00:04:22.920So why did you start this journal during Operation Desert Storm for your boys?
00:04:29.320Well, you know, now that that's over 40 years ago that it happened, it's interesting because
00:04:33.740one of the things that not many people know is that we were told that we would be deploying
00:04:39.660via television. I got a call in Germany. We were all stationed in Germany at the time and
00:04:45.840our unit was and got a call saying, hey, watch TV tonight. The Secretary of Defense is going to be on
00:04:51.220giving a message. And we didn't know what the message was. We knew that there had been forces
00:04:56.260in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the 82nd Airborne had deployed over there in their quick reaction force.
00:05:02.980But they had been there since August, and we didn't know what this announcement was about.
00:05:08.160Well, we tuned in, and Secretary Cheney and General Powell were on, and they said that they were going to send the 7th Corps of the United States Army, which was based in Germany at the time after the Cold War still.
00:05:22.180And they were going to send them to Saudi Arabia to reinforce the 82nd Airborne Division and to continue to persuade Saddam Hussein to pull out of Kuwait.
00:05:32.240That shocked, as you can imagine, all of us that were listening.
00:05:35.020So there was a flurry of phone calls that night between the squadron commander, a lieutenant
00:06:24.960And the division intelligence officer said, because 1-1 CAV is going to be out front, they're probably going to suffer up to 50% casualties.
00:06:35.980And that was stated openly in the meeting, so other staff sections could do things like the personnel officer could say, okay, we've got to reinforce them with more people.
00:06:45.220And the logistics officers would start their planning to provide more logistics to us.
00:06:50.940But it shocked all of us in the CAV, as you can imagine.
00:06:54.140We went back to our headquarters and I started thinking, holy smokes, I've never seen war before, unlike this current generation.
00:07:01.880This was the first time I was going to go into a real fight as opposed to just a training exercise.
00:07:06.700And I started thinking about what that meant, not just for me, but for our families.
00:07:19.860My thought was, if I'm one of those 50% that suffer a casualty and perhaps even die, who is going to help my wife raise those kids?
00:07:29.900Not only is she going to be a widow, but there are going to be two young boys who don't have a role model.
00:07:35.020I decided at that point to start writing a journal when I got to the desert and just tell them about life before a war and then life during a war and life after the war if I was lucky enough to survive.
00:07:47.660And that's how it all started. That's a very long story, Brett. I'm sorry, but that's how it all
00:07:52.080came about. So you did return, right? So you wrote this journal thinking like, okay, I might not make
00:07:56.720it. Yeah. That's the, that's the spoiler alert to the book. I did return. Yeah. Right. So what
00:08:01.960happened to the journal during that, you know, until now when you published it? Well, our, our
00:08:07.460two boys, when I returned, it was eight months later, you know, it wasn't a couple of years,
00:08:12.200I wasn't dead and they were still their same ages of 10 and seven. So they were not interested
00:08:17.340in reading the musings of their father or the deep thoughts of their dad while he was away.
00:08:22.500They just wanted to play ball and play with their Legos with me and stuff like that. So I
00:08:27.520kind of threw the journal into a footlocker. Now, both of our sons and one of our daughters-in-law
00:08:33.620became soldiers later on, and they knew about the book. I think both of them had read it as they got
00:08:40.020older, but I didn't think either one of them had really paid a whole lot of attention to it. It was
00:08:45.600just something in my past until Christmas morning of 2024. And what happened was our youngest son
00:08:53.060and his boys were visiting us on Christmas in that timeframe. And after we had the big debacle
00:09:00.160of a normal Christmas of opening presents and being half asleep because our grandsons woke
00:09:06.340up too early and those kinds of things, he came up to me with a box when everybody else was done.
00:09:11.040And he said, dad, this one's just for you.
00:09:39.840They were old Polaroids and pictures from people with throwaway cameras that provided photographs during the operation.
00:09:48.580And he put them all in a context of a manuscript.
00:09:51.860But then what he said after I thumbed through it and got very emotional and all the sights and smells and sounds of the desert started coming back, he said, you know, Dad, my brother and I knew what you were trying to do.
00:10:04.100You were trying to prepare us in case you didn't come home.
00:15:02.120So, all the things that I wrote about friendship as a, I guess I was 33 or 34 years old when I wrote the original journal, were all the musings of a relatively young man who wasn't even in middle age at that point.
00:15:18.400And what I found as life went on, when I did the reflections on the journal entries in the book, it really showed the importance and the value of something like friendship.
00:15:30.460In that chapter, you talked about the difference
00:28:11.920And while we didn't have video games back during Desert Storm, well, I guess we did. It was the beginning of, I guess, the Pac-Man era in 1991. There wasn't the kind of video games we have now where things are sanitized and it's easy. And if you die, you'll just turn the game back on and come back to life.
