#101： The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War With Robert Coram
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay sits down with Robert Corum, who wrote the biography of John Boyd, "Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art Of War." Boyd is one of the most influential military strategists in history, but not many people know about him. In this episode, Brett and Robert discuss Boyd's life, his work, and his battles within the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:18.840
Now, there are a lot of great military strategists in history that come to mind when you mention
00:00:25.140
The most obvious one is Sun Tzu, or the Art of War, thousands of years ago.
00:00:28.520
There's also Carl von Clausewitz, but there's another one, one of the most greatest military
00:00:36.880
His name's John Boyd, and he started his career as a fighter pilot during the career in war,
00:00:42.720
and then he went on to revolutionize air tactics, the design of fighter planes.
00:00:48.420
He also went on to just develop these grand theories that are being used today in branches
00:00:53.140
of the military around the world on how to win wars.
00:00:58.260
He's one of the most fascinating characters I've ever read about and written about.
00:01:04.460
He wrote this biography called Boyd, the fighter pilot who changed the art of war.
00:01:09.040
Today we're going to discuss John Boyd's contribution to military strategy, his life, his idiosyncrasies,
00:01:15.820
his battles within the bureaucracies of the Pentagon.
00:01:18.700
We're going to talk about what we can learn from Boyd on being a better man, and also learn
00:01:26.340
I think you're really going to like this, so let's do this.
00:01:37.580
So for our listeners who aren't familiar with you and your work, can you tell us a little
00:01:41.280
bit of a background about your career and what ultimately led you to writing a biography
00:01:47.920
about an obscure military strategist that not a lot of people know about named John Boyd?
00:01:53.660
When I was in college, I wrote for the student newspaper, and some of my columns came to the
00:02:01.680
attention of the people at the Atlanta Journal, and I was offered a job there and was there
00:02:07.780
for four or five years and left freelance, write for Atlanta Magazine, wrote a number of
00:02:14.160
magazine articles for most of the major national publications, Esquire, the New Yorker.
00:02:19.640
And then in 1980, I went back to the newspaper, this time to the Constitution.
00:02:24.440
There were two separate newspapers at the time.
00:02:27.000
And after a couple of years, like every reporter, I wanted to write the great American novel.
00:02:32.140
So I left the paper, and I wrote five novels before I ever published one.
00:02:37.920
That's why I had a rather long learning curve in this business.
00:02:40.580
In 1988, I published the first novel, and over the next 10 years, I published seven novels
00:02:49.760
And I've got to tell you, except for one of those books, they were all somewhere south of
00:03:04.300
And one of John Boyd's friends, whom I had known for 10 or 15 years, and who had been
00:03:11.600
after me for most of those 15 years to write a biography of Boyd, contacted me again.
00:03:17.380
And he said, it's time to write the biography of Boyd.
00:03:20.300
And not having anything else to do at the time, I thought I would go to Washington and talk
00:03:27.160
to a couple of Boyd's friends, primarily to get Boyd's friend, Chuck Spinney, who was
00:03:33.260
a good friend by then, to get him to leave me alone about this.
00:03:41.140
But I went to Washington and talked to Tom Christie and Pierre Spray, and at length to Chuck, and
00:03:48.060
I realized this is one of the biggest stories I've ever come across.
00:03:58.100
Well, I mean, OK, that's the thing that's amazing.
00:03:59.900
So John Boyd, he is one of the greatest military strategists in the history of the world.
00:04:05.980
And some people have called him that, like he's up there with Sun Tzu.
00:04:12.420
So for our listeners who aren't familiar with John Boyd, could you outline his career and
00:04:19.320
He was probably the greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu.
00:04:26.740
He wrote an energy maneuverability study he developed that changed aviation forever.
00:04:33.600
He wrote an aerial attack study that changed the way every air force in the world fights.
00:04:39.080
And Patterns of Conflict, which was his final work, was probably the most influential briefing
00:04:46.840
But the thing you have to remember about Boyd is, even though what I wrote was a military
00:04:51.660
biography, that Boyd's work transcends the military.
00:04:58.280
He's taught in MBA programs all over the country.
00:05:02.500
First responders, police officers, fire departments all read about him.
00:05:07.140
Homeland Security is in the process right now, developing a – using Boyd's OODA loop to
00:05:18.120
Almost 20 years after Boyd's death, there are conferences every year about his work.
