What I Learned On Leave

By Rick Van Arnam

Bagram, Afghanistan

Like some of the best things learned, this lesson was not planned. When I deployed to Afghanistan in early January, I had no intention to take mid-tour leave (vacation). I wanted to save a year’s worth of accumulated leave so that I would have a six week sabbatical prior to returning to work.

But something magical happened, though, as soon as I landed at Bagram Airfield on March 1^st. I learned that all soldiers deployed to Afghanistan for 270 days or more were authorized fifteen days of non-chargeable leave that would start the day after landing in the United States. So I departed Bagram on May 26^th and landed in Vermont and into my wife’s arms two days later. Thinking back on my twenty-six years of work, I have only had this much consecutive time off once. It was back in 1986 when I took thirty days leave between Ranger school graduation and flying to Korea for my next assignment. At that time, I was single, did not own a house nor own nearly as much responsibility.

What I learned over the next fifteen days is a lesson for life that may be of value to you – especially if you are fully embedded in your career-life balance which makes the thought of a two week vacation a near impossible dream.

The value of a two-week break is immense. Although a two-week vacation is twice the length of a one-week vacation, I believe it offers at least five times the benefit. I feel refreshed, relaxed, recharged and reinvigorated. I never felt this way after only one week of vacation. Experts can likely explain this in better physiological terms than I, but I think it is due to a couple of simple ideas. First, it takes a few days to really unwind and unplug from work. Second, deep relaxation came to me quicker when it occurred to me throughout my first week that I still had more than a week’s vacation left! That realization was a multiplier allowing me to relax and enjoy each day more fully without the usual ‘work creep’ occurring.

Here is my advice and challenge – in the next year, do all you can to take a two week vacation and do all that you can to enable those who work for you to do the same.

There may be more objections than I can tackle here, but I’ll address a few of the quick pop-ups. If you are still uncertain afterwards, take this idea to a trusted friend and get a second opinion.

Objection # 1: My job isn’t like being deployed to Afghanistan.

Maybe. Maybe not. I am forty-seven years old and serve as a primary staff officer to the brigade commander. I work on an airfield that is more like a small city than a combat outpost. I work in a new building and have a nicely furnished office. I have air conditioning. I am awake by 5:30am and work a fifteen-hour day usually getting to bed by 10pm. My day is filled with meetings, briefings, e-mail, making decisions and leading a 100-soldier intelligence section. Truthfully, I feel like a senior executive in a medium-sized company. I go to the gym at lunch and have most of the resources I need. If you work in a white-collar environment with mid-to-senior level executive responsibilities and work over fifty hours per week, our jobs are more similar than you may think. So go ahead, take two weeks off.

Objection # 2: My team or company can’t afford to lose me for two weeks.

We are in the middle of the summer fighting season in Afghanistan and it is likely the most pivotal fighting season since 2002. Bagram Airfield was attacked on May 19th and I took vacation on May 25th. In my absence, our section performed outstandingly and all earned praise from the command group and higher headquarters.

Lose the ego and take vacation – you will be doing more for your organization than you think. I know that I am more valuable to my commander now than I was in the month prior to leave. My head is clearer; I am rested and simply feel more enthusiastic about tackling the complex problems sets (see Puzzles, Rubik's Cube and Brainteasers, posted 6 June 2010) that define Afghanistan. Leaders can instill confidence in their people by turning over the reigns to the person that they should be developing to replace them. If you have made yourself indispensable, you are likely limiting your organization’s growth.

And, if you are at the very top of the organization as an owner, commander or CEO and believe that you cannot be gone for two weeks, think again. Does anyone else in your organization have more people under him or her than you? In five years, no one will reflect back and comment, “If only so and so had not taken that two week vacation back in 2010, we wouldn’t be in this mess today.” So go ahead, take two weeks off.

Objection # 3: I don’t need a two-week vacation.

