November 11, 2023
As a twenty-year-old reserve officer training to become an Army Ranger, I was instructed during a joint exercise in the Black Hills of South Dakota to lead a squad of soldiers on a mission behind enemy lines. The commanding officer, who was regular army and boasted excessively of his Vietnam combat experience, was leading a battalion of soldiers into battle and needed my squad to secure the path forward. My objective was to clear out machine gun and artillery placements while capturing hostiles who could be interrogated for intel. The battalion was moving to engage at a pace of four kilometers per hour and it was imperative that I stay at least thirty minutes ahead; so imperative in fact, I was told it mattered more than the lives of my soldiers. The commanding officer repeated this stipulation multiple times to ensure I understood the gravitas of his orders.
My squad of seasoned soldiers were skilled at the art of escape and evasion and experienced in operating effectively behind enemy lines. As we worked our way through the dense forest, we encountered enemy snipers at a point where the wide canyon we were upwardly traversing began to narrow. We quickly naturalized the snipers staying on schedule without incurring casualties by utilizing a Sioux warrior trick I’d learned growing up on the reservation whereby you appear to be in one place while actually being somewhere else. The field observers were impressed with the ingenuity my squad demonstrated but disappointed I focused more on eliminating the threat than taking prisoners, sacrificing the potential to gain valuable intel.
Continuing up the canyon, we soon encountered a machine gun emplacement on a knoll situated such that it maximized field of view and battalion exposure with minimal exposure to themselves. Cognizant of my three-fold objective to secure passage up the canyon, take prisoners for intel if possible, and stay thirty minutes ahead of the battalion, even if it meant sacrificing my men, the machine gun fire raining down on us made it clear I was facing at a lose-lose scenario. On the one hand, I could take my men straight on into enemy fire, probably neutralizing the threat in minimal time but incurring heavy casualties, thus rendering us ineffective for future engagements. On the other hand, I could modify my strategy with the possibility of taking prisoners and maintaining squad effectiveness for future encounters, but risk falling behind schedule.
Certain my primary responsibility was too my men, and mostly dismissing the Colonel’s insistence that staying on schedule mattered more, I placed six of my guys in the line of fire in such a way the enemy would believe a full-frontal attack was underway. Meanwhile, I split the remaining men into left and right flanks. As the main group kept the enemy focused, both flanks snuck around and above their position before hitting them with rapid crossfire. When the smoke cleared, one prisoner remained who we compelled to reveal where his cache of maps and other deployment intel was hidden. My squad, completely in tack, were pretty damn excited for having emerged from the lose-lose scenario with prisoners, intel, and no causalities; surely major congratulations and recognition would be forthcoming.
Throughout the day, other reserve officers attempted the same scenario, but no one was able to take prisoners or gather intel, and every other squad incurred significant casualties. I started the day a second lieutenant but expected a field promotion at the end-of-exercise briefing, as I’d witnessed in other field exercises where an officer performed exemplary relative to his peers. The guys in my squad felt the same, as they owned bragging rights for being the most effective combat unit on the field and to Army Rangers, that means a lot.
So, with night approaching, the brash Colonel with extensive Vietnam combat experience, gathers everyone into a circle, including officers and their squads. My guys and I huddled together, not only because we were a team, but because that would make it easier to get our collective “attaboys.” The Colonel began by graciously thanking all the field coordinators who not only evaluated each officer’s performance but provided an overall assessment of what they observed. The Colonel took a moment to review their summary report and then, in dramatic fashion, shreds the documents and tosses the torn pieces to the wind. His demeanor instantly changes as he begins angrily pacing around the inner circle of soldiers; making multiple loops before stopping in front of me and ordering me to stand.
As I eagerly jump to my feet, I glance back at my guys with a proud thumbs up, for the praise that was certainly forthcoming, but boy was I ever wrong. Before my mind had a chance to catch up with what was happening, I was brutally berated in front of everyone in a manner I’ve never experienced before; and I used to be a ranch-hand, so I knew what it meant to be yelled at. With no mention of the prisoner captured, or the intel secured, or even my ability to achieve the stated objectives without incurring a single casualty, something no other officer accomplished, I was verbally assaulted for taking four minutes longer than the average time it took the other squads to neutralize the machine gun threat.
