By Jeff Buchanan
In June I spoke at a 250th Army birthday event. The US Army is older than our country and one cannot tell the story of our country with telling the story of our Army. In telling the story of our Army, you could focus on campaigns from Lexington and Concord to the second Fallujah or the fight on Robert’s Ridge…or you could choose to do what I did, which is to tell the stories of individual Soldiers I served with.
One of the stories I told was about Master Sergeant Thomas Ballard, the team sergeant of a group off 12 paratroopers advising an Iraqi Army unit in Najaf in early 2007.
There’s not sufficient space on this platform to do the story justice but suffice it to say that Thomas Ballard was incredibly heroic in leading his team in a desperate hours-long fight against a group of hundreds of fanatical terrorists. Ballard positioned his men, re- distributed ammunition, killed bad guys entering the perimeter, called for air support, and treated the wounded. That team went through 11,000 rounds of machine-gun ammunition in the battle (and with the help of reinforcements as the fight wore on) killed 373 and captured 425 terrorists who were bent on killed thousands of innocent people in Najaf, including the leader of the cult-like group. Ballard’s leadership that day was critical in defeating the enemy, keeping his team alive, and arguably saving the holy city of Najaf.
I used a “Paul Harvey” technique to then tell the rest of the story. Twenty years earlier, I was Private First-Class Ballard’s commander on a training exercise in Australia. Our unit was a long-range surveillance detachment, and our job was to infiltrate by land, sea, or air to collect and report on enemy activity deep in their own area. We were in the field in far north Queensland for 35 straight days. The conditions were grueling and at the end of the exercise, the Australians threw a party. Ballard drank too much beer and beat up an Australian soldier. I was the only officer in our small, elite unit, and as such, had the authority to administer punishment. It would have been easy to kick Ballard out of our unit (we were the only group in our division on parachute status), but my first sergeant, Bob Bails, argued to keep him with us.
Bob, a recent veteran of 2nd Ranger battalion said: “He really screwed up and we need to give him an article15…but we should also keep him. He’s just a kid who made a bad decision, but I’m confident he’ll learn from it.”
So that’s what I did. I busted him to Private, fined him seven days’ pay, and put him on extra duty for 7 days. I have no doubt that if I terminated his jump status and kicked him out of our unit, he would have continued to get in trouble and would probably have been out of the Army in a year. Instead, we kept him on our team and gave him a second chance. And twenty years later, he was still in the Army and his leadership in a desperate fight made all the difference. I think about my decision and its impact in Iraq 20 years after the fact, and three big lessons come to mind.
First, listen to your first sergeant…or assistant coach, deputy director, research assistant, etc. Nobody has the market cornered on good ideas. This can apply to a wildlife management agency, a guide service, or even a law enforcement unit. In my case, I was a “commander” with absolute authority and responsibility for everything my unit did or failed to do. But I made better decisions when I opened myself up to others and listened to what they had to say. We never “took avote” and I still made and owned the decision and the results, but if I listened to others, I always got additional options.
Second, everybody makes mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are serious enough that one must follow through with a court case and potential prison sentence, but that is usually not the case. I learned that if I gave others a second chance, they frequently became one of my best Soldiers. A friend of mine used to say: “Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”
Third, don’t kick out everybody who can fight. You may just want that dude on your team someday.
The next time one of your employees makes a mistake, I encourage you to reflect on your own rough patches. Sometimes the mistake is serious enough to warrant a firing or even prison time, but usually it is not. When you give somebody a second chance, they will frequently rise to the occasion and may become one of your best “troops.” They might even save a city. Everybody makes mistakes. Give them a second chance when it is warranted and you will rarely be disappointed.
Jeff Buchanan retired as a Lieutenant General from the Army in 2019. He had four combat deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. He also led the military forces supporting FEMA in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and commanded more than 6,000 troops on the Southwest border in support of CBP. He and his wife live on a small ranch outside of Patagonia, Arizona and he is one of five commissioners for the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
