Lieutenant Colonel Mike Vincent

The Mid-America Veterans Museum relies on community donations to preserve veterans' stories. The Operation Insight podcast aims to educate, featuring guest Lt. Col. Michael Vincent, a Marine Corps officer sharing his journey from high school sweethearts to joining the Marines after 9/11. Lt. Col. Vincent highlights the importance of taking initiative and participating actively in life to fulfill a calling, rather than waiting for a sign from above. The Mid-America Veterans Museum is a 501c3 nonprofit business. The museum would not exist without the donations of our generous community. Your donations ensure the museum continues to share and preserve the stories of our veterans. To donate, visit mavm.org and click on Donate. The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this podcast are for general information only. The primary purpose of the Operation Insight podcast is to educate. The views, information, or opinions expressed on the Operation Insight podcast are solely the views of the individuals or guests involved and by no means represent absolute facts. Operation Insight does not accept responsibility for their views or comments. The Operation Insight podcast may at times cover sensitive topics including but not limited to suicide, abuse, violence, severe mental illness, sex, drugs, and alcohol addiction. You are advised to refrain from watching or listening to the Operation Insight podcast if you are likely to be offended or adversely impacted by any of these topics. Neither the company, host, director, or the guest shall at any time be liable for the content covered, causing offense, distress, or any other reaction. Welcome to Operation Insight with your host, Sergeant Ethan Gross. Welcome back, family. Today's episode will be a little different. Jason's feeling under the weather, so he's not joining us this evening. But I think this might be the perfect guest for a situation such as this. Our guest tonight is Lieutenant Colonel Michael Vincent, United States Marine Corps, September 2003 until September 2023. The reason I say that Mike is probably the best guest for a situation like this is because I actually have you quoted, Mike. Marines don't quit. We adapt. We overcome. We maneuver. Just as Marines don't quit and just as Marines adapt and overcome, we will adapt and overcome tonight. And I'm going to do the very best I can to replicate what the Marines stand for. I love it. Simplify. So, Mike, first of all, I really appreciate you being here. I appreciate you giving of your time. We've been talking since I think around May, and you were still based out of Camp Lejeune at that point in North Carolina. Your son was finishing up high school. Am I remembering that correctly? Yeah, my twin boys were graduating from high school, and so that's all done now and we're fully relocated to Missouri. Well, I certainly appreciate you being here. I'm really happy that you're back in the area. But you're actually originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma. So tell me a little bit about first your family and then what brought your family to the St. Louis area. Well, my dad worked for McDonnell Douglas in Tulsa, and that was 1994 that Boeing bought out McDonnell Douglas. And when that happened, there was a little bit of uncertainty of what we were going to do. And thankfully, Boeing offered my dad an opportunity to transfer to St. Louis and continue doing what he was doing, and so we moved. Whenever I was just, I guess, eighth grade, starting eighth grade, and ended up in the Harvester-St. Charles area. Sure. Went to French South High School and started going to a little church up the road and met a girl there. If I understand correctly, first you met your future father-in-law and then the girl. You know, I don't remember what came first, so I'll be honest. Knowing me, it was the girl that I noticed first. But it wasn't long before her dad noticed me noticing his daughter. Yeah, yeah. And that turned into a summer job learning heating and air conditioning. That was an amazing opportunity. Right here in St. Charles, Carl Library Heating and Air Conditioning, been operating since 1992. And in those summers, summer of 94, summer of 95, summer of 96, I was an apprentice and he taught me the trade. And I was dating his daughter throughout the whole time, too. It had a benefit. Fast forward a little bit. I graduated from Francis Howell, decided to go to University of Missouri. I was there when September 11, 2001, happened. And when that happened, as it was the case for a lot of other young people my age at that time, kind of shifted a lot of our understanding of kind of what we were being called to do at that particular time. And for me, you know, it was a really strong conviction and a strong calling to help in whichever way I could. You know, I could sit here and tell you it was a strong sense of patriotism or anger at Al Qaeda or something like that. There were elements of that, I'm sure, but, you know, really it was seeing a lot of my peers joining up and feeling called to help in some way. Maybe as a heating and air conditioning guy, I don't know. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do to help, but I felt like I could help. And, frankly, I went to officer candidate school in the summer of 02, still had a year of college left. But when I graduated OCS at the end of that summer of 02, you know, the Marine Corps basically, like the other branches, you know, said, okay, good job. You completed OCS. You need to go complete your degree. Once your degree is completed, we'll commission you. So I came back to Mizzou, finished my degree, and then in 03 is when I was actually commissioned. And the Marine Corps gave me logistics as an MOS. And you know what? It suited me perfectly because it gave me an opportunity to go to all the different types of organizations, the major types of organizations in the Marine Corps, infantry units, aviation units, logistics units, and find a way to provide support, do what I could to learn their language, figure out what makes them tick, and see what I could do to provide good support for the limited amount of time that I was there as their logistics officer. Let me get into the weeds a little bit because I find this interesting. So I don't know how to ask this question. Basically, how into your girlfriend were you at that point before college? We were your classic high school sweethearts. Okay. Oh, yeah. Did you know where it was going to go before you attended Mizzou? No, and, you know, we did have a breakup. You know, we broke up during that period of time as well and spent a couple of years. We dated other people. We went to different schools. So she wasn't part of your decision when you decided to join. No. When we got back together, we were both thrilled to be back together. And it was like, hey, there's something I've got to tell you. Wow. I've joined the Marine Corps. How did you feel about that? Yeah, there was a little bit of shock. But at the same time, there was my wife's always been like this. There was an element of kind of like, all right, let's do this thing. We're in it now. You know? That's great. And so, yeah, that was hard too. That first summer, well, the summer I went to OCS, right before I left, you know, talking to my boss, now my father-in-law. Sure. And saying, hey, I'm not going to be here this summer to help out. I'm going to be in Quantico, Virginia. I had a 10-week job interview to see if maybe I could become an officer in the Marine Corps. How did he take that? He wasn't thrilled. I don't think he was convinced initially. You know, as time went on, you know, I was really blessed by having the support of them, my now in-laws. And my parents as well. Did you look at Carl as a mentor at that point? More than just a boss, but a mentor? Oh, yes. You know, I had mentioned that I met Beth, my wife, up at the local church we were going to. I met him there too. And that kind of spiritual mentor connection was always there in the very beginning. And that's a thread that ran through, and to this day, runs through, you know, our relationship. He's my father-in-law now. He's my boss. But he's been one of my best friends since the very beginning. So the reason I ask that is I'm curious, was he part of your decision to join the Marines at all prior to doing it? No. I would say no. That really was more of a circumstantial environmental decision, which I believe that's how calling works in general, is an awareness of what's going on in your environment and a willingness to say, am I being asked to help in some way? And can I help in some way? And if, you know, the thing that I'm able to do aligns with what my community is asking me to do, well, that just might be your calling. Sure. And I think that that's a freeing way to view that because it's not solely dependent on your own preferences. Because, you know, our preferences can be deceiving sometimes. You know, I prefer to be on the couch with a beer in my hand right now. And those aren't always the most healthy things for us. You know, there's a lot more going on out in this world, and we're called to be a part of it. So no, he wasn't a direct part of it. But it does sound like the things that you learned from Carl and the things you learned from your church family led you to making that decision. I would argue yes. And it takes participation in the process. I would say in general, not just in the spiritual domain, but I think any of those domains of wellness in our lives, whether it be our physical health, that mental academic engagement, the emotional mental health component, the spiritual fitness component, each of those things requires us to participate in the process and take some initiatives. As opposed to just be consumers and just be kind of spectators. Sure, watch it idly go by. Exactly, hoping that maybe you'll catch lightning somehow or the skies will open up and a beam of light will come down and say go the end way. That was a really important lesson that I know I needed to learn on my own spiritual fitness journey, and that is you can't sit here on your hands expecting a voice from heaven to tell you which way to go. Sure. And I know some people listen and pursue those goals in their lives, whether it be through religion or their own personal faith journey or what have you. I might not take that the way that I mean it, but the way that I mean it is that there's an element of responsibility, ownership, that's been delegated to us. And I think the military is a great metaphor to understand that in terms of our mortality is the context of our leadership philosophy. In other words, we do what we do because we know we're not going to be here forever, maybe not that much longer at all. And that becomes really, really clear in that combat scenario, that context of having an enemy actually trying to kill you, or even in the support role, perhaps as a logistician, but still being exposed to danger in some way. Sure. But it's true right now still. And so how we lead in our families, how we lead in our organizations, how we lead our teams should, if nothing else, be in the context of I need to prepare those who are going to come next. There's an element of selflessness involved. Yeah, and understanding that you are going to fade away. Yeah. And what's going to be – what have you done once you're gone? What will your legacy be? That provokes a focus on others. I think it should provoke your focus to be on others as opposed to that focus being on building up your own influence, power, brand, company, financial situation, whatever the case may be, where we're tempted to just stockpile and hoard away those things as if they're so scarce. If I don't bury it out in the field now, I'll never get it back. Divorcing ourselves from that mindset and realizing, like, no, no, no, no. This organization is going to be fine without me, but there's individuals in here that I can have a positive influence on. That's a tough truth to accept. Yeah. In the long run, in organizations, especially in the military, this sounds a little callous, but in the long run, you're a number. Yeah. And you are a cog in the mechanism that is the United States military. You can have an impact, and you can have a spectacular impact on your Marines, your soldiers, airmen, sailors, whoever it is. At the end of the day, someone's going to relieve you of your post. That's right. And they're going to be the commander, and the memory of you will fade in some capacity. Everyone has that fate. That's everyone's ultimate destination. We all know what it's going to be. That's right. You're getting into something that I want to talk more about later, but I just want to touch upon it right now. The power and the potency of teamwork and teams. You know, when you try to do something individually and when you try to save the world by yourself, you're going to fail. But if you can find a team, and if you can find compatriots that you can trust and you can rely on and that complement you, that's when you have a winning team, and that's when you have a winning strategy. Anyway, we'll talk about some of your philosophies about leadership and team building later on because I'm really interested in talking about that. So let's get into the weeds a little bit more about you being at Mizzou. So Marines do ROTC really differently, don't they? Yeah, ROTC is one of the programs, one of the accession pipelines, to be a Marine officer. It's Naval ROTC, and there's no Marine Corps ROTC. It's going to be Naval ROTC. And just like the Naval Academy, if you are a midshipman at the Academy or if you're a midshipman at, say, Mizzou's Naval ROTC program, you can opt Marine Corps. You can kind of choose and then kind of compete