Without formal training in this field, I thought my best course of action was to interrupt her path toward self-destruction, to provide her time to reconsider her options.
As she sat quietly before my desk, I looked up to catch her eye. “I understand that you are considering killing yourself,” I said in an even tone.
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Well, don't do it here.” I swept my hand to indicate the surrounding company area. “We have other people with lots of problems who need help. Don't kill yourself here in the company, on this post, or while you're in the Army. It will cause no end of paperwork.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
I thought that, if she could put off suicide for the week remaining in the Army, she could find new reasons to delay this irrevocable step later.
I was wrong.
A few days after the young soldier had been discharged, the first sergeant came in to tell me that the police had called the MPs with the information that the trainee had been found in a hotel room dead, a victim of suicide.
By the time I commanded again, I understood more about the nature of suicide and the meaning of gestures and threats.
There are many incentives for taking care of soldiers. During holidays, single soldiers worked shifts on Christmas, while married soldiers worked New Year's. Jews, Christians, and those of other faiths worked out exchanges of work shifts. But with the young PFCs and SP-4s who worked Christmas, I made it a point to visit the operations floor to discuss the mission and to chat with them about their homes and families in America. It was amazing how many had not heard from the folks at home and couldn't afford the then expensive international commercial telephone rates.
As battalion commander, I had more than simply the feelings of some homesick young soldiers to consider. I took command in 1986, just as the AIDS crisis became a matter of public discussion. Two decades into the epidemic, it is sometimes hard to remember the degree of ignorance about AIDS that prevailed at that time. Soldiers, young and old alike, needed more information. Then, the Army's emphasis was on the HIV testing and notification process, not on prevention.
For most soldiers, AIDS seemed to be purely associated with homosexuals, one more reason for them to be unconcerned. AIDS was a problem “out in San Francisco.”
But when it became clear that HIV and AIDS could afflict both men and women, straight and gay alike, some people verged on panic. For the first time in the twentieth century, sexual relations could be equated with death.
One of the company first sergeants told me, “Why would I talk to the soldiers about AIDS? If they get it, there's no hope and they're just going to die.”
“First Sergeant,” I said, “the people who think it's hopeless are the ones who'll end up infected with HIV. You just can't sit back passively and pretend it's not happening. There may
be
a cure one day. You can also manage your own behavior and be careful who your partners are.”
Seeing I had not been persuasive, I decided to be proactive. Once every quarter, battalion commanders held Commander's Call in which we directly addressed the soldiers on important issues, including health and safety. I held my Commander's Calls in the conference room on the fifth floor of the old Wehrmacht barracks that was our headquarters. Since we were a four-shift battalion, and wanted to provide three makeup training sessions, I gave my presentation seven times.
“The subject of today's safety discussion is sex,” I announced. When I said the last word, I saw the drowsy eyes pop open throughout the conference room. Many of these soldiers were hardly out of adolescence, and sex was either an embarrassing or forbidden topic. So I continued, “What I'm going to talk about is very sensitive. I'm not trying to present a religious or moral viewpoint. The reason I am raising this issue is that your lives are at risk and you need practical information. These are the facts you need to know to protect yourself.”
I had considered asking one of the chaplains or Medical Corps doctors to help me in this task. My soldiers could seek pastoral or medical advice if they wished. But I was their leader, so a practical general discussion to cut through the confusion was my responsibility.
Mutual trust is an equally strong bond between commander and soldier (coach and player). In the Army we take young people, most straight out of high school, and train them in a relatively few months to function as adults in a demanding, often dangerous, and always serious profession. We hope to instill in them a level of stable maturity and self-discipline far beyond that of their peers who have remained in the civilian world. This is why the Army's Basic and Advanced Individual Training process is so critical. After only six or seven months, young soldiers join their units anywhere in the world. A soldier who was dancing in his high school prom in May could be driving a Humvee through the snowy hills on the Kosovo-Macedonia border on Christmas Eve, mindful of the land mines that might lie in the frozen mud ahead.
