Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (17 page)

Del Vulcan was a parent with three kids enrolled in Nicollet. He was also a lieutenant colonel in the army, my senior mentor, and head of the ROTC department at Minnesota State University. When he confirmed what I had learned, my decision about what to do next was clear. I would seek a private meeting with Booth, man to man, and propose a solution that would punish
me but also reinstate the boys’ suspensions. The plan
briefed
well, anyway.

I confidently strolled into the school on Monday morning, wearing my truth and reason like a suit of armor. I sought nothing for myself; surely Booth would see virtue in that.

I spoke with Booth in the most respectful tone I could muster as I asked him to reconsider his judgment about the matter. When I finished, he leaned back in his chair, chuckled, and mocked my presence in his office. In that moment, Booth looked like the caricature of a crooked villain in a James Bond movie.

He stood up and moved to a seat adjacent to me and explained in a patronizing tone, “Mr. Weber, I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to go back to your class, and you’re going to finish out your last few weeks of student-teaching experience here at Nicollet.”

So it comes to this, then
, I thought.

I braced myself in my chair and spoke with conviction. “I need to be more clear,” I said. “I’m not going back into that classroom until you tell those boys what they did was wrong.” Then I calmly, but directly, laid out each of the facts: “I know you’re on probation as the superintendent here, and I know what influential position that mother holds on the school board.”

The look on his face wasn’t much different from the one I’d seen on Billy Bean’s years ago.

As emboldened as I felt, I practically lowered my head as I pleaded with him, “Look, the door is closed, and it’s just you and me here. Why won’t you see that this is the right thing to do? Punish me, hold me accountable for my behavior, but tell those boys what they did was wrong.” I thought for certain that humility would grip him, but instead he was incensed.

The hair on my neck stood on end as he glared at me and raised his voice: “Don’t … you … dare tell me how to run this school, young man. You are speaking to the superintendent of
this school district! Now you get your things together and get back to your class now!”

“I will not, sir,” I replied calmly. “You have stripped me of my authority and sent a clear message to those students, as well as to other teachers, about who runs the show around here. I cannot return until those kids know otherwise.” Booth stood up, reached behind me, opened the door, and bellowed, “I’ve had enough of this—now you get out of my office, or you’re done here.”

I stood up, looked him straight in the face, and calmly said, “Mr. Booth, you are a coward.”

I think I actually saw the top of his head come unglued from his skull. “That’s it, mister! You—are—fired! You get your stuff, and you get out of this school right now!”

I was shaken to the core. How could I be so right and end up so wrong?

Koenig’s twelfth-grade class was in session when I entered the room. His look told me he could read my face. “What’s wrong?” he said.

That question unlocked my emotions, and my eyes filled with tears. “It’s over,” I said. “He fired me.”

The bell rang, and those students poured into that hallway like gossips on a mission from God. Hearing about the firing turned an already juicy story into an instant legend, and they didn’t even have the details yet. Many of my students—mostly my seventh graders—approached me at the doorway to Koenig’s classroom with tears in their eyes, asking if it was true.

A few weeks later, the school board met, and the sight was unprecedented. I had been asked to come and speak, because a host of parents wanted to hear from me. Koenig later remarked he’d never seen anything like it in twenty-five years of teaching. “Seeing that many angry parents was impressive enough, but seeing equally angry students aligned with their parents was priceless.”

Booth opened with an announcement: “Now, I want to be clear here that this meeting is not going to be about Mr. Weber. We have important school business to tend to here.” (Koenig later remarked, “What did he think all those parents were there to discuss? The school’s fuel bill?”)

The standing ovation and vote of confidence I received from parents and students that night was intoxicating, but it didn’t relieve me of feeling like a failure for my temperamental approach.

Of course, there was something noble about standing up to Booth, but he never did rebuke those boys. And had this been a real job, I’m not so sure nobility would have counted for much in the unemployment line. There was plenty of room in which to feel proud, but also to seek better balance.

