My Share of the Task(25)

                I wasn’t sure how to take Graney. A chain smoker who avoided strenuous exercise as most soldiers do snakes, he held training and staff meetings that would stretch on for hours. He seemed to ignore most of the popularly accepted practies of an infantry commander. “I want you all in physical training at 0630 every day,” he once deadpanned, “because when I roll over and go back to sleep, I want to know where you are.”

                Graney violated most leadership traits except two, and they counted more than the rest. He cared deeply, and he knew his business. He wasted no time pontificating about the merits of being a great unit, he simply began to deconstruct almost every component of the battalion and put it back together again, patiently teaching us how things should be done.

                “How do you spell excess class IX?” Graney routinely querried soldiers of every rank in the battalion. “Class IX” was the military term for the spare parts for our vehicles and other equipment.

                “C-O-U-R-T-M-A-R-T-I-A-L,” we had to dutifully spell out.

                It was his tongue-in-cheek but serious way of teaching us how a truly disciplined unit worked. It was a tradition, albeit a bad one, in mechanized units, to steal and hoard spare parts. It was certainly tempting. Possessing extra parts gave a driver or unit the ability to repair a vehicle rapidly, without going through the Army Repair Parts system with its paperwork and time lag for delivery. For a commander, fixing a vehicle rapidly meant better vehicle readiness reporting—a positive metric of performance. For a soldier, fixing a vehicle rapidly meant finishing work earlier and having more time off. In countless movies over the years, Hollywood glamorized the “scrounger” who could come up with scarce parts quickly.

                But Graney knew it killed the system we ultimately depended on, and he taught us why. Besides the obvious theft involved, stealing or hoarding parts meant vehicles were fixed without forcing the repair system to work. The more we went around it, the less responsive it was. It was basic, but getting the basics right was Graney’s brilliance.

                He also killed lunch. In a weekly command and staff meeting not long after he arrived, Graney announced, “I want to do away with the lunch hour,” capturing our full attention. “It will make us more efficient.”

                When not on field training, it was habit in most units for soldiers of every rank to take a full hour or more over lunch, often using the time for essential personal business beyond eating. Picking up laundry, paying bills, and other activities caused soldiers to get into their personal vehicles and drive, often off base. Graney thought it was stupid and explained why.

                It typically took more than two hours to provide soldiers a single hour. Activities in the motor pool or arms room had to be stopped early to allow equipment and tools to be secured, and soldiers had to move to and from wherever they were working. Graney instead offered the idea that if we limited lunch to the nearby mess hall, we could sharply reduce the time used and that we could then finish work and release soldiers by 3:30 P.M. They would then have free time for personal business. There were initial doubts, as it wasn’t tradition. But it worked beautifully.

                In countless hours of detailed explanations, Graney taught us what to do—and why.

                Sometimes in the process, he could seem unreasonably demanding. Riding together in his jeep back to garrison one Friday after a long week of training, we saw up ahead of us on the road a column of M113 armored personnel carriers. They were from one of our companies, heading to the motor pool before the weekend.

                “Watch this, Stan,” Graney said, grabbing the radio handset. He contacted the company commander up ahead, instructing him to establish secure radio communication with us.

                The captain responded to him in an unsecure communications mode, making the familiar excuse that the “Vinson” security equipment—which, when attached to the radios, made their transmissions secure—was inoperable. In earlier days we would have accepted the excuse and told them to fix it when they reached garrison.