You Can Take Us Out of the Military …

I showed up to a meeting yesterday, fifteen minutes early. Like any good former military person.

For those of you who don't know, the military has a very specific definition of being on time. If you're supposed to be somewhere at 0900, you'd better fucking be there at 0845. Because if you show up at 0900, you're late. Not technically late, according to the clock on the wall, but fucking late according to everyone who matters. And being late is rude. You're wasting somebody else's time, possibly somebody who outranks you, and almost certainly somebody who has better shit to do than wait for your ass to show up.

That lesson gets drilled into you early, and it doesn't go away when you take off the uniform. Decades later, you can still spot the former military folks in a crowd. They're the ones standing around fifteen minutes before anything starts, wondering where the fuck everybody else is.

So there I was, fifteen minutes early, and two other gentlemen arrived at about the same time. The conference room was empty, so the three of us walked in. And without a word of discussion, we all headed for the same end of the table. The end that faced the door.

One of the gentlemen mentioned that he always preferred sitting where he could see the entrance. The other immediately agreed. I laughed and told them I was exactly the same way. And just like that, we established that all three of us were former military.

Nobody had asked about service history. Nobody had mentioned a rank, a branch, or a deployment. We hadn't even started the fucking meeting. But there we were, three people who'd shown up early and immediately gravitated toward the seats that gave us the best view of the room.

I let the two gentlemen have the door-facing positions. I took my second choice, sitting directly in front of the door with my back to it. Not my preferred arrangement, but at least I knew exactly where the fucking door was.

And I sat there smiling to myself, because the whole thing was so goddamned predictable. Three people. Three military backgrounds. Three sets of habits that apparently nobody ever bothered to uninstall.

And it wasn't just the seating arrangement.

As the meeting progressed, I noticed something else. We all spoke the same language. Not literally, of course. We weren't sitting there communicating in some secret military code. We just talked plainly. Bluntly. We made our points, asked our questions, and got to the fucking point without wrapping everything in six layers of corporate bullshit.

Nobody seemed particularly interested in hearing themselves talk. Nobody needed to spend ten minutes explaining something that could be said in thirty seconds. If there was a question that needed to be asked, somebody fucking asked it. If there was a problem that needed to be addressed, somebody brought it up.

And then, somehow, we got onto the subject of motorcycles.

Now, I've been riding long enough to know that when you get a few motorcycle riders together, sooner or later somebody's going to start talking about an accident. It's practically inevitable. We talk about motorcycles, we talk about riding, and eventually we talk about the times when the fucking pavement won.

I mentioned my accident last October, when I got hit by a car in Santa Fe. The accident that totaled Lilith, broke a whole bunch of shit in my body, and very nearly killed me.

The gentleman across from me told us about laying his motorcycle down on the interstate. He described how his Kevlar armor had melted into his shoulder, burning and tearing the skin all the way down to the fucking bone.

The other gentleman talked about being hit by a car while riding his motorcycle.

And just like that, we weren't talking about motorcycles anymore. We were talking about injuries. Healing. Surgeries. Medical interventions. All the delightful fucking things that happen after your body gets introduced to something significantly harder than it is.

And then the pictures came out.

One gentleman pulled out his phone and showed us a photograph of his shoulder while it was healing. I pulled out mine and showed them a photograph of my lip after the accident, when it had been split open for about an inch and I had to let the fucking thing heal. The other gentleman showed us a photograph of his calf, cut open all the way down to the muscle as part of some medical treatment he'd undergone.

So there we were, three former military people sitting around a conference table, comparing photographs of our various mutilations like we were showing each other pictures of our fucking grandchildren.

By this point, another person had joined us. A woman who wasn't former military. And I noticed that she seemed a little squeamish about the whole conversation.

Which, to be fair, was probably a perfectly reasonable reaction to walking into a room full of people enthusiastically discussing exposed muscle, missing skin, and traumatic injuries while passing around photographic evidence.

But the three of us?

We didn't give a fuck.

Not because we were trying to make anybody uncomfortable. Not because we were deliberately being gross. It simply didn't occur to us that there was anything particularly unusual about what we were doing.

We'd all been hurt. We'd all experienced things that left marks on our bodies. We'd all been through the process of healing, and we'd all learned that sometimes the human body can survive some pretty spectacular fucking damage.

So we talked about it.

Plainly. Matter-of-factly. Without whispering, without dancing around the details, and without acting as though the subject was somehow inappropriate.

And that struck me as another one of those things that military service can leave behind.

When you've spent time in an environment where injuries, emergencies, and the possibility of death are things you have to be prepared to deal with, you develop a different relationship with some of that stuff. You learn to look at an injury and think about what happened, what needs to be done, and how somebody's going to recover.