00:05:23.000
It's far beyond the military, and it's approaching universal today.
00:05:29.460
In any area of conflict, you can use Boyd's teachings.
00:05:33.420
Excellent, and he also had a – played a significant role in the development of new fighter jets, correct?
00:05:46.100
The F-15 has never been defeated in air-air combat, and the F-16, before the Air Force
00:05:53.200
added a lot of heavy weight to it, was one of the finest fighter aircraft ever built.
00:05:58.500
So, yeah, and he was behind the scenes in building the A-10.
00:06:01.880
So, yeah, he built – was responsible for three of America's frontline aircraft back
00:06:08.880
Okay, and we'll talk a little bit more about sort of his troubles getting what he wanted
00:06:16.460
You mentioned the OODA loop, and we've written about that before on the site.
00:06:22.240
So, OODA loop, for those who don't know, stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
00:06:27.680
I know you're not an expert on the OODA loop, but can you just talk a little bit like what
00:06:33.740
it is, and do you think a lot of people – you talk about how a lot of people are using it,
00:06:37.820
but do you think a lot of people misunderstand what Boyd had in mind for the OODA loop?
00:06:42.660
Let me back up just a little bit and say that when Boyd and Chuck Spinney, who was working
00:06:47.400
with Boyd, developed the OODA loop, they almost did not release what they had found because
00:06:58.460
If you truly understand the power of it and know how to put it into play, and they were
00:07:03.360
afraid that some bad things could happen if this were made public.
00:07:08.900
But the good news about all this is that so few people understand it, and even fewer
00:07:16.660
But it's, as you mentioned, just observe, orient, decide, and act.
00:07:24.140
They underestimate the importance of the orientation phase.
00:07:35.620
And once you truly know a lot about whatever your area is, when you develop what Boyd calls
00:07:43.040
finger spitzing fuel, it's a German word meaning a fingertip feel for something, you can skip
00:07:49.520
the orientation and the decision phase, and you can look at something and make an immediate
00:07:54.880
decision if you have the fingertip feel for the situation.
00:07:59.280
And what you'll usually do is the least expected action, which is always better than the most
00:08:05.160
effective action, because your enemy or opponent can figure out what's most effective, just
00:08:11.120
But what they can't figure out is the least expected action.
00:08:15.460
And by doing that, you create confusion and ambiguity, and your opponent is sort of lost
00:08:23.720
And when he stumbles out the other side, he's way behind where you are in the time cycle.
00:08:31.240
Because I don't know if that makes sense or not.
00:08:34.460
And I think a big part of the OODA loop is, you talked about this in an email, it's not
00:08:38.760
quickness, it's you just want to control the, it's not fast, you want to be quick or like
00:08:46.800
If you get inside the tempo and act quicker than your opponent is, and he's always behind.
00:08:52.780
And it doesn't matter whether you're playing tennis or you're in a combat situation, it doesn't
00:08:58.260
matter whether it's a corporate takeover or any area, a tennis match, any area of conflict, you
00:09:09.480
And I think, why is it that more people don't know about John Boyd or that he was behind
00:09:15.280
a lot of this, these really amazing theories about strategy and how to deal with ambiguity?
00:09:22.700
He was a very prolific, he put out a lot of presentations, but it seems like there's not
00:09:30.060
I mean, there's like just a few papers or that he wrote.
00:09:34.020
Yeah, the military culture is an oral culture and most of his work came in briefings and
00:09:40.160
he only wrote a couple of things in his life and therefore there's nothing for academics
00:09:45.420
to pour over and therefore he's been ignored by academics.
00:09:50.860
His greatest legacy is a couple of briefings, but there's a website called Slightly East of
00:09:58.580
It's run by Dr. Chad Richards, who was one of Boyd's close friends and it's got a lot
00:10:03.700
of articles on there about Boyd and all of Boyd's work is on there, including the Patterns
00:10:11.740
So John Boyd, to say the least, was an interesting character.
00:10:18.160
Very brilliant, but he also had a lot of these idiosyncrasies about him.
00:10:22.400
And when I was reading your biography, I laughed out loud at some of these confrontations he
00:10:29.980
had or just some of these little glitches he had that was part of his personality.
