Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (12 page)

Nearly every officer I ran into that day—from superiors to peers to subordinates—commented they had never seen anything so bizarre and impressive at the same time. “Your legs were moving so fast, it looked like you were floating!” One colonel remarked somewhat backhandedly, “That was amazing. You looked like you had a hot fire poker shoved up your rear end.”

Being exceptionally good at such a little thing did not earn me a challenging assignment, a stellar evaluation, or any awards, but it did attract attention to the hard work I was already doing. The career-changing assignment followed months later, and my performance in that job led to the improbable string of successes I mentioned at the beginning of this book.

*   *   *

There are certainly enough stories here so far to underscore MacArthur’s suggestions on how to balance failure and success. As you can see, I seemed to bounce back and forth between them. Routine failures helped me stay humble in success, and my successes gave me the confidence to be proud and unbending in my honest failures.

But what happens when you experience too many of one and not enough of the other? I propose to you that confidence and humility become harder to calibrate, and MacArthur’s equation becomes much more difficult yet even more necessary to undertake.

In my case, successes began to outstrip failures by ten to one starting in 2002 when I successfully completed my company
command assignment. What I began to struggle with then—a little at first and a lot more ten years down the road—was the significance and deservedness of the recognition that followed. And if I ever fell short on self-doubt, there was an occasional peer in the wings who seemed all too willing to question how it was all possible.

In my twenty-four months of leading a company, I had experienced enough adversity, adventure, and drama to fill a nice-size book. By far the greatest challenge was managing four different deployments to Honduras, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, while managing training and operations for all of my non-deployed soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood. And then, just halfway through the assignment, terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.

Years later, my first sergeant, Joe Vroman, reached out to me and wrote about how impressed he was with my performance during those seemingly impossible times. Seeking perspective and suspect of romantic sentimentality, I pressed him. “What is it that I did that impressed you so much?” His reply is a trophy I cherish:

Joe added that I had also helped him personally.

As flattering as Joe’s comments were, they highlighted the paradox of successfully pulling off nearly impossible tasks. As he said, many of my subordinate leaders thought I pushed them too hard. I wasn’t exactly excited or proud that I was viewed as a slave driver, regardless of how necessary it was. This is the condition that often makes real leadership a lonely, depressing position.

It’s one thing to do a good job, but it’s quite another to do well by others. This philosophy is what drove my every effort in command.

Was it even possible to know if they perceived how truly important this was to me? How could I really know if I made an impact on them?

I knew leaders who reviewed their awards and evaluations as proof, but I learned years earlier never to rely on your own press. How could I separate true appreciation from polite conversation? I remembered how all those trainees heaped praise upon that overweight lieutenant in basic training, knowing full well they thought less of him.

These questions about effective leadership are like the ones I posed earlier with effective parenting—we know some techniques work better than others, but the outcome is inherently unknown because of the number of variables involved.

Three months after I left command, I received an unexpected answer to my collective questions that was difficult to reconcile. I was told that Vroman and the senior leaders of my old company had joined an effort to nominate me for the General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award, one of the most prestigious individual awards an army officer can receive.

Every year the army selects thirteen active duty officers from an eligible pool of more than thirty-seven thousand officers in the ranks of lieutenant and captain. It is intended to recognize those officers whose work best represents the ideals of General Douglas MacArthur: duty, honor, and country.

Officers are measured by their demonstrated leadership and influence, teamwork, physical fitness, adherence to values, proficiency in technical and tactical skills, as well as by less tangible skills like quality of the leadership climate, ability to gain consensus among diverse groups, and achievements that demonstrate an understanding of human nature.

Nominations proceed through several levels of command, and only select files make it to each next level. In fact, there are so many nominees and so many levels of participation, it’s wise to just feel honored for being nominated. That’s certainly how I felt about it.

But actually winning it?

Four months later, I learned I had. Kristin and I would be
flown to a ceremony in Washington, DC, hosted by the chief of staff of the army and the sergeant major of the army.

