A Commander is Everything

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Combat leadership takes a special kind of character. You are going (if the proverbial balloon goes up and you are leading troops in a combat zone) to be making choices and decisions on which the lives of other men are affected. Good choice will keep most of them alive, generally. Bad choices will kill the men, and if you have any kind of a conscience at all, will haunt you for the remainder of your days. (Truth to tell, even the good decisions will haunt you if one or more of your men pay a price.)

The thing is, you have to realize that your own person can be a tool.

SVC ran a war game exercise one time, in which a tank battalion commander in Vietnam suddenly found himself leading a task force composed of elements of his own battalion and a badly shot up rifle battalion. The background said it was TET, and the combined force needed to fight its way back to a firebase.

As part of the exercise, the tank battalion commander dismounted from his command tank, and walked back to the firebase. In essence, he assumed the role of an infantry battalion commander. He saw it as necessary to help encourage the soldiers of the infantry battalion. Their own command had been, essentially, wiped out, and the tank battalion commander wanted to "share the danger" with them.

Sure, he was on the road and more or less surrounded by armored vehicles (a slowly moving box formation while the infantry companies kept pace in the jungle keeping the enemy from getting at the softer skinned vehicles carrying the wounded). He was not, however, safely "buttoned up" inside a command tank, and as long as he was on the road, the infantry could be sure the tanks were not suddenly going to accelerate and leave them behind.

Did this actually have an effect? Morale is a difficult thing to divine. In the end, the battalion commander personally led the infantry in the final assault that opened the road to the safety of the firebase. Again, as worn as the infantry was, the commander had decided that his personal example in taking that risk was needed.

This was, after all, just a simulation. Yet even though he was not aware of it, the commander essentially emulated a division commander on D-day. When the troops were pinned down and things looked bleak, the man came to the beach himself and succeeded in inspiring the men to continue fighting. When the time came to make a breach, and the first man who volunteered to make the attempt was killed, the General personally charged into the enemy's defense, inspiring his soldiers to follow him and creating the breach that enabled the division to begin moving off the beach.

When you are in command, everything you do, the image your men have of you, is part of what you are.

Even in the simulation, the tank battalion commander was partly able to accomplish his leadership task because he had been in command long enough that even the soldiers of the infantry battalions knew who he was. His established character and willingness to share their dangers was part of what made the battle a success, even if it was a desperate retreat, rather than a desperate fight to get off of a beach in Normandy.