00:28:30.640That's what I was trying to portray, that when a nation decides to go to war, it better be very important and people that ask soldiers to go to war better understand the implications of that combat operations and how things might not always go as planned.
00:28:47.540That's sort of what I was trying to portray, but also there was a lot of emphasis on what we were doing to train and prepare because it just doesn't happen.
00:28:57.400I think a lot of Americans believe there's a magical equation that says, okay, we're going to send our people to war and everything's going to go just right.
00:29:05.740And they don't consider the amount of preparation that military forces have to have.
00:29:11.380So I wanted them to understand that too, that it is a difficult profession with a lot of challenges.
00:29:18.240They shouldn't just take it for granted what we were doing.
00:29:21.240Yeah. And then, I mean, also what I took from that chapter as well, that entry was just about
00:29:26.440the importance of planning, like just in general. And one of the things I appreciate about reading
00:29:31.840military memoirs or accounts for military history is just how much planning goes into something
00:29:39.300like that, something like D-Day or something like Operation Desert Storm. Like planning is just such
00:29:45.320a big part of military culture. Yeah, I do a drill with my MBA students because we talk about
00:29:53.220strategy, business strategy in the course. And what I do is I show them the message that Eisenhower
00:30:00.960received from Marshall to start planning the D-Day operations. And the message is a very simple
00:30:07.300one paragraph message. It was a telegraph that he received and it basically said,
00:30:12.400you are to enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine.
00:33:06.120It was written in the 1800s, and it was considered at the time, and it's still considered at the time because it is a lot of combat theory as the preeminent approach to what you need to consider between politics and war,
00:33:22.280conducting defense, offense, how intelligence is fleeting in warfare and how you can't depend
00:33:29.380on any kind of intelligence you get without proving it, the personalities of people and
00:33:34.940how they play. I mean, there's a million different subjects that are in this couple of hundred page
00:33:40.460book. And I guess the reason I was talking about it, to be honest with you, is I had attended in
00:33:47.1201988, a course that had just started at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
00:33:55.140And it was a one-year course called the School of Advanced Military Studies. And what they did at
00:34:00.240that course is they took a group of 48 individuals, all majors, and gave them an additional year of
00:34:07.140staff work doing nothing but dissecting history, theory, military theories, and operations, as well
00:34:15.680as conducting exercises in a wargaming approach. So Clausewitz was the centerpiece of this one-year
00:34:22.420course. And I had just graduated in 1988, I guess it was, before I went to Europe and became a
00:34:30.240planner at the division headquarters. And it was right before I went down to become the Cavalry
00:34:34.560Squadron S3. So that's the long history of it. But what was important, the group of those who
00:34:41.680had gone to Sam's were considered by many to be the masters of what happened in Desert Storm and
00:34:49.380why it was such a great operation. And in fact, the New York Times called this group of planners
00:34:54.720Jedi Knights after the movie at the time. And it was a revolution in military affairs because
00:35:02.620these planners basically went back to the book and took some lessons and applied them to modern
00:35:08.680warfare. And it contributed to an extremely successful operation called Desert Storm.
00:35:14.200There's an expression that we were taught the first day of that class in 1987 when I started
00:35:20.640was, if you want a new idea, you got to read an old book. And we read a book a day for an entire
00:35:27.380year and then talked about it the next day in class. Yeah, I love class words on war. Even as
00:35:33.260as a civilian, I think there's a lot people can get from it. I mean, one of the ideas that I got
00:35:38.080from him that I still think about a lot is this idea of friction. He said this, everything in war
00:35:43.260is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing
00:35:49.300the kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. So he just basically goes
00:35:54.920on talking about, yeah, you have this plan and it looks really easy, but then there's all this stuff
00:35:58.780you didn't think about that just starts mucking things up. Like, okay, the supplies didn't get
00:36:02.700here. Well, why didn't the supplies get here? Well, this thing happened down the chain. And I'm sure
00:36:07.060people who aren't in the military, just civilians, they've experienced that. It's like, I've got this
00:36:10.920project I want to do at my house. Why is it so hard to get this thing done? Why am I going back
00:36:17.340to Home Depot over and over again? Exactly. That's my life, by the way, right there. That is friction
00:36:23.340in the house. Yeah. But yeah, that's a great quote, by the way. And we spent a couple of days
00:36:27.900addressing that quote. There are a couple of books on various battles, one called The Battle
00:36:34.820of Duffer's Drift, which is about the Boer Wars, I recall, in Africa. But there was another one
00:36:40.540written about even our training center in California. It was called the Battle of Hill
00:36:45.520871 or 781 or something like that. And it talked about how no matter how many times you trained
