This week I was looking through the old binder of service documents that I have that I imagine most people who served also keep. I know there’s some sort of digital record somewhere. But it feels good to just have an old binder for my kids to find one day. I was trying to remember something from an award citation when I came across something that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. The events around it are never really too far from front of mind. But the document itself brought back a part of the memory that I had forgotten; that what happened didn’t have to happen the way it did. That people who had a choice chose something for me that materially changed my life. It’s probably the most important document in my service record; not an award citation; not a promotion letter. It's not my separation paper (AKA DD214), though I really do like that one. It’s the letter my CO gave me to release me from Iraq. Without being too dramatic, it’s reasonable to say it’s the letter that saved my family.
You’ll see that the reason stated for leaving a combat theater is “emergency leave.” The emergency? My family was in deep, deep trouble. And not the normal sort.
This week is the 13th anniversary of my son’s Autism diagnosis. It’s also the 13th anniversary of that letter. When my wife told me over the phone, I could hear that she was in trouble. She was Navy Wife tough. But she was cooked. She didn’t ask me to come home. Navy wives, or the sorts of women who choose to be things like a Navy Wife, don’t ask that sort of thing. But I knew I needed to get home or there wasn’t going to be anything to come home to. And it was three or four months until I was scheduled to get home.
Leif Babin (yes that Leif Babin before he was best selling big deal author) was the operations officer I reported to. We spent nearly every day together that deployment and he could tell I was in trouble. He didn’t ask me what I thought I should do. Or if I needed help. He didn’t make me say it. Again, people don’t ask these sorts of things. Tragedies of childhood diagnosis are nuanced. Had my boy been hit by a bus and left physically incapacitated, as he was now mentally, I would have gotten a Red Cross Message and been on the next thing steaming out of Ramadi. Had my wife not just endured three pregnancies in four years, after the age of 35, had I not left her behind with a three year-old, a two year-old and a four month old before her body had recovered, then maybe this would have been different. But it wasn’t different. This is all invisible. Nothing happened to my son at all. One day there was no tragedy. The next day there was. And I didn’t know how to tell anyone what I needed. Leif didn’t make me. He just asked me if I needed to go. And I said yes. Two hours later he and I were in front of our skipper when he signed the letter.
I was guilt ridden on both ends. I had men engaged operationally in the field. I had a responsibility to them. But I also knew my family wasn’t going to make it. It’s a choice I couldn’t make. So the skipper didn’t let me. I told him I’d be back soon. That I only needed two weeks at most.
“Go be with your family. Don't come back before Christmas. Come back after the new year. We need you. You’re important to this team. But we need you right.” he told me.
If you look closely at the signature, you’ll see it’s Keith Davids. And if you know anything about Naval Special Warfare, you’ll know who that is. My chain of command on that deployment was Leif Babin and Keith Davids. And you’ll know the war stories and glory that trailed behind them. But you might not know the true meaning of their leadership until you read what they meant to me.
I came back after the New year and joined the team. When I was gone, my number two stepped up. The team picked up the slack. And they picked me up. There was no slippery slope to looser standards or a line out the skipper's door for others to go home for their own nuanced emergencies. The only thing that happened was that my family got the support it needed. And that leadership team got a leader in me that would run through a wall for them. Truth is, I would have already. But if they told me to suck it up..? I'll never know. After we all redeployed, at our command family event, the skipper made it a point to tell my wife how much it meant to the Team for her to let me return to them after I’d come home. You can’t write this stuff.
The world is engaging in an earnest discussion right now about the modern labor force and what staffing is required to run a tech company. We’re diving deep into what it means to commit to the mission. To be truly “hard core”. My contribution to the debate is this letter and the story that surrounds it. There are times when you can’t go home; when the mission will fail without you. And there are even times when that trade off is something as important as life or death. Those things are extremely rare though. And they don’t last very long. Days? Weeks? Maybe. Months? Probably not. Years? Never. Anyone that’s telling you otherwise is selling something you don’t need.
To be crystal clear, this has nothing to do with having too many people to do a job or toxic bloat in an organization. Or how motivated people can rally around a problem and go all out. On the contrary, if you can run lean and mean, you should. This is the ethos of small team leadership. But know that the people you have will make or break you. Treat them like you believe it.
Against the backdrop of the coming storm of the world of tech layoffs, I’ll leave you all with the people principles we called the SOF Truths.
Humans are more important than Hardware.
Quality is better than Quantity.
Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.
Most Special Operations require non-SOF assistance
Apply that to the best talent pool of humans in the world that makes up the tech space. And a reality materializes.
You might need less people than you have. In fact if you probably do. But you owe those people you depend on great leaders to lead them. Because the hard, nuanced leadership moments are coming. Hiding behind 10X or die mindset won’t get it done.