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Something that stuck out to me in the Fort Hood report is the lack of standard for what to do if a solider goes missing. It made me think about something that happened when I was an instructor. A story.
I was an E-5 at the time and taught in a joint school. The senior enlisted in charge of my section was a marine E-8. He frequently didn’t show up to work on time or at all and it was an open joke that he was a drunk. That was the rumor. All I saw was the absenteeism.
We had just gotten word that a marine student who had recently graduated died tragically. You could feel the grief in the air. Some of the marines in the class I was teaching were close with him. One of my marines didn’t show up to class. I was immediately worried about suicide.
No one in his class could get a hold of him. I couldn’t get a hold of my SNCO. I called the Marine liaison who just kinda shrugged it off and asked why I was bothering him instead of my boss. When I explained I couldn’t reach him, he just told me to wait it out.
At this point I was kinda of panicked. So I went back to class to find out who had hung out with the marine student recently and ask more questions. One of the airmen said he thought he was partying at a hotel. He only knew the chain, not the location.
So I called every single hotel in that chain in the area and asked if they had a guest under that name. I found him. He was alive. He had just partied a little too hard... and yeah maybe the grief of losing his friend had something to do with it.
So after a brief “I’m so glad you’re safe” speech, I directed him to report to his liaison office and tell them what happened and follow their guidance. At this point I wasn’t sure if he’d be removed from training and it wasn’t my call to make.
Ok great. The worst thing didn’t happen and the Air Force E-5 did what probably any caring NCO would do. So that should be the end of the story. But it’s not. It gets darker.
When the marine SNCO, my boss, finally showed up for work he called me into his office. I was expecting something like “good work, good initiative even though you didn’t have top cover etc.” NOPE.
He led off with “now I’m not mad at you but...” and proceeded to chastise me for taking our section’s business over his head. He didn’t answer when I pointed out that I couldn’t get a hold of him.
He made no attempt to explain his own absence. He only cared about how this made him look. That’s Fort Hood. That’s everywhere.
When we worry more about optics than people, we lose. We lose the respect of our subordinates. We lose faith in the system. We lose focus. We lose people. We lose everything. And we will keep losing if we don’t fix it.
