The Days Forward

West Point Class of 1969

Duty Honor Country

Pro Deo et Patria – Country – 2021

Of the three hallowed words that comprise our beloved motto, I would in this article like to write about “Country” and what that word means to me.

I have always thought that I lived one of the most blessed childhoods that any kid could ever want.  Though to me I was simply living the only life I knew, yet it was in many ways magical and surreal.  That’s because I was born into and raised in the Army.  I was born in Fort Benning, Georgia, and raised mostly in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with overseas stints in Panama and Okinawa.  From 1954 to 1957, we lived in Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone in Panama … and for an eight-, nine- and ten-year-old, it was a fantastic place to live.  We lived in a nice house on a corner lot and across the street in front of my house was a jungle with wild banana trees and vines to swing on and iguanas to chase.

Jungle with Banana Trees (photo by Kelley Rees CostaRicaDailyPhoto.com)
An Iguana to Chase (Dave-CostaRicaDailyPhoto.com)

And across the street next to my house was the post theater with free cartoons every Saturday morning.  And then a block away behind our house was the post swimming pool.  Oh, and beyond the jungle was Gatun Lake, which at the time was purported to be the largest man-made lake in the world.  It was, simply put, a glorious place to live.

Arrow marks where Ray Lived (courtesy of Bill Roddy)

You might at this point in my story wonder what any of that has to do with the subject of Country; to me it had everything to do with it.  How it happened I don’t really know but for as long as I can remember I always seemed to understand that the life that I was blessed to live was a result of the simple fact that my dad was a soldier in the United States Army.  I understood that he was serving our country and I had this sense that what he was doing was a wonderful thing.

I think that one of the things that helped to instill these kinds of thoughts in me were the periodic trips that our family would make back to my father’s hometown in Connecticut.  Plainfield was a small little mill town in Eastern Connecticut that simply was no match for some of the sights that I saw growing up.  And although I absolutely loved our visits with my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, I knew that I was blessed that my dad had chosen to stay in the Army after World War II rather than return to Plainfield.  I loved my life, and I loved the United States of America for making my life possible.

One of my most poignant memories as a child occurred at 5:30pm when the evening cannon would go off signifying that it was time to bring the flag down at the end of the day.  We did not always live close enough to hear it routinely, but sometimes we were nearby when it happened and the impression of what would happen then has stayed with me for a lifetime.  Wherever you were and whatever you were doing you had to stand at attention with your hand over your heart and wait until the last note of the bugle faded away.  Even if you were riding in a car, the car would stop and everyone would get out and face the direction of the flag and pay your respects.  My fondest memory of such times was when we would be playing Little League games at the ball fields on the huge parade ground in the center of Fort Bragg.  All the games would stop and everyone … players, coaches, umpires and spectators would all pay their proper respects to our flag.  As a child I think these memories did more to instill a sense of patriotism in me then perhaps anything else.

The culmination of my childhood sense of patriotism probably occurred at the end of our first day at West Point on July 1, 1965.  My decision to attend West Point was embedded in me sometime around the age of ten or eleven or twelve.  From that time on, I made it my goal to pursue being an Army officer like my dad.  He had not gone to the Academy, but he had told me that if I truly wanted to be an Army officer than that was the only way to go.  No other way was better as far as he was concerned.  So, when we raised our right hands out on Trophy Point and swore our allegiance to the Constitution and to our Country, it was for me the culmination of a childhood dream.  A dream that the United States of America had made possible.

It was probably through reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which impressed me with the concept of the Mississippi River as being something special.  Or maybe it was one of the many movies that I went to in the post theater across the street from my house in Panama.  How ever it happened as a child growing up, to me the Mississippi River meant something very special. It was sort of the dividing line in the middle of our great country which divided the East from the West.  And I remember how entranced I was when I realized at the age of 29 that I was going to actually literally be crossing the Mississippi for the very first time.  It was in the Spring of 1975 when I was traveling with my wife from Vermont to Texas to visit Dallas where I would be attending seminary in the Fall to study for the ministry.  Since that first time I have probably crossed it a half a dozen times since, but every time I am thrilled at the prospect.  The thrill I get is not just because it is so immense, but also because to me the Mississippi is that long thread from North to South that binds our Country together.

The Mississippi River and its Tributaries Bind the Country Together (courtesy of the National Park Service)

The final vignette which speaks of Country to me flows out of my trip that I made in July 2018 to honor our classmates who fell in Vietnam.  It occurred while I was doing a recon of the Fort Snelling National Cemetery in South Minneapolis, Minnesota.  The cemetery is quite large and quite beautiful with well over 200,000 graves in it.  You would think that being as large as it was that it has have some rough spots here and there … but it was in fact meticulously maintained.  I was so struck by its size that I drove around and took pictures from several different vantage points.  Each picture that I took contains row upon row of graves as far as the eye can see, and none of the graves are duplicates in any of the pictures.  Each picture is a completely separate scene.                                           

Views of Fort Snelling, MN (courtesy of Ray Dupere)

I remember at one point in my tour I was quite moved to be in the presence of so many veterans’ graves.  I also felt a great sense of patriotic pride as I looked around at the wonderful effort that we as a country put into remembering our fallen heroes.