We all have moments in our lives that significantly change our trajectory, moments we replay in our heads over and over for years afterwards wondering if how we reacted was the smartest or best course of action; well, this was my moment. Failing to understand the broader point the Colonel was making regarding the need to sacrifice lives to achieve mission objectives, I stood my ground and countered his assertion that I had miserably failed to achieve my objective or to follow very explicit instructions because it took me four minutes over average by arguing that I took prisoners, gathered intel, and didn’t suffer a single casualty.
The Colonel, not known for his elegance, got directly in my face and shouted, “Fuck that, and fuck you! I gave you an order solider, stay 30 minutes ahead of my battalion, I told you to do it regardless of the cost. I asked if you understood, and you said yes. Then, the instant you get in the field, you decide you know better than me how to run this army!“
Still not grasping the broader point being made at my expense, I hit the first of my many career altering mistakes by counter-arguing that not only did I meet two key objectives but that with my squad at full strength, I could easily make up the four minutes on our way to the next encounter. While that may seem like a logical argument, here’s generally how things devolved.
Colonel: “I don’t give a rats ass what you think you could do later; I gave you an order and expect you to follow it without exception!”
Me: “Even if it means losing men?”
Colonel: “Without exception you follow your orders!”
Me: “Respectfully, I disagree, have an obligation and responsibility to my men that includes keeping them alive as best I can while achieving mission objectives. Once you’re in the field and engaging the enemy, you have to make trade-offs and decisions, and I think I chose well.”
Colonel: “I can’t even begin to care about what you think, you have an obligation and responsibility to me and only me! You are part of my team, and my mission matters more than your piss-ant thoughts. You’re not here to think, do you understand that? You do what I tell you, even if it means men must be sacrificed! Do you understand?”
Me: “No I do not. I mean I understand what you’re saying but I do not concede your point. You’re not the one getting shot at, the one writing letters back home to wives and parents. You’re not the one looking these men in eye, asking them to trust you, not the one sending them to their death. Every viable option must be considered, and a good officer does everything in their power to preserve the lives of his men.”
It’s not like I didn’t have options, I could have quietly accepted my humiliation and capitulated to whatever point he was trying to make, I could have rallied around his point by accepting his premise, and either of those options would have paid the toll toward my becoming a Ranger. However, for whatever reason, fate had me going in a different direction and from there, our argument devolved even further, as much as that’s possible, and as you might imagine, things did not end well for me. I ended the training exercise believing I’d be promoted, but instead was demoted to Sargent, which meant I was no longer an officer with the privileges that come with rank. So, while everyone else enjoyed their post-exercise dinner later that night followed by beers and a movie in the mess tent, I was banished to the back as punishment for my insubordination cleaning machine guns and rifles and storing away ammunition.
That being said, every cloud has at least one silver lining, and while fate didn’t play my way with the Colonel, there was this very pretty new cadet who’d come up from Colorado who’d been banished beside me because she couldn’t get her rifle reassembled after having torn it down for cleaning. At one point she got so frustrated everyone else had finished and left she started to cry. Well, being the kindhearted gentleman I am, and not to mention being someone who can reassemble army issue weapons blindfolded, I walked her through the reassembly process. Grateful and perhaps even out of pity, she hung around to keep my company while I finished my punishment. One thing led to another as we talked and then, instead of joining everyone else for the movie and beers once I’d finished, we took a very pleasant walk in the forest. So, sometimes even when things don’t end well, they can still end well.
A week later I’m called into the Commander’s office to review the field exercise incident and provide my side of the story. The Commander’s an older career officer who listens intently as I presented my case before cluing me in on what was really going on and where I went wrong. Apparently, the point the training scenario was meant to teach me, is that as an Army Ranger officer, there would be times when I’d in lose-lose situations, times when extremely difficult decisions have to be made, including sacrificing lives of others and officers have to accept that responsibility. He went on to explain two things that really pissed the Colonel off, first, by successfully achieving my objectives I failed to learn the lesson of sacrifice. Second, by refusing to concede his point in front of everyone, I not only embarrassed him, but basically ruined the entire exercise, and quite possible an entire class of future officers who because of me would now question the morality of future orders before deciding how to act; they had no choice but to treat me harshly to demonstrate the consequences of my foolhardiness.
