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football team and you want to create another team—so you take half of the offensive line from the winning, experienced team and put it on the new team with new players—then you take half the backfield—half of the wide receivers— half of the coaching staff and do the same thing—sending them all to become 1/2 of another team—meanwhile you replace the original winning team players with the new , inexperienced players and coaches and what do you end up with? Two teams that are mediocre! Unfortunately, this was not a ‘game’—these experienced Marines from outstanding, proven units , were thrown in with inexperienced Marines ‘on the fly’ while engaged in dangerous, life-threatening combat conditions wherein a missed hand signal may get someone killed—and it did!!
At this point one thing had become very clear to me—our troops were ‘at risk’ not just from the enemy but from the bureaucratic decisions being handed down to our units. I felt a deep sense of responsibility for my troops—we were expecting them to do almost impossible things. The ‘mission’ is always the no. one concern of a Marine officer but closely allied with that ‘mission’ is the welfare of your troops. I began to have serious doubts about the mission and the way we were being ‘managed’—my no. one platoon concern became ‘staying alive’! I felt that my job was to evaluate every mission from that perspective and to do what was necessary to protect our troops from thoughtless, ill conceived directives from some clean, starched, paper pusher in some air conditioned tent ‘somewhere’! If necessary I would challenge a directive—respectfully—prepared to ‘request mast’ in order to let my thoughts be known.
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