Go to the Basement
May 2005
Even though I felt that I was getting back to normal, smiling and laughing like my old self, my brain and my psychomotor skills still sometimes showed some of the aftermath of my time in Abu Ghraib. With no warning, my brain would involuntarily go on pause. To cope, I busied myself with administrative matters of the department while my colleagues, staff, friends, and students attempted on many occasions to get me to talk about what happened at Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t until May 2005, while I was teaching a psychology workshop to a group of young Army captains in our training program, that I seemed to come out of the mental fog. In my time away from classroom instruction, I started organizing my thoughts on Abu Ghraib, trying to bring some order to my memories and to find the lessons that might help other soldiers and psychologists. I was reluctant to talk with anyone about those experiences and what I had learned, but I knew that it was important to document them.
One day I was about halfway through my planned classroom discussion when I asked if anyone had any questions. A young Army captain by the name of Jessica Schuster from Minnesota surprised me and spoke up. Captain Schuster was like many young female Army officers. She was a former goalie on a girls’ hockey team, frequently lifted weights, and she had a get-down-to-business approach and style.
“Sir, I got an e-mail from one of my professors back at Minnesota and he told me that you were the guy sent to Abu Ghraib to put procedures in place to fix that horrible tragedy,” she said. “Colonel James, our year here is winding down. Sir . . . so, even though you haven’t talked about this much, my question is . . . sir, what leadership principles did you take away from Abu Ghraib?”
It wasn’t the first time I had been asked this question, of course, and I was used to just brushing it off. I could have easily demurred and returned to the day’s lesson, but for some reason my mind was receptive when the query came from Captain Schuster. At that moment, my brain and my memory seemed to start working again and in a very fluid way I was able to organize my thoughts. I felt like I was finally ready to tell someone about Abu Ghraib. I felt I finally understood it enough that I could offer some useful lessons. I don’t know why it happened at that moment, but it did, and I decided to answer the captain’s question.
I thought for a moment about the notes I had been making on lessons from Abu Ghraib, and then I turned, looked Captain Schuster right in the eyes, and whispered, “Schuster, you got to be there.”
She responded in a kind of a confused way. “Sir, what did you say? I didn’t hear you, sir.”
I repeated myself, louder, so the whole group could hear. “You have to be there. Captain Schuster, as a leader you need to always remember to be there. Never allow yourself to be a vacant, distant, and emotionally detached leader.”
I explained that there were many reports of the brigade commander, the post commander, and the task force commanding general of Abu Ghraib as simply being vacant leaders. They weren’t there.
“Sir, forgive me for asking something stupid and dumb, but Colonel, I really need to get in the weeds of it because when I graduate from here, I may never have another chance to talk with you about this again, sir,” she continued, speaking with an intensity I had not heard from her before. “Sir, why is this so important?”
“Well, Schuster, if I’m not there as a leader that will leave a message to my subordinates that I’m gone, not only physically but most importantly it sends the message that I left the mission, and I don’t care about the mission,” I told her. “When that happens we may as well pack up our shit and go home.”
She looked stunned, like she didn’t expect such a strong answer from me.
“Captain Schuster, you and your student colleagues need to hear what I’m about to say next,” I said, glancing around to the other attendees, who were now paying attention. “You gotta go to the basement.”
I heard one of the other students, Captain Jones, whisper, “Huh?” as she looked to the person next to her. “Go to the basement? What’s he talking about? Did he get hit on the head in Iraq?”
She didn’t think I had heard her and was a bit embarrassed when I looked directly at her and said, “Yes, I did get hit in the head. But nevertheless, Captain, you still need to look in the basement every chance you get.”
Nobody in the room seem to get my meaning yet, and Jones spoke up for the confused but intrigued. “Sir, what do you mean by ‘going to the basement’?”
“Well, gang, here’s the deal,” I said. “As a leader, you need to learn the value of getting up off your asses and looking under every rock when people least expect it, and going down into the basement and checking under every rock of every building. Then and only then will you be able to figure out what the hell is going on in an organization. More importantly, your troops will respect you for it. One of the problems in most organizations is that rarely will you find its senior leaders getting down and dirty to the lowest level and looking in every closet and every basement of every building.”
“Sir, what’s that going to tell you?” Captain Schuster asked.
“Easy answer, Captain,” I said. “Number one, it will tell you where the skeletons are, and number two, it will tell you where all the broken crap is hidden. Number three is most important. It will tell your subordinate troops that you have a vested interest in their organization and let them know that they can’t hide anything from you. Remember, Captain, your troops will judge you by your deeds, not your bullshit words.”
“But sir,” Schuster responded, “would it be better to have this as a planned inspection schedule?”
