What My Boss Finds Interesting, I Find Fascinating
How a new job and a new boss helped nudge me further toward Jesus Christ
I cannot remember from whom I first heard that adage. I think it was my Dad, but it could have been just as likely on the first ship to which I was assigned. That pithy saying had served me well in my career. If my boss asked me to do it, and it was not illegal, immoral, or grossly unsafe,* I was going to get it done. I’d figure it out. I was a good guy to have worked for you. I loved getting things done. In the case of every boss I worked for, the Navy system had done its job properly and put men of great character in leadership of the organizations I was a part of. I could do much worse than to attempt to learn how they thought and had become who they were.
I gave up command May 30, 2017 and moved across the Puget Sound to begin a “get well job” as Operations Officer for the John C. Stennis Strike Group. By that Fall, we welcomed a new Commander, RDML Mike “Wett” Wettlaufer. In his first in-person meeting with the strike group’s major commanders (O-6s); the cruiser commanding officer, the air wing commander, the aircraft carrier commanding officer, and the destroyer squadron commodore along with a few other significant players, he recommended they read The Armed Forces Officer (TAFO) which had just been published earlier that April. He said words to the effect of “this recently came out. It is a really good read. You should read this. I’ll email you a copy.”
Reflexively I wrote the title down, “Read TAFO - 2017” in slightly bigger font than the other action items I had jotted down throughout that day or from that meeting. Just like the men with greater responsibility than I had - the major commanders - I wanted to begin to understand my boss’s mind, how he thought. My job was to help him execute his commander’s intent. If he found TAFO interesting enough to mention, I was going to be fascinated in reading it. That he recommended it must mean he found resonance with what its authors had written. Perhaps his boss - a 3-star admiral - had recommended it to him.
Nevertheless, I began to read TAFO over the next week. In one sense it was general, “basic” stuff that one easily might have rationalized the decision not to read it because one had already learned at the Academy or ROTC. Easy enough to say, “I know this” or have read about this elsewhere. In another sense, it was timeless wisdom and a plumb line with which every officer should occasionally recalibrate. I can’t say it solved the problem of learning his mind, but choosing to read it was a reaffirmation of a habit of mind to look for such opportunities. Soon, I found the AFO fascinating for its own sake. It was humbling to get back to basics still fresh from destroyer command and see all the ways in which I did not measure up even if others I did.
As would be appropriate for a “get well job,” I attempted to make sense of why I had not been as successful in command as my previous fitness reports as a division officer, department head had predicted. I had also begun contemplating whether it was time for me to do something else altogether with my life. It was not that now the going had gotten tough that I was going to quit. A complicating factor during my tour on KIDD was that my father got diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and died all in less than a year. That loss was by no means the reason for my stumble. The last thing Dad had said to me when he still seemed healthy was from across the magnetometer in the Dothan, AL Airport TSA checkpoint. “I wish I had spent more time with you,” he called out to me. Seven months later I would watch him laboriously breath his last breath in my house in Lynnwood, WA the same day as my worst day in command (a story for another time).
Reckoning with his death as his only child who in his teens and twenties had become a royal snob who squandered an adult father-son relationship, I dead reckoned out (projected) what the next 11 years of my life in the Navy might look like if I stayed in until 30 years of service, including seeking a very outside shot at major command. I determined that I could easily put myself in a position to be absent in my kids’ teenage years in a similar way to my father’s absence from my life from age 14 through 18. Due to financial concerns, he took a job in Saudi Arabia during my late middle school and high school years only to return for good to see me graduate from high school and leave for college.
As I pondered how I got to “here” in 2017, I could not help but think that some of the shortcomings in my character might not have developed as they had, had Dad been there to [put his foot in my rear] guide me through those tumultuous years as a young man. To be clear, I do not blame him for that decision. He made the best decision he could considering the circumstances - being laid off from his job at then-Ft. Rucker with a mortgage to pay and a son who wanted to go to college.
I resolved that I would be around for my two kids to guide them.
But guide them based on what? Sure, I could teach them to avoid my own mistakes or ones like them, but what positive vision of the good did I have to articulate to them?
If only there were a Good Man book as there was an Armed Forces Officer publication that carried with it the weight of authority that I immediately accepted in the latter or other similar guidance like it. The self-help genre would not do. As the philosopher, Immanuel Kant said,
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
It dawned on me that though I had looked constantly to good accomplished men for guidance in my professional life, I had NEVER specifically sought anyone’s counsel on how to be a good father much less a good husband. I told myself, I’m smart, I’ve got this. I’ll figure it out. Pride. It also occurred to me that it was foolish to think my shortfalls in my personal life did not affect my stability as a leader no matter how much I tried to compartmentalize.
