysis of the current situation. What he was showing us, of course, was that there was always much greater complexity and significance to the “take,” the raw material of the professional intelligence analyst. Above all, Master Sergeant Davenport gave us perspective, something I would never have learned in school.

Whenever I wanted to submit what he considered a premature analysis, he'd tactfully advise me to “touch base” with a more experienced officer working on a similar project first, knowing that young captains like myself often viewed the world with narrow, laser-beam vision, and lacked the wider perspective of a more mature analyst. But he never put his own opinion aggressively forward; rather, more often than not, he waited for me to come to him for advice. The lesson in this was to know
when
to recognize I needed to ask him. The goal was not to eliminate the need to ask.

I learned that if Master Sergeant Davenport was not hurried or upset, the situation was not overly serious, although this was a period when some people much higher in the chain of command were understandably edgy about the hostile threat. Again, they had usually been in their jobs for less than a year, while he had served in Korea for much longer. Above all, he taught me that a soldier's true value to the Army was almost never related to a person's rank.

In fact, I came to recognize that each rank has its value. Soldiers should be proud of what they have achieved and of meeting the responsibilities attached to those achievements. A skilled sergeant SIGINT analyst, for example, can fill just as vital a role in meeting her unit's mission as a captain commanding the company. I have never felt the practice of adding the notation (P) after a soldier's rank when she or he has been selected, but not yet promoted to that higher grade, to reflect the Army attitude about rank. Soldiers should do their jobs, take pride in their current rank, and not be focused on status rather than work.

But I also learned that there were soldiers who unethically exploited their rank and position. When I commanded the 3rd Operations Battalion at Field Station Augsburg in Germany in 1986, I encountered a senior NCO who gave me real cause to distrust him. Contrary to regulations and policy, he kept no duty rosters, but operated instead through a network of more junior NCOs who parceled out work assignments almost as a form of patronage. This soldier and his buddies also controlled the lucrative soda and beer machine concessions located in our barracks. In theory, the money collected from these machines was supposed to go into the battalion account to pay for morale and recreation activities and equipment such as stereos for the day-rooms. But when I finally got him to present me the battalion fund books, there was nothing to show where the money had gone.

“Please explain what happened to the money,” I said, shaking my head.

He conceded that the machines made a lot of money, but had no record of where that money went. Possibly as a diversion, however, he took me on a tour of one dayroom that had some secondhand wood trim, which turned out to have been scrounged from another unit, and to another equipped with a stereo that he admitted was on loan.

Convinced that I could not trust him to control a corruption-free system, I put the executive officer in charge of the beer and soda machines. This got the NCO's back up and he began to openly challenge my authority, first in small ways, to be sure. I had made it known that I did not want smoking in my office. But he often came through my door with a lit cigarette either stuck in his mouth or jammed between his fingers. “Whoops,” he'd say, “forgot.”

Further experience in the battalion revealed there was no formal selection board for NCOs and soldiers, which were necessary for promotion and for the Soldier-of-the-Quarter competition, a prestigious award. This was in the hands of the senior NCO and his cronies. He was like a King Rat, invisibly running the battalion behind the backs of the officers.

I finally went to my brigade commander, Colonel Sam Simerly, to discuss the problem. “These are my concerns,” I said, laying out the details, some of which probably could have been serious enough to initiate an investigation.

Colonel Simerly had never been overly close to his battalion commanders, to put it mildly, and I was probably the least favorite lieutenant colonel in his command. But he apparently had already picked this NCO to serve on his staff and didn't want to see a can of worms opened with an investigation. The soldier in question was quietly removed from my battalion. There was a lesson in this unpleasant experience: As conflicts appear, you have to be explicit about your concerns from the outset. You do not refrain from giving full details, so there is no ambiguity.

But for every lazy or unethical soldier in my battalion, there were a hundred who were honest and hardworking. One of the best was Command Sergeant Major Ira Gant, with whom I worked closely after I took command of the battalion. I learned invaluable lessons about a military commander's unique relationship to her soldiers. He was among the most intelligent, thoughtful, and loyal NCOs with whom I've had the honor of serving. He spoke and moved rather slowly, and seemed amused by my interest in running. Fortunately for him, I didn't insist on the NCOs joining me on my off-post runs, only the battalion staff officers, who definitely needed some of this type of training time together. But Command Sergeant Major Gant would often mosey into my office toward the end of a long gray German afternoon and watch me lace up my running shoes.