Points of Leadership

A sure sign of outstanding leadership is selflessness and the willingness to acknowledge those with whom you disagree. These are qualities that put the interests and well-being of others ahead of your own.

As is always the case with pure leadership, naming names is an all-too-brief exercise. For me, names like Houfek, Bartlett, Renninger, Miller, Wauer, Welch, and Parucci easily come to mind. I could provide numerous examples of how these officers and chief petty officers defined the term. However, one person's actions and words have always stayed with me: from childhood, through ten years of my own military service, into the turbulent present.

I am a military brat, the third son and sixth child of an Air Force officer. Back in the late 1970's when we were stationed at Plattsburgh A.F.B., I watched my father commit two incredibly thoughtful acts of leadership.

On a particularly cold, upstate New York winter night, my dad and I were making our way home between whiteout conditions not uncommon to the shores of Lake Champlain, against which the city of Plattsburgh and the air base nestled. My dad decided to stop at a fast food restaurant to get takeout, since we would be returning to an empty house - Dad and Mom had divorced a few years before. Snow began to fall again as he returned to the car with our dinner and we drove the last mile to the front gate of the Old Base where most of the officers lived. We approached the guard shack amid the return of blizzard conditions and the entombed Security Police officer eagerly waved us on, unwilling to step outside his warm cocoon. Dad, however, stopped and rolled down his window.

The guard, lightly dressed, stepped from tolerable conditions into the bitter, white-chaos with a look that can only be described as controlled-rage. He was obliged to attend to the Lt. Colonel sitting in his toasty Volkswagen Sirocco, though the heavily armed enlisted man did so in a I'm-very-pissed-off-that-I'm-doing-this-for-an-offic er sort of way. "Good evening, Airman" my dad half-yelled. The guard froze in place, not because of the single-digit temperatures, but because of the steaming cup of coffee and a bag of food my dad had pushed out the window to him. I looked again at the enlisted man's face and was forever marked by the expression of deep gratitude that had melted away the understandable furor animating his face just seconds before.

Then, during the following spring,

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