Thread by @UncleRedLeg

Had some family in town this weekend. As some may know, I have a son at West Point.  Because some of my family tune into various news sources, one of them asked me. “So what does your boy think of all that woke crap being taught at our service academies?”  My answer in a 🧵1/.

I asked “What exactly are you referring to?” He said, “You know all that inclusion crap, all that can’t call parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad,’ all that pronoun stuff.”  2/

To be clear, my son hasn’t talked to me about any of this so I don’t know what he has been exposed to. He is just trying to survive his plebe year, make good grades, be a good teammate, and focus on becoming the kind of leader he would want to be led by. 3/

So with that in mind, I answered him the best way I knew how which is with the hope he would understand why I felt the way I did and why I think it’s all been way over hyped, way over analyzed and somehow we have blurred the difference between caring about your people 4/

and wanting to know them in a way that makes you a cohesive team and being “woke.” 

I told him a couple of anecdotal stories.  The first was from my own perspective. 

My dad died when I was 16. I am now 49 and people still ask me what my dad does or did and where he lives. 5/

It’s been a few years, so the question doesn’t get at me anymore, but when I was younger, it did. I don’t know why. I was immature I guess. My dad was my hero and when he died, it pissed me off when people asked me what my dad did, so I shied away from the question. 6/

At one point, early in my military career a leader actually took the time to get to know me and actually cared enough to get past my flippant answer.  It made a difference.  It made me trust him more.  It made me believe he cared about me more. 7/

He’d come from what many would call a traditional nuclear family but he had the wherewithal to see that maybe I didn’t or that mine was no longer intact.  This is as commonplace now as it was back then, maybe even more so. 8/

The men and women of our Army are raised by all types, a mom and dad, just a mom, just a dad, 2 moms, 2 dads, uncles, aunts, grandparents, foster parents and the list goes on.  What I’ve taken to doing is not asking about their mom or dad but asking, 9/

“Who do you call when you have some good news? Who do you call when you have some bad news?  Who do you call when you want to laugh/cry? Who loves you back home?” Most of the time I get pretty generic answers but sometimes the answer is surprising 10/

and what is even better is the look on the face of the Soldier when they get to tell you who that person is. It also puts the onus on the Soldier to tell me as much or as little as they want to about their family situation and probably more importantly, 11/

it lets them know that when they’re ready, they can tell me or their leader and not feel like they will be judged. It’s not “woke” to care. 12/

My other story was about a leader I had who would call me Dave.  This was a guy that I saw regularly enough that I corrected him plenty of times and yet when he saw me, he would call me Dave.  13/

Every time I corrected him, he’d say, “Dang!  I knew that, I don’t know why I can’t get it right.” But I knew the reason.  It was because it wasn’t important enough to him to remember.  To him I was just a young LT that wasn’t worth the effort. 14/

I didn’t trust him because he clearly didn’t care enough about me to just call me by my correct name. To be fair, I also suck at names, so I have to make a concerted effort to remember and I sometimes forget but this particular “leader” just didn’t care and it was clear.  15/

He left the Army, and we were better for it.

So, inclusion…why is it important?  Inclusion is not about overtly empowering people who don’t deserve it.  The cream will always rise to the top. It’s about applying a level playing field as much as that’s possible. 16/

Some folks will always have more talent, more brains, more acumen for leadership, more hustle. These are not traits that any one group of people have a monopoly on. 17/

Inclusion is about caring about your people irrespective of what they look like, what kind of background they come from, or who they love.  Inclusion is about building trust that might not initially exist because of all of those previous reasons.  18/

Because when it all comes down to it, what will make us the most lethal fighting force in the world is the trust we build in each other when we are training for what could possibly be some of the worst days of our lives. 19/

If I have to give an order to a group of people that will put them in harms way, they damn sure better trust me enough to know that I have done everything within my power to ensure maximum levels of success because if they don’t and I didn’t, the results will be catastrophic. 20/

At one point in my life when I was a young man, this wasn’t as obvious to me as it is now.  I wish someone would have explained it to me better.  Maybe then I could have built better teams, been a better leader, made more of a difference. 21/

But I am committed to it now. I am committed to let my people know I care about them because trust is a two way street and if you don’t have the trust of your Soldiers, you don’t have their respect and w/o that, you can’t take it to the enemy in the most lethal way possible. 22/

So in the end, it’s actually about being a more deadly, more cohesive and a more decisive force on the battlefield. That is not “woke.” That’s military leadership at its core and what we owe the people on the other end of that phone back home, whatever they may look like. End/