After coming home from Afghanistan, Fort Lewis, Washington was our next destination. Lindsey was six months pregnant with Hannah at the time and we were 3,000 miles away from her parents, when we had always been within driving distance. This was hard for her and she did not like being out in Washington. For me, it was similar in so many ways to my home state of New Hampshire that my soul felt like it was going home. Hannah was born in August of that year and I was gone for half the first year of her life, leaving for a month at a time five different times. I wasn’t thrilled about doing that, but that’s just a fact of Army life.
Usually when someone takes over command of a unit it happens three to six months after arrival, but in this case, I took command within two weeks of getting there and my soldiers weren’t even there. They were all in Fort Carson, Colorado, and the Army was in the process of moving them to Fort Lewis. The Army didn’t treat this as a PCS move for those guys, so some of them were given PCS orders six months later which caused a lot of issues for those soldiers and their families, in addition to everything else military families already deal with.
This year for me was particularly challenging. I did not like myself for a solid eight or nine months because of the person I had to be, or thought I had to be, at work. When I showed up to that unit, it was a complete mess. We used to make jokes about it. I would say that under every rock there was a grenade and my First Sergeant would say they weren’t just grenades, but Bouncing Betties and grizzly bears that would run out and bite you. Every single time I would look into something the unit was doing, it was just another thing. My number one priority was the safety of the people getting in those aircraft, and I just wasn’t very nice about making sure that what needed to get done was done. I fired a lot of people because what was going on just wasn’t ok.
These issues became adversarial in many ways between myself, my First Sergeant, and the existing leadership there upon my arrival. There were so many problems, and it didn’t get that way overnight, and who do you blame but the leadership? No one likes to hear that they’re failing or to have their faults pointed out to them, and that is what I had to do in order to get this unit functional and to where it needed to be. I had been in Blue Max that was good at everything it did, and this was the antithesis of that unit. It was my job to fix that. But let me tell you, it was a very hard job being that person. It still hurts me to think about it.
The silver lining in it all is that two years later the battalion won the Army Aviation Unit of the Year Award. I was extremely proud of that. It certainly wasn’t all me; there were a lot of really good soldiers in that unit who put a lot of hard work in, but I felt pretty good about the part I played in it. I also learned some important lessons about leadership through that experience that I have carried with me ever since.
I genuinely wish I had done a better job building a shared vision for the organization. What it basically means is that when one person comes up with a solution to a problem and then tells everyone else how the problem is going to be solved, it is much less effective than when the whole group comes up with the solution and implements it together, because now everyone owns it instead of one person. If I would have gone about things in this manner, I think things would have gone a lot more smoothly. There’s nothing I can do about it now, but I can take the lessons learned and apply them moving forward. Eighteen short months after arriving at Fort Lewis, Lindsey and I moved all our things into storage, she hopped on a plane back home to Pennsylvania, I drove the car across the country in like two days, flew back to Fort Lewis and hopped on a plane to Iraq.
