Like war, the entire experience could be brutally unforgiving. During a December 1983 rotation in which I commanded a mechanized infantry company, our battalion spent forty-eight hours of feverish activity preparing the deliberate defense of a desert pass. I barely slept as we dug fighting positions; erected kilometers of complex obstacles with tank ditches, minefields, and seemingly endless rolls of concertina wire; and positioned key weapons. We left small gaps in our obstacles as we worked to speed our movement, yet cleverly piled the necessary material next to the gaps so we could close them easily before the enemy attacked.
At the critical moment we failed to close the gaps. Under cover of a smoke screen, the opposing force made them freeways through our defense. Clausewitz’s 1832 maxim “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult” proved timelessly correct.
NTC rotations were revealing. For the first time in peacetime, the effectiveness of a unit and its leader was starkly transparent. Lengthy critiques called After Action Reviews, which displayed shortcomings in planning, coordination, and execution, seared the experience into the psyche of the force.
The scar tissue wasn’t all bad. “Disasters” on the desert battlefield became shared memories and lessons learned together. Without war, we recounted NTC stories. Funny tales bound soldiers, and even spouses, as they were told and retold around backyard grills. The NTC created a common experience across much of the force and served, as much as anything in peacetime can, to build wartimelike relationships.
* * *
On November 20, 1982, I ran the John F. Kennedy fifty-mile race near the Antietam battlefield in Maryland. Despite the pain, I was excited because the previous Thursday, the 24th Mech’s chief of staff, then-Colonel Pete Taylor, had informed me that I would take command of a mechanized infantry company the following week. A company commander was going to be relieved of command, and I would replace him.
On Tuesday morning I reported to the headquarters of the 3rd Battalion, 19th Infantry. My first stop was to report to the battalion commander for guidance. I knew him slightly and hoped he had personally requested my assignment to his battalion.
But his office was empty. The plain army-issue furniture remained; everything else was gone. I soon found that in addition to the company commander I would replace, the battalion’s commander, sergeant major, and personnel officer had all been removed.
Four leaders had been fired at once. I was stunned. I would never see anything like that happen in all my years thereafter. But their removal was, ironically, a sign of the Army’s growing improvement. Four years earlier, my company commander in Special Forces had been fired for mooning someone inside an officers’ club bar. Now, as I understood it, the Army had fired the leadership of our battalion because they struggled in the core skills of our profession. That was progress.
I was also told that a new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pierce T. Graney, would arrive in several weeks. I had no idea of the impact “Tom” Graney would ultimately have on me as a leader, or how his wife LaJuana’s example would instruct Annie.
* * *
My first few weeks as company commander were dominated by a single concern: property. I signed a document accepting personal responsibility for all the equipment assigned to the company, millions of dollars in value. Complete inventories of everything from barracks furniture to huge tool sets involved identifying and counting everything. Whatever was missing, someone typically paid for. A command inventory was a grueling task, made hellish if the unit’s accountability had been shoddy. My company’s property was in bad shape, and I spent countless hours counting tools, gas masks, weapons, and typewriters and then preparing documentation to determine responsibility for the losses, which I remember as having been over thirty thousand dollars.
Before Christmas, Graney arrived. He was a slightly paunchy, thirty-six-year-old soldier with sandy-colored hair and a bottomless mine of sarcastic comments. He soon showed he could be disarmingly informal in demeanor but was unwavering in his expectations. Taking command of a unit still in shock from its horrendous NTC performance in the summer, he forwent lofty motivational speeches. He simply told everyone that he knew how a good mechanized infantry battalion should run. In short order, he said, we’d be one.