by LTC Liam Walsh
“Sir, we just found live rounds on one of our trailers. We are gathering more information now.” I received this message from my Battalion Executive Officer at 4:30PM on our second day in “The Box.” The Box is an immersive training area, complete with cities, civilians, and enemy combatants, meant to provide U.S. Army units with realistic combat training. We had just transitioned from a live fire exercise into a force on force exercise at our Joint Readiness Training Center rotation, which required us to switch from live ammunition to blanks. Finding live rounds meant we hadn’t been thorough enough when making the switch, and that our soldiers were at risk of getting injured or killed during training. Nothing was going right. I had been sitting on a log with my commander when I got the news, and felt a lump in my throat as I prepared to tell them how we had messed up yet again.
It was the final straw in a series of events that, when compiled, indicated an organization on the verge of collapse. Over the previous 30 hours we’d lost a rifle, had three negligent discharges, had a $5M vehicle catch fire, and been in constant direct and indirect contact with the “enemy” forces. I was at my wit’s end. In my 18 months in command, I’d seen the battalion perform time and time again—including a wildly successful rotation at the National Training Center (NTC) just over a year prior. At NTC, we’d had the most successful urban attack they had seen in 18 unit rotations—yet here we were, struggling to do the most basic tasks. I felt broken and defeated. That night, the battalion walked across two rivers and caught the enemy by surprise. Our Soldiers performed heroically and it looked like we would finally have a win. Then during actions on the objective, two of my rifle companies were completely destroyed. We’d failed. I’d failed.
A few hours later I sat in our first After Action Review (AAR), unable to speak, holding back tears in my eyes and thinking through the raw emotion of what had been, by all measurable metrics, an abject failure as a battalion. It hurt. I questioned everything about what I’d done for the last 18 months in command. I felt that maybe I’d fooled myself into thinking we were better than we were, and we were now being exposed as a unit that couldn’t fight. I was being exposed as a leader who couldn’t push through adversity. For the first time I could remember in a very long time, I felt sorry for myself. As the AAR wrapped up, our Division’s Deputy Commanding General got up to speak. He noted that things were not going how we’d hoped, but that we had to keep going. We had to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We had Soldiers to lead and those Soldiers needed us. He then said two words that shook me back into reality:
“Move Forward.”
It was brilliant in its simplicity. Keep moving to the enemy. Keep getting better. Stop thinking about what happened in the past. Just move forward.
That was the turning point for me. The self-doubt and self-pity I felt wasn’t helping. I had almost 600 Soldiers in the fight who needed a commander to move them forward for the next 10+ days of the rotation. As my Sergeant Major and I drove back to our main command post, I kept saying those two words over to myself in my head: “Move forward. Move forward.”
As things tend to eventually, we started to do better. The rotation remained hard, but we grew and learned, we fought, and we began to mix wins in with our losses. From that experience, I came to anchor myself to the idea of moving forward having implications across more than just combat. As I typed this piece thinking back on the rotation, I felt compelled to share some of the lessons I took from my own personal failures and how I reacted to adversity as a leader.
The Power of “Yet.”
My brigade commander challenged us to think of the power of “yet.” “We may not have mastered digital fires. Yet.” “We may not have beaten the OPFOR. Yet.” This simple mechanism to look at every obstacle we faced as an opportunity rather than a challenge helped me move forward more than any other method I could have used. I’d use it in our Battle Update Brief with the staff in the mornings, highlighting things we would still accomplish. I’d pull company commanders in and remind them that we still had time on the clock and a mission to get done. During every setback, I found myself going back to the story from Ulysses Grant at the Battle of Shiloh, when William Sherman remarked “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” and Grant, unmoved, took a pull from his cigar and exclaimed, “Yes, lick ‘em tomorrow though.” Move Forward. Lick ‘em tomorrow. We haven’t won “yet.” A good friend of mine told me after the rotation that when he was a squadron commander he considered positivity as a pacing item–a piece of equipment that is so important to a unit’s success that its status is tracked separately and above all other pieces of equipment. He couldn’t be more accurate; the power of positive thinking as a commander in combat (and in life) is infectious and cannot be overstated.
Leaders’ Role in Positive Affirmation.