An extended vacation is not just about you. I’ll bet that you have family members or friends that would really enjoy some extended quality time with you. Deployed soldiers do perhaps learn this better than most people, but don’t miss an only opportunity to create a lasting memory. My kids did not know I was coming home this early and that provided perfect opportunities to surprise them – separately. I thought that I would have to close Elana’s wide-open jaw when she first saw me and I am convinced Connor was nearly in shock as I surprised him at his school’s chapel and he realized that I would be there for his 9^th grade graduation. A few days later, our family together climbed New Hampshire’s Cardigan Mountain and posted the pictures on Facebook to prove it. These memories, plus a lunch in Lake Placid with my mom and brother, are sustaining, and not just for me. So go ahead, take two weeks off.

Deployments have a way of teaching me more lessons than I can predict. This one took about two weeks to learn and is now wisdom for life.

RVA

Dead Bodies, Lies and Broken-Hearted Mothers

By Rick Van Arnam

Returning to Afghanistan

Leaders have a responsibility to think deeply on matters that shape character and chiefly, but not solely, include beliefs, values, and motivators. While this post may at first seem off the topic of leadership and character, it does reflect a single leader’s thinking on these important matters while deployed. The views and opinions are mine and mine alone and should not be interpreted as shared by others with whom I serve or the U. S. Army.

The bloated toes of the foot were curled unnaturally into a tight cringe that made me at first think that I was looking at something you would pay to see at a County Fair. The foot appeared almost unrecognizable to my forty-seven year old eyes that are trained naturally to recognize a normal foot. Attached to the foot was a long, white sinewy cord that was sort of like a well-worn telephone cord that had lost its original shape, but was still functional attaching the handset to the phone – except this cord was detached from the rest of the body and no longer with function.

I’m not medically inclined or trained, but I guessed that the white cord was a tendon that stayed attached to the foot when the suicide bomber self-detonated. The rest of the remains, body pieces and equipment, were scattered on a screen to be photographed and studied as part of an investigation following the 19 May 2010 complex attack on Bagram Airfield.

At some point, though, this dead body – body parts is a more accurate description – had not been an insurgent. He had been born a human being, a son, to a mother. As I looked at the remains of this attacker, somewhere my mind drifted back imagining with certainty that this dead body had once been a young boy – innocent and naïve like any young boy – playing games made up as he ran alongside other boys. I know that moment took place because I have been deployed or lived overseas a few times now and have seen dirt-poor, half-dressed kids play and frolic with smiles worn on their faces.

His mother had been present for some period of his life – I know this to be as close to fact as possible because Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest child mortality rates and kids who reach adulthood can only do so with the help of their mothers, close family or just pure luck (or all of the above). As I studied a picture of a piece from a torn satchel I wondered what her dreams were for her son on the day that she gave birth. I doubt, but could be wrong, that she gazed down her tummy to a crying newborn and smiled knowing that he would some day blow himself to smithereens. I don’t think that thought crossed her mind at that time, but I could be wrong – it is just not a natural thought no matter a person’s beliefs or ideology. I think, but could be wrong, that her heart would break on this day knowing the violent death her son had inflicted on himself. Underneath my military crust, which believes with a cool heart that this is the desired end state of any body committed to killing others who intend to do good, I was near sad-hearted thinking of the loss of human opportunity now scattered to be photographed.

Then I became mad – on two levels.

First, I was mad that in the press this futile attack would quickly pass overshadowed by multiple insurgent attacks on coalition forces in the days and weeks to come. On this day, insurgents tried to inflict mass casualties on Bagram Airfield and failed – miserably. One United States citizen, a young man from North Carolina working as a contractor, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe, in honor, he was the reason more casualties were avoided. When the attackers killed him sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, tower guards were easily alerted and quickly eliminated some of the attackers. The insurgents sent more than twenty attackers to Bagram on that day. Several wore identical suicide vests and most died either by self-detonating or killed by coalition forces. A few more suspected attackers were captured and I estimate that only a few were fortunate to retreat escaping death or capture.

But I was also mad at another level. I was mad that the suicide attackers had been recruited and seduced to believe that their horrific, self-inflicted death was either better than the opportunity of life itself or justified in the name of extreme religious ideology. My reaction to this anger was a desire to photograph the remains, including the bloated foot with the sinewy white tendon attached, and drop millions of these photos on the areas in which suicide bombers are recruited and trained. On the way to believing lies cast as vision, every recruited suicide bomber should have the right to see just how his body will end up.