Soldiering demands self-discipline, and that is what we try to develop through our training. This is one of the reasons the Army reacted so vigorously to the sexual harassment scandal centered at Aberdeen Proving Ground. If those drill instructors assigned there to serve as role models to the young trainees could not maintain even a modicum of self-discipline, what kind of lesson did that teach the trainees themselves? I'm pleased to report that, during my membership on Secretary West's Review Panel on Sexual Harassment, I personally found the great majority of Army drill instructors to be soldiers of great integrity, sincerely concerned with training the soldiers assigned to them, and worthy of the respect and trust of those young soldiers.
Maintaining the trust and respect of those who serve with you is a dynamic and often difficult process. Some people actually believe becoming a leader entitles you to work less and instead draw upon the energy and production of the people assigned to your organization. In fact, the reverse is true. A position of leadership is a responsibility, not an occasion for privilege. Truly effective leadership in the Army at either the senior noncommissioned or commissioned officer level entails even harder work for longer hours than other duty assignments.
The popular image of goldbricking NCOs and officers fostered over the decades in such classic television programs as
The Phil Silvers Show
(Sergeant Bilko) and
M*A*S*H
is misleading. In these fantasies, all the NCOs ran some scam, while the officers' responsibilities seemed to diminish and their degree of flagrant luxury increased as they advanced in rank. I can tell you from personal experience, it just doesn't work that way. Even in
M*A*S*H,
Colonel Potter portrays a multidimensional character who is more true to Army life than the other colonels and the occasional general who parade through the series.
In reality, command in the Army involves selfless service. A good commander spends more rather than less time on the job. In my battalion in Germany, my days began early and usually ended around 6:30 or 7:00
p.m.
Although social events were not a frequent requirement, I did attend battalion parties during the holidays and soldiers' athletic events.
Because I concentrated on running the best Military Intelligence battalion I could while looking out for my soldiers' welfare, I had very little time for housekeeping and personal activity. I lived in a rented farmhouse owned by one Herr Knöpfle in the ancient dairy farming hamlet of Kuhbach (Cow Glade) about thirty-five miles west of Augsburg. This was a quiet corner of German countryside. The Knöpfle house dated from 1607. It had gleaming hardwood floors, marble windowsills, and carved doors. My adjacent little house was postwar, very comfortable. There was no television so I enjoyed reading. And whenever I got back early enough in the summer, I changed into old work clothes and helped Herr Knöpfle and his two adult children with the chores in the dairy barn. Pitching grass to the lowing cows or sweeping their stalls was a good way to unwind. In return for my work, they invariably invited me to a traditional German farm dinner.
At dawn every morning, I was on the road in my BMW, headed back to the “real” world of Intelligence operations and leadership issues. If I chose the autobahn route, I usually came to full wakefulness by roaring past the green fields in light mist at about ninety-five miles an hour.
The Army had adopted the camouflage Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) for all ranks. They replaced the green fatigues I had worn in Korea. I had a large number of BDUs with the machine-embroidered name tag, rank, and branch insignia sewn on each set, and kept the uniforms rotating through the post laundry weekly. This saved time getting ready each day. For me there was a bonus to the BDU: I never had been very adept at keeping a shine on brass insignia. The dull green and black cloth appliqué lieutenant colonel's oak leaf and Military Intelligence insignia did not require cleaning with Brasso.
Throughout my life in the Army, keeping track of my uniform hat had been a problem, an issue that my civilian women friends never need to consider. But I would have been out of uniform with no hat. So I stashed extra hats in my briefcase, my office, and my car, as well as in my quarters. It cost me a few extra dollars to buy these hats, but the expense was justified by increased peace of mind. As a lieutenant general, I had at least fifteen hats of four different types, ranging in level of formality from BDU to Army Blue.