00:10:35.040
Can you talk about what some of his idiosyncrasies were and were there any stories in particular
00:10:39.180
that stuck out in his life where his personality clashed with others?
00:10:44.080
Well, let me list some of his better-known characteristics.
00:10:49.480
He was unkempt, loud, opinionated, intolerant of anybody who disagreed with him.
00:10:59.520
He was profane, one of the most profane men you'll ever meet, abrasive.
00:11:07.040
He had a habit of chewing on the quick of his fingers, and when he started working out with
00:11:13.460
the weights, the calluses on his hand, he would chew on those and spit them out during
00:11:17.320
meetings, which was sort of disconcerting to other people in the room.
00:11:21.620
He smoked cigars, and several times we'd get so engrossed in the conversation, he would
00:11:27.200
stick his cigar into the tie or the shirt of the person he was talking with.
00:11:31.980
After he retired, he was 48 years old, and he looked like a homeless person after that.
00:11:44.600
He said only two kinds of people can be truly independent, and that's those who have unlimited
00:11:49.620
resources and those who have no resources, because if you have no resources, people can't
00:11:57.980
oppress you or do anything to bend you to their will, and you're as independent as someone
00:12:08.580
And Boyd was, when he worked in his later years as an unpaid Pentagon consultant, he wore these
00:12:17.120
old bandline flare-bottomed pants and a shirt that was tatty, and he truly looked like a homeless
00:12:23.620
person, but he was one of those men who wanted to get as close to the truth as possible, and
00:12:29.820
that was the only thing in his life that mattered.
00:12:32.420
There is no absolute truth, but he came closer than most people to finding it, and he saw himself
00:12:38.440
as an outsider, as a man of virtue who was babbling superiors who were devoid of virtue.
00:12:45.080
And going back to having a cause, it's something I think every man, especially young men, want
00:12:50.800
is a cause, and those of us who can find a cause are fortunate indeed, and Boyd found
00:12:58.060
a cause and didn't care about all the other stuff.
00:13:02.920
He was, one definition of genius is the ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion
00:13:08.600
of all others, and Boyd concentrated about 100% on his work.
00:13:15.080
He was, he was terrible, he was embarrassing to his friends, the way he ignored his family,
00:13:21.760
but, you know, not everybody can make that sort of trade-off, but, but Boyd did, and his
00:13:30.160
As I read your biography, I was trying to think, what was driving Boyd?
00:13:36.340
Was it for, I mean, it wasn't for money, obviously.
00:13:38.380
He could have made a lot of money being a consultant.
00:13:44.100
But was it patriotism, or was it just like he just wanted to figure this thing out?
00:13:49.020
Well, it started out, he went into the military to be a fighter pilot, and all of his work,
00:13:54.260
everything, flowed from what he learned as a fighter pilot in Korea in the early 50s,
00:13:59.920
flying an F-86 Sabrejet, which had a 10 to 1 victory ratio over the MiG, and the MiG in
00:14:09.140
So when you work for Uncle Sam, especially in the military, you've got virtually unlimited
00:14:15.740
And Boyd could not have done several of the things that he did, the energy maneuverability
00:14:25.740
Had he not been in the military, I mean, how can you strap a computer in the back of a fighter
00:14:31.640
jet to test the principles of the energy maneuverability theory?
00:14:38.520
So a lot of Boyd's engineering kind of work, if you will, was done while he was in the military.
00:14:44.760
And he had a fiduciary responsibility as a rather senior officer in the Pentagon.
00:14:52.860
And he did not like the culture of the Pentagon and created a lot of confusion and discord among
00:15:03.940
But his greatest legacy, his intellectual war, came after he retired.
00:15:09.280
He was in his 50s when he developed patterns of conflict in the interlude.
00:15:14.440
So, yes, talk about the culture of the Pentagon, when Boyd eventually ended up working in the
00:15:22.680
Can you describe what the culture was at the time?
00:15:25.920
Because it seems like it was, you know, he described, he's kind of talking about like
00:15:29.740
sort of a lot of butt kissing and backstabbing, infighting, and that Boyd really wanted to
00:15:35.940
Well, he tried to change it, but it's even worse today than it was when Boyd was there.
