EVERY TEAM I’VE BEEN ON—AND THERE HAVE BEEN A lot of them—has trained hard. And I trained hard right alongside them and usually harder.
I’ve enjoyed incredible successes alongside teammates, as well as humiliating defeats. I’ve been on military teams where we got the job done—“mission accomplished,” as we say, even though the winners and losers weren’t always immediately clear. The SEALs could be like that. Congress is definitely like that. A military commitment or a political movement is a process with a lot of moving parts. Your team has control of only a small portion of the big picture.
The great thing about sports is that on any given day there’s typically one clear winner and one clear loser. I happen to subscribe to that old saw, “Ties are like kissing your sister,” which is an intentionally disturbing concept. Either you’re in it to win or why else play? (Though there’s always an exception to every rule, but I’ll get to that in a bit.)
For now, I want to talk about some flat-out successes.
I was on the track team at Whitefish High School. I ran the 100-, 220-, and 440-yard dashes, which are, of course, nominally team activities; mostly, they’re individual events. As I got stronger and heavier, the distance got shorter and my competitiveness at the top bracket lessened. I made it to the state finals by running the 100-yard dash in 10.2 seconds, which is pretty fast for a big Montana kid.
The determination I developed as a kid to always do better was great training. You do things as a kid instinctively before you understand what “ego” or “pride” are. For many of us, the first place we understand that is in physicality. I’m not an anthropologist, but I’ll bet it has something to do with survival. Back in the early days of civilization, being able to hunt better was more important than remembering how many ribs a woolly mammoth had. Even today, kids learn to walk before they learn how to count. Physicality is in our genes.
I’m not saying that education is less important; it’s not. My point here is that one follows the other naturally. Lifting weights, running track, being aware of yards to go for a first down—you learn to “learn” by doing things. Whatever a teacher tells you is reinforced, really burned into your brain, by execution. Consider broken field running in football: “Hey, that wasn’t a shorter way to go. Oh, that’s what the math teacher meant by square of the length of the hypotenuse being equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides …”
So I knew from an early age that if I wanted to play sports to the best of my ability and really make a contribution, I had to train harder than the guy next to me. The simple fact was that there were other kids who were more skilled than I was or who had more natural ability. I couldn’t control that. But I could control whether or not I was the best-trained athlete I could be. I was the first kid in the gym on school mornings. When I was allowed to drive, I would get to the gym early in the morning—before the coach showed up. I would wait in the car or do calisthenics in the parking lot. It became so routine that the coach ended up giving me the keys. Fall mornings in Montana are beautiful, but the temperature is usually below freezing. Workouts are a great way to beat back the effects of the weather.
Later on, when my SEAL training included cold-weather endurance, I thought my background gave me a leg up. Between the glacier-fed waters around Whitefish and having to wait in my car for someone to open the gym, the cold wasn’t my enemy but my ally! When you “embrace the beast,” any beast, you control it instead of the other way around.
But my biggest successes came with our football team—the Bulldogs. I played guard on offense and strong safety on defense. I would have been a great tight end had I not had bricks for hands. What I did have was speed, strength, and desire.
The Bulldogs were undefeated in 1979, which was my senior year. And we beat a pretty tough team—Powell County High School in Deer Lodge—14–7 for the Class A state football championship. They were good, but our offensive line averaged 230 pounds, which was big for high school at the time. Our quarterback, Eric Smith, was six foot five and solid, with a great arm. He’s now in management at Boeing.
That was the Bulldogs’ first championship. We didn’t earn our second one until 2015. That first championship year, 1979, was very special: we had Smith and some great receivers, like Frank Wright, and great coaching. Sometimes little cities and towns happen to have one or two years of phenomenal athletes and coaching. For me, that experience was the first solid link of winning and teamwork.
