in my company's mission to produce the world's greatest leaders, they have procured the most talented, experienced, and battle-hardened instructors in existence (still waiting for the time-machine to come on-line).
This one in particular is a 70+ year old Irishmen. Let that sink in. Their ancestors wer murdered, displaced, and their homelands turned into golf courses. Then their food crop turned to waste. They come to America and fight in every war America has fought. This man fought in Vietnam, watched saw his buddy take a bullet to the head coming into a landing zone in the battle portrayed in We Were Soldiers. Normally, battalions don't take on a Division. 4 to 1 odds in somebody else's backyard isn't on my wishlist.
He just lit up a Pall Mall and did his thing.
They dug up this fossil to teach us about leadership; how to take care of our soldiers, to bloody our hands in life, and to take care of ourselves. Hard to to take of your someone else's sons and daughters when you can't take of yourself.
This man's lady ,who heplans on taking to the beach next summer for their 50th wedding anniversary, finally got him down to 3 packs of cigarettes a day. He's been smoking longer than he's been married.
This guy serious'd up his sons when hardline drugs started hitting the streets in the 70's and 80's. He made each of his sons dig a 6 ft grave in the backyard (a metric fuck-ton of digging). "I'll shoot you and bury you my bloody self if ya bring any o' them damn drugs home for disgracing the family."
The 3 sons turned out to be: a physicist/engineer, a professional bull-rider, and an Army Ranger. Fuck.
"Irish car bomb? We just call it a bomb. But I don't need any beer to drink my whiskey. And Guinness is drank at room temperature. Cold beer is for sissy-babies."
And as he began this class with a 5 minute long poem on the hellfire and brimstone of THE Red White and Blue, I shat out any notion of not being a leader in America's armed forces.
"Soldiers will die even when you do everything right. One day, you will have to write that letter home to someone's mother, and she will say 'Damn you to hell! Why do you come back, but send my son home in a box?'
"Charlie died that day in the Ia Drang Valley. A few days back, my lady and I went to visit Charlie's mother. One of Charlie's twin boys was there, grown and still living at home. He said,'I wanna show you my dad.' And there above the mantle was a framed letter that some 32 year old boy from Georgia, our commander, that he wrote home to Charlie's wife. I ain't no sissy baby, but I cried"
-you can't have a family and stay late every day in military. Wake up early so you can come home early to your family. example:
-"Daddy, mom says you make about $14 an hour"
"that sounds about right, yeah" she pulls out sock from under a bed, dumping change all over
the bed"Daddy, can I buy an hour of your time so we can spend some time together?"
-the greatest gift you can give one of your soldiers isn't a 3-day pass. Write that man/woman a letter. You think he won't take it home to his parents and show them how his military cares about him?
-when you go home on leave, the first thing you want to do us ditch your uniform. But, your parents have every right to show you off. Put on your dress uniform and let them take you out to dinner, to church. Let them be proud of you.
And now I feel just a little better about leading soldiers. Thanks to the sergeant his troops called "The Blade"
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