In the spring of 1998, army leaders at Fort McClellan were looking for an adjutant to serve during a large military parade. The adjutant is usually the most junior officer in such pageantry, and the job demands a mastery of drill and ceremony that many career officers find intimidating. From the spectators to the troops on the field, all eyes are fixed upon this lone actor to get it all precisely right.
Getting selected for such a task was therefore hardly an achievement for me. No one wanted the job. But I did. I’d been marching since I was fourteen, and I knew the painfully long sequence of commands and marches so well I didn’t even need to review a script.
The most embarrassing, undignified, yet impressive task the adjutant must perform on the parade ground is affectionately referred to as “the duck walk.” That’s what the adjutant looks like during the brisk march he must execute to reach his position on the parade field before the marching formation reaches its position on the parade field.
Nearly every officer I ran into that day—from superiors to peers to subordinates—commented they had never seen anything so bizarre and impressive at the same time. “Your legs were moving so fast, it looked like you were floating!” One colonel remarked somewhat backhandedly, “That was amazing. You looked like you had a hot fire poker shoved up your rear end.”
Being exceptionally good at such a little thing did not earn me a challenging assignment, a stellar evaluation, or any awards, but it did attract attention to the hard work I was already doing. The career-changing assignment followed months later, and my performance in that job led to the improbable string of successes I mentioned at the beginning of this book.
* * *
There are certainly enough stories here so far to underscore MacArthur’s suggestions on how to balance failure and success. As you can see, I seemed to bounce back and forth between them. Routine failures helped me stay humble in success, and my successes gave me the confidence to be proud and unbending in my honest failures.
But what happens when you experience too many of one and not enough of the other? I propose to you that confidence and humility become harder to calibrate, and MacArthur’s equation becomes much more difficult yet even more necessary to undertake.
In my case, successes began to outstrip failures by ten to one starting in 2002 when I successfully completed my company command assignment. What I began to struggle with then—a little at first and a lot more ten years down the road—was the significance and deservedness of the recognition that followed. And if I ever fell short on self-doubt, there was an occasional peer in the wings who seemed all too willing to question how it was all possible.
In my twenty-four months of leading a company, I had experienced enough adversity, adventure, and drama to fill a nice-size book. By far the greatest challenge was managing four different deployments to Honduras, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, while managing training and operations for all of my non-deployed soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood. And then, just halfway through the assignment, terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.
Years later, my first sergeant, Joe Vroman, reached out to me and wrote about how impressed he was with my performance during those seemingly impossible times. Seeking perspective and suspect of romantic sentimentality, I pressed him. “What is it that I did that impressed you so much?” His reply is a trophy I cherish:
I recall that when you planned any training exercise or deployment … you would always pack so much into the allotted time frame that I would question (in my own mind) whether we could actually accomplish everything. You would take thirty days’ worth of training events and somehow pack it into a seven-day exercise. I used to think you were crazy, but we always got it accomplished with great results! …
It may have required longer hours, or focusing on doing the task the right way the first time … but either way, we learned to adjust and get it done.
You were hard-nosed and always stuck to your guns … always reassuring us that we could accomplish the mission, and it worked (and believe me, I remember leaders coming to me asking for help to change your mind). Whatever the circumstances, we always persevered and came out on top. We never failed to accomplish anything you set in front of us and we became “believers” because of it.
Your constant pushing and challenging and questioning and training really made the leaders under you learn very quickly to manage their time wisely. It really was inspiring, though, because I remember many times coming back from a training exercise with you and sitting in my office going, “Wow … did we just do that?”
Joe added that I had also helped him personally.
I’ve never had anyone challenge me to go further, do more, be better, and squeeze more into every day than you did. You taught me to set my sights higher than I ever imagined, and that through hard work, dedication, and immense training, we could accomplish anything!
I owe many of my successes in life to you and your mentorship. Although it was completely exhausting to work for you, I can honestly say it was inspirational.
As flattering as Joe’s comments were, they highlighted the paradox of successfully pulling off nearly impossible tasks. As he said, many of my subordinate leaders thought I pushed them too hard. I wasn’t exactly excited or proud that I was viewed as a slave driver, regardless of how necessary it was. This is the condition that often makes real leadership a lonely, depressing position.
It’s one thing to do a good job, but it’s quite another to do well by others. This philosophy is what drove my every effort in command.
Was it even possible to know if they perceived how truly important this was to me? How could I really know if I made an impact on them?
I knew leaders who reviewed their awards and evaluations as proof, but I learned years earlier never to rely on your own press. How could I separate true appreciation from polite conversation? I remembered how all those trainees heaped praise upon that overweight lieutenant in basic training, knowing full well they thought less of him.
