Our Honor Board hearings were held in a stately conference room next to Smoke Hall. Inside the room, there were three long mahogany tables, where I sat alongside twelve other midshipmen. Directly ahead of us was a smaller, detached table behind which sat a distraught second class midshipman who had been accused of plagiarizing a term paper crucial to his final grade. Presumably he had been struggling with his grades for months, and when faced with the prospect of failure, he had copied entire passages verbatim from other sources to get a passing grade. “Guilty” or “not guilty” were the only conclusions the board was allowed. If guilty, the Commandant of Midshipmen, Adm. Sam Locklear, would decide the punishment. No one held any illusions; a second class midshipman found guilty of an honor violation had an excellent chance of being expelled from the Academy.
I was the honor chairman, and it was my duty to make sure this man’s peers asked the tough questions and ultimately made their decision according to the words of our Honor Concept. I felt the knot in my stomach tighten as I imagined myself in the accused’s shoes: What would I have done if faced with that potent mix of pride and fear of failure? Integrity is a virtue that is talked about in most leadership seminars as a critical trait. It is an attribute that defines a person’s character and behavior. It goes beyond not lying, not cheating, not stealing to serve as a guide to doing the right thing wholeheartedly. In short, it is an individual’s ideology. At the Academy, we tried our best to nurture integrity within ourselves; the honor education focused on the “me,” the individual, and my development as a person of integrity. Two sea tours in the Fleet, involving hundreds of watches for thousands of miles of ocean steaming, gives one time to think and to make a few big mistakes. What I learned from this experience is that successful leaders bring out integrity in others. Such leaders create a culture where the truth can readily be told.
On a moonless night in the Pacific, I struggled to stay awake through one of my first officer of the deck watches on USS John S. McCain (DDG 56). It had been a full day of drills, an hour or two of broken sleep, and then back to the bridge for the “reveille watch,” from 0200 to 0700. We were under way as part of our destroyer squadron’s group sail, during which all the ships in the force are put to sea for a series of exercises, to prepare for upcoming operations in the East China Sea. Each day featured an exchange of several officers and crew members to observe the operation from other ships in the squadron.
On this particular morning, the ships converged to close quarters before first light, put their small boats in the water, and conducted the personnel transfer. The radio crackled with the signal for each ship to close one another, and I ordered the conning officer to turn starboard to our appointed position in the darkness. The bridge was pitch-black, I could only see the outlines of those on watch, quietly focusing on their duties in order to make it through the long hours of the watch.
My quartermaster was diligently plotting our course and speed and entering them into a log. My junior officer of the deck walked over and examined the chart and radar every few minutes in the dim glow of red light. I knew they were all tired. The minutes before the first rays of sun reach above the horizon can last for what seems to be forever. This is the time when the human body reaches its nadir of energy. I had certainly reached mine, I thought, as I sipped the last, cold drops of the coffee I had poured myself hours before. Then the silence was broken by the radio chatter with new signal orders. I snapped at the other officers to write down the message quickly: “All ships ordered to close each other and take tight formation for personnel transfer.” I strained through my binoculars to see the red and green running lights of the ships converging in the dark Pacific night ahead of us.
It was 0455. The captain had asked the officer of the deck, me, to wake him up at 0500, prior to the personnel transfer. It was a tradition to give the boss a wake-up call, not because he needed to be reminded to wake up, but because he worked eighteen-hour days and rarely slept for more than four hours at a time. No matter the time of day, the captain is on call and responsible for the welfare of the ship, its crew, and our mission. I was being trusted as the officer of the deck to keep us safe while on watch.
I rehearsed and revised the report that I would give the captain when I called him. I wanted to sound confident instead of exhausted. I had been on board for a little more than a year. I was ahead in my qualification exams, already having qualified as an officer of the deck on the best Aegis destroyer in the Pacific Fleet. We had returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom to our homeport in Japan only months before and were already preparing to sail again, which was the tough but proud life of a sailor in the forward-deployed naval forces. I had picked up tons of valuable experience in driving my ship halfway around the world and back. The last thing I wanted was to fail my first real test when in charge on the bridge.
I woke the captain and reported: “Sir, the time is now 0500; the ship is on course 050 at 13 knots; we are 5,000 yards away from the guide, USS Curtis Wilbur, and are closing to our assigned station of 500 yards astern for the personnel transfer; there are three other ships moving to their assigned station in the screen formation” The captain grunted his approval and asked if everything was okay up there. “Yes, Sir,” I answered as confidently as I could.
The radio crackled again. The junior officer of the deck recorded a message that the ship ahead of us was turning to port, but clearly the ship was turning to starboard, its running light plainly visible and now only several thousand yards away. The ship directly off our port beam had started to turn as well. In an instant, I knew I had confused the identities of the ships around us as the formation grew tighter. It should have taken my watch team only moments to regroup, but we were now only focused on staying clear of collision. I looked at my conning officer, Ensign Cordray, still green and inexperienced after only three weeks on board. I felt the knot in my stomach and knew I was in over my head.
My first option was to muddle through the next few minutes and hope to recover situational awareness. My second option—the more humiliating of the two—was to call the captain to the bridge, admit I had lost “the bubble,” and face reprimand or worse. My mind protested. Hadn’t I just woken him with his wake-up call and told him everything was fine? It was decision time. I took a deep breath and picked up the phone. “Captain, I need you to come to the bridge now.”
