Of Names and Black Hawks

That Kid and Jane — Delta and a Glance — Books and Life Is War — A Name

That Kid and Jane

Boredom threatens every junior high school student. But, when I was a junior high school student, the library was less boring and became increasing less so as I figured out how to navigate the stacks and find a quiet place to read. It was in the library, strangely enough, in the quiet and the peace, that I fed my growing interest in warfare.

Growing up in Virginia Beach, I was surrounded by military even though you’d have to go back one generation in my family to find a professional soldier. Dam Neck, Oceana, and Little Neck were regular landmarks in our travels through the localities surrounding the Atlantic and the Chesapeake. F-14 Tomcats regularly flew overhead, making flights between bases and aircraft carriers just off the coast. The joke was that the way you could tell a tourist in Virginia Beach is that they looked up when the jets flew overhead. Locals didn’t. My next-door neighbor was an A-6 pilot. At one point he thought it would be kind to invite the kid next-door out on an aircraft carrier for what the Navy called family days. It was kind. And I was captivated. Kids my age put together Revell models of all sorts of vehicles—Ford Mustangs, Harleys, X-Wing Fighters. Within a few weeks of my visit on that aircraft carrier, I had transformed a kit of those gray sheets of plastic with pop-out pieces into a replica A-6 Intruder. It is those kinds of experiences, living around navy bases and spending time passing through the lives of military families, families of my friends and neighbors, that led to a significant reduction in the boredom as a junior high school student. This is the lead up to how I met Jane in the junior high school library.

Jane isn’t female. In fact, Jane was a guy. At the end of the nineteenth century, Fred Jane founded a company that was built on his love of the military, especially military vehicles. Eighty years later, his books had found their way to the Princess Anne Junior High School library. I read every Jane Information Group book I could find. Each page had full color mock-ups of military vehicles complete with plastic page overlays that added three-dimensional depth to my vehicular and pugilistic fascinations.

I never watched the movie Black Hawk Down. But, just a few months ago, I read the book. That book and the heroism it chronicles, notably in the sacrifice of Shughart and Gordon, rejuvenated my early love of war vehicles, specifically in the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk. The Black Hawk has served the U.S. Army for years as its tactical transport helicopter. The ability to transport eleven soldiers into tactical missions, endure extreme conditions, and hold up under heavy fire is why the Black Hawk is at the top of my list of badass vehicles. That, and because those themes—grit, endurance, support, sacrifice, commitment to soldiers on the ground, the desire to be wherever in the world a fight is raging—are all themes that have been echoed in my experience as a leader.

Delta and a Glance

That experience as a leader, at least in leadership situations I’ve found myself in, led to several points over the years when I was absolutely exhausted and worn out. At one of those points, in a helpful set of circumstances, a friend of mine was kicking up a cohort-style leadership training course designed to encourage and refresh leaders who had been leading for ten or more years. He’s run cohort after cohort since then, helping dozens of leaders. I was in the second cohort. The men in that group would meet in different cities for three days at a time throughout the year to learn from the best leaders in the world.

One particular meeting included a trip to a shooting range run by a retired Delta Force operator. We spent the morning firing various weapons on the shooting range with interspersed training in an on-site classroom—speed, surprise, violence of action. We spent the afternoon in their shoot house, learning the basics of how to clear a room as a four-man team. The operator of that ran the range said that he could tell all he needed to know about leadership potential and team dynamics by watching squads of four work their way through that shoot house.

Leadership is the challenge of reaching a wartime objective with a team marked by loyalty.

During one of our classroom sessions another Delta Force officer taught us about how the Army special forces looks at force multiplication, about how many of the leadership principles were the same for building and leading successful teams. He was intimidating. He didn’t have a pointer for his presentation, and so pulled out a largish knife from somewhere on his person. Someone in my group muttered something in surprise to the blandishment. Without missing a step, the soldier simply said, “What? Would you prefer I used my Glock?”

The range owner had not served with the Delta soldier leading this portion of the training. The older ranger owner stood at the back of the room and listened as the younger officer taught the class. At one point, the officer looked at us and asked, “What is the most important characteristic of leadership, especially leaders leading teams in challenging situations like warfare?” We were all too intimidated to answer the man teaching our class with a tactical knife in hand. Then his eyes met the eyes of the crusty Delta in the back of the room, the range owner. They looked at one another for a moment as if they were reliving sober memories, long past. After a pause, the range owner replied, “loyalty.” The officer upfront nodded and kept teaching. I don’t remember what he taught on next. But I remember that glance between those two men who had seen things and led through combat I couldn’t imagine. At the same time, from everything I learned and had experienced leading in difficult situations, I knew and understood a small amount of what those two soldiers communicated to one another in an intense, knowing glance.

Loyalty is the most valuable virtue for leaders and teams. Not blind loyalty. But the kind of loyalty that gives you unflinching trust that when you face the hard thing, whatever warfare looks like for you, you can trust the guy next you, trust him no matter what. As a leader, that is what I’m looking for in those with whom I work, it is the core of what I teach and coach to leaders, it is, I believe, what holds the fabric of any team together, of all civilization together. Loyalty.

Books and Life Is War

After another particularly difficult season of leadership, I found myself exhausted again. This was six or so years after my experience with the two Delta Force operators. I needed to step down from the leadership role I was in because I needed time off to recover, time off that needed to be longer than a sabbatical. And it was time for the organization I had started to find its next leader. As I stepped into what was next—editing, project management, coaching—everything in me ached with weariness. I had been through hell, had been slandered, had been betrayed by people I trusted. I knew leaders who had been through similar things, some were my friends, some were acquaintances. I’d call them on the phone and ask them about their experiences. I especially wanted to know what they were doing to recover, what activities they were doing or not doing, how they were caring for themselves and their families, what books they were reading. I’ve always been a reader, so that last question about books always came up. Many of the leaders I spoke to found some solace in books that I’d put in the therapeutic genre. I hadn’t. I felt weird that those books seemed like wound-licking to me. The books that comforted me the most were books about war.

I read books about World War I, World War II, the battle of Mogadishu, Korea, and Vietnam. In those memoirs and histories of combat I found so many similarities with modern leadership. That theme of loyalty came up again and again, loyalty to a team in the midst of war. The themes of necessary conflict, of mission worth fighting for, of protecting the vulnerable—these themes were all over the books I read. My thoughts about leadership came together with my thoughts about life—they began to narrow, to gain focus.

My theological convictions provided the foundation for all of it—that very early in human history divine hostility, divinely ordered enmity marked humankind. I read books across genres—about leadership and anti-fragility. I came to the conclusion that life is best characterized as warfare, street warfare or urban warfare to be precise. Leadership is the challenge of reaching a wartime objective with a team marked by loyalty. It is now a firm conviction of mine and at the core of how I live my life and how and whom I serve.

A Name

For some reasons above and for some reasons that aren’t listed above, I named my coaching practice Black Hawk Coaching. I’m not active military. I’m not a veteran. I’m not a LEO. And I’m not trying to pose as one or LARP on a website. I have, however, found in Fred Jane’s books, in war memoirs, and from the lives of soldiers what I think are the underlying principles of all life and leadership: life is best understood as warfare and loyalty is the core virtue for leaders.