These questions about effective leadership are like the ones I posed earlier with effective parenting—we know some techniques work better than others, but the outcome is inherently unknown because of the number of variables involved.
Three months after I left command, I received an unexpected answer to my collective questions that was difficult to reconcile. I was told that Vroman and the senior leaders of my old company had joined an effort to nominate me for the General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award, one of the most prestigious individual awards an army officer can receive.
Every year the army selects thirteen active duty officers from an eligible pool of more than thirty-seven thousand officers in the ranks of lieutenant and captain. It is intended to recognize those officers whose work best represents the ideals of General Douglas MacArthur: duty, honor, and country.
Officers are measured by their demonstrated leadership and influence, teamwork, physical fitness, adherence to values, proficiency in technical and tactical skills, as well as by less tangible skills like quality of the leadership climate, ability to gain consensus among diverse groups, and achievements that demonstrate an understanding of human nature.
Nominations proceed through several levels of command, and only select files make it to each next level. In fact, there are so many nominees and so many levels of participation, it’s wise to just feel honored for being nominated. That’s certainly how I felt about it.
But actually winning it?
Four months later, I learned I had. Kristin and I would be flown to a ceremony in Washington, DC, hosted by the chief of staff of the army and the sergeant major of the army.
Within a week, I received another call from Washington. A completely separate officer selection board had selected me as one of twenty captains to participate in a prestigious and rigorous multiyear army program. It consisted of a three-year assignment in Washington, DC, with a one-year sabbatical to complete a fully funded master’s program in policy manag
ement at Georgetown University, a one-year assignment working on the joint staff of the Pentagon, and another one-year assignment working on the army staff in the Pentagon.
As if all the above weren’t amazing enough, just three months later, I received word that a third officer selection board had chosen me for “below-the-zone” (early) promotion to the rank of major, one of only two given to MP officers in the entire army that year.
Having received all that praise and recognition, I found it difficult to keep perspective. Even though the affirmation had come from more than sixty independent senior officer assessments on three different selection boards, I knew I personally couldn’t be that good. This observation forced me to do some heavy reflecting about how to accept praise with the proper amount of humility—and to ask myself what being humble really meant.
I had seen too many people declare they didn’t deserve the recognition they received. I considered this false modesty or even a lie. Of course, they deserved some of the recognition, just not all of it.
Real modesty and humility, I thought, needed to be about figuring out which part of the recognition belonged to me and which part belonged to my team, my peers, and my superiors.
In the final analysis of failure and success, it may be difficult to tell which is which. I know people who would consider some of my victories to be thinly veiled defeats.
There’s a word for how to see the difference, I suppose: perspective.
It doesn’t come easy, and it doesn’t come quick. But it does come if you seek it out or choose to acknowledge it when it’s provided.
My dad and brothers acknowledged such perspective in hindsight. Back in the late 1970s, as we stood in the pits at Raceway Park and mourned what I then considered the greatest defeat in my short life, none of us, not even my dad, knew the irony of the story behind that car he “inherited” that night.
Gene Kreuger’s pink “X2” car was actually an intentional throwback to the one driven by nineteen-year-old Dale Earnhardt ten years earlier.
Although Earnhardt became famous driving his number 3 black car, his first dirt-track car was a 1956 pink Ford that was branded with a “K2.” Earnhardt and his crew intended to paint the car avocado green, but a paint mishap resulted in the car being pink. They couldn’t afford to repaint it, so Earnhardt, who would become a legend in NASCAR racing and in the houses of Weber, ended up cutting his teeth on dirt tracks in a pink car.
It took us ten years to learn a truth that would have made us reconsider the definitions of success and failure back in those pits. Too late to spare the heartbreak, but in time to give our family a feeling of connection with one of our heroes.
Honest failures. Success with humility.
From black spray paint on a race car and single hand salutes to duck-walk marches and bowel movements, I have seen that the little things mean a great deal and just a little more care in handling makes a difference. In fact, I propose to you that doing an extraordinary job with ordinary work prepares you to better tackle the difficult and the complex.
For years, I’ve hunted down and collected lists of tips—top ten this and six steps to that—hoping they could help me avoid failures and achieve success. Those lists are valuable summaries, and you’ll find my favorites tucked away on my bookshelf to be read when the spirit moves you.
But what is just as important as those lists of tips is the value of noticing and caring about what is right in front of your face—simple, common social graces. “Please” and “thank you,” for starters, but also giving credit to others when and where credit is due, taking a personal interest in those you serve or who serve you, and “unplugging” from gadgets and the churn around you in order to give a person your full attention. These are simple to talk about but harder to do, and they not only lead to success but encourage others to help you succeed or manage your failures.
So an honest failure is one that comes (and will come) only after a decent attempt at gathering facts, thoughtful consideration toward those who have gone before, and then an honest and objective self-reflection. And success with humility comes (and will come) not by trying to be the best but by doing your best every time and letting the results speak for themselves—to others and to you.