Should I indeed decide to wind-down my career after this strike group OPS job and become a Doctor of Physical Therapy, a Lawyer, work in the Seattle tech industry, what guidance was going to keep me on track in the second half of my life? “What my professor finds interesting I find fascinating” would work to get me to pass the tests of the curriculum and earn the degree(s), but absolutely it would not help me to figure out how to be a good husband and father through a stressful career transition. No. Being my own boss, my own authority in my personal life had not resulted in the success and happiness I may have vaguely imagined in the past even if I had taken the time to really think about them - not as a son, a husband, a friend, a man. I needed something outside of myself, beyond what I had found interesting and fascinating on my own.
I had nothing useful to guide me for marital and fatherhood success and happiness other than a goal to stay married and raise smart kids.
During this time as a strike group OPS, I had tons more time to read (or re-read) and think. I’m not saying the job is a walk in the park, but the day-to-day leadership required in that job was as nothing compared to being in command of a ship. My team of about 20 was very top heavy, I had four other O-5s, 2 O-4s, 2 O-3s who worked for me. We owned processes instead of equipment. I had a lot more bandwidth available. No late night phone calls to disrupt sleep either. Around this time I found myself re-reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning This warning from the preface jumped out at me this time around (I rarely read prefaces by the way).
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
I recall thinking, I’d done the “personal dedication to a cause” part of it, but “surrender to a person other than oneself,” stuck in my mind. Had I done that? Could I do that outside the Navy? The military, for all its faults, is a trustworthy-men-and-women-building-institution. What about in the mercenary private sector? Less so. Your mileage may vary. Did he mean my wife? Surrender though? that seemed off. Mind you I’m still an atheist at this point, but I now see that re-reading as a #tapoftheshepherdscrook that brought me eventually to here a few years later:
Ephesians 5:25-30
25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body.
The Holy Spirit used the writing of a Holocaust survivor and psychologist to begin to further break down my barrier of pride.
Back to 2017 and The Armed Forces Officer. Lest you all think I am parochial, the way General George W. Casey, Jr., USA (Ret.), described the identity of an Army Officer caught my eye.
Writing around 340 BC, Aristotle stated that moral goodness (character) is the result of habit. If you do good things repeatedly, you will be a good person. I found that to be true over my 41-year career. As I made decisions as a young officer on simple (in retrospect) matters, I developed the habit of doing what I thought was best for the organization I was serving and acting with conviction—something that prepared me for the very difficult choices I had to make as the com- mander in Iraq and Army Chief of Staff. Good character is essential, and building it starts early. Acting with conviction builds credibility. Gen. Casey
Moral goodness of character is the result of habit. But who defines goodness in marriage? Or is it in the definition of marriage itself that goodness is inherent. Under whose authority should I come to understand how to be a truly good man, not just a good officer. As if the two were separable?!
If I couldn’t bring myself to surrender to my wife, which is what I thought Frankl was getting at, was I a good husband? It was all good in theory - this surrendering - but what about in the heat of argument when I knew deep in the marrow of my bones that she was the one who was wrong. [pause to allow the reader to shake his or her head].
If not her, then to whom would I surrender? He had survived the crucible of the Holocaust. He had been tested in the most austere of circumstances. It occurred to me that I should pay heed and figure out the answer to that question.
I remember over that winter and spring of 2018 thinking, “if I am going to surrender to someone, to submit fully to his authority it has to be a perfect person, THE perfect person. To my thinking back then, the only perfect person who theoretically exists out there is this Jesus Christ I have been running away from most of my life. Nah, all my friends know me as an atheist. So many of my old face-to-face arguments and facebook posts were related to my atheism. I had a photo taken with Christopher Hitchens shortly before his death and an autographed copy of his 2007 book inveighing against the Almighty. Being an atheist was part of who I was! It was a major part of my identity.
But if I were to do it, if He truly existed, I thought, it would have to be Him, only Him.
Philippians 2:9–11
9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
And if so, what did He find interesting that I should find fascinating?
But I wasn’t there yet. That would take another year.
(to be continued)
Thank you for this, Tim.
Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Thank you, sir.