Seconds later, the captain was standing by my side. From the bridge, we could see that we were now only hundreds of yards away from several other warships, but we couldn’t identify each ship because it was too dark to see their profiles and hull numbers. I expected a sharp reprimand right then and there for poor watch standing. Instead, something different transpired that helped shape my view of leadership, integrity, and what a command culture should be.
The captain listened to my explanation of what I knew and made a quick assessment. He then started quietly feeding me rudder orders to give to the conning officer. “Right 15 degrees rudder,” he said. I echoed. “All engines ahead one-third for seven knots,” he added. Again, I repeated. “Shift your rudder.” I called the last order and suddenly felt the ship moving out of danger and into a clear path. The captain could have easily given these orders himself in a show of frustration but instead chose to work through me. In doing so, he helped me regain control of the situation as well as the trust of my team. It was the confidence boost I needed. Like many commanding officers under the stress and anxiety of having ultimate responsibility, he could have berated me and sent me off the bridge. By not making an example of me that morning, he allowed me to learn from my failure. An experience such as that was all the junior officers needed to know that the captain was someone they could trust and rely on in a dangerous situation.
One of my responsibilities as strike officer on an Aegis destroyer was to maintain custody of classified documents. There was strict accountability for top-secret paperwork and a requirement that two people handle the information. After the documents were reviewed and understood, they were required to be destroyed. One night, after a weeklong exercise in which my team had been called upon at intervals around the clock, I sat in the ship’s radio shack next to the classified document shredder mulling a serious dilemma. The log showed that there should have been five documents in my possession, but the destruction record showed that only four had gone through the shredder. I asked my partner if he had seen the missing one, but he didn’t remember. I traced my steps, walking from shredder to safe, shredder to the desk, shredder to anywhere that I might have conceivably gone and everywhere in between. Had I written my notes in the log incorrectly? Could I have been that careless in my fatigue? I played it cool and walked out of the radio shack trying to keep an impassive face while I pondered what would happen if I could not find this paper: court-martial? Fort Leavenworth? Discharge? The voice of my chief petty officer played nonstop in my head, warning me about how careful I had to be with classified material at all times. The knot in my stomach grew tighter and tighter.
Lying awake in my officer rack at 0300, I knew I could go back into radio easily enough and alter the destruction log and end the whole sorry episode. I wanted to talk to someone, but once I disclosed this violation, I would lose control of the situation. I would also lose the opportunity to cover my tracks. If I decided to falsify the destruction log, no one would ever know. At 0600 that morning, I found myself standing in front of my department head telling the story of how I had mishandled a document. I had looked everywhere and had retraced my steps, but without success. Losing the piece of paper was like falling on my own sword. I could lose my job. Yet, I would lose my integrity, and all the trust that had been given to me, if I turned my carelessness into a lie and my actions later came to light.
The sum of my experiences at the Naval Academy helped in always guiding me toward the right action, no matter the consequences. The hours of training we received as nervous plebes that first summer, the countless case studies, the skits and scenarios we enacted for plebes when it was our turn to lead them, and the numerous honor boards that I witnessed had all deeply imprinted in my mind that violating my integrity would have irrevocable consequences. This, however, didn’t make swallowing my pride and admitting my mistakes and shortcomings any easier. Yet, my revelation was that the environment on USS John S. McCain encouraged integrity because I knew the commanding officer would deal with me fairly. Confidence and trust in the chain of command made doing the “right thing” not quite so hard.
Creating a command culture that encourages integrity in others does not mean ignoring mistakes and wrongdoing. John Paul Jones reminds us that a naval officer should “not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate, though at the same time, he should be quick and unfailing to distinguish error from malice, thoughtfulness from incompetency, and well meant shortcomings from heedless or stupid blunder.” In each of my cases, no one overlooked my failure. After that morning watch, the captain made it clear that he expected more from me as an officer of the deck. Following an investigation into the missing document that concluded that I had most likely shredded the document inadvertently, I received formal counseling to help ensure that I never again repeated that mistake. Each incident reaffirmed my belief that it is better to go forward with bad news than to bury it.
What my captain showed me in his actions was that the officer who was forthcoming with problems and forthright about his or her failures could still maintain others’ trust and continue to improve and excel. My captain viewed admitting one’s faults as a sign of maturity and of officer development. What’s more, that attitude was the bedrock of a solid, winning, and combat-proven destroyer crew. Our entire ship believed in integrity above all else. It was acceptable to strive for great things, and if something went wrong and one missed the mark, to grow from it.
Fleet experiences provided perspective on leadership that my four years as a midshipman had not. Annapolis espoused selflessness but rewarded individualism. If you made a mistake, you were responsible for the consequences. Even as midshipmen honor chairman, my development of integrity had been all about me—my personal choices and the negative consequences if I failed to live up to the Honor Concept. One’s grades and push-ups score dictated one’s own success, not the performance of subordinates. At sea, and in life, the performance of the team is the metric for excellence. After a year on a destroyer, and earning my salt at sea, I learned to use my own integrity as an example to foster the integrity of others.