for that opportunity to take one of those Marine quotas, if you will. And if you get that, then similarly you'll go to Quantico, Virginia one summer and go through kind of an officer candidate school type experience. It's a little different. Midshipmen in Annapolis, Maryland don't go to the same. The program isn't exactly the same, but it is in Quantico over one of their summers. Same thing for midshipmen at Naval ROTC. They'll go to Quantico during one of their summers or two of their summers and get a little bit of the philosophical kind of indoctrination. But there are other pipelines to become a Marine officer. Not only are there the enlisted commissioning programs for those that enlist first and then during their enlistment through tuition assistance or perhaps they go on the reserve side, complete their degree, and can come back through. There's those enlisted commissioning programs. But then there's platoon leaders class, PLC. And PLC is a guy like me who's just a bearded, long-haired college student walking around campus who sees a recruiter one day and follows said recruiter and says, hey, you're a Marine, right? I didn't really know other than I recognized the uniform from the movies. I didn't have any family that were in the military. None in the Marine Corps. My grandfather was in the Army. Past that, I didn't really have any exposure to it growing up. And so when I saw a Marine gunnery sergeant on campus, I followed him, got into a conversation with him, and he challenged me to apply for officer candidate school. This was right before September 11th, by the way. I want to say this was like May of 01, around that time. So what was your impetus then to go up to that recruiter? Well, it's funny you mention my father-in-law a moment ago. He didn't necessarily say or do anything that provoked me to think about it. But my dad, on the other hand, my dad, who worked for Boeing, had been, you know, worked in different divisions within Boeing, including the F-18 program. And so I had like a little bit of a connecting rush with understanding the Navy and Marine Corps team. He sent me an e-mail one day. I'm sure it was like my Hotmail account or something. And he said, hey, Mike, you ought to check out this link. And it was a link to MarineOfficer.com. Is that out of the blue? Honestly, it was kind of out of the blue. And, you know, to this day, that was a contributing factor because I did click on that link and I did look at the website. And as you know, how the Marine Corps does with its advertising and throwing the dress blues in your face and the dude with the sword fighting the dragon and all the cool stuff, you know, I was intrigued. And then seeing the recruiter on campus kind of brought it back up like, oh, yeah. It became very real. And I was like, that's a Marine. I recognize him. So that led to me applying and getting accepted to go to OCS. And I want to say it was like August of 2001 when I got my letter that said, hey, we'd like to invite you to come to Oxford Candidate School next summer, summer of 2002. And then September 11th happened. And so it really kind of brought into focus like, whoa, what actually are you doing? Like is this just – are you just going because you think it will be cool? Because now the framing and the context of this decision has changed. It got a lot more real. And I really started to kind of consider like, wait, no, what am I really doing? Like what's driving me here? For me, it really came down to that recognition that I felt like I could help in some way. Those are my peers that I saw joining up. So my dad was a part of it in terms of provoking that decision. So when you say you felt like you could help, kind of delving into this a little bit more because I find it interesting. What was it about you, your characteristics, personality, whatever it was, what was it that you felt you could contribute? That's a great question. I think pretty quickly I realized like, okay, I'm probably not going to be fixing air conditioners in the Marine Corps. Although, you know, that crossed my mind, you know. I didn't know anything about enlisted versus officer programs. I didn't know anything about that. I just knew that the recruiter was like, hey, you're halfway through your degree. We're going to send you to OCS. Okay, whatever you say. And then once I learned more about the different job and occupational fields, it became kind of clear to me like, all right, I'm probably not going to be a technical field like HVAC. It looks like I could try to become an aviator if I wanted to. I could try to go infantry, obviously. That's the preponderance of Marine officers that are infantry officers. And then there's these other large fields like logistics. And once I learned about the logistics occupational field, it really resonated with me because of that support role, that support philosophy that kind of drives that particular occupational field. Go to an organization, learn who they are, what makes them tick, what they need, and figure out the best ways to provide that for them. So really you had a spirit of servanthood. I would argue that that spiritual component of it was already really alive within me at that time. Interesting. And I think that that recognition of one's mortality, that recognition of serving something bigger than yourself, those components, regardless of the particular religious persuasion or the particular denomination per se, those were threads that were running through that I saw connecting me to what was happening in the country at that time. So I do think there was an element of that that perhaps had been developed within me maybe a little bit quicker and drove me to be willing to kind of take that leap, if you will, out of a realization of this is big, I want to be a part of something bigger than myself, and I recognize that my physical existence here is something that's going to change, and so I want to be in pursuit of something more in the spiritual domain. Which is funny because I've heard you say, I'm fairly certain it was on a podcast that you were on, Mike, that as far as you knew, the only job in the Marines was infantryman, rifleman. It wasn't until I got to the basic school, so after officer candidate school, and then came back to Mizzou, finished my degree, went back to Quantico now as a second lieutenant, going through the first six months of training that all Marine officers go through. It's an infantry school, but at the end of that six months, you start to learn about, okay, not all of you are going to be infantry officers. Some of you are going to need to be intelligence officers and artillery officers and communicators. It was probably halfway through the basic school that it started to sink in like, oh, wait a second. I'm not infantry. Okay, I'm cool with that. It wasn't clear to me. So am I artillery then? Because there's probably only a couple of choices. But then I realized, oh, no, man, there's, you know, I forget the exact number of occupational fields at the time for officers, but I don't know, 20, 25, something like that. And that's where the staff there at the basic school start to make a deliberate effort to really educate us on, here's all your other options, and you guys need to start communicating what you believe your preferences are going to be. And based off of your preferences, your class standing, the recommendations of your instructors, we're going to start placing you guys in those occupational fields based off the needs of the Marine Corps, but also based off of your preferences depending on your class standing. And there's a complication there. Maybe you've heard this before, but they break the class into thirds, and so top of the top third, top of the middle third, top of the bottom third will get their preferences. Bottom of the top third, bottom of the middle third, bottom of the bottom third are less likely to get something at the top of their list. I didn't know that. So it tries to ensure a quality spread based off of class standing, but it's a quality spread of a whole bunch of quality people. Everybody wins in the end, you know, but certainly the Marine Corps is going to make sure its needs are met first. All those Marines out there have what they need, you know. If you would, Mike, just for a brief moment, and then we're going to delve into your first duty station. What do you remember about 9-11 that day? Yeah, I was a student at Mizzou studying history, and I had a paper due that day that I guess I had probably procrastinated on, and I got up early that morning to finish it. And, you know, you remember probably how it was back then. You know, we didn't have computers in our rooms necessarily, not like we have now. Maybe some people did, but I didn't, so I had to go find a computer lab. And there was a little computer lab in my dorm on the bottom floor, and it was just a corner of a big common area that had been set up with maybe a dozen or so computers. In that same area, there was like a lounge area with a TV and couches and things like that. And when I came down that morning at around, I don't know, 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning, I was sitting at a computer starting to work on my paper. I don't know if the TV was already on or someone maybe came and turned it on, but it happened to be on, and just random SportsCenter was on or, you know, sports news was on. And if I remember right, it was around 7.15, 7.20, 7.30 central time, 8.15, 8.20, 8.30, Eastern Standard Time. And so all of a sudden, news flashes started cutting in on the broadcast on that particular TV. And as I'm sitting there typing away, I start to see out of the corner of my eye something's going on. And people are starting to gather around the TV. And so, you know, I need to finish my paper, but now I'm like, what in the world is going on? So I walked over there to see what was going on. And as you can imagine, I ended up sitting there for hours, maybe two, three hours, didn't leave that couch, focused in on the news coverage of what was going on and, you know, the reality that was starting to set in of what had happened. Coincidentally, that semester at the University of Missouri, I was taking a class called International Terrorism. Wow. It's probably total coincidence. It was an elective. I was taking it. I was in the middle of, you know, it was September. I was in the beginning of the semester taking a class called International Terrorism. We started hearing that classes were canceled that day. All classes were canceled. Well, my International Terrorism class was supposed to meet that day. I was scheduled to go to that class, and I was like, I still want to go. If the professor happens to show up or whatever, I just want to ask him his opinion and get his input. Very topical subject. So, you know, it was maybe like 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. So I went to class, even though I had already been told all classes are canceled. And sure enough, I showed up, and almost everybody else in the class had also showed up. Just like, hey, I know it's canceled, but I just wanted to come and see what, are you hearing anything? Is the professor here? We'd love to talk to him. And after a few moments, I want to say it was like an assistant professor or someone, maybe his assistant, came in and said, hey, I saw you all gathering. I've called Professor, I forget his name now, unfortunately, and I've let him know that you all are here. He's going to try his best to make it here and meet with you guys. And a few minutes later, he showed up, and he's like, hey, I've been on radio programs this morning. I've been interviewed on radio programs answering questions people want to know. And so he sat there with us and told us how he already knows it's Al Qaeda. It's well established. The intelligence community already kind of, he didn't say that when we saw it coming, but you could tell he was very confident based off of the research he had already been conducted and the things he had already been involved in. He already knew it was Al Qaeda. And this was before I'd even heard that name of that organization on the news. So we got as much as we could out of him, and he's like, but, hey, listen, I'm due for another interview. You guys need to get back and take care of yourselves and be on guard, be alert. We're not sure what's going to happen next. And so we all kind of left there going, oh, my God, this is crazy. It's interesting to think about your international terrorism course. When you think about just a year later, that textbook had to probably be ripped up and totally redone based off 9-11. Yeah, you're probably right. The understanding of international terrorism, the understanding of their tactics, you know, obviously there had been terroristic acts before 9-11, but 9-11 was a game changer in so many devastating ways. Did you have moments, I'm sort of jumping around here a little bit, Mike, did you have moments when you were deployed to Iraq and or Afghanistan when you thought back to those times in 2001? Yeah, definitely. Anyway, one kind of funny connection that I thought about was when I went to OCS in the summer of 2002, you know, operations in Afghanistan were already well underway. Sure. Like November of 2001, even maybe October of 2001, there was operations going on in Afghanistan. So by the time I was in Quantico at Officer Kennedy School in June of 2002, we all had a pretty clear idea of the operations and where we were probably going to be deployed. Sure. So I thought, maybe I wasn't watching the news closely enough back then or whatever, but when I got to Officer Kennedy School and got issued cammies, we got issued green woodland cammies, which we wore and trained in there at Officer Kennedy School, and we got