*   *   *

A tempered will and a temperamental predominance of courage are needed not just for contending with bosses. Those qualities are also useful when dealing with respected peers and subordinates.

In late June 1996, the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia was bombed. Nineteen U.S. airmen were killed, and more than 370 personnel were wounded. The complex, which consisted of a few dozen tightly packed, eight-story condos, was home to about four thousand U.S. soldiers and airmen stationed in the country.

After the bombing, the Department of Defense made a decision to repatriate all U.S. family members back to the States and move all U.S. service members into a more defendable location. An order was drafted for fifty MP soldiers and one MP officer to help carry out the mission.

The excitement in the Triple Nickel was conspicuous when that order arrived at Fort Lee. Real-world missions like this were rare in the nineties, and the size and scope of the task were twice what any platoon leader would normally handle. These facts made it a dream assignment, and the task fell to me.

Our expectations were high—and they were shattered almost immediately upon arrival in Saudi Arabia, where we were assigned to OPM-SANG, a rank-heavy U.S. Army command that would serve as a sort of parental unit during the deployment.
^*

My fifty-man team was split into four groups and scattered throughout a country the size of the western United States. The work our soldiers received was akin to mall security and would ultimately have nothing to do with security for U.S. families; fifty German shepherds would have served the same purpose.

Ninety percent of the personnel in OPM-SANG were majors and lieutenant colonels, a stark contrast in age, experience, and expectations compared with my enlisted soldiers. This meant conditions were ripe for conflict, which was ignited at the top.

Several of our young soldiers were verbally reprimanded by senior officers for wearing shorts and flip-flops to the community pool. Command policy required all soldiers to respect local customs and wear head-to-toe clothing while walking to and from the pool, because local Saudis worked in the compound. The policy and the reprimand were appropriate, except for one thing: senior officers routinely violated the policy themselves.

The idea of taking up this issue with a general officer twenty-five years senior in experience and rank wore hard on me in light of the still-fresh experience at Nicollet with Mr. Booth, but I felt the same conviction to do the right thing.

Just don’t call the man a coward
, I figured,
and we’ll be okay
.

I enlisted the support of a lieutenant colonel sixteen years senior to me to provide “flank support” and then personally took up the case with the general.

When I met with Brigadier General Larry Smith, we engaged
in pleasant small talk, then he invited me to speak my mind.

“Sir, I need your help,” I began. “My soldiers violated the uniform policy, and I need to fix that—I can take care of that. I’d like to ask your help in getting the senior officers to help set the example.”

Smith leaned back in his chair and literally spoke down the brim of his nose at me. His condescending tone was even more pronounced than Mr. Booth’s had been.

“Now you listen up,
Lieutenant
Weber,” he said softly. “We’re not going to get into that kind of talk and comparison around here. This issue doesn’t belong at my level.” (Actually, it did, because it already was.) “You just take care of your platoon of soldiers. They’re doing a fine job, and you just need to make sure they keep that up.” Without skipping a beat, he shifted to a more upbeat tone and choice of subject: “Aren’t these facilities just grand? Now, how’s your family doing?”

What grace. What skill.
What slime
.

I glanced over at my flank for support, but the colonel stood there like a sheep. He didn’t even try.
^†

It was bad enough getting shot down by someone like Smith. It was far worse getting shot down by a respected subordinate in the incident that followed.

Despite the total letdown in expectations with the Saudi mission, I decided to focus on the one thing that meant the most in any case—the welfare of our soldiers and their families.

I talked one-on-one with soldiers and junior leaders about their work conditions and off-duty likes and dislikes, and I wrote a newsletter to families back home, describing our living arrangements
and the hundreds of dollars in extra income we were making.

Everyone liked the attention and the involvement, except Sergeant First Class Avery James. He was my new platoon sergeant, and he was actually the kind of NCO I had dreamed of getting nearly three years prior. But with the newsletter, he thought I was too involved and shared too much information.