Within a week, I received another call from Washington. A completely separate officer selection board had selected me as one of twenty captains to participate in a prestigious and rigorous multiyear army program. It consisted of a three-year assignment in Washington, DC, with a one-year sabbatical to complete a fully funded master’s program in policy management at Georgetown University, a one-year assignment working on the joint staff of the Pentagon, and another one-year assignment working on the army staff in the Pentagon.

As if all the above weren’t amazing enough, just three months later, I received word that a third officer selection board had chosen me for “below-the-zone” (early) promotion to the rank of major, one of only two given to MP officers in the entire army that year.

Having received all that praise and recognition, I found it difficult to keep perspective. Even though the affirmation had come from more than sixty independent senior officer assessments on three different selection boards, I knew I personally couldn’t be
that
good. This observation forced me to do some heavy reflecting about how to accept praise with the proper amount of humility—and to ask myself what being humble really meant.

I had seen too many people declare they didn’t deserve the recognition they received. I considered this false modesty or even a lie. Of course, they deserved some of the recognition, just not all of it.

Real modesty and humility, I thought, needed to be about figuring out which part of the recognition belonged to me and which part belonged to my team, my peers, and my superiors.

In the final analysis of failure and success, it may be difficult to tell which is which. I know people who would consider some of my victories to be thinly veiled defeats.

There’s a word for how to see the difference, I suppose:
perspective
.

It doesn’t come easy, and it doesn’t come quick. But it does come if you seek it out or choose to acknowledge it when it’s provided.

My dad and brothers acknowledged such perspective in hindsight. Back in the late 1970s, as we stood in the pits at Raceway Park and mourned what I then considered the greatest defeat in my short life, none of us, not even my dad, knew the irony of the story behind that car he “inherited” that night.

Gene Kreuger’s pink “X2” car was actually an intentional throwback to the one driven by nineteen-year-old Dale Earnhardt ten years earlier.

Although Earnhardt became famous driving his number 3 black car, his first dirt-track car was a 1956 pink Ford that was branded with a “K2.” Earnhardt and his crew intended to paint the car avocado green, but a paint mishap resulted in the car being pink. They couldn’t afford to repaint it, so Earnhardt, who would become a legend in NASCAR racing and in the houses of Weber, ended up cutting his teeth on dirt tracks in a pink car.

It took us ten years to learn a truth that would have made us reconsider the definitions of success and failure back in those pits. Too late to spare the heartbreak, but in time to give our family a feeling of connection with one of our heroes.

Honest
failures. Success with
humility.

From black spray paint on a race car and single hand salutes to duck-walk marches and bowel movements, I have seen that the little things mean a great deal and just a little more care in handling makes a difference. In fact, I propose to you that doing an extraordinary job with ordinary work prepares you to better tackle the difficult and the complex
.

For years, I’ve hunted down and collected lists of tips—top ten this and six steps to that—hoping they could help me avoid failures and achieve success. Those lists are valuable summaries, and you’ll find my favorites tucked away on my bookshelf to be read when the spirit moves you
.

But what is just as important as those lists of tips is the value of noticing
and caring about what is right in front of your face—simple, common social graces. “Please” and “thank you,” for starters, but also giving credit to others when and where credit is due, taking a personal interest in those you serve or who serve you, and “unplugging” from gadgets and the churn around you in order to give a person your full attention. These are simple to talk about but harder to do, and they not only lead to success but encourage others to help you succeed or manage your failures
.

So an honest failure is one that comes (and will come) only after a decent attempt at gathering facts, thoughtful consideration toward those who have gone before, and then an honest and objective self-reflection. And success with humility comes (and will come) not by trying to be the best but by doing your best every time and letting the results speak for themselves—to others and to you
.

 … 
TO SEEK OUT AND EXPERIENCE A VIGOR OF THE EMOTIONS, A FRESHNESS OF THE DEEP SPRINGS OF LIFE, AN APPETITE FOR ADVENTURE OVER LOVE OF EASE.

1994, engagement