“Hell no,” I told her. “Good leaders are available twenty-four seven. On many occasions at Abu Ghraib, I would simply go walking around the compound and just see what I could find. I would find doors and gates unsecured and guards sleeping on duty. They’d see me walking around and act like they’d never seen a colonel before, because in that place, many of them hadn’t. No wonder we had so many goddamn escapes every month. Sometimes the best way to figure out how well an organization runs may very well be to show up at 0200 and ask a bunch of questions to the first private or young officer you come across. And while you’re there, it would be a good idea to just sit down and have a cup of coffee with a bunch of the soldiers and let them ask you questions about the mission, your goals, and the Army. And guess what, you’d be amazed at how much you can learn about what works and what’s broken. The added benefit would be that these young troops will love the hell out of you and respect you no end for taking the time to reach down, talk with them, and ask them how they feel about something.”
I paused for a breath and realized that the young officers were intensely interested in what I was saying. Damn, I think they’re getting it, I thought.
“Captain Schuster, I need to also add that, as a leader, you need to have a very, very clear set of behaviors that are the dos and don’ts for your organization. In other words, they should be posted everywhere, what behaviors will be accepted in our organization and what is clearly, flat-out not to be tolerated.”
I talked with them about the quote from Colonel Banks as I was leaving Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for Abu Ghraib. Banks had told me, “Larry, remember people will do what their leaders allow them to do.” I explained that Morgan told me on many occasions that the rules had to be clear at all times. Unlike most psychologists, the colonel had served as a company commander of a forward-deployed unit in the first Gulf War back in 1990–91. He knew that a good leader has to set clear boundaries and that when any soldier crossed the line, it had to be dealt with immediately.
“This meant that if the infraction was not dealt with by the leaders, soldiers would continue to do it because it was allowed by the leaders in charge. And as a result, behavior would begin to slowly drift away from the SOP,” I said. “That’s a lot of what I found when I got to Abu Ghraib.”
“Sir,” Captain Schuster said, “isn’t that the same as a vision statement?”
“Heck no,” I said. “Look on the wall in our conference room and you’ll see the general’s vision for this hospital, but in that vision statement nothing is said about what important behaviors will and will not be tolerated. That’s the message that needs to get out to soldiers through meetings, handouts, small cards, e-mail postings, whatever you can think of to get it in front of them. More importantly for the soldiers, everyone in the command needs to know what’s not going to be tolerated—things like DUIs, sexual assault, and spouse abuse. Early on in Abu Ghraib, all the soldiers I have talked to who were there when the abuses happened told me that there were no rules. It was like the Wild, Wild West.”
I was pleased to see the captains were tracking with me. They were getting it, and that encouraged me to open up more.
“The tragedy of this was that while Abu Ghraib was morally falling apart, the leadership was not there to take the necessary corrective action,” I said. “Captain Schuster, it will be critical to your operation to have active attorneys lay out the rules of engagement. These attorneys will help these young soldiers and officers interpret the Uniform Code of Military Justice and how to interpret the rules of engagement and what conduct is appropriate. Captain, I want to come back to something I said earlier, and that is how important it is to be there. By this I mean living, eating, sleeping, and praying with your soldiers. One of the problems I saw in Iraq was that there were approximately thirty-five generals living in the lap of luxury at Camp Victory. These generals were living in actual palaces that Saddam Hussein and his sons once owned. Now, as for myself, whenever I went to Camp Victory, I slept in a tent with privates and I rode around post on the same public buses that all the other privates and sergeants rolled around post on. Keep in mind that if you want to know what in the hell is really going on at a command, talk to the privates and sergeants. I never learned a damn thing by hanging out with colonels.
“The generals, on the other hand, were chauffeured from point A to point B in air-conditioned vehicles and would return home at night to the air-conditioned palaces that were built and owned by Saddam. The average soldier, on the other hand, slept in hot-ass tents and went to sleep every night worrying if a mortar would come through the top of the tent. I went to sleep many nights in Iraq in tents, saying my prayers, and, as I dozed off, would ask the Lord to take care of my wife if I got blown up in the night. Captain, I heard a famous saying once but I don’t remember who said it. It goes like this: ‘A leader who stays in the rear will take it in the rear.’”
The captains chuckled a bit at that line, but they were still paying attention.
“Most of these young soldiers literally slept in their underwear because they either did not live in an air-conditioned tent or the air-conditioning was usually broken. Dehydration was a very, very common problem on convoys for many junior soldiers because the vehicles were not air-conditioned. Now, yeah, war is hell and all that, and you can’t whine about not having air-conditioning, right? But you know, the generals’ dehydration was never a problem because they always drove around in air-conditioned Humvees.