We do not do that, though, because it is not humane. How ironic is that? That we would not publish, in pictures, the most inhumane way to die because to do so would be inhumane? I suppose we don’t do this out of respect for human life – which includes the respect and compassion for the life of the broken-hearted mother who lost her son to a lie.

In America, there is a common saying that there are only two certainties in life – death and taxes. But having been deployed, I can say that throughout the world only one thing is really certain and that is death. Very few of us will ever have an opportunity to manage a graceful end to our life, this I believe. But no one should be led to embrace a lie cast as vision over which a mother’s heart would break at the site of a body contorted beyond recognition. It is just not right.

RVA

Puzzles, Rubik's Cube and Brainteasers

By Rick Van Arnam

Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan

I grew up in the 1970’s putting together jigsaw puzzles at my grandparent’s house. Even my Great Grandmother Walrath always had a puzzle in progress with pieces scattered across a card table. As kids, my siblings and I would often get a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. After wearing out or losing enough of the puzzle’s pieces, we would scotch tape its box corners and take it to camp where it likely remains. In the 1980’s, the Rubik’s Cube became the puzzle to own (I never solved it). By the time my kids were born in the mid-1990’s Connie and I started to buy clever travel puzzles for the kids. We actually enjoyed these puzzles more than the kids competing against one another until she consistently beat me and my anger increased to a point that I didn’t even want to kiss her goodnight!

As challenging as those puzzles were to me, I’ve been introduced to much harder puzzles on this deployment with much more at stake than a good night kiss from my wife. The Army even has a name for these puzzles – we call these Complex Problem Sets. For example, a Complex Problem Set could be anything from figuring out who really holds negative or positive sway in a province to looking at poppy eradication as a national strategy in Afghanistan. Complex Problem Sets are characterized by having several factors that cause second, third and fourth order effects. These brain-straining conundrums call out the ongoing need for deft leadership skills grounded in a selflessness that puts others first for a greater good and humility to recognize that one person alone cannot solve these issues.

Today, I sat in a meeting discussing a Complex Problem Set that required our staff to understand many things about many villages that surround us. As I looked across the room and listened to several inputs, it struck me not only how hard we are working to solve this Complex Problem Set, but also how many different areas of expertise and diversity had a chair at the table. As a reminder, I am serving in an Infantry Brigade, but you would not have guessed that by the makeup of those in the meeting or the range of topics of discussed.

In the room where I made this private observation, service members from the Army, Air Force and Navy participated (for good measure, we share a building with Marines). Joining these men and women were civilians from the Department of State, USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) as well as civilian contractors who study ‘human terrain.’ The organizational diversity was matched by the diversity of individual expertise. For example, there were Army Civil Affairs’ personnel who were experts on public health and from one I learned that three factors – dirty water, upper respiratory disease and malnutrition – contribute to eighty percent of the public health issues in Afghanistan. Contributing to the challenge of the Complex Problem Set is the overarching chemistry challenge brought on by a melting pot of organizational cultures, competing priorities and individual personalities.

Trying to select one leadership skill or character trait on which success hinges is like trying to find a single solution to “solve” Afghanistan – or for that matter, figuring out how to turn around GM, fix healthcare or balance a university’s budget in the wake of plunging endowment values. From my observation, success in solving Complex Problem Sets requires a holistic and patient approach; this same attitude can be applied to leadership and character development if we want to experience similar success at solving the Complex Problem Sets that occupy our future conference rooms.

Humility, for example, is a character attribute brought into view by recognizing that a single person cannot solve these problems. It takes a room full of input just to draft a plan in order to positively impact results. One person cannot be smarter than the collective wisdom that gathers to figure out Complex Problem Sets. Big problems don’t require big egos, but instead, big humility that enables brainstorming over singularly directed answers or the will to take a new position after further thought or admitting that a third or fourth order effect had not been considered.

Working through a Complex Problems Set is not always enjoyable. But like the brainteaser we returned to as a kid, the challenge and opportunity to get something important right draws out the leadership and character in people.

RVA