To add to the conversation, and digress from the posts before me, one thing that grabbed me was the sheer anxiety that LT McDonough felt along his journey to Vietnam. In McDonough’s own thoughts, he believed he was far more suited to combat than many others. He was confident in his physical abilities (boxing), which was supplemented by his mental abilities while being virtually starved and sleep-deprived at Ranger School. He grew up in the Bronx with a father that was a WWII veteran and had 22 years of enlisted service. His learning of tactical and technical skills at West Point outpaced most, but even though he held all of these abilities, he was still anxious and unsure of what Vietnam would bring.

While at West Point, one of the only things he and his peers would absorb were the numbers of dead Americans being named off in the news (approximately 400 per week). He always wondered if he would just become another statistic, if the men he led would just become another statistic. McDonough knew that the terrain and climate during Jungle School in Panama would be somewhat similar to Vietnam, but he knew that Vietnam would lay upon him thousands of uncontrollable circumstances that included both terrain and climate. Then as leaves for Vietnam, being pampered on a corporate plane stewardesses, he finally realizes that he has no idea what is about to happen to him or his men, that he’ll be consumed by uncontrollable circumstances.

When he speaks with the various other soldiers he comes across, namely the soldier with the 173 Airborne patch and Tom Rolfe, McDonough’s anxiety seems to only deepen. The soldier with the 173 Airborne patch enjoyed killing even though he lost many of his friends, yet it seemed as though all he enjoyed was killing. This made McDonough wonder if he would ever end up like this soldier. A bloodlust so uncontollable that you can’t even seem to hold a mildly normal conversation without mentioning killing. Moreover, when McDonough was speaking with Tom Rolfe, Rolfe could only talk about his family. On every mission, Rolfe would basically be extremely reserved and not do everything he could to help his soldiers because he was worried about what would happen to his family. This made McDonough, even more so than the other soldier, feel anxious and question his motives because McDonough himself had a family that was counting on him to come home.

While I think it is valuable to factor in multiple viewpoints to come to a decision, you can’t place your own feelings above someone else’s when you’re responsible for an entire platoon. Your soldiers are counting on you to create an outline and adapt to complete the mission whilst using your leadership skills and composure to bring home as many of your soldiers as possible. Someone like Rolfe failed to do this because of the thought of his family, and the other soldier sank too deep into combat because all he thought about was the mission and what it required to complete it. Being a platoon leader, especially during combat, requires a balance. A balance between the mission and the capabilities of your force, but it also requires emotional intelligence. You must be able to understand your own emotions, along with your soldiers’ emotions, and then be able to properly react to them in order to be more effective. If you are more worried about your family than your soldiers and the task at hand, whilst waiting in the wings while your soldiers take the brunt of the contact, you aren’t effectively understanding your soldiers’ emotions of fear, anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty, thus, you aren’t providing a sort of beacon of morale and motivation to complete the mission. If you don’t see that one of your soldiers is withdrawn and can’t stop speaking about killing, or that they enjoy killing, you don’t understand that their personality has been absorbed by chaos and now you have virtually no chance of being able to effectively respond to it.

Very respectfully,

Steven