00:15:44.380
People outside the military think of the Pentagon as a place where all these patriots are building
00:15:53.360
And there are great patriots, in principle, men and women who work in the Pentagon.
00:15:58.420
But the fundamental purpose of the military, industrial, political complex is not about
00:16:06.420
It's about funneling money to defense contractors.
00:16:09.980
The Pentagon's books have not been audited in decades.
00:16:13.680
It's for the simple reasons they deliberately made the books so complicated, no one can figure
00:16:19.920
There's so much money involved in so many—the F-35, for instance, the joint strike fighter that's
00:16:25.800
being developed now has hundreds of subcontractors, and they're in most congressional districts
00:16:34.160
And the constituents of the congressmen and the senators there want to keep those jobs.
00:16:40.020
So this horribly expensive airplane, for which there is no threat in the—they're trying
00:16:46.580
to kill the A-10 to make room in the budget for the F-35.
00:16:53.740
It's a corrupt, venal, terrible institution, and most people think of it as—they're there
00:17:06.780
And many of the two- and three-star generals who retire, something like 70 percent go to work
00:17:14.440
They're going to work for the same people that they have regulated or whose projects
00:17:18.780
they have controlled as two- and three-star generals.
00:17:27.240
You describe in the book that one of the things that Boyd would do—he kind of used the OODA
00:17:32.580
loop within the Pentagon, I feel like, some of the things that he was theorizing at the
00:17:38.260
time to sort of create discord and confusion, and you called it like a—you called it like
00:17:43.380
he would—he called it a cape job, right, whenever he pulled the wool over someone's
00:17:49.900
Well, a cape job was when he—for instance, when he was delivering the briefings on the
00:17:55.240
energy maneuverability study, and he was confronted during the briefing, and someone tried to diminish
00:18:04.440
his work and say, this has all been done, and he would say, okay, tell me your source for that.
00:18:09.800
He used other people's words and information against them, which is devastating if you can do it.
00:18:16.100
And he would ask the person to tell me the source for that.
00:18:21.060
You tell me who did this work before, and if you're correct, I'll step aside.
00:18:25.140
And, of course, nobody had done the work before.
00:18:27.040
So Boyd said that by asking leading questions like that, he was holding out a cape, and the
00:18:33.860
bull charged and went headlong over the cliff, and he was a master of that technique.
00:18:39.740
So I guess the question is, like, why—Boyd seemed like someone who didn't really fit in
00:18:46.180
And I guess it was that whole fighter pilot mentality.
00:18:49.880
It seems like that was sort of the culture amongst fighter pilots at the time, and I guess
00:18:53.240
still today, but, you know, in a military, it's very hierarchical, very structured.
00:18:59.980
Why did he stick around instead of pursuing civilian work?
00:19:03.880
And did he ever think about pursuing civilian work?
00:19:05.320
I mean, did he ever have those moments, like, I'm just done with this.
00:19:10.040
Yeah, he made a couple of feints at retiring, but what he was doing was too important for the
00:19:14.660
country, and he knew that, and he stayed, and he knew he would never be promoted beyond
00:19:20.940
If you look at the awards he won and his contributions to the military, a few people in military history
00:19:28.320
have contributed as much as he did, but he worked outside the system.
00:19:33.000
He stood up and was recognized as an opponent to a lot of senior officers, so his career
00:19:40.740
The irony here is—and I've discussed this with Air Force Academy people—and they say
00:19:46.460
that all the service academies do this, they teach their cadets and their students to be
00:19:52.100
principled people and people of honor, to always do the right thing.
00:19:55.840
But what they don't teach them is that when they stand up and be like Boyd, that there's
00:20:02.040
When you do the right thing, there's always a price to pay.
00:20:05.180
And many of these young officers who graduated and were fans of Boyd find out to their utter
00:20:12.140
dismay that their careers have gotten sidetracked by doing what they thought was the right thing.
00:20:17.640
You know, something we haven't talked about is Boyd's career as a fighter pilot, and before
00:20:25.080
he got into all the energy maneuverability theory and the OODA loop, but he was actually
00:20:30.900
one of the best fighter pilots in the history of the Air Force.
00:20:36.760
Yeah, that was in the 60s after he came back from Korea.
00:20:41.440
And when you look at his career, you can't connect the dots until you look back.
