A haunting memory from a former job

This article in the Washington Post underscored the most enduring memory of my time spent advising the North Carolina National Guard.

I was, once, the senior advisor to a tank battalion in the North Carolina Army National Guard, which deployed to Iraq in early 2004. I was at Pope Air Force Base watching them board the airplane that would take them into theater. I had no statutory obligation to be there when they departed, but I felt I owed them that obligation as someone who had prepared them to go in harm's way during the 18 months prior to that deployment.

The one memory that frames that event was when the troops, after several hours of wait, moved out to the plane. It was night, and as I was standing in the hangar watching them walk out, to my right a meter or two away, I heard a girl, maybe three years old, calling out "daddy, daddy, daddy" to the flashing lights on the flight line.

It was loud, between the crowd of family members and the din of the jet engines, but I heard that girl's three words clearer than anything else that night.

I would train a rifle company from the 116th Infantry, the unit mentioned in the WaPo article, a few months later as they prepared to deploy to Afghanistan.

As a planner, I've written orders that, in the final analysis, probably killed some of the people who had to execute them. That girl's three words are a memory I keep close to understand why the quality of the work I do is so critically important.

Another take on this story at The Smirking Cynic.