It doesn't mean you don't feel anything. It doesn't mean you don't understand how serious it is. And it sure as fuck doesn't mean you haven't been affected by what you've experienced.

It just means you can talk about it without needing to dress it up in polite language.

And I realized that the same thing was happening in that conversation that had happened when we walked into the room. We recognized something familiar in each other. A way of looking at the world. A way of communicating. A willingness to talk about difficult things without pretending they aren't difficult.

The funny thing is, I'd been talking to my own team about this exact subject earlier that morning.

My first job out of high school was operating a nuclear power plant under the fucking water.

Think about that for a minute.

While a lot of people my age were figuring out college, parties, and what they wanted to do with their lives, I was learning how to operate machinery that could kill people if we fucked it up. Not metaphorically. Not in some corporate presentation about safety culture. I mean actual fucking death.

On a submarine, accountability isn't optional. Integrity isn't optional. Doing your job isn't optional.

If you make a mistake, you own it. Immediately. You don't hide it because you're embarrassed. You don't bullshit your way through an explanation because you're worried about looking stupid. You don't point at somebody else and hope the problem becomes theirs.

You fucking own it.

Because a mistake that gets reported can be corrected. A mistake that gets hidden can get somebody killed.

And if you're responsible for something, you're responsible for it. You don't get to decide you're having a bad day and somebody else can pick up the slack. You don't get to shrug your shoulders and say you thought somebody else was taking care of it.

There are people sleeping in that boat. People eating. People standing watch. People trusting that every other person aboard is doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing.

Their lives depend on you. And your life depends on them.

That's a hell of a way to learn responsibility.

It's also a hell of a way to learn the value of plain language.

When something goes wrong aboard a submarine, nobody needs a beautifully crafted explanation filled with carefully selected words designed to protect somebody's feelings. They need to know what the fuck happened, what's happening now, and what we're going to do about it.

Clear. Concise. Accurate.

You don't bury the important information under a mountain of bullshit. You don't dance around a problem because the truth might make somebody uncomfortable. And you sure as fuck don't lie about the condition of a piece of equipment that somebody else's life depends on.

You tell the truth. You do your job. You take care of your people.

And that mindset doesn't belong exclusively to submariners. It's something you find across the military, in different forms and different environments. The circumstances change, the equipment changes, and the missions change, but the underlying obligation is the same.

Do your fucking job. Because somebody else is counting on you.

Being trained in an environment where the consequences of failure are immediate and sometimes catastrophic as a young adult fundamentally shapes you. It changes the way you approach problems. It changes the way you communicate. It changes what you expect from yourself and the people around you.

At least, it did for me.

And apparently, it did for the two gentlemen sitting across from me yesterday.

We didn't need to establish some elaborate set of meeting rules. We didn't need a discussion about communication styles or a fucking PowerPoint explaining the importance of accountability. We just got down to business.

We asked questions. We challenged things that needed challenging. We made decisions where decisions needed to be made. And we didn't spend half the meeting congratulating ourselves for having a meeting.

Imagine that. People getting together to accomplish something instead of performing the elaborate corporate ritual of appearing to accomplish something.

I've sat through enough meetings in my career to know the difference. I've watched people talk for an hour without saying a goddamned thing. I've watched simple questions turn into lengthy discussions because nobody wanted to give a direct answer. I've watched people avoid uncomfortable truths until the problem became ten times worse than it needed to be.

And I've watched organizations spend more energy managing the appearance of accountability than actually holding anybody accountable.

That shit drives me fucking crazy.

Because accountability isn't a slogan. Integrity isn't a poster. Leadership isn't a title printed on a business card.

They're things you do. They're the choices you make when something goes wrong, when nobody's watching, and when telling the truth might cost you something. They're whether you show up when you're supposed to, whether you do what you said you'd do, and whether the people depending on you can trust you to follow through.

And sometimes, apparently, they're as simple as showing up fifteen minutes early and wanting a seat where you can see the fucking door.

Or sitting around a conference table comparing photographs of horrific motorcycle injuries without anybody thinking twice about it.

I left that meeting smiling.

Not because we'd solved every problem in the world. Not because everybody agreed on everything. And certainly not because any of us had suddenly become less opinionated after leaving the military.

I was smiling because I'd spent time with people who understood something that has shaped my entire adult life.

Say what needs to be said. Ask what needs to be asked. Own your mistakes. Take care of your people. And do your fucking job.

You can take us out of the military.

But apparently, you can't make us show up on time instead of fifteen minutes early.

You can't make us stop looking for the door.

And you can’t make us talk pretty.