At midnight, I will have been retired 21 years from the Army, but as many of your can attest, I never really left. I still love the service and I appreciate everything that service did for me. I get upset when I see things go sideways for the troops like they have recently. A lot of the problems are with the leadership. Like the 1SG who made a public spectacle of herself earlier this year and elevated some misbehavior by some troops on social media to the Pentagon. In the comments, some folks have asked what she should have done differently, so I’m going to give some unsolicited advice.<\/p>\n
Many of my peers thought that “Courtesy Patrol” in Germany was their opportunity to act like MPs and arrest people for drunkenness down on the strasse. I saw it as a teaching opportunity. If I saw people in drunken brawls, me and my minions would unceremoniously toss them in our van and drive them to their units and turn them over to their Charge of Quarters and their First Sergeants instead of turning them over to the MPs and get them put in the community blotter report. <\/p>\n
When one of my squad leaders was picked up by the MPs for fighting one night, my battalion commander blamed me. So, instead of crying about being picked on for something that wasn’t my fault, I started my own platoon courtesy patrol – I went around to the local bars and policed up my troops at 2AM very night and took them back to the barracks before they could get in trouble. Because my peers didn’t do the same for me that I did on courtesy patrol for them.<\/p>\n
I never got any recognition for making the hard choices, I didn’t go around telling my leadership how I kept their troops’ names out of the blotter – I just did it because it was the right thing to do. It gave me a sense of satisfaction about me and my job. The troops knew that I cared about them and they’d walk through fire for me.<\/p>\n
Those things I did back then are things I still do today.<\/p>\n
A few months ago, someone sent me some stuff on a fellow he knew at Fort Drum who was wearing things he hadn’t earned – a Purple Heart and a CIB. I looked him up on AKO, which also lists their supervisors’ names and I emailed the evidence against the guy to his squad leader. A few weeks later, the squad leader emailed me back that he had corrected problem and he thanked me for coming to him. <\/p>\n
Last week, someone emailed us a disturbing picture of a buck sergeant making some wild ass statements about something that has been in the news lately. Instead of making a big deal of it, like some of the Facebook busts of troops (the young lady who skipped out on retreat and the folks misbehaving on burial detail come to mind) I sent the Facebook picture to him personally and warned him about his behavior. The other day, I got an email back from him thanking me for coming to him and promising that he would refrain from that behavior in the future.<\/p>\n
I’m not looking for accolades by telling these stories, I’m telling you because it’s a minefield out there. If the professional NCO Corps is going to survive the current political climate, they need to think about doing the right thing that doesn’t get them medals and spots on the news and in DoD press releases. It’s not covering up problems, it’s fixing problems – the thing that needs to be done.<\/p>\n
Real heroes are embarrassed by the recognition, and the professional NCO Corps are the real heroes of the military. They get the job done because that’s their job – not because they want some more shinies on their clothes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"