and how it has changed him.
“I think a lot about the loss of life,” he says. Unlike many soldiers both above and below his rank, he knows the value of emotion and not burying it. While still in Iraq, he was starkly candid with Britain’s
He remembers getting the news of two of the first casualties of his battalion. His sergeant major told him that their engineers hit an IED while out on patrol. He opened his hands to reveal a slip of paper. In it were the names of two soldiers with the letters “KIA” next to them. Goins said he sent a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) to retrieve the bodies. When the force returned, Goins said he went to the gate to meet them. He walked alongside the Bradley carrying the bodies and, touching it, began to weep. He helped remove them from the vehicle to take them into the graves registration building, where men and their body parts are reunited before being choppered out.
Goins called the battalion together and told them “not to forget those guys, send letters to their families, talk amongst yourself, get the emotions out.” Goins said he himself was choked up. He asked the chaplain to lead them in prayer, but the chaplain deferred to him, saying, “No, you do it, sir.”
Goins said he began the prayer without bothering to hide his grief, tears running down his face, like an old- time Baptist preacher overcome by the spirit. “Comfort the families, Lord, comfort us. Keep us strong and keep us from doing the things we don’t want to do.”
But there was something tactical about what he was doing and saying as well. He was encouraging his men to vent their emotions in sadness now, so they wouldn’t do it in anger later.
“I prayed to the Lord to keep us from turning evil,” Goins says, “to keep us from revenge. You can kill people anytime,” he says, “a monkey can do that. We have to do it right.”
Goins thinks he was able to do it right and keep his men focused on the mission rather than revenge, but personally, he says, it meant coming to terms with the two very different dimensions of himself.
He literally calls them Mo and Morris, reflecting the concept of the shadow self or alter ego discussed in earlier chapters, but for Goins they were simply a way to more effectively explain the firewall he maintained between the soldier and the man.
“Morris is the guy that is out bass fishing and gut-hooks a fish or hits a squirrel and feels bad. Morris is the guy who’s really sensitive. But when I’m operational I’m Mo. Mo makes decisions based on fact.”
Goins provides me with a simple yet striking example from Iraq of the differences between his alter egos.
“We’re on a mission and we’re taking fire from a house. Through our scopes we can see the shooter goes back inside. We can also see two little kids inside the house as well. We’ve got birds [choppers] flying overhead and I give them the order to take it down.
Goins is married, even has a son of his own, C.J. He can understand this may sound callous, but Mo’s thinking is clear, logical and without emotion. He believes—no, he knows—that he’s saving his men’s lives.
“I’m responsible for the lives of my guys. I’m not responsible for those kids. Whoever started shooting at us was. Now, I don’t have problems living with both [Mo and Morris], but other people do. There are those that need killing and those that need helping,” he says, as if stating an obvious fact.
Former Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman would likely agree with Goins’s rationale. In his book
In this context, Goins obviously knows his parameters, understanding even before he’s in a fight that his responsibility to the safety of his men and his own moral code will dictate when he will keep his safety on and when he will pull the trigger, whether Morris or Mo will be in charge. While those choices can be clear on the battlefield, Goins admits that it’s sometimes difficult to keep the man separated from the soldier in the aftermath.
Goins recalls being out in the field during a firefight when two young Iraqi girls were wounded in the crossfire. During the incident Goins pulled up to a residential area where his medic was working on one of the girls.
“But she’s so jacked up she doesn’t look like she’s going to survive,” says Goins. Then he heard over the radio that there was another wounded girl a little farther up. He told the medic they needed to leave the first girl behind and see what they could do for the second. When they reached the second girl, they discovered she was badly hurt as well but might survive with advanced medical treatment back at their base. When the medic picked up the girl up to put her in the Humvee, she began to cry and her parents, standing in the doorway of their house, told them not to take her away. The medic ignored them, still holding the girl, until Goins said, “Sit her down—and let’s go.”
“The parents didn’t want her going with us,” he says, “so I tell him we can’t take her, that’s kidnapping. Put her down, we gotta roll.” Reluctantly the medic put her down in disbelief. They got back in their Humvee and drove silently back to their base. Once there Goins said he was overcome by the gravity of the decision he made to leave both girls to die. He says that when he saw his brigade commander he couldn’t contain his tears.
“I just left two little girls behind,” he explained. For the next two hours, Goins said, the brigade commander, Colonel David Sutherland, drove him around in a Humvee, inside the base perimeter, talking him through it.
It was an incident in which “Mo,” the trained soldier, had to make the decision, but “Morris,” the empathetic man, had to suffer its consequences. Goins knows that while imperfect, this psychological firewall has allowed him to be at peace with himself, both morally and professionally.
Most important, though, he believes it lets him be the officer that his men can respect but also the human being to whom they can relate.
Goins knows that when his year at Harvard is done, he will likely be sent to war again, but this time he will command an entire combat brigade rather than just a battalion.[27] With each promotion the responsibilities multiply, more lives are at stake and the balance between soldier and man becomes harder to maintain.
“Emotionally I’m ready to deploy, but do I have enough in my well to survive? My body armor is in my garage, it’s ready to go,” he says. “But your well is not just yours as a commander. Everyone is dipping in it and everyone’s runs dry at some point.”
But if his well does run dry, he can take comfort in the fact that there will be another Goins to take his place. His son, C.J., is currently a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
After completing his National Security Fellowship at Harvard, Colonel Morris Goins was made commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division (Alaska). The brigade deployed to Afghanistan in January 2012 and is operating as Task Force Spartan in a highly dangerous region near the eastern city of Khost and the border with Pakistan.
Chapter 10: The Quiet Soldier