“It’s a private matter,” he insisted, regarding the money details. “Some soldiers don’t want their spouses knowing about the extra income so close to the holidays.” And he had come from the school of thought that soldier welfare was the sole domain of the NCO.

More than anything, however, he resented things I had no control over. We had no vehicles or equipment to maintain, little or no time for individual training or weapons marksmanship, no logistical supplies to coordinate, and soldiers who were farmed out all over the country.

These conditions relieved James of roughly 90 percent of his job as an NCO, a condition that was accentuated by the fact that there was a 50-to-1 ratio of officers to NCOs. I shared his frustration, but there was nothing I could do about it, and he knew it.

My dustup and subsequent failure with General Smith only further incensed James. His resentment toward our situation spread to a resentment toward me, and on one occasion he lashed out at me in front of a few soldiers. Without even thinking, I ordered him outside, acknowledged his frustration about the circumstances, and then laid into him.

“What is it exactly that you think we’re supposed to do here, mutiny?” I asked him. “Am I supposed to place my rank on the table and offer a threat of resignation because of all this?”

As much as we disliked the mission, we really had nothing to complain about. We were receiving combat and hazardous-duty pay for conditions that were anything but hazardous. Ours was
a collective mismanagement of expectations, and I told him he needed to help our soldiers extinguish their fires of discontent, not throw fuel on them.

James’s insubordination in front of soldiers was a cardinal sin in the army. I thought about his exceptional performance to date as the next thought made it to my lips: “I can handle disagreements in private, but if that kind of public insubordination ever happens again, I will do all in my power to have you redeployed to the States on the very first plane out of the country.”

Personally, I still wonder what he thought of me in that moment, but professionally, the only thing I cared about was him changing his crappy attitude. To his credit, he did just that.

When you’re in charge, everyone knows how to do things better than you are doing them. That was no exception with Second Lieutenant Michael Burns. Our deployment called for only one officer, but Burns was sent anyway, so his presence was already redundant and unwelcome from day one.

Still wet behind the ears in the army, let alone as an officer, Burns had a very immature professional attitude.

“You’re just not forceful enough with these jokers,” he’d say with a casual wave of his hand. He had clever retorts about working with senior officers that revealed a warped understanding of the profession.

“Schmoozing isn’t my style,” he’d say. “I speak only when spoken to.” He found staff meetings to be tedious, which they are, but he seemed to have missed the fact that they came with the territory.

Burns’s loose attitude came to him honestly, as he worked mostly at night and out of sight of senior officers. But I was just as direct with him when he criticized me in front of our soldiers for the same issues James did.

I held a razor-thin line of superiority over Burns, so imagination had to be the tactic of choice. I told him I was assigning him new duties. He would join me in the headquarters on the day shift
for a little firsthand senior officer experience and professional perspective.

I imagined he would be disappointed, but I had no idea it would make him as angry as it did. He tried reasoning with me and even apologized for offending me, but I had no intention of letting the matter go. “No, it’s about time you had the opportunity to show me how to do it right.”

He recoiled hard. “I don’t need to experience it to know how it should be done. When you’re right, you’re right, and that’s all you need.”

I thought about my experience with Booth as well as the recent run-in with Smith, and I replied, “I somehow missed the lesson that teaches that you can still get your way when folks who outrank you don’t listen or don’t care what you think.”

“You’re not in charge!” he yelled. “You’re not the commander!” But his quick call back to the States was short. He showed up the next morning for his appointed duties and developed (I’d like to think) a new appreciation for tempered wills and temperamental tendencies.

*   *   *

Nearly two years after my adventures in Saudi Arabia, I was assigned to a job that seemed to punctuate the importance of risking failure and missteps in the practice of MacArthur’s proposal. In fact, “temper of the will” would become as much about softening as hardening—for both the subordinate and the superior.