00:36:52.980in this specific battle, even if one thing in each different battle went wrong, it would cause you to
00:36:59.820lose the battle. And it was a dynamic that that friction description, the clause which uses,
00:37:07.360what we talked about as we were describing that in our class way back in 1988 was putting a grain
00:37:14.920of sand in a cog and how it could screw up. And that's what friction really is, how it can screw
00:37:20.940up the machinery. And if you pour a whole bag of sand in that, which are the accumulated faults of
00:37:26.420various soldiers doing something wrong on the battlefield, it will really cause your machine
00:37:31.880to stop. And that's what Clausewitz describes as friction. Yeah. And his solution was you just
00:37:37.320have to account for it. You can't plan for everything to be frictionless. Right. You have
00:37:41.980to put more grease in the machine or clean it out every once in a while, or maybe make a list before
00:37:47.820you go to Home Depot to try and do that household repair, right? Yeah. So you had some entries about
00:37:52.620more concrete things and one of those was just about handwritten notes you know that one became
00:37:58.780more important as the years went on because it was all about receiving letters and how important
00:38:05.920those were to the soldiers when and none of your young listeners are going to understand this when
00:38:12.120something called mail call happened at the squadron operation center that's when the big
00:38:18.060bag of mail came in and soldiers were, you know, names were read off because they received a letter
00:38:23.420from their loved ones or something. And that was probably the most important day of the week when
00:38:29.540you got mail. Well, now you get text messages and emails and DMs, direct messaging, but those don't
00:38:37.780last. And what I've told my MBA students, what I've told my soldiers is if you want something to
00:38:43.860last, write it down on a piece of paper. And that has become, I believe, a lost art. It is something
00:38:51.080that someone can hold onto. If it has a little perfume or aftershave on it, you can smell it
00:38:57.300and it brings back memories, which really drive the thought process. It is something you could
00:39:04.020hold onto in a desk drawer. My mother-in-law died a few years ago. And when we were cleaning out
00:39:10.260her apartment, we found two boxes of letters under her bed from her husband in World War II,
00:39:17.100and they were in sequential order. And I'm sure that she was either reading those or thinking
00:39:23.060about those, but those were the only things under her bed and one of the few things left in her
00:39:28.400apartment. You don't get that when you write an email or a text message. You can't keep that or
00:39:33.480hold on to it. And even in business, if you're in business somewhere and your boss puts a note on
00:39:40.080your desk says, boy, you really did a great job in that project the other day. And I was really
00:39:44.780proud of the way you handled our competitors on that. You'll find those people tacking that up
00:39:50.540to their wall. You can't do that with an email or a text message. Do you still write handwritten
00:39:55.920notes? Every single day. Yes, I do. In fact, my buddy, General Marty Dempsey, who I mentioned
00:40:02.180before, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he and I feel the same way about this. And he told
00:40:09.160me a story one time I did not know. And he said that every day when he was chairman of the Joint
00:40:13.200Chiefs of Staff back in the 2012-2014 timeframe, he would write a note a day to an arbitrary
00:40:20.420service member. And what he would have would be the sergeant's majors or the senior enlisted
00:40:26.060advisor of each one of the services in the Pentagon would come to his office on a daily
00:40:31.480basis with a story about a soldier, if it was the army, in their force or a Marine who had done
00:40:38.120something unique or an airman. And he would sit down and write a one page note on Joint Chiefs
00:40:45.340of Staff stationary and give it to the senior enlisted guy and say, get this to the guy.
00:40:51.320And he was telling me a story about one time it went out to this kid, the sailor on a submarine,
00:40:56.740and it took it about two months to get the letter to him. But he finally got it and he opened it up
00:41:02.400and he read this note saying, congratulations, you'd done a good job on such and such. And he
00:41:07.180turned to his chief, his NCO, and said, who the hell is this Marty Dempsey guy that just wrote
00:41:13.080me a letter? I mean, he didn't know he was in his chain of command, but he had just gotten a letter
00:41:17.340from the top guy in the military. And he realized how important getting that letter was. But he did
00:41:21.980that the entire time he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That's a good habit. So if you're
00:41:25.840a leader in any organization, take some time to write some handwritten notes. Yep, exactly. And
00:41:30.840handwritten thank you notes. I think that's, we got to keep that going for sure. Like we make our
00:41:34.860kids after they get something from their aunt or uncle. You got to write a handwritten thank you
00:41:39.440note. Yeah, exactly. Got to do it. And you also have a chapter, and this is kind of another fun
00:41:43.460one, about not swearing. Telling your boys don't swear. What made you think to put that in? Was
00:41:48.240there a story behind that? Yeah. I mean, when you get around a bunch of soldiers, your language goes
00:41:52.860down pretty quickly. I mean, every other word is an F-bomb and you kind of get into that habit.