The Commander concluded by recognizing that in times of conflict I probably was the kind of officer the army needs in the field; someone unafraid to assess conditions and make decisions based on achieving optimal outcomes. However, he went on to stipulate, it was not a time of war and he feared that should I continue my journey toward becoming a Ranger, things would not end well for either me or the U.S. Army. The long and the short of it was that I was not going to be offered a commission and was encouraged to pursue other nonmilitary career paths, which is how I become a research engineer where I get to be the person in charge of me.
Ironically, a short while later I was awarded the VFW medal for “Excellence in Leadership;” apparently others appreciated the tenacious moral stand I took that late afternoon in the Black Hills of South Dakota against ferocious aggression. The retired combat veteran who presented my medal had served tours in Vietnam and his long white hair and equally white ZZ Top beard gave off a definite Berkeley hippie vibe. As he shook my hand he leaned in and whispered, “The army may not want you son, but me and everyone I served with would have been damn proud to follow you in combat.”
I tell this very long and convoluted story to make a short sharp point about the conflicts currently shaping world affairs, including the Ukrainian and Palestinian conflicts. The point is this; in military matters, there are objectives and there is ground truth. Often the objectives, like securing a border, or keeping your country safe, or rescuing hostages, can seem both noble and achievable while on the ground a completely altered reality exists. Political leaders and military experts comfortably assert the sacrifices that must be made to achieve their quasi-noble objectives along with the acceptable abstract sacrifices they it requires. What they so conveniently fail to recognize is that those sacrifices are lives; families that don’t get to watch their sons and their daughters grow old, children who don’t get to experience the joy and love of being raised by their parents, tragedies that once committed can never be reconciled.
In many ways, I’m still that twenty-year-old idealist who had enough misplaced moxie to tell a combat Colonel he didn’t give a flying fuck about his orders and objectives, not when it came to saving the lives of his men. As I struggle to make sense of the current conflicts sweeping the globe, I’m reminded of something the famous Polish scientist, Marie Curie, said, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we can fear less.“
It’s easy to pick sides in a conflict, we seamlessly align our passions around religion, or politics, or nationality, but to truly understand a conflict in all its deeply dysfunctional detail is a much more difficult undertaking that involves the ability to see ground truth in unbiased terms. But regardless of what side one finds themselves on, the idealist who still lives inside me knows as strongly today as he did forty years ago that there’s always one overriding morality that unites us all in a shared bond; the need to stand up and say it’s wrong to senselessly take the lives of innocent men, women and children regardless of the nobility of your cause, the wrong you think your righting, or the objective you devoutly believe you’re ordained to achieve.
Now is that moment to measure your morality….
Everything in life comes with consequence and had I known that late afternoon in the Black Hills Forest just a few short miles Mount Rushmore when I stood toe-to-toe with the combat vetted Colonel holding firm to by beliefs that I was sabotaging my chances to become Army Ranger I question whether I might have reacted differently. I really wanted to be a Ranger, so much so that when invited to join the Persian Rifles, an elite Ranger officer corps for the guys wanting to get deep in the commando side of things, I jumped at the chance. In reality though, based on how my life’s played out, I have answered that question multiple times and I know that if I had to replay that moment again, I ‘d repeat my stand knowing full well it meant not becoming a Ranger. . .
That afternoon in the Commander’s office I was introduced to the military provision that officers serve at the pleasure of the President as Commander kindly informed me that the President no longer feels it would be pleasurable to have me in the army. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Regan did not personally disenfranchise me, but I get the point; I may have entirely missed the point the combat vetted Colonel was making that afternoon in the forest, but not the President’s. So, this is the question each of us must face, probably multiple times in our life, namely, are you willing to accept the consequences that come from standing up for your principles, morals and integrity? If so, how is that being measured in you today?
