thedrifter
12-19-06, 02:28 PM
December 25, 2006
Books: Modern-day Spartan
‘Passion’ offers eloquent insights into the burden of command
By J. Ford Huffman
In embedded journalist John Koopman’s book about the march into Baghdad, “McCoy’s Marines,” Lt. Col. Bryan P. “Darkside” McCoy has the title role.
In military expert Bing West’s book about the battle of Fallujah, “No True Glory,” the colonel is known as “Killer” McCoy.
Darkside? Killer? Can “Attila the Hun” be far behind? Who is this guy whose self-described “idea of success was to win a fight without having to win a bunch of medals in the process”?
Now we know from the officer himself. As commander of 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, he led the first Marines into Baghdad when the war started in 2003.
“The Passion of Command,” a slim paperback McCoy wrote for war fighters, offers an insightful look at how a war is being fought, how a Shakespeare-quoting (“we band of brothers”) marathon runner thinks and how a leader leads.
McCoy is succinct, divides his points into segments and speaks in words that are sometimes blunt, sometimes elegant.
In combat, leadership stakes are as high as it gets: life and death. “Let’s confront one issue head-on and spare each other blushes on the subject of killing,” he says. His job, he says, was to kill and to order others to kill. “Combat is at once voracious and capricious, a domain where compassion (to the enemy) is seldom rewarded. Indeed, it is often punished by bleeding emotional energy from you when you have none to give.”
The leader has his troops to worry about. “The leader is entrusted with the lives of his men and accepts unlimited liability for their welfare. The task of bearing such a burden requires more than passive preparation from organizational schooling and mandatory training. Such a task demands passion in the medieval Latin sense of the word: to suffer for love.”
How do you instill passion? In a few key ways, McCoy says:
Through tough training. “We trained as though the men were professional athletes.” Otherwise, “severe physical fatigue makes an individual vulnerable to a wide array of afflictions.”
Through compassion. McCoy stresses the need to let everybody know somebody will help. His serious example is casualty evacuation. “Just as marksmanship engenders confidence, so does the knowledge that if one is struck down in the fight one will be treated and evacuated promptly and professionally.”
Through discipline. For McCoy, this is defined as “reinforced habit designed to produce a specific character, or pattern of behavior, that is strong enough to override creature comforts, personal wants and lapses in fortitude.”
What does he expect of his officers? Only what he expects from himself. “I command, you control,” he says. “Men need leaders, not tyrants.”
What is required of the individual who must enforce McCoy’s rules?
A force of personality. A leader “displays a bias for action, makes decisions in a timely manner, seeks responsibility, accepts consequences, and is highly competent at his job.”
Social energy. Mutual respect. “People will endure incredible hardship if first the leader endures the same hardship shoulder to shoulder with them. Second, the men know why the hardship is necessary.”
The virtue of shame. “No one wants to be known or remembered for coming up short when most needed.”
To project the responsibilities of an officer, McCoy concedes that a leader must sometimes wear “the warrior’s stone mask” as a way to make orders that are “impossible expectations with heavy dollops of cruelty.”
The mask can keep an officer a gentleman, but it can make him into a machine. While “the mask granted me immunity from my conscience” during the stress of war, later McCoy was “shocked by my own indifference” and “doubted my own humanity.” He admits having become “intoxicated by the thrill of the fight, as war removed its own Mask of glory and romance and revealed to me its true face of fleshless bone, and the dark side of man — and perhaps myself.”
Away from battle and back on the home front, McCoy is compelled to remove his stone face when he comes across a warrior friend’s poignant newspaper essay about compassion during combat. The piece is a catharsis for McCoy, and underneath his mask, he finds tears in his eyes. The reader finds humanity.
The Passion of Command: The Moral Imperative of Leadership. By Col. B.P. McCoy. Marine Corps Association. 82 pages. $9.99. Author royalties go to Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund.