issued two sets of desert cammies. And I remember the staff issuing us those desert cammies and saying, they put these in the bottom of your wall locker, you're not going to wear these while you're here. And then get this, one of the staff instructors, I think it was a staff sergeant, looked at me. I know what it was. One of the candidates was bold enough to say, if we're not going to wear these, why are you issuing them to us? And the staff sergeant said, because you're going to wear those next year when you go to Iraq. Wow. And I remember in the summer of 2002 thinking to myself, I think he means Afghanistan. Right. What does he mean we're going to wear these? Maybe it was more common knowledge and I just was more oblivious. I don't think it was. The staff sergeant was like, you're going to wear those in Iraq next year. And although I didn't quite make it to Iraq by the end of 2003, and early 2004 I was wearing those cammies. And so I couldn't help but think to myself, man, I'm glad I – Didn't throw these away. Yeah, I'm glad I – or I guess early 2005 was the time I got there. But as I'm wearing my desert cammies, I'm thinking to myself, oh, I'm glad they issued those to me because I've got a couple extra sets of desert cammies now. But sure enough, I wore them in Iraq, just like the staff sergeant said. But in the summer of 2002, I was kind of confused by the comment. I was like, I think he means Afghanistan, right? Nope, he meant Iraq. So I did think about things like that. Officer Candidate School really is a screening. It was compared to like a job interview. And I think those are really good ways to think about OCS. Officer candidates aren't so much trained to do much of anything there. Like, for example, you don't go to the rifle range and qualify on the rifle at Officer Candidate School. Officers don't do that until they're at the basic school after they've been commissioned. So it's a little backwards, perhaps. But OCS is ten weeks to reconsider your decision. And a lot of candidates reconsider their decision and say, I ain't doing this, no thanks. So they're basically testing not only your will to be a Marine, but also your aptitude to be a Marine officer. Absolutely. So there is that. I think aptitude is a good word. So there's like an academic component of what they're evaluating you. There's a physical fitness component that they're evaluating you on. And there's a leadership component that they're evaluating you on. And you get grades and you get assessments and evaluations during that time. And it is. It's a way for them to perhaps make a tough call to say to somebody, hey, man, this isn't working out for you. Sure. That's probably less common. I don't have data to support this. Dropping somebody due to academics, leadership, or physical fitness is probably less common than the drop-on request, the candidate that says, no, thank you. Self-selecting, basically. And I definitely have memories of Officer Candidate School of candidates in the middle of training saying, yeah, forget that. I'm out. And the staff kind of applauding and like, all right, bye. Because there's a taxi stand right there next to the parade deck, and you can catch a cab to the train station, you can catch a cab to the airport pretty readily. You can be out of there if you want to be out of there. That was a little bit of an interesting psychological component of OCS is that you can leave whenever you want. You don't got to be there. And so that's a little bit of a different dynamic. What was your amount of freedom like when you were at OCS? Did you get to explore in D.C.? No, there wasn't enough time for that. But I will say for the program that I went through, and I probably trailed off earlier when I was talking about platoon leaders class, so it's not Naval Academy, not Naval ROTC, but instead PLC, where as a college student, you can just apply, and if you get accepted, you can go to OCS. And if you make it through, in my case, ten weeks, the summer after your junior year, they'll offer you a commission as long as you go back and finish your degree. Ten weeks, the first six of those could have been the first five, I don't know. You're training seven days a week. But in, like, the sixth week, you get about 36 hours of liberty on the weekend. And it's awesome because, you know, you're released, like, on a Friday night, and you don't got to be back until Sunday morning. You're like, oh, my gosh, this is incredible. I can go stay in a hotel. I can, you know, my girlfriend, now my wife, she came out, you know, one weekend, and we spent 24 hours together. You know, there's Internet cafes, you know. Sure. You can go to the Internet cafe and check your hotmail or whatever. So there was an element of freedom at around the halfway point, maybe the six-week mark. Okay. Where you could have a little bit of liberty. And, again, I think back at that, and I think, what a good way to perhaps provoke someone to say, I'm not going back, and really, really make sure if you want to be there, you're going to find a way, even after a comfortable bed. A taste of freedom. A taste of freedom. You're going to come back on Sunday morning, and you're going to report back in if you really want this. Yeah. And so that, to me, is maybe part of the genius. I would say the advantages of that kind of program is because, at the end of it, you should have a candidate who has had plenty of time to consider their decision. Sure. And even after graduation from OCS, I still had to go back to Mizzou and finish my degree. I was not on a contract during that time. I hadn't contracted. You don't contract until you're commissioned. So you basically attended the platoon leader course, OCS, of your own free will. That's right. That's right. And that's how that program works. Of course, Naval Academy is a little different. I think even Naval ROTC is a little different. But that POC program is, I've always thought it was advantageous in that regard because I went back for my senior year, grew my hair out, grew my beard out, really considered, in the wake of September 11th, really considered my decision and really was able to gain that kind of personal clarity to say, I'm doing this and now I know why I'm doing it. It's not just a job. It's not just a challenge. This is actually a calling and a life that I want to pursue, at least for this season of my life, however long this season lasts. I didn't necessarily set out to do 20 years, but I just turned into that because I continued to feel like, hey, man, this next opportunity is something that I really feel like I can contribute. And I think back to your question about, well, what is it you felt like? If it wasn't heating and air conditioning, what were you contributing? Well, that's where I think those durable skills really shine through. And you see this all throughout industry. Those skills that formerly were known as soft skills, to call them soft skills, you know, commitment and communication skills and resilience, these types of things that we know, even if you lack, in some ways, in your technical ability, if you lack a particular certification or if you lack even some experience, if you've got these durable skills. I read a Forbes article a couple years ago that is rebranding soft skills into durable skills, and I like that because I think it really captures a little bit more of what we're talking about. Sure. If you were blessed enough to have coaches and mentors and parents in your life who helped develop some of that ability to cope with failure, ability to be thoughtful in your communication and the things that you're doing, you could rattle off all those durable skills. That, to me, is what I felt like maybe, if nothing else, I was contributing. I'll be a good teammate. I'll do everything I can to help. I'm not going to quit until this thing's done. And those types of things, that's how I had been raised. And so I think, if nothing else, I felt like, well, I know I can do that. As we know now through Gallup has done a ton of research on this and Forbes, as I mentioned, we know those are the skills that win the day in any organization, whether it's a military organization or a small business here in St. Charles. Those are the kind of teams that we're trying to build. Individuals, guys and gals who are just interested in accomplishing the mission and supporting one another and setting one another up for success and maybe even outdoing one another in kindness and respect in order to generate the momentum in the team, generate the kind of loyalty and retention so that good people want to keep coming back and be a part of your team. I think that's a smart change because when you hear soft skills, I think typically people assume, oh, that means they're not necessary. That means they're not important. I like that change a lot, durable skills. What's interesting about you talking about this, Mike, is in many ways, and maybe it's an obvious point I'm making here, but it reflects the Marine Corps. A Marine is always a rifleman first. That is a skill you must always have no matter what situation you're put in. No matter what kind of stress you have to endure, you will be a rifleman at the end of the day, whether you're an intelligence officer, a logistics officer, whatever it is. It's similar with durable skills. Those are skills that you can rely on no matter what situation you're put into. So, yeah, I think durable is a much better term than soft in that particular case. Let's get into we'll kind of dance around here a little bit. What was your first duty station? So my wife and I talked about it, and we volunteered to go to Okinawa right out of the basic school because we kind of sensed that a lot of people weren't wanting to do that right off the bat. People want to stay stateside. Right. And Marines don't go too many places. It's limited in terms of major duty stations, particularly entry-level Marines. You know, you're pretty much going to go to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, or you're going to go to Okinawa. And the smaller outliers like a Korea or a Hawaii or even a 29 Palms, those are smaller outliers. It's just not as likely that you're going to end up there. So knowing that and seeing how everyone was kind of jockeying to stay stateside, that's what I talked about. I'm really like we want that experience. Maybe it would be fun. So I threw my name in the hat and said, yeah, I'll do Okinawa. I'll volunteer for it. So I put that on the top of my list, and we ended up in Oki. Was it from there that you deployed to Iraq? Right. So I got to Oki. My daughter had just been born. And so newborn baby, me, the wife, and Okinawa. And Operation Iraqi Freedom was in full swing. This is now 04, summer of 04. And I said to my wife, hey, honey, the Marines that are deploying to Iraq right now are units out of San Diego and North Carolina. None of the units out of Okinawa are deploying to Iraq. So I just want to put your mind at ease. Oh, my God. Great job. I think two months later, I remember walking in our house on base, and she was feeding the baby. And I was like, honey, I'm taking my platoon to Iraq. And I remember her putting the baby down, and she looked at me and she goes, that's the kind of thing that you need to say. Honey, why don't you put the baby down and sit down? There's something I want to tell you. That's what I was about to say. And I was like, oh, yeah. You just walk in with that. My bad. But, you know, as operations in Iraq had continued and were in their second year by that time and it was going to continue on for some time, those units out of California and North Carolina started asking for supplementary units, augmentation, other units from other parts of the Marine Corps. The only other part of the Marine Corps that wasn't as involved, the Marine Expeditionary Force out in Okinawa. So, you know, those calls were coming in as I was checking in and getting a motor tea platoon and starting to train my platoon and was really excited about taking my platoon to the field and doing all the things, the lessons learned we were hearing from Iraq. You know, I was pumped. And I remember my company commander bringing me and the other platoon commanders in his office, and he said, hey, one of you all is going to take your platoon to Iraq and you're going to go to North Carolina first. You're going to augment a unit out of North Carolina, and you're going to go with them to Iraq. And, Mike, it's going to be you and your platoon because you've been doing the best training lately. Which you love to hear, but you also kind of hate to hear. You know, it was kind of like because, you know, I really am watching you. Your platoon is the best trained right now. And so, of course, you're like, oh, well, thanks for noticing. The other platoon commanders are like, man, this guy, he's new. I've been here longer, you know. You were all revved up then. I was revved up. It was totally exciting. And I think, you know, I raced home that day, like, honey, it turns out I am going to Iraq. And she's like, are you kidding me right now? How about they sit down? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, reality kind of set in as we got closer to that deployment date where it's like, oh, wait, hold on a second. I'm deploying to a combat zone with my motor jeep platoon. We're going to drive all over Al-Ambar province delivering ammo and food and water and fuel and all the things that we did on that deployment in 2005. And I just had a phenomenal platoon. I mean, I can't say it enough how great those guys and gals were. We just had a 20-year reunion last summer of that 05 deployment in Lake of the Ozarks. And, yeah, we just had such a great time reminiscing and telling stories. And, you know, part of the reason why we were able to enjoy that reunion is because we all came home from that deployment, which, of course, you know, I know that wasn't true for a lot of other units. And we had a couple guys that got hurt. You know, but thank God we were all able to come home from that. So in that regard, it's just a memory, an experience of mine that was, you know, one of the most difficult things I had done in my life up to that point, but something that I look back on and it's a standard, a model of kind of like what Wright looks like in terms of everybody pulling their weight on the team. What hardships did you endure in Iraq? Yeah, for us, we were a logistics unit. So, you know, I hesitate to say that we endured hardships. I was with an infantry battalion for my Afghanistan deployment and so gained a whole new appreciation for hardship on that Afghanistan deployment. But on that Iraq deployment, you know, our hardships were just like everybody else's, not a lot of sleep, on the road all the time, running all over the AO, doing the things that needed to be done. And for us, it was logistics, resupply missions. You know, but as you know, the AO was such a nebulous environment where there was, you know, not real clear lines that delineated, oh, here's where there's real, you know, a lot of enemy activity. Sure. And here's where it's relatively safe, you know. Just as soon as you thought you had figured that out, you know, that would change on you. And so we were crisscrossing and interacting with the enemy that whole deployment. And, you know, the improvised explosive device was kind of the main way that the enemy interacted with us. But we had, you know, our share of ambushes and small arms fire attacks and RPGs zipping past you and that kind of stuff. And thank goodness we had armored vehicles. And I had really, really aggressive Marines behind machine guns. But as soon as somebody wanted to take a shot at us, they regretted it. And thank God for those Marines who, though they joined the Marine Corps to drive a truck, you know, they ended up needing a gun for that deployment. And they did great. So in a lot of ways, you said yourself, it was an ideal picture of what a deployment should look like. So then after your deployment to Iraq, did you head right back to Okinawa or was there a duty station change? Nope. Went right back to Okinawa. And, you know, this is the end of 05 now. Immediately I could see that whereas I took my platoon to augment units out of the East Coast, now a whole company was getting trained up to go and augment, I believe, another East Coast unit. And, you know, just assumed and thought, oh, okay, I guess I'm going to fall in somewhere with this company that now is going to deploy, I don't know, six months from now or eight months from now or whatever it was. But instead what happened was I got nominated to go interview to be an aid to camp for the commanding general of the organization that I was in. So essentially you were a personal aid to a high-ranking officer, a general in this case? Yep, yep, yep. And, of course, I would have never guessed that that was a job I would have in the Marine Corps. I interviewed with six or seven other lieutenants. I do think the Army has a very similar system where a one-star general will have a lieutenant as their aid to camp. A two-star general will have a captain. A three-star general will have a major. A four-star general will often have a lieutenant colonel. But I was a lieutenant, and I went to go interview to be the aid for the one-star general that commanded the logistics group that I was in. And, you know, I sensed, and I also, you know, in an authentic way, I didn't want the job. I wanted to deploy again, which sounds crazy saying that, right? Only a 20-something lieutenant would be like, I want to get back in there. Now I look back and I'm like, dude, thank God you did. But at the time, you know how it is. If your unit's going, you want to be there with them. You don't want to not go if everyone else is going. So I had already kind of made up my mind, and this time talked to my wife. It looks like I'll be deploying again. It'll be in a few months, whatever. I got to go interview for this aid thing, but don't worry, I'm not going to get it. By the way, my twin boys were born during this time. So now I've got the two-year-old daughter and my twin boys that were newborns born over there in Okinawa. So when I interviewed for the aid gig, I remember sitting there with the general and saying, sir, I appreciate the opportunity to interview. I'm definitely not the guy for this job because the boys hadn't been born yet. My wife was pregnant with the dead shift. I said, hey, I'm not the guy for this job. My wife is pregnant with twins. There could be a higher risk associated with a pregnancy of twins. I would just hate to be the aid that is not going to be able to do the job and constantly gone or at medical appointments. But you were kind of looking for excuses at this point, okay. Yeah. So I thought that was a slam dunk. I thought for sure that he was going to be like, yeah, you're right. I can't have my aid flaking out. You know, getting medically evacuated out with his wife or babies or something. So I kind of figured, yeah, there's no way. And I'll never forget the general looking at me and going, wow, Mike, I really appreciate those family values. That's exactly the kind of aid I want to apply. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think you heard me right. I take it back. I take it back. I'm saying I'm not the guy, you know. He's like, man, I like that. That's great. And so I got the job. I ended up being his aid. I'll tell you, he was just one of the greatest bosses I've ever had. He was awesome. And I know not everybody has that same experience being an aid for a commanding general. But not only was he just a genuinely good human being and a good family man and just a great person, you're in Okinawa. So when you're traveling with the general, you're traveling to some really cool places. Sure. I got to go to Korea and the Philippines and Thailand and mainland Japan. And, you know, he was a guest of honor at a couple different birthday balls, one of them in Hanoi, Vietnam. I got to go to Hanoi for the Marine Security Guard detachment that guards the embassy down there. Fair birthday ball. He was the guest of honor. And the same thing for Jakarta, Indonesia. The Marine Security Guard detachment at the embassy in Jakarta had their birthday ball, and he was the guest speaker, guest of honor. So I got to come along. I was the aid. So it turned into some really, really cool experiences. My wife, in the meantime, was in Okinawa taking care of twins and a 2-year-old daughter, as my wife did. Like, she's a real hero in this story. But that aid job was awesome. Go through, if you can. I'm sure there's no normal day. But kind of go through some typical duties as the aid to camp. It's predominantly travel planning. So in the case of this particular organization, the general had subordinate organizations and subordinate commanders who were in mainland Japan, Hawaii, and, of course, Okinawa. And those units would do training exercises in Korea and the Philippines and Thailand. So whenever the general was looking at his, say, calendar for the next six or eight months, he would say, all right, we want to get out there and see this training exercise in the Philippines. I want to go see the colonel in Hawaii and see his organization. I want to get over to Korea. We're doing a huge command post exercise. The whole organization, we're going to set up our command post in Korea. So real quickly, the calendar starts to fill up. Sure. And all the planning within defense travel system, government travel cards, hotels, lodging, transportation. Reimbursements, all that. Travel claims and all of that. And then also just the interactions, the meetings that the CG is going to have. Sure. So he might say, hey, when we're in Hawaii, I need to go see the commanding general of Marine Forces Pacific. So he'd give me an office call with him. He'd say, hey, when we're in mainland Japan, I want to go see the Japanese Ground Defense Force commander of the Japanese Ground Defense Force base near Camp Fuji, where the Marine Corps has a little. Sure. So all those little things, you know, the CG says, oh, yeah, give me an office call here, and we need to go there. And you're writing all that down. So a typical day really is refining those travel plans. Yeah. Maybe sometimes going into the general's office and saying, hey, sir, that thing you want to do is not going to work. You know, I'm thinking maybe this instead. And getting all that in the system, getting it all booked, getting it all planned, making sure the CG knows the plan and that he's got the right uniform and that you're ready to rock and roll. So it's primarily travel planning. But the general might say, hey, I've got a meritorious coin program. I want to be able to give coins from the commanding general out to Marines that have earned some recognition. So managing that program for them would be another responsibility. So purchasing the coins, getting the coins, keeping track of the coins, because all that's with appropriated funds. So you need to keep track of when those get handed out and why they get handed out. I would imagine, you know, it's going to sound obvious, but your scheduling and coordinating skills probably were really honed and refined. But I would also imagine, and tell me if I'm wrong, Mike, I would also imagine that your personal skills and your communication skills increased exponentially. Am I correct when I say that? You know, I wouldn't be able to, like, prove that, but I certainly feel like that's true. You go from being a platoon commander to, you know, where you're talking to your Marines all the time and interacting with them in that way, interacting with young people, very young people, and then switching gears and all of a sudden the main person you talk to all day is a general officer. There's a certain decorum there. Yeah, there's definitely a difference in approach. And, you know, I wanted to contribute. I wanted to do my job. Sure. But I also wanted to be in receive mode as much as I could. Funny story, which kind of segues to my next duty station, is when it came time for me to leave Okinawa and go to my next duty station. You know, I hadn't really done this yet. I'd only gone from the basic school to Okinawa. And I volunteered for Oki, so I didn't really know much about the process of getting your next set of orders and how that really even worked. Like, do I get to ask? Do I have a say in the matter? Am I just going to be told? I was still a little too junior to have the courage to just call up your monitor and say, hey, man, I want to go to California this time. So I wasn't sure. Am I allowed to talk to my monitor? I'm not sure. So I thought, well, I'll get the general's advice. And I had a printout of all the openings, all the job openings for lieutenants with my logistics MOS. Sure. And there was some really cool stuff on there. And one of them I remember in particular was this weird reserve center in Santa Cruz, California, where they needed an active duty lieutenant to be there to do, we call it instructor inspector duties for a reserve unit. And I thought, man, Santa Cruz, California. That would be a sweet gig. I bet you that would be a sweet gig. So I'm, like, highlighting that as my number one. I don't know what I was thinking. So I go in there in the general's office. I'm, like, hey, sir, I was really hoping maybe I could get your advice on these billet openings. And the general looks at him. And I can't remember if he told me there on the spot or if he said, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll take a look and I'll get back to you. But whenever he got back to me, he goes, easy, easy, Mike. There's only one unit on here that you need to be gunning for. I'm, like, oh, I wonder if it's the Santa Cruz. So he gives me the list of billet openings, and he had circled 7th Marines Regiment in 29 Palms, California. You know, one of the more all the Marine Infantry Regiments in the Marine Corps are infamous in some way or another. Sure. You know, I had heard of 7th Marines. I knew about 7th Marines. So when he said 7th Marine Regiment, you want to go to 7th Marines, that's where you want to go. And I was, like, oh, thanks, sir. Wow. Thank you for that. What were your thoughts on the Santa Cruz? No? Okay. Wow, 7th Marines. Okay. Thank you. God, what a waste. You know, man, that was not what I was looking for. And so I didn't really know what to make of that, but I could tell the general was convinced. Like, hey, man, that's the unit you want to go to. Man, was he right. Because whenever I got the call from the monitor some weeks later, and the monitor said, Mike, have I got a gig for you, 7th Marines. And I thought to myself, did the general call make a call on my behalf? That's unbelievable. You better not have. You know, I remember thinking, like, this is too much of a coincidence. Yeah. The CG says 7th Marines, and now I'm getting 7th Marines. And it's in 29 Palms, California, not San Diego. 