“Country” to me is not just one thing but many things.  It is our flag and it is our land.  It is our history and it is our people.  It is our founding fathers, and it is our future.  It is our hopes and our dreams and our sense of being.  It is simply put, the United States of America, the greatest country that has ever been thus far in the history of mankind upon this earth.

Honor: The Role of Honor – 2011

Once each year during the holidays, the Societies of all the Service Academies in the Greater Kansas City area sponsor a formal dinner in Kansas City to celebrate the cadets and midshipmen from Western Missouri and Eastern Kansas. Cadets, midshipmen, dates, and families attend. Attendance is always good.

I was fortunate to have been in the Kansas City business community and the civic community for some time. I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the 2011 event, and to discuss the role of an academy experience in the development of honorable leaders. I made a study of it to add more impact. Here is the outcome:

     “Good evening and thank you for inviting me. It is always an honor to be among great Americans and great Americans to be. And that is the topic that I have been asked to speak about…specifically, what is it about an Academy experience that positions you to become great Americans? And what will motivate you to truly achieve throughout your career, regardless of your chosen field?

     Tonight, I am going to share with you the wisdom of many great and accomplished graduates. Let’s talk about how an Academy experience sets you apart as you pursue your career, whatever that career might be.

     When I began to prepare for this talk, I quickly realized that I am just one person with just one journey. I did not believe that my input alone was good enough for tonight. And so, I went to graduates of all the Academies, and I focused on prominent general officers, surgeons, lawyers, CEO’s, astronauts, entrepreneurs, authors, actors, congressmen and congresswomen, ambassadors, coaches, university presidents, and many more.

     The very fact that people like Roger Staubach, Mike Krzyzewski, General Wesley Clark, General Scott Wallace, the Chairman of the Board of Johnson & Johnson, the CEO of General Motors, the CEO of 7-11, the Chairman of Comfort Systems, and many others WANTED to share their lessons and perspectives speaks volumes about the importance of the message we have for you.

  • General Scott Wallace (USMA 1969)
  • General Wesley Clark (USMA 1966)
  • Coach K (USMA 1969)
  • Roger Staubach (USMA 1965)

     Once I had inputs from prominent graduates, I sorted them into common themes. Surprisingly, there were but nine themes that came through. Some will not surprise you. But as we move through them, I believe that you will be surprised, even moved, by what you learn tonight.

     So here are the collective thoughts on the truly significant things an Academy experience gives you:

  1. Discipline and the ability to prioritize. You made it this far, so you understand discipline and prioritizing already. It will matter throughout your life.
  2. A strong sense of teamwork. Let me explain ‘strong sense of teamwork’. I struggled in chemistry. A classmate of mine stayed up all night before the final to help prepare me to pass. He was a contender for the top position in rank order of merit academically and could justify studying for himself. Instead, he stayed up all night with me helping me to prepare.
  3. How to assess situations and make good, honorable decisions.
  4. How to genuinely listen to people…superiors, peers, and subordinates. Too many people never learn to listen to subordinates.
  5.  You are learning how and when to lead.
  6. You are learning how and when to follow.
  7. You are learning how to maintain your poise and values in difficult situations.
  8.  You are gaining a deep insight into yourself and what you are capable of.
  9.  And finally, and perhaps most important, you are learning lessons in honor and leadership, to include the ability to motivate people to act for the love of accomplishment, the love of the team, or love of Country. NOT LOVE OF MONEY! You are learning leadership with honor, the truest form of leadership.         

      These attributes that you are gaining have great value for you and the people around you. They create trust and respect that are fundamental to great teams.

      Keep in mind, too, that your development is a 2-part process. First, you gain these important attributes at the Academy. Then, you serve in the Military, where you are given great and challenging leadership responsibilities very quickly. It is the military experience that hones your attributes and builds your courage about accepting responsibility and making honorable decisions.

     But having these unique and wonderful attributes and leadership experiences is only a portion of the final equation for you. To achieve great things, to be a great American, you must have the drive to achieve throughout your lifetime.

     What you probably least recognize about what you are experiencing at the Academy is that you are being shaped by the integrity, the honor, and the drive of the people around you.

     Every day you are surrounded by great individual leaders, famous visitors, upperclassmen and women who excel, and great young professors who themselves have your attributes. Consider this, the young officers who taught me at West Point included Major Pete Dawkins (Heisman Trophy winner), Major Norman Schwarzkopf (Commander, Operation Desert Storm), Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig (U.S. Secretary of State), and Specialist 4th Class Arthur Ashe (Tennis Grand Slam winner). And you are surrounded by similar talent, advancing on their respective journeys.

