Out of respect for the uniform
Dateline: in bed in Portsmouth RI, 16 December 2004
What's weird for me since PNM came out is this desire of so many people I've never met—or, in many instance, would ever even think to meet—calling me up or sending me emails and asking my permission for them to come to Newport and simply talk to me about the book. I am consistently stunned that anyone would spend the money on airfare or drive several hours in a car for this "privilege." I mean, I can't wave my wand over anything really, and all these appearances simply highlights the weird fit I endure now at the college (or let's say, the lack of any fit).
Late yesterday while I was checking email remotely from home, a colleague of mine at the college reminded me that I had told him to come to a meeting with a bunch of reserve Army officers who had asked weeks earlier to sit down with me and talk about PNM. Damned if these guys didn't give me a single communication by email, instead using only the phone. So sitting at home in Portsmouth, I had no idea how to get a hold of them the night before our planned meeting to let them know I was down with the flu.
[Whew! Come to think of it: good thing I'm not trying to do a TV call-in show tonight in DC on CSPAN. Man, what a stinker that effort would have been.]
Then, true to form, baby kept me up to 4am with a combination of ear infection and two upper teeth coming in (good news being I got to watch both "Boogie Nights" and "Wonderland" right in a row on HBO, which allowed me to observe that the main character in "Boogie Nights" was obviously completely based on John Holmes—okay, not important to you, but that was my evening), so I got up at 9am feeling pretty wobbly. But, I couldn't have a two-star general, three other officers plus a sergeant major all go to the effort of driving all the way to the island from up New England and then get turned away with the news that I was home in bed. I mean, we're talking units that have done plenty of time in Iraq. It's simply a matter of respect for the uniform and those who wear it.
So I sat down with these guys for almost three hours and we talked the realities of what the Army reserve is facing in this Global War on Terrorism. It was a frank exchange and a very good one for me, giving me loads of ideas for future writing as well as a better idea of the challenges that lie ahead in arguing for a SysAdmin function—something they all seemed very charged about in a positive way.
In all, they were an impressive bunch, and I felt deeply privileged that they wanted to take an entire day out of their busy schedules to discuss all these issues with me. Happier still to sign all their books at the end.
Will I get to spend more time with them? Maybe give their rank and file the brief? Hard to say. Not much in it for the Navy, you know. . .
. . . but plenty for the man with a plan.
The Army officers also left me with this nugget, which I pass onto you:
I told them about how I saw PNM as the big idealistic statement of what was possible, based on a rather realistic and ruthlessly pragmatic diagnosis of the current strategic security environment, and that the sequel would project that idealism a good two decades ahead, and then describe—in that same realistic and rather ruthlessly pragmatic way of mine—exactly what I thought it would take to get there. I also told them that the Feb. article in Esquire, which I put to bed last night by phone with Mark Warren (okay, he, as the editor, actually "put it to bed" whereas I merely acquiesced to his latest round of brutal cuts! All so this guy named Jeffrey Sachs can get in his two cents worth in the same issue!), would be a first great expression of this combination, aimed very specifically at the next four years—or the second Bush administration.
The Army officers' response was very interesting: they said a mix of long-term idealism with brutal short-term realism is the essential mental model the military likes to inculcate in its personnel, and I'm not simply referring to some simplistic the-ends-justify-the-means bullshit, but rather a balance of yin and yang, as the Chinese like to describe it to me.
In describing this model, the two-star general cited the "Stockdale paradox" as laid out in Jim Collin's bestselling business book, Good to Great (I have already located a copy and Xeroxed all the relevant pages). The basic story comes from Adm. Jim Stockdale (yes, that same guy who ran quite badly as Ross Perot's VP candidate in '92). Stockdale was not only a former president of the Naval War College, he was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in the "Hanoi Hilton" POW camp, spending eight years there and suffering numerous incidents of serious torture at the hands of his captors.
Stockdale tells the story of the optimists who never survived their time in Hanoi, simply because they clung far too much to their dreams of release and—in doing so—couldn't handle the brutal realities of what it took to survive the day to day. So instead of dealing with the here and now realistically, they tended to cling to the hope that they'd be home by whatever the next holiday was, and when that day came and went, their spirit would be diminished by that measure. Over time, they died because their spirit was extinguished by reality.
Stockdale's paradox is thus expressed by himself in this manner:
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Of course, the opposite is equally true: you don’t want to get so wound around the axle about today's harsh realities that you lose the capacity to dream the happy endings, because that spirit is necessary, if not sufficient, to survive bad times and remain whole. Otherwise the short-term sacrifice loses all meaning, and your sense of a guiding rule set—typically your religious faith—tends to get jettisoned in favor of not just survival-at-all-costs but survival-with-no-sense-of-costs.
Good lessons all around, making me glad I got my sick ass out of bed this morning.
Here's the catch of the day:
■ On the question of who serves, I say let 'em all in!■ No U.S. SysAdmin, no Core SysAdmin
■ To shrink the Gap, let it grow the food
■ When security gets solved, economic connectivity can begin
■ The Hard Right is wrong on military strategy—as usual
■ Saving more lives, but still losing too many souls