29 Palms. This is a high desert. There's no beach there. There's sand. There's no ocean, you know. So I'm, like, how am I going to tell my wife this? So I break the news to my wife. I'm, like, hey, honey, our next set of orders is going to be 29 Palms, California. And she's, like, I thought you told the monitor West Coast. And I said, well, in the monitor's mind, it is West Coast. It is California, and so it is West Coast. But there's no coast there, to your point. And she's, like, oh, my gosh, you know, this is intimidating. And that was the highlight of my career is my three years within 7th Marines. And I spent a few months up at the regiment in the motor T section in the logistics section. And then within a few months, I think once the regimental logistics officer realized that I wasn't completely lost, he was, like, I'm going to let you go down to one of the battalions. So I got to go down to 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, and that changed my life. Those years with that battalion just completely changed my life for the better. What was it? It was a great lesson in leadership, or what was it that changed your life? I think the Marine Corps makes a lot of efforts to harmonize the manpower process for an infantry battalion. More than they're able to do for, say, a logistics unit or even an aviation squadron, which the aviation squadrons also try to stabilize for a deployment cycle. But certainly with the infantry battalions, you could feel the Marine Corps doing everything it could to allow that commander to build the team on the front end before deployment and to keep that team together through the whole training workup, through the whole deployment, and through the whole post-deployment cycle. And then for many of us, I don't know the percentage, but I'm going to say half of us all stayed together for the next deployment after that. So what ends up happening is you become really, really close because it's that same cadre of Marines that you're doing everything with. And because it's an infantry battalion, you're in the field all the time, it's obviously real busy in those years. It was real busy. You're in the suck together. You're all in it together. Yeah. And other units in the Marine Corps exist to support those infantry units, and I would say the aviation units as well. Everybody exists to make sure they are stabilized and set up. Sure. And so some of those logistics units, like even my Motor T platoon that I took to Iraq, we didn't have that same – there was cohesion, and we were tight, but not like what I experienced in that infantry battalion because we had so much time together and so much repetition, training, and then the deployment, and then, like I said, for almost half of those, another workup and another deployment after that. So that really just creates an intimacy and a cohesion that you can't create that any other way. It just takes time. It takes chemistry. It takes just everyone together in the hardship growing closer together. And so that was awesome. That's what you need to win wars. I think people might be surprised to hear that that's the exception that you experienced, and it shouldn't be that way, but I think in many cases it is. I only have my own career to compare it to, but it's the only time I really saw and felt the whole Marine Corps, headquarters Marine Corps, through our Marine Expeditionary Force there in California, through our division headquarters, bending over backwards to set us up for success. And, yeah, I could feel it. And then in units that I was in after that, it wasn't great. It was fine, but you could tell it was kind of like, hey, listen, we're going to make certain sacrifices in the training command environment, obviously. You know, training command units aren't going to deploy. We're going to make certain concessions even in this aviation group or even in this logistics unit to make sure that our infantry units, the pointy end of the sphere, are completely set up for success. It's hard to say that other units don't enjoy that stability when it works out, but I could really feel it those years without battalion in the way that I didn't experience it. That's amazing. I didn't have any other units in the rest of my career. So it is special. I may have already passed this. This might have been an Iraq story. I'm not sure. Kind of going back to what you said earlier, Mike, about you just wanted to help. You had this urge to help. Tell me about the story of fixing someone's AC. Yeah, well, you know, like I said a moment ago, it's been clear to me like, oh, okay, I'm not going to be a heating and air conditioning technician in the Marine Corps. You know, I'm going to be a bit more of a generalist, which suited me very well, as I said. But, you know, I still do a few things about air conditioning. In Iraq, for example, the Marines, you know, caught on that I could occasionally fix a window unit here and there if called upon. I'm a little embarrassed to say that at the beginning of that deployment, you know, we would operate nocturnally. We would do all of our resupply missions at night. So you'd come back after being out all night, and, you know, it's the morning, and you get everything cleaned up and buttoned up and put away, and now you're going to go get some sleep and start the whole cycle over again, six or seven or eight hours. So I'd go to my tent, and inevitably the tent flap would pull up and sunlight would beam in, and I'd hear the voice of one of my Marines or some other Marine. Is Lieutenant Vinson in here? Lieutenant Vinson, are you in here? And I'd pop up out of my cot and, yeah, yeah, I'm right here, I'm right here. Sir, we were told you could come take a look at our air conditioner. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'd throw my boots on and grab my Leatherman, and I'd race out my tent, and sometimes I'd be able to fix it and sometimes I wouldn't. But later in that deployment, the tent flap would pull up, the sunlight would beam in. Hey, is Lieutenant Vinson in here? And I'd say, no, man, he's not here. He's on the road. Yeah, we're not sure when he's going to be back. I'll let him know you came by, you know. I feel bad that I started doing that. But in Afghanistan, our infantry battalion was spread out over a large AO, of course. Seems like it always turns out that way. And there were combat outposts that we had built, the Marines had built, to harden their positions and start operating out of these, you know, very remote rural villages in southern Afghanistan with a mission to recruit and train local police forces. That was actually our mission in 08, was here the Marine Corps Infantry Battalion was going to go move in to eight or nine villages in southern Afghanistan and start putting together local police forces from the residents that lived there and start issue uniforms to them and make a little pistol range and start kind of just teaching the basics of patrolling and kind of a law enforcement gig. So we thought, okay, I guess we can do this. As it turns out, many of those villages, we were not welcome there, and it turned into a fight in several of those places. And so for some of our units, it was a fight to hold deployment. It was just fighting to stay in that village against what ended up being, you know, a couple of different Taliban training centers, and they were doing their own training out there and didn't appreciate us moving in next door. And one of those distant outposts, and, you know, by this time I'm a captain. I'm not necessarily leading these resupply missions like I was as a lieutenant in Iraq years prior, but now I've got a couple lieutenants that work for me, and they're the ones out there with their platoons running these resupply missions. I would ride along whenever I could, and on one of those days I did ride along with one of my lieutenants in his platoon. And this was maybe halfway through the deployment because the Marines knew where they were going. They'd been to this FOB before and generally varied their route for their own security purposes. Try not to be too predictable. Don't take the same road trail in every time. This was southern Afghanistan. There really weren't any roads to speak of anyway, so it made it a little easier to create your own, you know, pathway, and there's obviously security benefits to being random with the route that you took. On this particular day, as I was in the back of the convoy riding along in our recovery vehicle, listening in to the radio, listening to my lieutenant run his platoon and doing a great job, and he stops the convoy and asks me to come up and chat with him for a second. So I move up in the vehicle that I'm in, get out, like, hey, what's going on? And he's like, well, there's a patrol out, and they want me to link up with them and let them kind of take me in the rest of the way to the FOB, but I'm trying to explain to them, hey, you're a little four-vehicle patrol. I'm a big, cumbersome logistics convoy with a dozen-plus vehicles, heavily loaded down. I'll meet you at the FOB. I've been there before. I don't need to link up with you. I don't really need a guide. I got this. But the patrol leader was insistent in saying, like, hey, my lieutenant is telling me to tell you come link up with us down here and let us lead you in, let us guide you into the FOB. We're up on a ridgeline. They're down in Miswati. We didn't want to be down in there. We liked where we were perched up on this kind of elevated terrain where we could see well and just make better decisions. So, you know, I told the lieutenant, like, hey, man, you make the call, but if you're asking my opinion, you know, let's do what you normally do. You decide what route you want to take in. They'll be fine. Don't worry about that patrol, and we'll talk to the lieutenant when we get there. I'm sure he'll understand. Well, as we started snaking our way to the FOB, the patrol, probably frustrated with us, starts turning around, also making their way back to the FOB. You know, we did not go down to link up with them. But as they were turning around, kind of doing a little bit of the Austin Powers, kind of turning vehicles around, one of them hit a massive improvised explosive device. And there was a gunner in the turret, three Marines, a driver, an A driver, and a Marine in the back, and there was a Navy corpsman in the back as well. The Navy corpsman was killed, and the Marines were thrown from the blast, thrown from the vehicle, and severely wounded and burned. Now we are moving down into Nirvana. We're going down there with our dock, with our radios. Our lieutenant is kind of leading the way to go hoarding off the area, get our dock in the fight to start treating the wounded, start to call in a CASEVAC to see if we could. We knew we needed to find these guys out. We could tell that these were going to be significant injuries and just kind of start to stabilize the situation as best we could. Sure. And, you know, it just got real crappy real fast. Were you taking any fire? No, no small arms fire at the time. Of course, you're just kind of waiting for the next shoot to drop. You're not sure what's going to happen next. So everybody got into a security cordon and stabilized. We're ready for a possible attack if one's going to come. We're talking to the nearby FOB and the lieutenant and his platoon that were in the nearby FOB. We're calling in the CASEVAC. The wounded Marines are CASEVAC'd out, but the dock is still in the vehicle, and the vehicle is on fire and the ammunition is cooking off. And it was just a situation where it's like we need to wait. We need to sit here and wait for all the ammo to stop cooking off before we can get close enough to put the fires out and get a dock out and get in out of here. And that took all night. That took hours and hours. And so the whole night you're just making your way around the cordon, talking to all the Marines, like, hey, just stay vigilant. I know it's getting cold. I know it's getting late. I know this sucks, but just stay vigilant, stay alert, head on a swivel. Let's just make sure that if anybody's going to mess with us while we're waiting to get dock out of that vehicle that they regret that. They're not going to mess with us. Our priority is going to be recover dock, get him CASEVAC'd out, and recover the vehicle. And so we accomplished all that ultimately, and by the early morning hours, dawn, up all night, up all day the day before, we're rolling into the FOB, and we need to rest for a little bit before we start making our way back. We did get another helicopter in and got dock flown out, killed in action, and got him on his way home. And when I got to the FOB, I wanted to go face-to-face with the lieutenant, the infantry lieutenant who had been there, the one that, you know, I'm sure was probably frustrated with that for not linking up with his patrol. And I wasn't sure. I wanted to talk to him and just find out how he was doing. Obviously, he was not doing well in the sense that his Marines had been wounded and he had been killed. So it was a small outpost, and as I looked for him, I could see him walking around the perimeter of the FOB. And so I went and caught up with him and put my arm around him and said, Hey, man, how are you? How are you doing? I am so sorry how things turned out. We brought the ammo that you requested. We brought the parts that you needed. We brought a hot chow that we can cook while we're here. Like, we want to do whatever we can to just try to get everybody back in the fight, back focused, and anything else I can do, literally. What is the one thing here at the FOB that's just annoying you logistics-wise that maybe while you've got me here, you know, what can I do? And the Lieutenant looked at me kind of incredulously like, Really? You want to help me, huh? I was like, Yeah, man. Is there anything I can do while I'm here? I know. This sucks. What's one thing I can maybe do to lift spirits a little bit? He goes, You want to do something? That air conditioner over there on that 20-foot container, that air conditioner hasn't worked the whole deployment. So you want to do something to help? Big shot. You can go fix that air conditioner. How about that? And I was like, It's the part I was born to play, baby. I'm sorry. I grab my letterman and I go racing. I got you. And I go running over to