I was lucky when it came to eating. The battalion had a good mess hall that served four meals every twenty-four hours to meet the requirements of our soldiers working shifts. So I could always buy a good, cheap meal (officers paid, and the soldiers living in the barracks ate free) and could spend time talking to soldiers while we ate. But when I missed dinner in the mess hall, I returned late to my farmhouse, hungry. There my highly refined culinary skills came into play: chunks of German brown bread torn from the loaf, wedges of cheese sliced on the kitchen counter, and hunks of salami with the rind peeled back. Not very
gemütlich,
but some nights food had simply become fuel. So much for a luxurious European assignment, finally freed from the drudgery of Pentagon staff work.
The popular conception of Army officers followed by a retinue of aides and personal assistants catering to their whims is also false. Only general officers in certain positions are entitled to enlisted aides who clean the public entertainment rooms of their quarters and prepare their uniforms. This is not a wasteful perk meant simply to make life easier for a particular general. Rather, having an enlisted aide frees that officer to spend more time on professional duties and official social obligations.
When I became the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, I was assigned Master Sergeant Wayne Smith as my enlisted aide. He transformed my life from chaos to order. I lived in quarters on the second and third floors of a beautiful brick house built in 1838 on Fort McNair, a small, shady enclave nestled on the Washington, D.C., waterfront. My position entailed long days at the Pentagon, inevitably followed by mandatory social events. Some days would start at 4:00
a.m.
and not end until nearly midnight. My normal workday schedule was a minimum of twelve hours.
But Master Sergeant Smith was there to support me, making sure my uniforms were clean and pressed, the downstairs of my quarters were spotless, and my refrigerator stocked with appetizing food. I now had a full homemade meal to microwave when I got home late. The days of spaghetti or eating vegetables straight from the can were over. When I entertained, which I often did as DCSINT, Master Sergeant Smith handled each occasion with military precision, freeing me to spend time with guests, often from some interesting foreign country.
From the time I was a girl hearing stories of my grandfather Jimmy Haygood, I knew that good coaches inspired their teams to high performance. In that famous 20-20 tie against Ole Miss in 1931, Coach Haygood took his Southwestern team into the locker room at halftime trailing 20-0. There's no record of what he said to his players. But he was renowned for inspiring rather than bullying. Whatever message he delivered, his players held Ole Miss to their twenty points, scored twenty of their own, and only missed winning when an extra point kick went wide. Clearly, my grandfather was a positive leader.
Years later, I read Dr. Henriette Anne Klauser's provocative book
Write It Down, Make It Happen,
and I thought of my grandfather. Dr. Klauser believes one important responsibility of the leader is to be inspirational. By this she means the leader seeing things in the most promising light, envisioning a great future, inspiring hope in the team, and most essentially, sustaining group energy toward meeting their common goal. To me this is a great definition of an effective leader, whether in the Army or in civilian life.
Sometimes, however, mid-level, younger leaders think the senior leader is being overly optimistic due to ego or self-aggrandizement. But the leader who expresses doubt about achieving a goal will be much less likely to succeed at the level originally intended. If the leader doesn't think the mission is possible, neither will those on her team.
This does not mean that a commander or successful executive is a cheerleader, but rather a practical guide who bridges the gap between the purely inspirational and the concrete, between today's reality and tomorrow's dream. In short, like a winning coach, the leader must be able to convince the team members to continue struggling against difficult odds to achieve an unlikely goal. If the leader (commander, coach, or executive) becomes discouraged and loses energy, team morale suffers, and with it, the mission.
After I had taken command of the battalion in Augsburg, I discovered that finding good, affordable child care was a real problem for many of my soldiers. Some were dual-career married couples, others, single parents. Almost all worked on rotating shifts, which meant the soldiers could not use the local German day care centers or U.S. Army facilities, which were almost always full to capacity. In any event, the Army child care center did not open early enough in the morning for our day shift or stay open late enough at night for my soldiers working the 11:00
p.m.
to 7:00
a.m.
“Mids” shift.