In Honor of the United States Armed Services

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For Veterans Day, Some Former Military Officers Reflect on Lessons From Their Parents
The values that shaped them include leadership, optimism and charting your own course.


By Debra Weiner
Nov. 10, 2020

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Debra Weiner is interviewing 100 newsmakers, thought leaders and other people who’ve made an outsize difference about the most valuable thing their parents taught them. Following are excerpts from a few of those stories, edited and condensed.

Leadership
JIM DUBIK, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general

Commanding general for training the Iraqi forces during the surge of 2007-08; Senior Fellow, Institute for the Study of War; author, “Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics and Theory.”


ImageJim Dubik with his father, Sam Dubik.
Jim Dubik with his father, Sam Dubik.Credit...via Jim Dubik
My dad was an Army corporal in World War II and a sergeant in the Korean War, and worked at a plastics factory in the shipping and receiving department, so from a world standpoint, a regular guy. But he knew so much about how to lead, how to get the best out of somebody and, as a boys’ baseball coach, he taught me things about leadership that have been fundamental for the rest of my life.

I was probably 12, and it was the bottom of the last inning. There were two outs. The bases were loaded, and this kid was up but refused to bat because he was so anxious. He implored my dad to put somebody else in, but my dad said, “No, this is your turn. I have confidence in you.”

Well, the kid swung, missed and got even more nervous. He swung again, fouled, and this time walked out of the batter’s box. My dad was coaching third base and came down, talked to him, hugged him and put him back in the box. Then he turned around and told the parents in the stands to cheer. And whack, he got a hit.

In high school, I started coaching with my dad. I’d say, “You know, if we play this other guy longer, we’ll have a better chance of winning.” And he’d say, “Yeah. But I’m not here to win. I’m here to have every kid be proud of himself and how he was part of the team.”

It was the same philosophy when I went into the Army. I was 21, right out of college, commissioned to be a second lieutenant in the infantry, and Dad said, “Remember, you’re an officer and people are going to look up to you. But the people looking up to you may die as a result of your orders. Don’t treat them like cogs in a wheel. Treat them with dignity. Respect them for what they’re willing to do.”

When I was a major, I was a deputy commander of a Ranger battalion and one of the higher-ups, a colonel, was really not good. He told me at one point, “Stop thinking. I’ve thought of everything. I don’t need suggestions from you.” At the time, I didn’t know he was going through a personal crisis and stress from a recent combat tour.

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But when you’re a major and go head-to-head with a colonel, you lose. It’s that simple. So I said to myself, “What are you going to do? Change your M.O. and suck up so you succeed, but in the process screw the people that work for you? No way.” Getting promoted was not worth my integrity. That time I didn’t need to talk to my dad. I was channeling him. Luckily, that colonel was an anomaly in my career.

Just before my brother died of cancer, he asked me what I thought about death. I said “Bob, in wartime death is random, instant and final. It’s completely out of your control. What is in control is how you live, and you lived well.” And that’s back to my dad. If you live your life with the right set of values, when death arrives you’re able to, in military terms, come to the position of attention, do an about-face, and be proud of what you see.

Be Your Own Person
JAS BOOTHE, former U.S. Army major

International public speaker and founder of Final Salute Inc., a nationwide nonprofit that provides homeless women veterans and their children with transitional housing.


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Jas Boothe with her father, Mickey Grayson.
Jas Boothe with her father, Mickey Grayson.Credit...via Jas Boothe
I saw way too much as a kid. Mom was a strong woman but struggled with health issues and because of that got taken advantage of emotionally, mentally and physically. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with my father. He always made sure I had what I needed, and would feed my two older sisters — we don’t share the same dad — and even the adults in my mom’s house, just to make sure I ate. But I rarely stayed at his place. Mostly he picked me up and brought me over to his sister’s or his mother’s.

My father was a fear-of-God, worst-case scenario kind of person. Every time he talked to me, it was about being strong and protecting myself. I’d be 8 or 9, and he’d be like, “Don’t go down that street or you’ll get shot in the head.” Or “Boys don’t care about you; they just want to have sex with you, and then you’ll get pregnant and be damaged goods.” I thought, “Dang, why is he so hard on me? Why is he so mean?” But I think that was his way of trying to keep me out of trouble.

My father grew up in the ’60s, which was a harsh time to be a Black man in America. He talked about being chased home as a kid, and as an adult, people trying to take advantage of him because they didn’t think he was educated enough to understand. So he was always in survivor mode and fighting something. Fighting the power, the man, something. Even with the doctors, up until his last days, he was like, “I don’t have pancreatic cancer. They’re just trying to get my money cause I’m Black and they think I’m stupid.”

He was always training me to be like a warrior. Crush people if they need to be crushed.

When I was around 12, some neighborhood kids were messing with me. My mom talked to their parents, but they kept doing it. Finally I told my dad that these kids had jumped me.

We drove over to where they lived, and he grabbed a little bag from under his truck seat. And he pulled out a gun. It was a silver revolver. I was like, “Oh my God, what are you doing?”