the container where they had set up as like a little operations center, and we had an air conditioner on the top of that thing dumping cold air into it, only it wasn't working. And I got up there on top of that container and started taking panels off and looking at it, and I'm like, Oh, I see exactly what's wrong. There's a little contact or a little switch in there that had burnt up. It gets dirty. It arcs and burns. I was like, Man, if I just had another. There is. There is another air conditioner here. I know because as the logistics officer for this unit, I know exactly what equipment we've sent to every single one of these FOBs. So I know there's a second air conditioner somewhere. So I jump off the container and I went and found the staff sergeant. I said, Hey, staff sergeant, where's your other air conditioner? And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about, sir. I'm like, Whenever we build this FOB, I sent you guys two air conditioners. One of them is on the roof there. Where is the other one? And he's like, Hey, listen, if it's on this little FOB, it's going to be over in that tent. That's our little GP tent, our little supply tent. If it's here, it's going to be buried in there with all the other stuff we're not using. I'm like, All right. So I run in there, pull up the tent flap. I'm trying to see, and there it is. I pull the contactor off of that one, go back up on top, slap her on, fire it up, and we had cold air dumping out of that. Operation centered, I was like, Yes. Did you circle back to the lieutenant after that? Well, you know, not to be like, Hey, hey, how about that? I was trying to be cool about the whole thing. I was really proud that, you know, the platoon that was there, the motor team platoon that had driven all day and then stayed all night with the cordon and got docked out and picked up the whole vehicle. We weren't going to leave the vehicle for those guys either. We recovered the burnt-up vehicle as well. And they cooked a hot meal for everybody. It's just the tray rations that you heat up, you know, the little unitized free rations, the ETRs. It wasn't, like, fancy, but it was still hot food. And I was really proud that the motor team platoon made chow for the infantry platoon there that morning. So that was great. So we sat down and ate and drank the coffee, you know, the instant coffee. Just tried to let them know they weren't alone. And honestly, I think that was one of the most important things to us as a logistics section within an infantry battalion is, especially in 08, and I'm sure other units experienced the same thing, I had people saying things to me like, why are you not flying everything? And when someone would ask me that, like, first of all, they didn't understand just how much it takes to sustain a rifle company in that environment. A helicopter can't move that much stuff. You'd need way too many helicopters. They'd have to fly way too many sorties. So, you know, the fuel alone and the water alone is too much to fly. So you're going to have to put trucks on the road. And so I always would try to say, like, hey, you've just got to understand, like, we don't have enough helicopters in the inventory to sustain these guys. So we've got to put trucks on the road. I know it's risky. I wish we didn't have to. There's no way around it. There's no way around it. But here's the other thing about it. We had calculated that our rifle platoons, because we were distributed out to the platoon level, and we had calculated based off of our ability to drive to them, to resupply them, each platoon could theoretically get a ground resupply mission every 14 days. That's theoretically. If there's any delays anywhere, then that will become 15 or 16 or 17 or 18 days. And so within that 14 or 15 or 16 or 17-day window, we would try to have a helicopter, you know, airlift mission go in. And that's going to be for your small things, maybe that critical repair part or perhaps a routine kind of casovac if somebody's got a minor injury or is sick or something like that. So we'd mix in a helicopter mission in between during that two-week period. Kind of mitigate the needs in between that. Mitigate that. Call it a dead period where no one's going to be there to do anything because the distances are too great and there's too many other folks that also needed to be supported. The Air Force also helped us establish drop zones at each of our locations, and the Air Force maybe once a month would do a containerized delivery system airdrop. So for those rifle platoons who are out there, you know, on their own, a second lieutenant, Marine Infantry second lieutenant, to the mayor of, you know, Bakwa, Afghanistan or whatever, they may not see us come out there but for every once every two weeks, but they should have something that breaks that up, a helicopter airlift mission or a containerized delivery system aerial resupply mission airdrop. But I realized that if we didn't go out there with those trucks, who would ever go out there and see them? Sure. Who would ever go out there and put their arm around them, joke around with them, shoot the shit, drink coffee, talk about news, talk about, hey, what we're hearing about redeployment timelines, talk about how so-and-so is recovering in the hospital in Landstuhl, you know, something like that. You know, the commanders tried to do what they could to circulate, but, you know, it was a team effort. You know, that commander by himself can't go see everybody frequently. Everyone needs to be a part of that. The sergeant major, you know, was obviously a part of that. We have other senior leaders that would try to go out. I really felt like it was another really important part of what we were doing. And I wasn't always there, but my lieutenants were always there. And my motor team platoon commanders became very, very close with those other rifle platoon commanders and the company XOs because they were the ones that was going out there and drinking coffee with them and going out there and making sure that somebody put eyes on them and did a face-to-face and said, hey, brother, hang in there. You know, I'll see you in a couple weeks. You know, I thought that that kind of interaction was really, really important. And, you know, not only was it logistically impossible to take the trucks off the road, it wouldn't have been good. It wouldn't have been good for us. You know what I mean? I want to talk about it just a little bit. That gets to resilience, and I've heard you mention toughness versus adaptability. So we will get into that. I want to just briefly talk about DLI because you and I have that in common. So eventually you were tapped for the Korean Command Staff College. So as part of that role, you needed to complete the Korean language course at DLI. So just on my own curiosity, Mike, tell me about your time at DLI. It is an interesting chapter of my career that I would have never predicted, right? But as, you know, I'm sure it's the same in the Army, but in terms of the career progression requirements, the professional military education requirements to be eligible for promotion and things like that, you know, you've got to go to school every now and then, right, depending on what's your occupational field, what's your rank, what have you. You'll get looked at for different schools. So I had already gone to Expeditionary Warfare School as a captain. As a major, you need to complete Command and Staff College. And all roads go through Quantico. Quantico is kind of called the crossroads of the Marine Corps because you officers, you know, become officers there. They come back for Expeditionary Warfares. They come back for Command and Staff College. And so when I got tagged for Command and Staff College, it would have been our third or fourth time in Quantico. And I remember my wife saying, do we have to go to Quantico again? You're in the D.C. area. Highway 95 is inevitable. It sucks. It just sucks the life out of you, that highway. So, you know, I sympathized with her when she was like, do we really have to go back to Quantico again? And I was like, well, no, we can throw our name in the hat for one of these other alternative programs. And one of them was foreign Command and Staff College. You could go to a foreign country's Command and Staff, like a little exchange program. And so I had to take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery. Sure. It's the D-Lab. If I had ever taken the D-Lab as part of my session process, I didn't remember ever taking it. Okay. But the monitor said, all right, if you want to be considered for foreign Command and Staff, go take the D-Lab. Well, I went and took the D-Lab. My wife had already seen that there was Argentinian Command and Staff College, French Command and Staff College, Brazilian Command and Staff College. And she's like, oh, I want to go to one of those. And I'm like, yeah, that would be awesome. Okay, cool. I go take the D-Lab. I'll never forget the guy printing off my score. There were all these old printers. And he rips it off and he goes, okay, Major Vincent, oh. I've never seen a score this high before. And I was like, oh. And I kind of felt uncomfortable because there was other Marines there, you know, looking at me like, what's with this guy? The reality is I watched way too much Star Trek as a kid. Klingon, Ferengi, and all these, like, fictitious languages. Apparently I had a high aptitude for foreign languages. Who knew? That's funny. Whenever I went home and I was like, hey, honey, my score is too high to go. They're not going to send me to learn Spanish or French. That's not how this works. And I said, if we do this, looking at the list, it's going to be Japan or Korea. I just wanted to let you know that because we've already done Okinawa. I wasn't sure. And like my wife says, she's like, let's go for it, man. Let's just see what happens. That's awesome. And I was like, all right. So I threw my name in the hat, got tagged for Korean Command and Staff, went to Monterey, learned to speak Korean. Korean is one of the easiest. Oh, my gosh. I've heard horror stories about the Korean schoolhouse. The staff was awesome in a terrifying kind of way because they're actual Korean natives. You know, they're over on contract for two or three or four years. Their English is okay enough to facilitate instruction. But, you know, after a few months, two, three months of the class, you know, English is prohibited. Sure. Your only Korean is all that's allowed. So you get that immersion experience. Was yours 18 months? Fifteen. Fifteen at that point. Okay. I think they've extended it a little bit since then. I don't blame them. I could have used three more months, I'll tell you. So, but what an amazing spot, man. As you know, Monterey is a beautiful place, amazing campus. I had been, you know, stand in duty my whole career in Okinawa and Camp Lejeune and other places. And stand in duty is, you know, usually high adventure on a place like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Marines do all manner of crazy things that you get called in on. And so the first time I stood duty in Monterey, I was like, here we go, man. Duty, who knows what's going to happen tonight. And so I remember walking out of that duty hut kind of like looking for a fight, like expecting, like, to just get messed with or shenanigans. And it's so quiet. And, you know, it's like a Friday night. I'm like, where is everybody? Like, where's the party at? You know, where's the couch that's being thrown off the catwalk? Where's the fight? You know. Because I've just kind of been conditioned for like, you know, whatever. And I go walking through the barracks, which are more like dorms there. And I'm seeing, like, study groups. I mean, like, Russian study groups sipping red wine, reading Russian poetry to one another, all four branches together, you know. Like, engaging in this high-level intellect. And I was like, oh, this is a different type of soldier, sailor, airman, and marine that comes to DLI. These are the cream of the crop. So thank goodness duty was always very calm because you just had some outstanding, outstanding young people. I've heard you say, you know, I would expect this of any officer that attends DLI. I've heard you say that in some capacities you felt sort of bad because enlisted folks, and I remember this as someone who went to DLI as an E4, they are not only are they struggling to learn a foreign language, they're also still struggling to kind of figure out what it means to be a service member. And so what I've heard you say is, you know, you would come in for formation or whatever and say, hey, here's some coffee, here's some donut. How are you guys doing? Did you enjoy your weekend? And you just see these bleary-eyed people who are like, why is he so chipper? Tell me a little bit about that experience. Well, you know, again, it was not lost on me that I was being pushed through an exchange program that was, you know, a real, like, pleasure to be a part of. An honor to get to go to Korea and represent the Marine Corps at a Korean school. Whether I passed my language test or not at DLI, I was still going to Korea, and I was still going to go through their course. So it behooved me to study and do well and learn the language, but it's not like my neighborhood warriors depended on it. And I realized with the enlisted members of my class, you know, their jobs depended on it. I remember one particular case of a sailor who was struggling. And my neighbor at the time was a personnel officer with the Naval Detachment there, Navy Chief Warrant Officer. And I remember sitting around one night talking to him, and I was like, hey, if this sailor sails out, you know, what's going to happen to her? Is she going to get re-designated? Is she going to get a different, you know, MOS, have to kind of start over? And he goes, oh, no, she'll still go to a ship. She'll report to her ship. And I'm like, well, in order to do what? She doesn't have a job. And he's like, whatever sailors do on ships, they don't have jobs. And I was just like, oh, my God. And it really kind of – and every branch had a different policy for their academic failures or whatever the case may be. I think the Marine Corps did recycle you, although I think you got – you had some paperwork in your record if you failed out. I think the – from what I remember, the Navy and Air Force were extremely strict, Army a little bit less so. And so it helped me understand just how much stress everybody was under and that, you know, it wasn't the same for me because I was a little further along in my career. I was older. My orders were different. It wasn't the same level of stress. I still felt a lot of stress, but only because, like, I wanted to do – I wanted to pass. I didn't want to fail. Sure. So I ended up passing. I ended up in a 2, 2+, 2, 2+, 1+, speaking, I want to say. Okay. Yeah. I was quite proud of that. Yeah. The speaking, getting your 2 on speaking, I feel like is almost impossible. Oh, the 1+, on speaking. That's hard enough. Oh, my gosh. You know, I didn't hardly know anybody else that got a 1+, on speaking. But anyways, I realized that the stress was just palpable every day, and I just – my heart broke for them. So I thought, you know, if there's anything I can do to help everyone just be a little less stressed, because our instructors weren't going to. Sure. These were native Korean folks who just had a different culture when it came to academic settings. Very strict, very hierarchical. Their language. No mercy, no sympathy. And so I hoped that, you know, each day I was trying to do a little bit of something. Sure. Because stress shuts down the learning process. I mean, just shuts it down. And once that sets in, like, it might take a whole day to reset, if you can come back from that at all. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know how much I helped, but I wanted to try each day to be like, hey, everybody, we're going to be okay. We're going to get through this, you know. And the more stressed we are, the less, you know, we're going to be able to actually do what we're here to do. Yeah. I want to ask you something about Monterey and DLI, just because I'm curious. And I really loved my time there. Did you do anything fun in California while you were there? Oh, yeah. What kind of things did you do or see? We'd go up to San Francisco and see Giants games. We did a whale watching tour. We did a couple other out on different boats in the bay there. We joined the aquarium. Oh, nice. We were members of the Monterey Bay Aquarium there, which was just like, that's like a hidden gem. It is. It is. Across the country, I've never seen anything like that. Yeah. We fell in love with the Big Sur coastline. Sure. And one of our favorite state parks was Garrapata State Park, which is in that whole chain of parks there in the Big Sur National Seashore. So we'd spend Sunday mornings out there on Garrapata just enjoying how beautiful and how amazing that part of the country is. You know, the temperature's mild all year round. Yeah. You just have a little chilly, you know, all year round. The water's always freezing. So we didn't get in the water too much. Sure. But, yeah, we got up to wine country, you know, while we were there, and saw Sonoma. Good. We loved it. I remember my wife saying, you could have been stationed here this whole time? Why are we just now being stationed here? And I'm like, David, that's not how it works. No. This is not like a duty station where, like, Marines get stationed. Yeah. You only come here for DLI or the Naval Postgraduate School. Yeah. And, of course, I wasn't doing Naval Postgraduate School. I was doing Korean Command and Staff College. And the Santa Cruz thing didn't work out. Yeah. Thanks to the General. That didn't work out. You know, man, was he right about 7th Marines. I will say that. He was totally right about 7th Marines. So we'll skip ahead just a little bit, just for the sake of time, Mike. Yeah. Tell me about the end of your Marine career. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, after that platoon commander time and infantry battalion logistics officer with 2nd Battalion 7th Marines, the Afghanistan deployment, that then led into a Marine Expeditionary Unit deployment where we all went on ship and floated around the Western Pacific and participated in different exercises. I went to school. Then I taught for three years in North Carolina. Then went to Monterey in Korea for Command and Staff. And then I got orders to Hawaii. And, I mean, this is after 15 years of telling my wife, we're never going to Hawaii. Stop asking me about Hawaii. We're never going to Hawaii. We went to Hawaii. And, oh, my gosh, paradise. Loved Hawaii. Loved the aviation unit that I was a part of. Because, you know, I'm a ground logistics officer, but I got to see that aviation side of it and learned so much, formed some great friendships during that time. And at the tail end of that tour, got selected for lieutenant colonel and got selected for command of Combat Logistics Battalion 6 in North Carolina, Camp DeJune. So we left Hawaii. It hurt leaving Hawaii. But we were excited to go to North Carolina where I was going to get a chance to command a battalion. And so COB 6 was kind of, you know, capping off my career. Sure. You know, I skipped over my company commander time because it was at the schoolhouse. So it was a little different. It wasn't a deploying unit or a fleet unit. But I did get a chance to command a company there in the instructional environment, in a training command. But that was very formative for me. It's team commander time, company commander time. In Hawaii, I got to command a detachment during my time out there. And now here I am a battalion commander. And as I was considering what came next, it just kind of occurred to me that I didn't feel like, and I'm sure there's colonels and generals that will tell you, you were wrong, man. That's not true. But for me, I felt like I don't know that I'm going to get the chance to be as close with the Marines that I've gotten the chance to serve with, get to know, be a part of their lives, be involved in training and development and just friendships. I just felt like, well, everything after battalion command, because it was hard in battalion command to really be as involved as you want to be because there's a company commander there. Sure. Who's like, hey, man, get out of my company's business. There's a natural distance there. I'm trying to do my thing and develop my leadership ability. So you're like, I'll leave you to it. So I just kind of saw the writing on the wall where it's like, okay, you know what? I think I did what I came here to do. And it was around that time that my father-in-law said, hey, Mike, totally respect what you've done as a career in the Marine Corps. And I know you might serve another 10-plus years, but if you decide to retire, would you be willing to consider coming back to St. Charles and helping keep the heating and cooling company in the family and in business going? That's cool. And so Beth and I talked about it, and we decided that's going to be the next calling, the next season of our life is once we retire, I'll let the boys graduate high school, but now we're back here and going to keep the family-owned heating and cooling company. The place that I started. That's great. The place that I started all those years ago, we're going to keep that thing going and in the family, and my brother-in-law, Jonathan Leiber, I'll be supporting him. And that's exactly what I've always been called to do, is find a way that I can serve and support in some capacity. Sure. It'll be in a heating and air conditioning uniform now, but I'm just thrilled to have the opportunity to do it, be back here in St. Charles, now going to be running a small business and hopefully doing a lot of the same things, just in a slightly different capacity. What a cool, I love the bookends in your life, Mike. Your dad, for whatever reason, decides to send you a link about the Marines, that starts this trajectory, and then the twilight of your career is approaching. You're not quite sure where you're going to go next, and your father-in-law decides to reach out to you, hey, I'd like you to come back if you're willing to do it. Just beautiful bookends of your Marine career. Thank you for explaining your Marine career and talking about it and going into detail. There is so much that we could talk about. That's kind of the issue with guests like you, Mike. There's so much material. Let's do this because I really want to get into some of these things before we have to close. I want to start by saying this because I find this interesting. In an article that you wrote, you pointed out that the Marine Corps still advises that Marines, young Marines, read the Marine Leader's Guidebook on Resilience, which, oddly enough, is written by a former governor of this state, Eric Greitens. And you reference in your article, which I think it's a sensible thing to do, there's no reason to try to avoid it, that Governor Greitens, as we know, was relieved of his command, as you could say, had to resign as governor for sexual assault allegations. Not really the kind of person that I think you want to highlight as a leader for your military, as service members. That is a highlight of the title of your article, Rebuilding Marine Corps Resilience. From what I read of that article, and I referenced it earlier, Marines don't quit, we adapt, we overcome, we maneuver. The second part of that quote is, but when it comes to how we teach resilience, we're stuck. Give me a synopsis of what's wrong right now with resilience in the Marines. Well, you touched on two things there, and I know we are short on time, so I'll try to be quick and to the point. The first one, I would say, is that, and I'll just speak from my own experience, but I think other people would agree it's true for them, too. The actual activity of being resilient has everything to do with being flexible and adaptable. And the idea of being steadfast and holding a hill is a cultural, sexy notion of what resilience looks like, but it's not actually what resilient people do. And what's not lost on me is kind of ironic is, actually, the Marine Corps' war fighting philosophy agrees that it's flexibility and adaptability that enables us to maneuver, avoid an enemy's strength, and bring down an enemy's system of command and control. Why is it, then, that we push so hard these notions of take and hold the hill, do not budge, do not move, take the hit, and can keep taking it, and someday, you know, you'll still be standing there. It's a Rocky Balboa mindset, and I love the Rocky metaphor because it sums it up perfectly. In Rocky I, he stands toe-to-toe with Apollo, gets his face blasted in. In Rocky II, he does the same thing. This time, he actually ends up getting up before Apollo does, and he wins. I'll skip over Rocky III for a second because it's different. Rocky IV stands toe-to-toe with Drago and just takes a beating and comes out on top at the end. In Rocky V, Rocky has traumatic brain injury and is forced into early retirement because that's what happens. Whenever you just stand toe-to-toe and take it, that's the consequences of that. That's the fruit of that. Rocky III is different. Rocky III, he loses his title. His manager dies. He's at the lowest point in his life, and his friend comes alongside of him and says, you cannot stand there toe-to-toe and fight this guy. He's going to blast you. He's going to knock you out again. I'm going to teach you a new way. You need to change your fighting style in order to avoid getting punched by this guy and come at him with a new method of speed and agility and flexibility and these things. It sums it up perfectly. Rocky III is a message of resilience. Other Rocky movies are an American culture of machismo that infects a lot of our organizations. That's what I would say is number one. Resilience is about your ability to change and adapt. It's not a test for how long you can hold that position and not budge. Steadfastness and rigidity is the enemy of resilience. The second part of that is that moral authority plays a vital role in giving Marines permission to be flexible because sometimes being flexible feels like you're violating a commitment you made, and it can feel that way. I need to change something. It's hard to raise your hand and say that. I'm not able to hold this anymore. It's I need to change. It feels like maybe you're doing something wrong because the culture makes you feel that way. Only a moral authority can create the kind of environment of trust and permission that lets a Marine know it's okay for you to ask for a change. Now, we all know there are times where you do have to be steadfast, no doubt. So I'm not some pie-in-the-sky, naive person that believes that you're never going to have to wait. I know it's hard right now, but things are going to get better. Knowing that you've got an environment of trust where the leader does not have an ulterior motive, where that leader isn't just using you for his or her own personal gain, that's the role of moral authority. And when we elevate individuals in leadership positions that compromise that moral authority, rightly or wrongly, Governor Greedens wasn't convicted in a court, to my knowledge. He did resign amid allegation, and then it appears he would have been impeached for the campaign finance and violations and other things. But the reality is now there