This week’s Inspirational message is about frustration, conflicting timelines, and perseverance. Over the weekend I experienced an event that wasn’t progressing in accordance with my own personal, mental timeline. It reminded me of both the quote below and a funny story that occurred during my last deployment to Iraq:
The longer you have to wait for something, the more you will appreciate it when it finally arrives. The harder you have to fight for something, the more priceless it will become once you achieve it. And the more pain you have to endure on your journey, the sweeter the arrival at your destination. All good things are worth waiting for. - Anonymous
The setting is “the surge” that occurred in Iraq during the 2007-2008 timeframe. The idea was for the United States to drastically increase the number of troops into Baghdad and the Al Anbar province in order to quickly remove threats and accelerate the conditions for reconciliation, self-security, and governance for the area. I was a mechanized task force operations officer, planning and executing all of the tactical operations for our 850+person battalion in our portion of the Sunni triangle for an extended 15-month deployment. In those early days of the surge, it was a constant fight. Besides the 24-hour operational cycle, one of my additional duties was to submit a weekly operations report up through our chain of command for wider, higher level visibility and situational awareness. Among other things, this report contained updates on our latest intelligence situation (political, enemy forces, allies), current combat power and personnel status, significant acts in the last 24 hours and upcoming operations in the next 48-72 hours, tactical risk assessment, and “Commander’s Issues.”
I had to gather and consolidate this information from my subject matter experts on staff and subordinate commanders and then add my own operational assessment that highlighted mission critical resource requirements we needed in order to continue to be successful in this fight. This last portion was an incredibly important, especially since part of the surge strategy was to permanently place our task force in the middle of a dangerous area of operations, geographically separate from our parent organization. In other words, we did not operate out of one of the major forward operating bases – we were on our own, which made us extremely dependent on being resupplied by our supporting elements. After about 4-5 months of this hectic, chaotic, and stressful environment, I started to get frustrated that despite outlining in our weekly assessment exactly what additional assets and combat multipliers our task force required and the importance of their timely introduction, I often felt like I was communicating with a brick wall. Didn’t anyone higher in our chain of command care about how difficult a scenario we were facing? Our weekly operations report took a significant amount of time to gather, vet, edit, and submit – but our efforts seemed like they ended up in vast stack of unread and unimportant documents on someone’s neglected “To Do” box. The lack of response finally led me to insert the following comment in my section of the operations report:
“I’m getting the distinct feeling that nobody above our task force level is reading our weekly reports. Week in and week out, we attempt to not only provide our best assessment on the current and evolving conditions of this important area of operations, but we also make requests for assistance that could significantly improve our ability to achieve operational and strategic short- and mid-term goals in the greater operation. If you happen to be the first to contact me on our task force SIPR line, not only will I share my personal frustrations, but will happily present you with one of our coveted Task Force Battle challenge coins.”
Now, if you’re still reading this, I’m fairly certain that you would agree that this was not one of my finer (or wiser) moments. But frustration, mortality salience, and anger can sometimes override our more refined appreciation for effective communication techniques and the humble realization that we unfortunately are not the exact center of the universe at any given point in time.
Maturity and experience have taught me that timelines are a relative thing. Sometimes we get frustrated because we don’t see the results (or support) we expect within our own internally-established timelines. This can be especially maddening because our brains prefer to go into hyper-drive, playing out the myriad of courses of action available and pre-selecting the necessary decisions and activities required within our personally-prescribed schedule to be successful. And while, at the time, this may make perfect and wildly logical sense, it very rarely reflects the balanced optimism and pragmatism required to dig in for the extended fight. As someone once said, you must treat these personal adventures more like marathons than sprints.
In periods like this, we have to take a step back and remember that we are but a part a much larger system; one in which events occur along a self-determined pace. My best visualization is the different sized cogs within a watch or clock. While they are all interrelated and dependent upon each other, the cogs are also various sizes. The first cog turns clock-wise, affecting subsequent cogs to react in a counter-clockwise manner, and so one… The small ones turn faster and may enjoy several full rotations before a larger one achieves a quarter turn.
Which brings me back to that fateful surge period in 2007-2008. It was maybe 2-3 weeks after that questionable decision to share my “internal thoughts” in that particular operational assessment, that one of my Battle Captains ran out of our command post to tell me that I had a call from Multi-National Division Central headquarters – three levels above us in our chain-of-command (my boss’ boss’ boss). I initially wondered who in the heck would be calling me from MND-C? And then a split second later, my stomach did a couple of back-flips while my mind screamed “Oh no…” Once I got on the secure line, a mature voice asked “Is this Battle 3 from Task Force 1-30 Infantry?” When I answered in the affirmative, I heard “This is Major General XX from MND-C G-3/5/7. I was wondering if I was the first to reply to your request, because I’d really like to get my hands on one of those coveted battalion coins.”
I may be remembering that conversation in a more positive light than it actually occurred. It turns out that someone from my immediate superior’s staff had read the report, but thought it would be funny to ask a friend of theirs on the MND-C staff to be the first to respond – a prank that back-fired. After a quick laugh and confirmation that Major General XX was indeed the first to respond to my challenge, he also shared some valuable advice that life does not always operate at the pace and efficiency we would all prefer. Sometimes you are the little cog spinning rapidly. Other times you are the ponderously slow large cog. His message was that, as frustrating as it might seem, we must all come to the realization that all of these related pieces move at their own pace because they are embedded within their own unique contexts – and it’s only when looking at the clock/watch/event holistically do we fully understand that despite their different speeds, they all are working together to achieve a higher level outcome.
We eventually did get the support we needed to be successful in our 15-month mission. It didn’t always come as quickly or in the quantities I would have preferred, but they did come. As I reflect back on this learning opportunity, I’m certainly thankful that my cavalier and entitled attitude at the time didn’t land me in hot water with my superiors. But I’m especially thankful that I didn’t go with my initial imaginative yet fictional assessment that our task force area of operations “was experiencing a resurgence of Cretaceous period velociraptors, whose speed and wily intellect were making our strategy of clear, hold and build difficult, unless we were able to get a much-needed resupply that could introduce a larger and more aggressive carnivore into the combat multiplier equation.”
Some things, indeed, are worth waiting for. How are you adjusting your preconceived schedules to account for interdependent, yet potentially context- or time-delayed, reactions outside of your span of control?
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