00:20:45.920
And when you look back at his career, you can see the stepping stones and how he developed
00:20:54.020
And when he came back from Korea, he just had a passion about trying to figure out why the
00:21:02.900
F-86 had such a high victory ratio when it was an inferior aircraft, and he would put
00:21:09.060
all that to play as an instructor in what was then called a fighter weapons school at
00:21:17.940
And he had a standing offer to let any student, and these are the best fighter pilots in the
00:21:25.020
Air Force who come out to the fighter weapons school, he would put them on his tail in the
00:21:29.320
six o'clock position, and guaranteed that in 40 seconds, he could reverse their positions
00:21:37.560
And he did it by a rather drastic maneuver that nobody else had the courage to emulate.
00:21:48.620
And whenever you get up behind someone, you'd say, guns, guns, guns.
00:21:53.480
Because you need something like three seconds saying guns, guns, guns.
00:21:56.940
It's equivalent to 16 films of gun camera film, which is considered enough for a kill.
00:22:03.600
And just as a student was getting ready to hose him, he would reverse positions, and he
00:22:09.940
would be on their six screaming, guns, guns, guns.
00:22:13.520
I think there's a few instances where he did that to, like, planes who weren't even involved
00:22:18.300
He would just, like, sneak up behind them and just scare the crap out of them.
00:22:25.680
And those, back in the day, the B-52s flew these long 10-, 12-, 14-hour missions.
00:22:31.980
And this guy was coming in to land, and he was in the landing pattern, and these guys
00:22:36.780
They wanted to just go through the debriefing and go home and sleep for two days.
00:22:41.360
And, boy, it makes a head-on pass at the B-52 and rolls inverted right in front of it
00:22:47.780
He was so close, they could count the rivets on his belly, and he was screaming, guns, guns,
00:22:53.020
And the aircraft commander got really upset and was just raising cane over the radio.
00:22:59.020
And Boyd decided he needed another lesson about what amazing people fighter pilots were.
00:23:05.340
So he made an attack from the side, a deflection attack, and came right across the cockpit.
00:23:10.540
And he got grounded because of that, but the B-52 pilots learned a little bit more about
00:23:23.760
Despite his contributions to military strategy, and particularly to designing new generations
00:23:29.740
of war planes and just basically revolutionizing air combat, when Boyd died, there was no member
00:23:45.860
But can you explain, like, why were Marines, like, and kind of went there to honor, pay respects
00:23:53.420
Let me back up again to when the book came out.
00:23:58.040
The venom toward me and toward the book from the Air Force was just startling.
00:24:04.400
But Chuck Spinney, one of Boyd's friends, still worked in the Pentagon at the time.
00:24:09.980
And he called and said, you better stand by for some incoming fire thereafter.
00:24:15.120
He said two full colonels in the Air Force had been assigned the job of debunking the book.
00:24:24.580
But there was also a professor over at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, who
00:24:31.600
is the only person to write a really mean, nasty, critical review about the Boyd book.
00:24:37.280
And today, even today, they hide Boyd material at the Air War College because they think these
00:24:43.940
young majors and lieutenant colonels will have their minds poisoned by a reading board.
00:24:49.920
And at the Air Force Academy, they have what they call a class exemplar for each class.
00:24:56.460
And this is to pick someone who is a role model of what these young cadets want to be in their
00:25:03.880
And four or five times, the senior class has tried to pick Boyd as the exemplar.
00:25:09.640
In every instance, senior officers have stopped them from doing that.
00:25:18.800
I wrote another military biography about a Colonel Bud Day, who's the most highly decorated officer
00:25:25.500
and a great story about his being a POW in Vietnam.
00:25:32.680
And the chief of staff of the Air Force was there.
00:25:35.400
And he came over and he said, thank you for writing the Bud Day book.
00:25:43.080
And I said, well, why don't you recognize John Boyd?
00:25:49.280
Even today, the Air Force refuses to give him the institutional recognition he deserves.
00:25:57.140
And I get emails from young officers two or three times a week.
00:26:01.500
And they've read the book and they said, well, when we get to be senior officers, we're going
00:26:08.640
And what they don't understand is that they will never be really senior officers until
00:26:14.920
And that means they're not going to recognize Boyd.
00:26:17.940
So I'm not sure the Air Force will ever honor and recognize Boyd.
