What It Means To Be a Leader
By Senator Jim Webb
Published: May 18, 2008
Adapted from =93A Time to Fight=94 =A9 Jim Webb (Broadway Books, 2008).
Read the full chapter.
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2008/edition_05-18-2008/1What_It_Tak=
es_To_Be_a_Leader
On June 5, 1968, I had the honor of taking the oath of office as a
second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. Thus my
professional career began with a vow to protect the Constitution
against all enemies, foreign and domestic, at a time when the country
was riven by external and internal conflict.
Our instructors at the Marine Officers Basic School were handpicked
from among the finest young officers in the Corps. Almost all had been
in combat, and many bore visible scars. As the months at school went
by, they repeatedly and unendingly challenged us with an age-old
mantra: What do you do now, lieutenant?
Just before we graduated, a tough but insightful lieutenant colonel
who had fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam gave us a speech, a
warning that echoes in my memory almost every day. He recounted a
story of a fight in Korea that went incredibly bad=97where, for all his
experience, he made an error in judgment.
=93I had the enemy pinned down on a ridge,=94 he said. =93I set up a base
of=
fire and sent 13 Marines into the tree line in order to envelop the
enemy. Thirteen Marines went into the tree line, and all 13 were
killed. And, gentlemen, there is not a day that goes by when I don=92t
think of that.=94
The colonel then spoke of the inalienable bottom line of combat
leader****p: While all Marines are equally in harm=92s way, it is the
leaders who must make the decisions about what to do, then live with
the results. What he may not have realized is that he also spelled out
the responsibility that sits on the shoulders of all leaders.
In the long months I spent as a rifle platoon and company commander in
Vietnam=92s infamous An Hoa Basin, the colonel=92s admonition resonated
again and again. We constantly operated in blown-out populated areas,
moving from village to village and digging new perimeters every few
days. The An Hoa Basin was a bloody, morally conflicted mess. Enemy
contact came in every imaginable form, from small cells of local Viet
Cong to regiment-sized North Vietnamese Army units. And every day, we
who led the squads, platoons and companies were required to make
decisions that would have confounded the seminars on ethics and
philosophy at universities where some of our peers now grappled
intellectually with the war we had been sent to fight.
Sometimes such moral dilemmas became deeply personal. =93Clearing=94
village bunkers was a normal process when we were facing enemy
contact. Every Vietnamese family had a bunker next to its ****ch. When
firefights broke out, families went into their bunkers. But it was a
common tactic for enemy soldiers to hide there as well, often allowing
them to open fire on us from behind. So a routine developed, which the
Marines and the villagers understood. Marine teams would move from
bunker to bunker, telling villagers to come out. After that, a Marine
would throw a grenade into the bunker, then one of them would enter
it, making sure it was clear.
During one sweep, the Marine who jumped into the bunker following the
blast found that three people had not come out. A younger man,
probably a local Viet Cong, had been killed. Hardened by combat, we
shrugged him off. But the other two stopped my heart even in the mind-
numbing repetition of tragedy that defines war.
A gray-haired man in white pajamas, probably a grandfather, was dead,
having wrapped himself around a small boy to protect him from the
blast. It was clear that his final thoughts were of the boy. His
shocked, opaque eyes and his still-curled body were the very
definition of love and human sacrifice. The boy was still alive,
although barely.
We were in contact with the enemy, and night would soon be upon us. I
walked through the village, setting up our defensive positions and
calling in a re****t to our commander. A corpsman followed me, cradling
the boy in his arms. He and I had now served together through seven
months of hard combat. We had seen a mountain of tragedy, and we kept
nothing from each other. He was insistent: =93Skipper, if you don=92t get
this kid out of here right now, he=92s going to die.=94
I called for a medevac, but I knew what the answer would be. Emergency
medevacs were available only for Marines. We were in a high-risk
landing zone. Vietnamese civilians could only be given =93routine=94
medevacs when landing zones were calm and all Marines had been taken
care of.
What do you do now, lieutenant?
I couldn=92t lie to my chain of command. There weren=92t any wounded
Marines. I made a case for the boy and lost. =93They=92ll only bring it in
as a routine,=94 I told the doc. We knew this could take hours.
=93All right,=94 he answered, clearly exasperated. =93Then you watch him
die.=94
The doc put the boy on a wooden box next to our command post. Over the
next half hour, as I spoke on the radio, the boy lay near me quietly,
never making a sound, all the while watching me. Nor could I stop
watching him. And as we stared at each other, he slowly died.
There are still moments when I look back and see the little boy=92s
brown eyes and the curled corpse of the grandfather whose last thought
had been to save him. I will never forget them, nor should I. The An
Hoa Basin filled us all with a lifetime of such stories.
When you have personalized death, looked into the eyes of innocent
people as the life drained out of them, watched lives torn apart not
once but hundreds of times=97friends, enemies and those caught in between
=97it brings not only sadness but also an oddly stubborn wisdom. When
you have watched an enemy fight with ferocity and often with honor,
you tend to conclude that on some level you have more in common with
those you were trying to kill than you do with people who view wars
only as an intellectual debate. And when you have served among good
people, fellow Marines, some of whom you came to love with the same
intensity as you do your own family, there are few others you will
meet in your lifetime who can ever gain that same level of trust and
respect.
As the colonel intimated in his talk, a sense of accountability is the
burden of leader****p, whether in combat or on Capitol Hill. When you
have the authority to make decisions, you inherit the responsibility
to accept the consequences and the obligation to use your authority
for the common good.
What has this got to do with the politics of today?
Everything.
Our country is in the middle of a profound crisis. This crisis has
many causes, but much of it has been brought about by poor leader****p
decisions at every level of government. In addition, our electoral
process is dominated by financial interests that are threatened by the
very notion of reform.
Elections shouldn=92t be media circuses, nor should they be auctions
where a candidate sells himself to the highest bidder. They should be
moral contracts between those who wish to lead and those who are
consenting to be led.
What, then, must we do?
In one form or another, this question is asked daily in every
community and in almost every household around the world. In
authoritarian societies, it=92s whispered; in others, it is debated. In
America, we quite frankly find ourselves doing a little of both.
Our challenges lie in improving the way we=92ve been selecting our
leaders. To the American voters, I offer this advice: Be as shrewd and
ruthless in your demands on our leaders as the wizards running
campaigns are in their strategies to get your vote. Do your part to
send to Wa****ngton people who truly want to solve the problems of this
country from the bottom up.
You won=92t regret it. You will benefit from it. And the stakes could
not be higher. Sometimes the business of politics seems silly. It can
also be infuriating. But you must stay in the game, because you and
your grandchildren will be the inheritors of both our successes and
flaws.
Jim Webb (D.) is a U.S. Senator from Virginia.
Adapted from =93A Time to Fight=94 =A9 Jim Webb (Broadway Books, 2008).
Read the full chapter
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