I got something else out of high school football: a chance to train under Bob Raeth. He was with Whitefish High for only three years, but he gave the school that first football championship season. He not only sharpened my game, our game, but he taught me the importance of leadership. A championship season is a combination of factors. Here’s more math for you: great coaching, great talent, and the support of the people in the stands equals motivation. Motivation equals success. That’s not just true in sports or in the military. It’s true in every aspect of life.
And by the way, I cannot overemphasize the value of knowing that a town or population supports you. Back in the 1960s, the widespread and vocal public disapproval for the Vietnam War and the simultaneous ambivalence or downright dislike for the men who fought it helped to create disillusionment in the field and disenfranchisement when the warriors came home.
Contrast that with today and the omnipresent and heartfelt shirts and banners and bumper stickers declaring “I support our troops.” Americans have recognized that saluting our military men and women is not a partisan issue. It doesn’t mean you are for war. It means that you do not take for granted the fact that one soldier (or one police officer or one firefighter, for that matter) is prepared to step into danger for you.
So, talent, motivation, support—all are needed, inseparably, for any successful endeavor. Bob Raeth understood that. He viewed his players as both students and athletes who could be shaped into a team. Being successful on the field also meant you had a responsibility to lead by example off the field. From Coach Raeth I learned about the importance of being a part of a team in order to accomplish greatness and the duty and obligation expected of every teammate.
The personal gain would have been enough, but I cannot overstate the importance of the public support I experienced when Whitefish High School named me to its Hall of Fame for athletics and leadership. By now you’ve probably guessed that, for me, high school wasn’t all about athletics. I pulled nearly straight As and graduated with a 3.85 average, which was good enough for third in the class. I was class president my freshman, junior, and senior years. I missed out during my sophomore year because … well, it’s not always about competency but also popular message and focus. I took the job for granted and got beat. I learned from that kick in the can that I didn’t like losing. I would learn to like it even less when it mattered far, far more, but for now it was good to know how it tasted. I’m not telling you something you don’t know; everyone who has ever lost—at work, at love, at cards, at anything—understands that you do not want that to happen again. Ever.
I was in the Boy Scouts of America, which I loved. I’d started in Troop 17, which was a big deal in Montana—it was one of the oldest troops in the state. It was established in 1919, just nine years after the Boy Scouts got started and three years after Congress formally chartered the organization. The Boy Scouts of America has gotten a lot of bad press over the years because of their now-abandoned stand on gay scoutmasters. I want to give them some good press here, one that is of particular importance to Montanans and, increasingly, to all Americans.
The BSA has always been at the forefront of environmental awareness: You put out fires you build. You leave a campsite cleaner and better than when you found it. You respect wildlife and habitat. This is in addition to the cliché of helping elderly citizens cross a street—which isn’t a bad quality either, this idea that we should slow down and help one another.
Scouting gave me an early taste of leadership. I attended the 1973 Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho and could easily swim a mile. I had learned how to cook, camp, and use a compass. During our 1974 Scout-O-Rama in Flathead, Troop 17 built a rope-and-pole footbridge I’d designed from scratch in about six hours. That bridge would have supported a whole Scout troop wanting to cross a stream or chasm, and it was the first real sense of accomplishment that I remember. I was twelve when I had the opportunity to design it and lead our entire troop in constructing it. Not only did I earn merit badges in the Boy Scouts, but I learned a lot during my Eagle Scout service project. It was the first time I had ever looked at the environment with a critical eye. I had grown up on Whitefish River and never really thought of it as anything more than a place to swim, row the boat, or catch crayfish. The project I chose was to follow the banks of the river and look at the sources of any pollution or runoff that was coming into the river. I took pictures of the railroad’s oil holding ponds and looked at how the ponds of oil would overflow into the river. I looked at the storm drains dumping into the river, took soil samples, and proposed solutions to the degree a young student could. When an old logger downstream was mowing his lawn and caused a spark which caused the river to catch on fire, I knew the source. The project promoted a lifetime of conservation values. I am not the only one that the Boy Scouts have had a positive influence on. Presidents and leaders from almost every aspect of American culture have been involved in scouting. Yet, despite all the good the Boy Scouts of America have done for millions of young adults, the organization is being assaulted and vilified for its intolerance.