And he was like, “This isn’t a game. What did you think I was going to do?”

“Uh, not murder a whole houseful of people because their kids are bullies. I don’t like this. Let’s just go.”

I’ve never been religious but I’ve always felt spiritually led; that there was a protective presence around me pushing me away from negative influences and behaviors. I mean, I respected my parents. And there probably were reasons I never knew about that caused them to live their lives a certain way. But I realized I had the ability to shape how my life would turn out. It wasn’t like I got a notepad and wrote down all the ways I’m not going to be like my parents. But I guess I took subconscious notes. “Nah, that’s not for me. I won’t go down that route.”

I never called my father dad — he was always Mickey — until I was 27. I was getting ready to go to Iraq when I got head, neck and throat cancer. I was in the hospital for six months and was talking to him on the phone one day, when he said, “Hey, you think you can start calling me Dad?”

I think because I was, quote, “weak and very vulnerable,” he finally saw me as his little girl and felt like I needed a daddy. It was like the universe letting me know I was going to get through the cancer. And after that, until the point he passed, we had the greatest relationship. Despite how different we were, I’m still my father’s daughter.

The Golden Rule
STANLEY McCHRYSTAL, retired U.S. Army general

Commander of Joint Special Operations Command in the mid-2000s; commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, 2009-2010; currently a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.


Image
A teenage Stan McChrystal, back row center, with his parents, Maj. Gen. Herbert J. McChrystal Jr. and Mary Bright McChrystal. In front are his younger brother Peter S. McChrystal, in glasses, and John Overman, a cousin.<br /><br />
A teenage Stan McChrystal, back row center, with his parents, Maj. Gen. Herbert J. McChrystal Jr. and Mary Bright McChrystal. In front are his younger brother Peter S. McChrystal, in glasses, and John Overman, a cousin.

Credit...via Stan McChrystal
My mom always treated people kindly and with consideration. She never talked about it or wore it on her sleeve. It was just what she did.

I remember, when I was 6, my brother and I spent two or three weeks in Lafayette, Ala., at the family homestead, this big, brick, Victorian-looking thing which my great-grandfather had built. My mother flew down to pick us up and when she arrived in her traveling clothes, which in those days were nice clothes, some of the relatives came out to greet her. Then the cook, a heavyset African-American lady who had been with the family for years, came out and was effusive with my mother. And then this one-armed guy who wore a straw hat and worked on the farm, Old Mose they called him, came up and goes, “Miss Mary Gardner.” It was almost like you were at Twelve Oaks or something. And my mom greets him in a really personal way, like he mattered. I wasn’t real conscious of race before that trip to the South, but I was struck by how my mom acted differently than my relatives. Not that they were mean. They were just of that society.

I played in a very competitive Little League and there was one game, I was pitching, when a father on the other team started heckling me. Who heckles a 12-year-old? So I heckled back. I thought I was very clever standing up to this old guy. But after the game, my mom goes, just because somebody acts the fool, doesn’t make it OK for you to act the fool. I said, point taken.

When you get to be very senior, not just in the military but also in politics and business, it can make you feel entitled. Privilege, which is a kind of power, can corrupt insidiously. When I was in Afghanistan, American soldiers would sometimes look at the Afghans who were working on the post and literally see through them, as if they were not people. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t, “I hate Afghans.” But it’s what people do with the “help.”

My mother died when I was 16. She got up New Year’s Day — she hadn’t been out or drinking a thing the night before — and started feeling strange. My father took her to Walter Reed. She was having some kind of kidney failure and by 2 the next morning, she was dead. But even now, when I act in a way that isn’t the best I can be, I go, boy, my mom would not be happy about that.

Being respectful of people is the compass I try to live by. But you can do everything right and fail. You can do everything wrong and win. So where I’ve come to is, intentions and effort matter more than the outcome. I try to do what is right simply because I know that’s what I should do.

Optimism
JAMES STAVRIDIS, retired U.S. Navy admiral

The 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO; former dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; author of nine books, including a novel to be published in March.


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James Stavridis’s father, Colonel George Stavridis, in Vietnam in 1967.
James Stavridis’s father, Colonel George Stavridis, in Vietnam in 1967.Credit...via James Stavridis
In 1922, my father’s mother was living in Smyrna in western Turkey when the Greeks and Armenians were herded down to the harbor and the Turkish army burned the city behind them. She was rescued by Greek fisherman who came across the Aegean to bring them to Greece. In Athens, she met my grandfather and these two 20-somethings took a ship for America and went through Ellis Island.

My grandparents always believed that was a profoundly positive experience and transmitted that to my father. In all the 50-plus years I was around him, I never saw him fail to meet the moment with a sense that things will work out. Not in a Pollyanna way — he was a combat Marine; he saw plenty of the dark side of the world — but that if you move with a positive force and face the challenges in front of you, good would outdo evil in the long throw of a life.

In 1966, my dad was preparing to go to Vietnam for a one-year deployment. I was in middle school and watched him pack his sea bag and put it by the door. I think most people would have been pretty downbeat, thinking I’m getting on a plane in the morning and going into a combat situation. But my dad was so positive in conveying that he would be fine.

