I also immediately started spending as much time as I could with my Marines and the recruits. Obviously, I wanted to drill down and figure out how we could improve, but I also needed to better understand whom I was working with, as well as the culture of the three male recruit-training battalions and the training process in general.
I felt that leadership by walking around was important, and I spent a good two-thirds of my day out with my Marines. This had always been my approach to command, but it was very different from the approach of previous Fourth Battalion commanders. It meant I went to the range, observed DIs and recruits during the Crucible, exercised with them on the PT field, and participated in their hikes. I arrived at work every day by 5:30 in the morning and stayed until late in the evenings so that my Marines knew I was committed to the mission and their success.
It wasn't that I didn't trust what they were doing. Rather, I wanted to make sure that they were okay: Did they have what they needed? Did they feel like they were being properly supported? I felt like it was important that my drill instructors saw me when it was cold and when it was hot.
We were in it together.
I also wanted to observe my company officers—the young lieutenants and young captains. I wanted to make sure they were being mentored and trained as leaders. I crafted my schedule to allow time with each company every day, but I spent more time with the platoons about which I had some concerns, because that's part of supervision and that's part of training—especially in a battalion where officers had previously been ignored.
My sergeant major came on deck in July, too, which helped a lot. I had been operating without one because of the unexpected move of the previous sergeant major when she and my predecessor butted heads. I felt like I hit the jackpot because I liked her and trusted her. So, while I was working with the officers, she could work with the drill instructors, and, as a team, we could get a better sense of what we needed to do collectively to improve both training and quality of life. In the military, first sergeants and sergeants major often earn respect and gratitude from officers because they've usually been in the military longer and understand the enlisted culture and the service members so well. She absolutely served as my right hand, and I enjoyed her company and depended on her advice. There wasn't a day that I didn't spend a significant amount of my time with her.
And she knew the deal. She had been a drill instructor and first sergeant at Fourth Battalion, and she had seen good and bad COs come and go. We seemed to share the same goals for the Marines and recruits in the battalion, and I conferred with her for her input and recommendations before I made decisions. In my previous command tour, I had worked with a few sergeants major who weren't great. But I was impressed with her from day one, and I thought we would be a good leadership team. In fact, I made it a point, when talking to the Marines, to always start my sentences with statements like, “Sergeant Major and I think” or “Sergeant Major and I decided” so they could see there would be no daylight between us and we could model the relationship we expected between the company commanders and their senior enlisted, the first sergeants.
And as we observed our officers and enlisted Marines, we both had some concerns. Most of the problems seemed to stem from November Company, and we realized we needed to start by fixing the issues there.
To start the cultural evolution, I decided my first all-hands training event would be about abuse, tying in what we were seeing at Fourth Battalion with what had happened in Abu Ghraib several years before. Think about it: Abu Ghraib, the horrifying prisoner-abuse scandal we saw early in the war in Iraq, resulted from a lack of leadership and supervision. Soldiers felt pressured to behave in a certain way to fit in with the larger group, and rather than speaking out against something they knew was wrong—terrifying prisoners with dogs; making male prisoners stand naked in front of women; forcing prisoners to stand on buckets, with hoods on their heads while strapped to fake electric wires so that they believed that if they fell, they would be electrocuted—they participated. Apparently, no one there felt there was someone to whom they could go to report the abuse. The power structure there was similar to what we saw at Fourth Battalion, and specifically in November Company. In other words, the leadership was complicit in the abuse.
As I planned that first mandatory professional military-education briefing about a month into my tour, I also had one of my first encounters with the difference between Parris Island and everywhere else in the Marine Corps—and it would come back to haunt me during the investigation into my command.
As is normal, I asked my operations officer to set up the briefing since the training schedule was complex enough to require multiple sessions and a reserved classroom. This was a pretty basic task and exactly what you would expect a battalion commander to ask her operations officer to do.
She didn't do it.
The next morning, as I got ready for PT with the recruits, she came into my office to shoot the breeze. I said, “Hey. I asked you to set this up. Why wasn't it done?”
She told me she had been too busy, so I held her feet to the fire. “You can't say you don't have time when the battalion commander says she wants to do an all-hands, and you're the one who's supposed to facilitate training,” I said. I'm sure I wasn't smiling