“Eat where your soldiers eat. Sleep where your soldiers sleep. Pray where your soldiers pray. And drive in the same crappy vehicles your soldiers drive. Be out front and do whatever you ask your soldiers to do. This will garner their respect, and most importantly, it will always position you to know what the hell is going on in your organization.”
I was going through my Abu Ghraib notes in my head and for a minute I wished I had brought them with me. But then I realized I didn’t need them, that I knew these lessons as well as I knew anything.
“Now, listen to what I’m about to say. You need to write this down. I’m going to give you eight rules to lead by. These are the big lessons I brought home from Abu Ghraib, and you can use them no matter what type of an organization you’re in. Here you go: Rule #1 is ‘You got to be there.’ Don’t hide like a chickenshit bastard. Be available at all times. The leaders at Abu Ghraib hid and allowed rogue soldiers to commit atrocities. I can’t tell you enough times how important it is for you to be there with your soldiers. Eat at their tables in the chow hall, sleep where they sleep, everything. You got to be with them and they will love you for it.
“Rule #2 is ‘Be seen.’ When leaders are not seen by their subordinates, they will begin to drift away from following the rules. You’ll have to show up unannounced at all hours of the day and night.
“Rule #3 is ‘You must be involved.’ Captain, as I said a few minutes ago, you must be everywhere in the organization. Along the way there, talk with and have fun with the lowest-ranking people you meet. The privates, the secretaries, the janitors, those who feel as though they’re the nobodies of society. That’s where you will really build morale and turn a failed mission into a successful one.
One of the young captains asked, “Sir, why do I ever need to talk to a janitor?”
“Captain,” I said, “you’re not tracking with me yet. An old aunt of mine told me a long time ago, ‘Take care of those who take care of you.’ If you just be kind to that janitor and ask him every day how he’s doing, your office will be spotless all the time. And even better, Captain, he’ll tell you when some shit is really screwed up. That guy will cover your flank all the time.
“Rule #4 is ‘Be bold.’ Make the right, hard moral calls. Your troops will love you and respect you for it. We all love being around a leader who has a big set of balls. That’s the person we all want to follow. Be bold and lead.
“Folks, Rule #5 for me is ‘Be passionate’ in everything you do. Your soldiers who work for you will see it in your eyes, and more importantly, Captain Schuster, they will feel it in you. Your passion will spread to the rest of your unit like a wildfire. Some of the officers I met at Abu Ghraib seemed to operate with a management style like that of a guy who owned a funeral home. They had a job to do, but they did it with very little passion and they would move about the post in a very emotionally detached way. A blind man could see that these type of leaders didn’t want to be there.
“Rule #6 is ‘Be fun.’ You guys know how I am. I’m always cutting up with folks, telling stories, having a good time. That’s the kind of colonel I am.”
“Sir, we always know when you’re in your office,” one captain offered. “I can always hear your laugh all the way down by my office.”
I looked Captain Johnson in the eyes with a wide grin on my face and said, “Son, you got it. Nobody likes being around a mean, nasty boss. Not only is it not fun, but it drains your energy and you just don’t want to come to work. It ain’t fun. You need to have a blast at work, and it will inspire those around you to have fun as well. As a leader, you set the tone. If you’re miserable, they’re miserable. If you’re motivated and passionate, they will be too.
“So Rule #7, gang, is ‘Be energetic,’” I continued. “Do whatever you do with energy and people will want to be around you. It will be infectious.
“Rule #8 is ‘Be clear.’ Everyone who works for you must at all times know the rules of engagement. This has to be overtrained. Remember, soldiers will do what their leaders allow them to do. If you allow it, a soldier will do it. Thus, you better be clear on what are the appropriate and inappropriate standards of conduct.
“Ladies and gentlemen, now you got it. That’s what I learned at Abu Ghraib and these are the things I live by. Our time for this morning is up. I’ll meet with y’all next week.”
As I got up from the table, Captain Schuster said, “Colonel, would you mind if I ask one last question, sir?” I told her it would have to be quick.
“Sir, are you the same person now that you were back before the war?”
A quietness fell upon the room as the group stopped getting their belongings together to leave and waited to hear my answer. It was as though they all took in a deep breath and held it. I didn’t answer immediately, and I began to see faces and images of the past, to reflect on the death of my mother, the loss of my soldier buddies, and I could almost hear the sound of incoming mortars all over again. I didn’t realize that about thirty seconds went by in total silence as the group waited for me to respond. Finally, I took a sip from my coffee cup and said, “Captain, we’ll have to talk about that one next week.”
Then I walked away before they could say anything more.