J. Ford Huffman writes for USA Today.
Ellie
Books: Modern-day Spartan
‘Passion’ offers eloquent insights into the burden of command
By J. Ford Huffman
In embedded journalist John Koopman’s book about the march into Baghdad, “McCoy’s Marines,” Lt. Col. Bryan P. “Darkside” McCoy has the title role.
In military expert Bing West’s book about the battle of Fallujah, “No True Glory,” the colonel is known as “Killer” McCoy.
Darkside? Killer? Can “Attila the Hun” be far behind? Who is this guy whose self-described “idea of success was to win a fight without having to win a bunch of medals in the process”?
Now we know from the officer himself. As commander of 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, he led the first Marines into Baghdad when the war started in 2003.
“The Passion of Command,” a slim paperback McCoy wrote for war fighters, offers an insightful look at how a war is being fought, how a Shakespeare-quoting (“we band of brothers”) marathon runner thinks and how a leader leads.
McCoy is succinct, divides his points into segments and speaks in words that are sometimes blunt, sometimes elegant.
In combat, leadership stakes are as high as it gets: life and death. “Let’s confront one issue head-on and spare each other blushes on the subject of killing,” he says. His job, he says, was to kill and to order others to kill. “Combat is at once voracious and capricious, a domain where compassion (to the enemy) is seldom rewarded. Indeed, it is often punished by bleeding emotional energy from you when you have none to give.”
The leader has his troops to worry about. “The leader is entrusted with the lives of his men and accepts unlimited liability for their welfare. The task of bearing such a burden requires more than passive preparation from organizational schooling and mandatory training. Such a task demands passion in the medieval Latin sense of the word: to suffer for love.”
How do you instill passion? In a few key ways, McCoy says:
Through tough training. “We trained as though the men were professional athletes.” Otherwise, “severe physical fatigue makes an individual vulnerable to a wide array of afflictions.”
Through compassion. McCoy stresses the need to let everybody know somebody will help. His serious example is casualty evacuation. “Just as marksmanship engenders confidence, so does the knowledge that if one is struck down in the fight one will be treated and evacuated promptly and professionally.”
Through discipline. For McCoy, this is defined as “reinforced habit designed to produce a specific character, or pattern of behavior, that is strong enough to override creature comforts, personal wants and lapses in fortitude.”
What does he expect of his officers? Only what he expects from himself. “I command, you control,” he says. “Men need leaders, not tyrants.”
What is required of the individual who must enforce McCoy’s rules?
A force of personality. A leader “displays a bias for action, makes decisions in a timely manner, seeks responsibility, accepts consequences, and is highly competent at his job.”
Social energy. Mutual respect. “People will endure incredible hardship if first the leader endures the same hardship shoulder to shoulder with them. Second, the men know why the hardship is necessary.”
The virtue of shame. “No one wants to be known or remembered for coming up short when most needed.”
To project the responsibilities of an officer, McCoy concedes that a leader must sometimes wear “the warrior’s stone mask” as a way to make orders that are “impossible expectations with heavy dollops of cruelty.”
The mask can keep an officer a gentleman, but it can make him into a machine. While “the mask granted me immunity from my conscience” during the stress of war, later McCoy was “shocked by my own indifference” and “doubted my own humanity.” He admits having become “intoxicated by the thrill of the fight, as war removed its own Mask of glory and romance and revealed to me its true face of fleshless bone, and the dark side of man — and perhaps myself.”
Away from battle and back on the home front, McCoy is compelled to remove his stone face when he comes across a warrior friend’s poignant newspaper essay about compassion during combat. The piece is a catharsis for McCoy, and underneath his mask, he finds tears in his eyes. The reader finds humanity.
The Passion of Command: The Moral Imperative of Leadership. By Col. B.P. McCoy. Marine Corps Association. 82 pages. $9.99. Author royalties go to Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund.
J. Ford Huffman writes for USA Today.
Ellie