It was a rare weekend when we weren’t in the field, preparing for the field, recovering from the field, or occupied with an upcoming deployment. If I wasn’t cursed with weekend duty, I either took advantage of Schofield Barracks’ proximity to Waikiki to partake in bottomless mai tais at the Outrigger Reef, or played hermit in my barracks room. Back then, I pecked away at my top of the line Gateway PC with a whopping 1 MB of RAM, 400 MB hard drive, and 33MHz processor, and a keyboard that clicked loudly with each key stroke. I was working on a novel, an activity that filled hundreds of lazy weekend hours, but my voice as a twenty-two-year-old novice now seems almost laughably naïve. Almost as laughable as all that computing power filling up an entire barracks desk, but I digress.
I’ve gone through multiple iterations of this novel, switching protagonists, switching eras in time, switching points of view, about a dozen times since the mid-1990s. While my writing style and perspective have also changed, hopefully for the better, one thing has not: an almost detached outlook on the Army. I served in it, and I still love it, but have always been realistic enough to accept that the Army did not necessarily love me back. When Mike Barin first approached me about this project, the words he used were, “would you mind putting your NCO hat back on for this?” I replied that any number of people could and probably will be better, but he wanted my take as a former NCO. He knew exactly which button to push, because as a former NCO, there was no way I could deny him. It’s so ingrained into us when we’re pup leaders, that we as noncommissioned officers are the first line of defense against the US Army devolving into a disorganized mob of soldiery, that I couldn’t say no.
What I’ve strived to do in my writing, specifically this piece, is to impart upon NCOs coming up that they have a vital role in the development of junior soldiers who will, hopefully, take their place one day. “No one is more professional than I” is a stanza from our creed that I took to heart, and have held dear for decades. I had no concept of this twenty years ago as a staff sergeant in the National Guard. I simply accepted as Gospel that there was some ephemeral and sacred trust placed upon my generation of NCOs, and oh, by the way, young Sergeant Kim, don’t you dare fuck this up. What I didn’t also realize then, but have a heightened awareness of now, is the extent of the trust placed in us.
Why do I write? I’ve thought about this a great deal, but primarily I needed a creative outlet that, in fictional form, reflected how I led, and how I wanted to be led and taught. It was jarring, several years ago, to review this early work and be reintroduced to a martinet of an officer who, thankfully, resigned when the Army wisely didn’t promote him to major. My late former first sergeant, a Vietnam veteran who rarely raised his voice and inspired junior soldiers like me to not disappoint him, lives on in his fictional analogue.
These two flesh-and-blood people’s ages, races, and backgrounds have changed several times over the course of several drafts of the novel; what hasn’t changed, though, was their approach to leading soldiers, a subject that I hold more sacred than any organized religion (in case you hadn’t already noticed from my Twitter timeline). We write either what we know, or what we want to know. What I’d like to see more of is currently serving NCOs doing this, writing about their experiences and any/all lessons they learned in the process.
When I first joined Twitter, I joined to share the beginning of my journey into fatherhood, and to follow fiction writers whose work I admired. Later on, I followed and engaged with many officers across different service branches whose writing I enjoyed, and whose voices were unique. What I couldn’t shake, however, was the nagging feeling that something was lost in translation. Where was the writing from the military’s self-described backbone, the NCOs?
Despite a Twitterverse full of professional development in the form of articles, essays, and critiques from officers, there was precious little of that from NCOs, with the notable exception of Harlan Kefalas. While I offramped years ago, and don’t have Harlan’s or Mike’s contemporaneous take on the Army, some things like leadership never change. I hope that currently serving NCOs, or even junior soldiers who hope to one day become NCOs themselves, take to writing. We are leaders and mentors. Hopefully, mentees of great NCOs whose example demands emulation. We are the institutional knowledge of our branch of service, without which its future is uncertain.
This is why I continue to hope that more NCOs will write. I look forward to reading their work, which hopefully will inform and influence junior soldiers as they themselves rise up the ranks.
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