“I’m going with a battalion of 1,000 Marines to a coastal port called Da Nang. I am their commander. We protect each other. Our mission is to ensure that our ships can come in and out.” He talked about how they would set up perimeter defenses. Fence barriers would be constructed. He took the esoteric idea of what he was going to be doing and surrounded it in my mind with reality and protection.

My father was a tennis player and spent a lot of time teaching me the game. I was in high school and would often be overmatched. I’d say to him, “I’ll never beat that kid. He’s ranked No. 2 in the state. I’m No. 20.” But my dad would say, “No, no, no. Let’s analyze his game. Where are his weaknesses? His strengths? And how do you counter them next time you meet? Even if you lose tactically, you can learn from it strategically.”

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Your business may fail; you may get terminal cancer; you may have a relationship that fails. But even if there is significant failure, draw lessons from it and apply them to the next situation.

On 9/11, I was a newly selected, one-star admiral, and my office in the Pentagon was on the side where the airplane hit. I was 150 feet away, and watched it happen. In the Navy, you learn how to firefight, so my initial instinct was to run toward the explosion. But there was so much smoke, there was nothing I could do.

It took me 3 ½ hours to walk home. My wife had no idea if I’d survived. We had a moment, then I called my father. Like everybody who would be honest about it, I was afraid. Afraid for the country, afraid for my family, afraid for what was happening. But my father snapped me out of it. He said, “We are not going to be taken down by a terrorist organization. You’re an officer in the U.S. military. You have to get back to the Pentagon. This is your moment. Admiral.”

That was not quite the last time I spoke with my father, but among the last. He died of an aneurysm days later, on Sept. 16. He was 76.

Make the Most of It
SUNITA WILLIAMS, retired U.S. Navy captain

NASA astronaut who has spent 322 days in space and performed seven spacewalks; currently training to fly the second crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station.


Image
Suni Williams at her U.S. Naval Academy graduation with her mother, Bonnie Pandya, and her father, Deepak N. Pandya.
Suni Williams at her U.S. Naval Academy graduation with her mother, Bonnie Pandya, and her father, Deepak N. Pandya.Credit...via Suni Williams
My dad grew up in Ahmedabad in India. He was 2 when he lost his dad; 11 when he lost his mom. He lived with his older sister until she got married, but by 14 he was fending for himself. He decided he needed to live around people, so he got himself into boarding school and made his way to become one of the top neuroscientists in the world.

My mom is from Euclid, Ohio. Her parents were blue-collar workers who immigrated from Slovenia. Instead of marrying a Slovenian guy from the neighborhood, she met my dad. He was a doctor in the hospital where she worked as an X-ray technician, and he dragged her to Boston. But my mom, like my dad, has confidence in going with where the wind blows. She learned to play tennis, got us involved in swimming, took advantage of the mountains and camping. She became a lifeguard at Babson College in order to get us a membership to the pool. We’d go over there and she’d be folding towels.

When I was 17, it was the morning of the Boston Marathon, and I was mowing the lawn, frumping around, feeling sorry for myself. I was getting ready to go to the Naval Academy, which was not my first choice, and thinking, man, I’ll never get to run this race because who knows if I’ll ever come home again.

Finally my mom said, “I don’t want to hear you complaining any more. Get in the station wagon.” Then she drove me to the starting line. “Here’s a quarter. If you can’t finish, call.”

At the halfway point, I saw her on a bridge and ran over and said, “I think I’m done.” I didn’t have running shoes and was running in high-tops, so it’d been tough. But then this guy ran over and asked my mom, who had a jar of Gatorade, if he could have some. My mom was like, sure. Then the guy said to me, “C’mon, you can finish this.” My mom said, “Yeah, go for it.” And I was like, “OK, but I can’t run in these stupid shoes anymore.” So I took them off, gave them to my mom and ran the second half with the guy barefoot.

The first time I applied to become an astronaut, I got rejected. But some friends in the class ahead at test pilot school were selected and they wrote telling me to apply again. “Suni, this is right up your alley. It’s so much fun.” They recommended I get a master’s degree. So while I did my sea tour, I went to night school. It was hard. I had to drive three hours to take classes, and I wasn’t sure if there’d be any benefit. But I’d seen my parents do stuff that wasn’t the most flattering or fun, because potentially it could lead to something else. So I thought, even if this sucks, just do it.

I came to the astronaut office in 1998. There were a lot of us, so who knew when you would get a flight assignment. Then in 2003, the Columbia accident happened, and it was like, “Wow, will any of us ever fly? Should I quit?” So I had a little talk with myself. “Hey Suni, you have the opportunity to get physically fit; you have the opportunity to go to Russia and learn Russian, and meet people from an entirely different space agency. Even if you never fly, you’re one of the luckiest people in the whole wide world.”

Life gives you what it gives you. Make the most of it.

And that’s how my parents were. They made the best of any situation. They looked at the big picture, then picked up the pieces and handled them with grace, whatever they were.

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