00:26:26.580
But the Marine Corps, most of all, because the Marine Corps is always fighting for its
00:26:31.300
And they're always looking for something new and something innovative.
00:26:38.800
And because of him, the Marine Corps changed the whole way it went to war because of Boyd.
00:26:43.720
And he's today is one of the iconic figures in the Marine Corps.
00:26:48.520
An Air Force pilot who's recognized as a great military theorist by the Marine Corps, which
00:26:55.480
is, if you know military culture, that's impossible to grasp.
00:27:00.520
And I think he said at his funeral, there was actually, like at his burial, they, the Marines
00:27:05.980
did something that they don't, they only do for Marines, but they did it for John Boyd.
00:27:09.220
And one of the Marine colonel, a highly decorated combat officer, took the Eagle Globe and anchor,
00:27:15.520
which is the insignia of the Marine Corps, and put it on the urn at Boyd's funeral.
00:27:28.020
And to do it for a retired Air Force colonel, there's no precedent for that.
00:27:35.240
Yeah, because I guess they went on in the first desert storm in the 90s.
00:27:43.720
They used a lot of Boyd strategies to basically take down Kuwait, like in a few days, right?
00:27:52.240
Boyd had retired by then, but Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense, had been a young
00:27:57.460
congressman when Boyd first started working on his ideas.
00:28:00.940
And as a congressman, had been to a number of Boyd's briefings, and he knew Boyd and liked
00:28:07.080
him and had a pretty good understanding of his work.
00:28:11.180
And when he was Secretary of Defense and Schwarzkopf was beating his chest and pounding and jumping
00:28:16.180
up and down, Cheney called Boyd out of retirement and brought him to Washington.
00:28:26.300
And that left hook and the feint by the Marines, the whole battle plan came from John Boyd.
00:28:33.820
And when Cheney was vice president and I was working on the book, I made arrangements.
00:28:39.880
To my surprise, he took about 15 or 20 minutes to talk to me about Boyd.
00:28:44.820
And he was open in his acknowledgement of Boyd's contributions to him as Secretary of Defense.
00:28:53.400
So Boyd would famously tell the young men he mentored something all the time.
00:28:59.700
It's a phrase that sticks out to me, that stuck out to me even in the book.
00:29:04.320
And it was that you can either be somebody or you can do something.
00:29:12.020
Brad, you picked out the one part of the book that probably has drawn the single greatest response.
00:29:19.200
I would say most of the emails I get from men, and 95% of my emails about the book are from men.
00:29:27.120
The thing that most of them glom onto is the to be or to do speech.
00:29:31.540
And in essence, he would take a young officer and he would say that in life there's a roll call
00:29:40.240
And he would point off to one side and say, if you want to be somebody, you can go that way.
00:29:46.780
Your friends will like you and you'll get good assignments and promoted faster and your career will be good.
00:29:53.280
But at the end of the day, end of your career, the end of your life, you might wonder what the hell it was all about.
00:30:00.100
And then he would point the other way and say, if you want to do something, you can go this way.
00:30:04.720
And you will not be popular and you may not get promoted and you won't get good assignments.
00:30:09.180
But you will have done something for yourself, for your branch of the service, and for the country.
00:30:15.920
And he said, every man comes to a fork in the road and you have to decide if you want to be somebody or to do something.
00:30:26.360
And when I was writing, I didn't realize the impact of that.
00:30:32.960
But again, you picked out the single part of the book that most people respond to.
00:30:46.820
What did you personally learn about being a man, whatever that means to you, from studying Boyd's life and writing about it?
00:31:08.640
As I said, my career was sort of bottomed out when I wrote that book.
00:31:14.300
But when the publisher got the book, he sent me a contract for two more books, a two-book contract.
00:31:20.540
And it stipulated that each book be a military biography.
00:31:26.780
I didn't see myself writing military biographies.
00:31:30.660
And I went back and reread Boyd to try to figure out, you know, what was it about him that made the publisher want two more books about military people?
00:31:40.540
And I think we've talked about how Boyd loved the truth.
00:31:44.900
He was a man of commitment and passion and principle.
00:31:51.920
And, Brett, the irony is that my heroes have always been men of conviction, men of belief, men who sacrificed for their beliefs, who suffered.
