Never Been Average

The Chaplain shows movies on Friday night. Last week it was Clash of the Titans, which I saw while I was at Pendleton. I wasn’t too impressed, so I didn’t go. Today’s showing was Prince of Persia, which I went to. As I walked back from chow to the tent where the movie was being shown, I suddenly recalled scenes from M*A*S*H, where the characters sat on wooden benches, and threw popcorn at Klinger when the movies stopped rolling. I wondered if I would be sitting on a wooden bench--the chapel that Sunday services are in has wooden benches much like them. I was almost disappointed when I got there and found out I would be sitting on a metal chair. But not too disappointed, because it meant I got to sit on something with back support.

Prelude. I remember at one point, not all that long ago, sitting in a briefing evaluating the performance of a unit where a commanding officer was being told that his Marines were average. When the brief was over, he was angry. “Never in my life have I been average,” he snapped.

I promise this post will make sense at some point.

I had a project earlier today where some work my Marines completed was being inspected for completion. The inspector pointed out details that had been overlooked--nails that had gone through the plywood but not the stud behind it. Nails that had been done with a nail gun and not gone into the wood entirely, and then not been finished off with a regular hammer. I realized that I was good at holding myself to a standard of excellence, but actually fairly bad about holding my subordinates to a standard of excellence.

I’m too worried about being the bad guy, about whether they’ll work for me willingly or grudgingly if I come down on them to hard. About whether I have the stamina and endurance to stick around long after I want to because I am holding Marines to a high standard and they have not completed their task yet. But if I don’t do this, I am setting myself up for a career of having my Marines be just average.

I know some of my Sergeants are holding my Marines to a standard of excellence. A civilian inspector recently came to look at a different project some of my Marines had done, and told our Battalion Sergeant Major that the work was better quality than some Seebee projects he had seen. This was quite high praise. But obviously, I have problems in other areas.

Military commanders aren’t judged on what they accomplish. Their actions might be examined for strengths and flaws, as Gen McChrystal is learning right now, but their successes and failures lie in what their subordinates do or fail to do.

Earlier in the month I took some Marines out to a project site to drop them off. We had enough logistics vehicles that we went in two separate convoys, with me in charge of the second one. As I drove up to the entry control point (ECP) for the patrol base, I heard over the radio that a corpsman was needed at the ECP. I hopped out to find a Marine standing with his weight on his right leg; some heavy equipment had dropped onto his foot. (He broke some toes and suffered some pain, but will be fine. He didn’t get sent home.)

A couple hours later I fielded a stern call from our Battalion Commanding Officer, informing me that I was not their friend, and that I had better hold the Marines to a standard. That was something that my Staff Platoon Commander at The Basic School pounded into my head--if I didn’t hold to the standard that was established already, I was setting a new standard.

So, I think one of the biggest things I need to focus on now is holding my Marines to a high standard, and not worrying about whether they’ll like me or not. Not gonna be easy to do.

See? I told you it would all make sense in the end. Except for Prince of Persia. That was random. :-)