“Hell of a fight Liam. I would take you to combat…No hesitation. I would trust my kids under your charge. Keep it up.” On the ride back from that first AAR, my brigade commander sent me that message. I felt like an abject failure as a battalion commander—most of my organization had gotten killed, we’d failed to accomplish the mission, we’d lost sensitive items (we did eventually find the rifle), and we’d brought live ammo into a situation where we were not supposed to have it. We just couldn’t get out of our own way. I’d let myself go where no leader should go—I felt sorry for myself. Yet, when I was at my lowest, my boss recognized that I needed a win. The impact was immeasurable. A day or two later, one of our unit’s “coaches”–known as OC/T–approached me and said “Sir, I know you guys are getting told about how bad you’re doing. I have to tell you that’s complete B.S. and it makes me angry. You guys are doing a great job, and your Soldiers need to know it.” I looked at him squarely and said, “thank you, I needed to hear that.”
Leaders have a responsibility to deal in positivity, and my brigade commander and OC/T modeled that. It made a world of difference to me to enable me to move forward. During a particularly harsh battalion AAR a few days later, one of my subordinate leaders bore the brunt of negative feedback. I could tell that she took it personally. I pulled her aside, looked her in the eyes, and said, “you are doing a good job. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have you next to me everywhere I go. Let it go. I need you to keep doing what you’re doing. It will be okay. Move forward.” At my lowest I needed positive affirmation, and because of the modelling my commander showed me, I hope that I was able to provide it to another officer who was doubting her professional competence in a challenging environment. Leaders must deal in positivity. It makes more of a difference than you could imagine keeping you moving forward.
Take Care of Yourself to Take Care of Others
I slept 20 minutes in the first 72 hours of this training event. As things continued to go poorly, I placed more and more of the burden of the battalion on myself. I was combat ineffective, but I kept pushing. I’ve made a career out of gutting through challenges with pure perseverance (I did 9 months in Eastern Afghanistan as a Brigade Operations Officer sleeping 3-4 hours a night). One night early in the rotation, I was on the radio and it was clear to anyone listening that I was not functioning as a human being, let alone a battalion commander. I pulled back into our command post and my Sergeant Major directly confronted me and said “sir, please, you need to sleep. For all of us.” I muscled my way through a scheduled brief, providing zero constructive feedback to my staff, and then crashed hard in the back of my Stryker for a few hours. When I awoke at three in the morning, I was revived. I went back to my team and provided clear feedback and guidance that I’d failed to provide previously in my sleep deprived state. It made for a terrible night for my staff because I’d failed to take care of myself and couldn’t provide guidance. However, now with my regained ability to provide guidance, they were able to build a strong plan. It seems simple that you need to sleep, but more leaders than I care to count fall into the same trap as I did and think they can just power through. You can’t. There’s a reason why all airline safety briefs instruct you to put your oxygen mask on yourself first before helping others in the event of an emergency–if you don’t ensure you’re safe, you have no way to help others. To move forward, you need to sleep and you must find time for whatever “wins” you personally need. I learned the hard lesson that if I had taken care of myself first, I would have been a more effective leader to begin with and wouldn’t have needed that hard reset. It’s hard, but leaders need to take care of themselves to take care of others. It too is how we move forward.
Moving Forward
My rotation at JRTC as a battalion commander was the hardest thing I’ve done as a leader in the Army. Harder than Ranger School. Harder than four combat deployments. It was incessant and relentless. It did what the JRTC is designed to do—prepare you for the hardest day of ground combat. Looking back on the rotation, I feel an immense amount of pride in the personal growth I felt as well as the growth I saw in my team. Nothing I share here is new or novel, but I felt compelled to share my experiences, as a battalion commander with almost 19 years in the Army, on how I was able to anchor myself to a mantra—move forward —and find a way to persevere through hard things. If I need these reminders to operate at my best, my hope is that across the Army there’s a Second Lieutenant or a Sergeant or a Company Commander who is failing at something and taking it personally who can take some solace in my experience. We will all fail, it’s how you react that matters. You are the ones in the arena. What you do every day for your Soldiers matters immensely. Provide your subordinates with positive reinforcement. Recognize the opportunities that exist in challenges. Take care of yourself to take care of others. When the cards are down—Move forward.
LTC Liam Walsh currently commands 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment “Manchu,” 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. An infantry officer, he has served in light, Stryker, and security force assistance brigade formations, with four combat deployments to the Middle East and multiple operational deployments to Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific. He received his undergraduate degree in Military History at the United States Military Academy and has a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