00:32:02.420
Sir Thomas More has always been a great hero of mine.
00:32:05.780
And so was St. Gregory, who spent years in jail for his beliefs, and the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was jailed and later killed by the Nazis.
00:32:16.380
And then I wind up writing books about people who manifest those same characteristics.
00:32:25.460
So Colonel Bud Day, who was a subject of my second book, was a POW in Vietnam.
00:32:33.380
And there's a chapter in that book I still can't read without weeping.
00:32:36.960
And it's the chapter when Bud was being tortured.
00:32:45.280
And what gets me is it would have been so easy for him to stop the torture.
00:32:50.020
All he had to do was to sign a paper saying he thought the war in Vietnam was unfair, unjust.
00:32:59.680
The attorney general of the United States said it was an unjust war.
00:33:06.480
And that great exemplar of all things good and noble, Jane Fonda, was saying the same.
00:33:12.700
But Colonel Day was a serving officer in the hands of the enemy in a time of war.
00:33:20.240
And he would have died before he had broken his oath.
00:33:24.060
And then the next book, finding a subject is always the hardest part of what I do.
00:33:28.420
And the next book was about Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, Brut Krulak.
00:33:33.760
And the essence of his life is that he was a three-star general about to receive his fourth star and become commandant of the Marine Corps.
00:33:43.360
And of his own volition, and that's a crucial thing, he went to the White House of his own volition.
00:33:49.740
He was the only senior officer in the military during that long war in Vietnam who went to the White House and confronted President Johnson over the prosecution of the war.
00:34:00.400
And he said, you're doing this wrong, and unless you change everything you're doing, you're going to lose the war, and you're going to lose the next election.
00:34:10.680
And Johnson was so annoyed, he stood up and put his hand in the small of Krulak's back and physically pushed him out of the Oval Office.
00:34:19.900
And Brut Krulak, because of being a man of principle, did not get his fourth star.
00:34:25.180
He did not become commandant of the Marine Corps.
00:34:27.340
His life's dream was gone because he acted on principle.
00:34:35.280
And I don't think Lyndon Johnson is remembered by history in the same light.
00:34:40.020
So moving on to a personal thing, what Boyd taught me about being a man,
00:34:47.400
that I saw in these, first in Boyd and then in Colonel Day and then General Krulak, the same attributes,
00:34:57.140
the devotion to duty, commitment, never making an excuse, doing the job no matter the cost.
00:35:04.620
My dad spent 31 years in the Army, and he and I didn't get along.
00:35:08.580
And for most of my life, I was running from everything he represented.
00:35:14.220
But when I started 50 years after my dad died, writing about military people,
00:35:21.420
I realized my dad had the same virtues, qualities, attributes that these people had that I was writing about.
00:35:28.680
I was writing about my dad, and late in life, I realized I had rejected a rather priceless gift from my father.
00:35:43.840
I visit him in the cemetery every time I go home and we have a talk.
00:35:47.500
And so I have learned both, Boyd turned my life around professionally and enabled me to a much higher level of understanding,
00:35:58.080
not only about my dad, but about military people in general.
00:36:04.800
Well, Robert Corum, thank you so much for your time.
00:36:12.200
He's the author of the book, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.
00:36:16.300
He's also written a whole bunch of other books as well.
00:36:20.420
Highly recommend you pick up the Boyd biography.
00:36:23.440
You also find out more about Robert's work at robertcorum.com.
00:36:31.200
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:36:34.900
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
00:36:40.300
And again, I really appreciate your feedback on the podcast.
00:36:42.560
If you can give it a rating on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever it is you use to listen to the podcast, we listen to that.
00:36:48.220
I've been trying to improve the sound quality on that, some of the balance.
00:36:56.680
I've bought some equipment that will make recording telephone interviews much better and sound better.
00:37:02.600
Because I know there's been a few complaints about that as well.
00:37:06.740
We're always trying to improve the podcast, so your feedback is welcome.
00:37:09.480
And also, I'd love for you to go to the post that we publish the podcast on, on Art of Manliness,
00:37:14.660
and leave a comment about the podcast and also suggestions for future podcast episodes.
00:37:21.160
I like to interview people, not just have me blather.
00:37:24.160
So if you have anybody you'd like me to talk to and reach out, let me know.
00:37:28.260
Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.