is a chip in that armor of a moral authority where subordinates are going to wonder if there's an ulterior motive. And if your team worries about that or wonders about that, they will not raise their hand and speak up and say, we need to change something. They will isolate and they will hide. I'll leave you with this final note. Stephen Pressfield wrote a book years ago. He's probably most famous for Gates of Fire, his historical fiction novel about the Battle of Thermopylae and the Spartans that defended the path against the Persian army. He also wrote a book called The Warrior Ethos. And in The Warrior Ethos, he makes a startling claim. He talks about shame-based organizations. And he says, for example, Japanese Bushido culture was shame-based. If you failed on the battlefield, you just had to take your own life. That was the expectation. You're not worthy to live. He said Afghanistan's Pashtunwali culture was shame-based. And then he says the Marine Corps is shame-based. And I remember reading that and throwing the book across the room and saying, how dare you talk about my Marine Corps that way. Well, Stephen Pressfield served in the Marine Corps, so he's got some experience. I went and picked the book back up and I was like, oh, God, he might be on to something. Because shame-based organizations elevate how you appear over how you actually are in your character. And I think that there are elements of our approach to operational combat and operational stress control that are still somewhat contaminated, I would argue, with some shame-based ways of thinking and a definition of resilience that's just fundamentally flawed. And it has to do with withstanding adversity without being significantly affected. That's the Rocky Balboa mindset. The Rocky III mindset is different where it says, oh, no, you're significantly affected, and you're not going to be able to just withstand this adversity. You're going to have to be able to make a change. And those are the cognitive skills. And I don't know if we've quite figured out how to train our Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and our own students in our high schools and colleges across this country, train those types of cognitive skills to be able to say, you're going to face adversity. You will not always be able to withstand it. And when you run into that, you've got to be able to make a change. That's resilience. And that's what I'm excited to be a part of the conversation with the Marine Corps because the Marine Corps is near and dear to my heart to see if we can't adapt and evolve our resilience programs in order to start to make a dent in the active-duty suicides. And maybe that could be a model for on the Reserve side, on the National Guard side, on the veterans side writ large, but also the administrative separations, those disciplinary and mental health issues that lead to a young Marine or a soldier or a sailor or an airman not being able to complete their contract because something happens and they can't hold a weapon anymore. And there's shame associated with it. And as soon as they can't, in the Marine Corps anyway, I can only speak to the Marine Corps, but I'm sure it's true elsewhere, if that Marine can't hold a weapon anymore, they're going to end up separated because that's what you've got to be able to do. But if there's suicidality or some other diagnosis or some other issue that's causing you to not be able to go to the rifle range, not be able to deploy, you're going to be out of a job. And that, to me, is an alarming set of data when you look at the number of administrative separations that are associated with those types of mental health diagnoses. I'm not talking about PTSD. I mean, that's in a different category. But I am talking about the things like anxiety disorder and depressed mood disorder and adjuvant disorder, some of those kind of squishy mental health diagnoses that seem to be identifying a Marine who's having difficulty adjusting to their life as an active-duty Marine, and that leads to them being separated, as opposed to perhaps some preventative training methodologies that might be able to make a dent in the amount of Marines that end up not being able to complete their contract. So I just did a Freedom of Information Act request and got some data from Headquarters Marine Corps that shows a really interesting trend in the Marine Corps for the last 20 years as it relates to administrative separations for mental health diagnoses. The number one reason we had to separate a Marine whenever I was a battalion commander was for a mental health diagnosis. Not for drugs, not for a condition of a serious offense, but for a behavioral mental health diagnosis that led to their separation. I don't think most people know that. And so that's something that suicide absolutely should be a priority focus, but I think those administrative separations should be another focus because that's a lot of people that are not available to deploy now because they got separated because they had difficulty adjusting. And I think a lot of them are perfectly capable of adjusting if we can just equip them correctly on that training. It just takes a little bit of tweaking. Earlier I said, and I'll stand by it. I think currently it is true even though I disagree with it. In practice, the military sees its service members in many capacities as a number. You're a cog in the machine. And I think that's the mindset that needs to be changed if we want to save lives. What I'm hearing you say, Mike, is vulnerability is a huge part of resilience. If you refuse to be vulnerable, if you refuse to admit that you will not be able to climb every peak, because no one can, if you're adamant that you can and it doesn't matter how many times you get punched by Drago, you're going to keep climbing that peak, you're only going to hurt yourself and you're going to hurt your team. For Rocky, it ended up being TBI and early retirement. Yeah. And I think that's a very reminiscent metaphor for a lot of our veterans in terms of a lot of what vets are dealing with now, and especially those that maybe weren't able to finish their enlistment because of a resilience issue. I wonder why they went from Rocky III being a great picture and then they reverted back. I don't know. Who knows? Hey, like I said, it's a cultural part. It's Americanism. It's the American image. And it's so attractive on the surface. Thanks for a great story. It seems right. It seems correct. But steadfastness is only valuable in service of flexibility. One of our favorite military theorists in the Marine Corps is actually an Air Force colonel named John Boyd. He had several lectures that he would give, and a couple of those have become kind of treatises that got published after his death. One of the things that he wrote, or maybe it was in one of his lectures, is he said, a pilot does not seize and hold a cloud, and a ship's captain does not seize and hold a wave. Instead, they maneuver through that space. And in the same way on the ground, we should think about ground operations as space to maneuver, not specific objectives to seize and hold because we can. And I thought that that was such a great metaphor and applies so well to that subject of cognitive maneuver in general. If I'm being taught to maneuver on the ground, if a pilot can be taught to maneuver in a dogfight against an adversary, if naval tactics can think of the sea as maneuver space, then we can do the same thing in the cognitive domain, and we can think about our cognitive existence, our thoughts, the way we think about our thoughts, the way we think about ourselves, the way we think about our circumstances, the branch we serve in, the combat scenario that we're in or we're just in. We can learn to maneuver through that space to gain an advantage and to shape the environment for our own well-being and our own benefit. I don't know that we're teaching that anywhere. And frankly, if you were to say, all right, Mike, where's the curriculum? I don't know that it exists. But maybe on that spiritual side of the house, in that spiritual fitness domain, that's probably where you would need to start in order to put together a curriculum like that. I'm glad you mentioned that because I want to end with that in just a moment. If our listeners are interested, which I don't know how you couldn't be from this conversation, if you're interested in hearing more from Mike, he's been a guest on the One Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast. He's also been a guest on the New Mission Career Transition, which that one was hosted by someone that you went to the Platoon Leader course with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris Trapillian. That's really cool. We also came in school together. That's fantastic. Well, hey, Mike, this is my last question, and you prefaced it perfectly. Earlier you mentioned church off of Harvester. I used to live in Colville, so I would see that church all the time off of 94. Yeah. And you've talked a little bit about the importance of faith in your life. At the end of the day, as a 20-year Marine officer who served bravely and selflessly and compassionately, I would argue, what role did faith have in your success as a Marine? You know, one of the most influential books that I've read was Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. He's a Holocaust survivor. Though I don't believe he was a religious man, he recognized, while he was in a concentration camp, the importance of understanding meaning behind suffering. And he concluded in his book that there is purpose in suffering. And we don't normally think of purpose that way. Like, you know, finding purpose in my life is generally more associated with career success or having kids or something like that. I wouldn't normally look to suffering as a way to find purpose in my life. But Victor Frankl concluded after his experiences, no, there's purpose in suffering. And the requirement, though, is to find and understand the meaning behind it. And he even went so far to say, you know, sometimes you need to even create that meaning. Now, not to get too philosophical on it, I would argue that a life of faith is one that enables an individual to say, I'm going to look for opportunities to create and generate meaning out of the experiences in my life. Storytelling is a huge part of that, by the way, which is a great connection to Urol's mission here, is it's hard sometimes to know the meaning or the purpose behind suffering. I would say that one of the benefits of a life of faith is one that says, because you're choosing to look for it, you are primed to find it. Jesus had a great saying in the New Testament when he said, if you seek, you will find. Search and you'll find it. Knock and the door will be answered. The thing that you're searching for, you will find it. And so it kind of puts the onus back on us to say, what exactly are you searching for? Because if you're searching for purposelessness or meaninglessness, you're going to find that. But if you can prime yourself, I would argue, through a life of faith that says, I'm primed to be looking for purpose. I'm looking for meaning in this, whether I can prove it to you or not. I'm going to generate it through the creative act, because what could the image of God in us be if not the ability to create? And so that, to me, is a kind of life I want to live. That, to me, is a life of faith. It's not necessarily religious, but it's looking to those individuals that have set a course and set an example. I look to Jesus, who set a course and set an example of a life that is absolutely committed to saying, one thing's for sure is I can tell you there's meaning behind this. That bears good fruit in our lives. And so that, for me, has been a big part of, I believe, what's helped me process my experiences in a way that has borne good fruit in my life. You know, my platoon in Iraq prayed together every mission. And I always say, hey, this is voluntary. You don't got to come pray. You know, we're just going to say a quick prayer. It's just a calibration. We're just going to calibrate our minds towards faith before we step off. No one has to. I'll be over there after the brief. And sure enough, I'd walk a ways over there, and I'd expect to be by myself every time every single one of my Marines joined me. And I'm not saying that like, oh, therefore. Sure. I'm just saying that that primed us to seek and find meaning in what we were going through. I couldn't agree more with what you said, Mike, and you said it perfectly. It's been a joy for me to be able to speak with you. I really appreciate you adapting with me, not having Jason here. I think we adapted pretty well. We did. Thanks for letting me ramble so long. Oh, no. The honor is all mine, Mike. It's a joy to hear just how positively you can reflect on your 20-year career as a Marine. You know, something I wanted to mention just briefly is I was Googling famous Marine generals, and Chesty Puller came up, and Jim Mad Dog Mattis came up, just as some examples. And I bring those two gentlemen up because even when I was a child, before I joined the Army and became a service member myself, when I thought of the peak of military excellence, you think of a Marine officer. I think you fit that mold, Mike. It's a real pleasure to have you. Please come back to the museum, check us out again. Will do. I really loved welcoming you to the museum tonight, and this has been an episode of Operation Insight. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Operation Insight is brought to you by the Mid-America Veterans Museum. Do you like our podcast? With your support, we'll continue to bring you great programming. If you'd like to donate, go to mavm.org and click on Donate.