00:41:59.860And I was just listening one day. I was in the squadron operations center and there were a
00:42:04.840on. And of course, every other word was the F-bomb. And I was using it too. And I realized
00:42:08.900that I had deteriorated in my language ability as well. So I just decided that, you know, I think
00:42:15.700it was Mark Twain, I'm not sure if this is true, who made a distinction between profanity and
00:42:21.880obscenity. And that sometimes profanity is the right thing to use, but it's never good to use
00:42:28.320an obscenity, I think. The quote goes something like that. And I just thought about that. So I
00:42:33.280I tried to dial back my language because it wasn't professional as one of the
00:42:53.940I do think not swearing kind of sets you apart these days because it's become
00:42:57.720so common. I mean, I'm surprised even in the past, I don't want to say 15 years,
00:43:01.600like how frequently i'll just be out in public and i'll hear the f word just yeah randomly well
00:43:06.700i was i was at a ball game my wife and i went to toronto to see a ball game a couple of weeks ago
00:43:11.780and there was a family with a couple of young girls sitting in front of us and right next to
00:43:16.540us were two guys enjoying the ball game but every other word was the f-bomb and finally i leaned over
00:43:22.480to them and i i said hey there's two young kids right sitting right in front of you they're hearing
00:43:27.340everything you say, can you tone it down a little bit? And they looked at me like I was crazy.
00:43:32.820And so it didn't have the effect that I wanted it to. And I was just an old man screaming at
00:43:39.000clouds to them. But, you know, I don't know how it affected the two young girls that were sitting
00:43:45.640in front of us, but I'm sure they heard it because these two guys were loud. And it's just not the
00:43:50.040right thing to do. Yeah, I agree. Probably the weightiest entry in the book talks about when
00:43:55.980you killed a guy, an Iraqi soldier. But you didn't initially write about that event directly in your
00:44:03.200journal. What did you originally write in your journal about that day? And how did that entry
00:44:08.400evolve when you revisited it decades later? Well, the original entry had to do with us
00:44:16.640searching bunkers where Iraqi soldiers had lived. And this was a couple of days after the war was
00:44:25.020over. And we were just given a mission to go out and search this wide area that had bunkers,
00:44:32.740underground bunkers, every 50 feet or so. And it was obviously some kind of unit area where
00:44:38.440infantry soldiers had lived. We had been searching them for a couple of hours and we started getting
00:44:44.020a little bit complacent because there was nobody in them. I walked into one of them and I went from
00:44:49.980very bright sunlight down into this dirt bunker and there was a soldier an Iraqi soldier in it
00:44:56.580and as I went in I surprised him obviously and he surprised me because he started to stand up
00:45:03.160and he brought his rifle to bear on me and I had my pistol drawn as we were searching
00:45:08.360the bunkers and I fired first because I didn't have to aim I just fired it at him and killed him
00:45:15.000when he dropped and he was immediately dead because i fired a couple shots his helmet came
00:45:21.980off and it rolled toward me and we were only like five or six feet apart when i shot him and when
00:45:29.180the helmet rolled toward me it had in it what a lot of soldiers put in inside their helmet liner
00:45:36.260is a picture of their family and he had a picture of himself and his wife and two young girls
00:45:42.840that created a significant moral injury for me and that event changed my life but I didn't write
00:45:53.720about what happened in the initial journal entry I just wrote that we had found an Iraqi soldier
00:46:00.000in a bunker and I didn't give the details of what had happened after we found him so when I wrote
00:46:06.040the later reflection when I wrote the book I fessed up I started the reflection by saying
00:46:12.520something like, I lied to you when I wrote this journal entry. And here's what really happened.
00:46:17.100I did that because I was 35 years older and so were our kids. And both of our sons were also
00:46:24.420soldiers with multiple deployments into Iraq. And they had experienced the same kind of moral
00:46:30.700injury that I described in that approach. And they suffer not post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:46:37.360but everyone that experiences something like that will have some kind of post-traumatic stress
00:46:42.620and they both did and our daughter-in-law as well one of our daughters-in-law was a soldier
00:46:48.000and I thought it was important to tell the rest of the story because it took me a couple of years
00:46:53.580to get over that and it took my wife finally suggesting that I go see a counselor a psychiatrist
00:47:00.100to talk about it because she was noticing changes in me as a result of the dreams I was having and
00:47:06.820the reflections and the flashbacks that I was having about that event. And it really came down
00:47:14.080also later on to when our two boys became soldiers and the first time they deployed to combat right
00:47:21.800after they graduated from college, they didn't have the long lead time that I had. The biggest
00:47:27.040fear my wife had was the potential loss of innocence that both of them would experience.
00:47:33.900And we talked a lot about that back in 2002 when our oldest son first deployed and then in 2005 when our youngest son did.
00:47:43.600And I thought that would be an important piece to write about in the book for other people who don't understand the moral injuries that all soldiers have in one form or another when they go to war.