Scouting also taught me about the conservation policies of one of our greatest presidents Teddy Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt and his sidekick, Gifford Pinchot, who perhaps had the greatest influence in establishing the conservation ethic enjoyed by millions of Americans today. Pinchot advocated for planned use and renewal of natural resources, and Roosevelt took action by wrestling 230 million acres away from timber and railroad interests and placing the land under federal protection. It was Roosevelt who had the courage to look into the future and use his powers under the Antiquities Act to preserve and protect public lands for the benefit of generations to come. Both Roosevelt and Pinchot understood that public lands are best managed for multiple use, and natural resources are to be used for the benefit of greater public good, not just for a select group of special interests. The same president who established one hundred and fifty national forests, fifty-one bird reservations, five national parks, and eighteen monuments is also quoted as saying, “Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”1 Planned use did not mean “no use” but rather “managing use” of our resources based on scientific methodology and sound public policy. Roosevelt agreed that some public land deserved greater protections as advocated by preservationists such as John Muir—where man is an “observer,” not a “manager.” But the public lands and the vast resources they contain were to be managed for the benefit of everyone and not just the select few. As a result, the model of multiple use and planned natural resource management has been the bedrock of traditional and sustainable conservation public policy for more than one hundred years. Recently, however, multiple use has come under fire as special interest groups have misused policy to successfully block resource management, reduce public access, and even lock out local communities from being a part of the land use process. Lawsuits have stopped timber sales from removing dead trees, roads have been closed, and even bikes have been banned from public lands. Our elderly and disabled no longer are able to access lands, as paths and trails are only for those able to backpack in or ride on horseback. Catastrophic fires creating billions of dollars of damage in 2015 alone ravaged critical habitats, threatened watersheds, and placed communities at risk. By government figures, more than seventy-one million acres of US Forest Service land requires treatment to remove dead and dying timber.2 Fire seasons are becoming longer, and the fires are so hot from excessive fuel loads that even the soil is being sterilized and depleted of valuable nutrients necessary for regrowth. In the words of Dale Bosworth, the former chief of the US Forest Service, “We do not have a fire problem on our nation’s forests, we have a land management problem.”3 It is a tragedy that can only be solved by prioritizing collaboration and returning to policies that promote healthy forests and lands through management based on sound science and practical application.
It is ironic that it is the intolerance of both sides of an argument that often drives dissention and divides communities. It’s not that the issue in question does not matter or isn’t important; it’s that one issue should not overshadow everything else. When it does—and, boy, is this a lesson for politics—you solidify the support among fellow believers but alienate those who are moderates or who may have valid reasons to disagree with you. You may win your argument, but the ill will and resentment you create will come back to bite you. Take it from a SEAL who did a lot of local-focused community-relations work: diplomacy, good diplomacy, strong diplomacy (which isn’t the same as making a bad nuclear deal with Iran) is always preferable to out-and-out warfare.
The Republican Party better figure out this lesson too. You grow the party by recruiting others to your side, not by exclusionary tactics that create division and draw lines where there were none before. The Republican Party needs to rebuild the Grand Old Party that was once an inclusive coalition of American values of small government, individual liberty, and opportunity for all. Today’s GOP must include conservatives, independents, and, yes, those Democrats who see their party of Jefferson and Jackson moving too far toward socialism or worse. Closing the door to new voters and supporting mechanisms that would allow elections to be determined by political insiders or elites only serve to create a permanent minority divested of the general voter loyalty. Elections are about winning ideas and not excluding others from participating. Political parties on both sides must place higher purpose over political positioning and understand that a role of the minority is to offer constructive criticism and present a better solution, as well as to compliment when the opposition fulfills its obligation of higher purpose. Similiarly, the role of the majority is to include good ideas from the minority into policy and accept honest criticism without retribution.