* * *
* Medically curious readers may find details for the “how” and “why” of my release from the hospital and other blow-by-blow details in my online CaringBridge journal, www.caringbridge.org/visit/markmweber.
Chapter Four
… TO SEEK OUT AND EXPERIENCE A VIGOR OF THE EMOTIONS, A FRESHNESS OF THE DEEP SPRINGS OF LIFE, AN APPETITE FOR ADVENTURE OVER LOVE OF EASE.
1994, engagement
2010, just before diagnosis
JANUARY 2011
My cancer treatment—a daily oral chemo called Gleevec—seemed to start working immediately. It slowed the cancer’s growth, and I was told to be patient and hope for the best. There were GIST patients who got ten more years out of this single medication; others got less than one.
I didn’t dwell long on the confusing mix of information or the fact that it was going to take a year or more to recover from the surgical complications. I started exercising more, got my weight back up to about 150 pounds, and let myself believe I was going to get at least two years or more from the Gleevec. I also decided that, despite the slow-growing cancer, I would try to return to my full-time job with the army as soon as I felt well enough to do so.
But why? you might be asking. Why not take this time and spend it with your wife and children instead of going back to work?
My answer was simple then and remains unchanged: because being an army officer, or being otherwise hard at work, is the closest thing to normal we all know. I didn’t know anything about tomorrow, but today I looked forward to the familiar feeling of coming home after a long day at work, having been gone just long enough to miss you and getting to see you all again. In fact, being home all the time felt abnormal—to all of us—and it resulted in added stress.
Kristin was not used to my constant presence. It was as if we had been suddenly thrust into involuntary retirement. Without the churn of work to consume my energies, I turned to the environment around me. I could make runs to the grocery store, help with dinner, and organize things in the house. That’s when things got bumpy.
Helping out is one thing, but I tackled home duties as the army officer I was—in dire need of a campaign plan. I cleaned out the fridge and freezer, organized the pantry, laid out a meal chart, started tasking you boys with more chores, and proposed ideas to “streamline operations.”
Big mistake.
Upkeep of home life was Kristin’s domain, and it didn’t matter that she sometimes hated doing it. Her dislike of the daily grind of housework was not an invitation for me to take over. As much as she appreciated the help, those household chores were normal and familiar to her, and they were habits she wanted to keep.
Right around Christmas, we got into a heated argument—our first in more than six months. She kept picking at me, which told me she was itching for a fight. Within minutes, we were yelling and cursing about anything and everything. I think we both knew our anger and frustration had little to do with the subject that started it all, but we raged on all the same. Then it just stopped.
I was out of breath and light-headed. She came in and sat next to me, then broke into a soft cry.
“I’m sorry, pookie,” she said as she leaned on my shoulder. “I like seeing you feisty like your old self. It helps me see you’re still in there.”
You boys were not spared the “benefit” of my constant presence, either. I knew shared hardship brought cohesion and teamwork, so I looked for ways you could be involved in my treatment and recovery. We settled on the routine task of cleaning out my bile collection containers. That was nasty work, and just like a trio of soldiers, you couldn’t resist bragging a bit about this grim daily drama.
The downside of this teamwork was being greeted by a hard-nosed army lieutenant colone
l when you walked in the door from school. I wasn’t a slave driver, but I made sure you didn’t plop yourselves in front of the TV.
“Will you ever be going back to work, Dad?” you politely asked. More than once.
* * *
Based on its title, you might think this book is solely about being a man, a father, and a soldier. Not entirely. This is also a story about being a lover and a husband. It’s about the rigors of married life—complicated by the trials of army life and the tribulations of cancer treatment—between two true individuals. In fact, no other experience in my life so completely captures the essence of MacArthur’s words on living an emotionally vigorous life.
On July 22, 2010, as we sat in the waiting room at the Mayo Clinic, absorbing the complexities and breathless uncertainties of the journey with cancer in front of us, I became aware that my wedding ring was missing. Even after sixteen years of marriage, putting on that ring was a very deliberate, symbolic act every single day. But after the hustle of our 5:00 a.m. start, now I couldn’t remember if I had put it on my finger that morning.
Certainly on this day, of all days, I should remember whether I had put on my wedding ring, right?
But I couldn’t remember.
I also couldn’t shake the fear that I did put it on that morning but then lost it during the day. It wasn’t likely—the ring had never fallen off my finger before. Then again, I was down ten pounds from the cancer, and if I had lost the ring, looking for it right then and there was the only chance of finding it. I retraced my steps in the few hours we’d been at Mayo and soon realized there was really only one place it could have fallen off—the bathroom.
Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters Page 9