  • Arthur Ashe
  • Alexander Haig
  • Norman Schwarzkopf
  • Pete Dawkins

     Just the singular honor and dignity of being a cadet or midshipman in these environments is shaping you and your drive. YOUR PHILOSOPHY FOR LIFE IS BEING INFLUENCED RIGHT NOW BY THE VALUES AND INTEGRITY OF THE PEOPLE WHO SURROUND YOU. And most important in that group, especially after you graduate, is your bond with your classmates. As they go forward and achieve, so too, will you, because you are bonded, and you all have the power of honor and integrity within you.

     I recall like it was yesterday being at one of my reunions. We had gone off post for a casual dinner dance. Our class band was playing our class song and we were all out on the dance floor going nuts like we were still cadets. I looked this way and saw a classmate who was a veteran astronaut; I looked that way and saw the Ambassador to Germany… the same man who had just negotiated the end to the first Iraq War; and I look over this way and see one of the first Dot.com billionaires; and over here I see the head basketball coach from Duke. Besides these classmates, I see many who are advancing fast in their military careers, and in other careers. Believe me, the honor and the motivation you feel at the Academy only grows within you as you get older, and everyone’s responsibilities grow.

     By the way, our class song was the Animals hit “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”. Our class band, “B. Arnold and the Traitors”, still plays at all of our reunions. So, my class was no less irreverent or playful than your class might be today.

B. Arnold and the Traitors at Camp Buckner 1966 (courtesy of Chris Sauter)

     I leave you with one last piece of wisdom; something that has helped guide me several times in my career. You will go on from your Academy experience to do great and wonderful things. But you will also be different from some of the other people you encounter. You will meet people whose motives are not driven by honor or integrity or choosing the harder right over the easier wrong. Often, it will be you who is in the arena fighting to make something good happen when these critics come along. I’d like to share an excerpt from a famous speech by President Teddy Roosevelt. The speech is about the man in the arena. It goes like this:

     “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles; or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who knows great enthusiasms; who spends himself in a worthy cause”.

     There will be times in your career when you see greed, or ego, or questionable practices. Stick to your values and protect your honor. They are, after all, what define you, what motivate you, what make you exceptional in the eyes of others, and what bond you to all Academy graduates.

     Teddy Roosevelt, later in his speech about the man in the arena says this:

      “There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion; of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm of the men [and women] who quell the storm and ride the thunder”.

     Ladies and Gentlemen, be true to your honor and your values; be true to your bond to all of us who have gone before you; and be especially true to your classmates and your family. And go forth with confidence as you ‘quell the storm and ride the thunder’.

     Thank you again and Godspeed to each and every one of you.” 1415 words

Duty: Rwanda – 1994


McDonough, DUTY:  RWANDA 1994

     I had been granted the opportunity to command at brigade level late in my career, something I had aspired to for some time.  But it would not be of a standing brigade already on the rolls.  Instead, it would be a brigade I would have to build from scratch, gathering people, units, and materiel from parts of a dwindling American Army presence in Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.  It would eventually become the reflagged 173rd Airborne Brigade, a storied outfit whose flag was retired after withdrawal from Vietnam in 1971.  But that could not be known at the time (but it was an objective I had in mind from the start).  Although the assignment would mean dislocation and separation from my family for a while, I eagerly accepted (with my wife Pat’s support) and took on the duties of command.

     Those duties came swiftly, for even as we were forming in northern Italy, the brigade (originally dubbed the “Lion Brigade” since we were near to Venice) was tasked to be the rapid reaction force for much of Eastern Europe and Africa and parts of the Middle East.  At that time (late ’93, early ’94) the Balkans were heating up while much of the remainder of our AO (area of operations) remained in turmoil.  So even as we built our organization, we had to be ready to move and operate quickly with whatever we had at the moment (and we did have some crack units, like the 3rd/325 Airborne Combat Team, from the get-go).  Operationally, the task was to consider where we might have to go and train for a variety of mission-types if so committed. The dilemma was that there were so many diverse likelihoods of place and mission, we could not possibly train for them all.  The solution was to contemplate a very difficult one and train for that one, hoping that if any others broke, we could handle them in stride.  Ironically, as it turned out, I decided in February of 1994 that Rwanda would be a particularly hard nut to crack, given its remoteness and complexity.  So, we conceptualized an evacuation of Americans under duress and trained, rehearsed, and wrote a plan for such a mission.

Rwanda – A Long Way from Italy (Berkeley.edu)
Rwanda – A Long Way from Italy

     On April 6th, a scenario in that country unfolded that we had not expected – a horror show that became the worst genocide of the last decades of the 20th Century, one that would see one ethnic group (Hutu) murder another ethnic group (Tutsi) at the rate of 10,000 a day through the spring and summer of 1994.  With little clarity of what was happening, I reported up through the chain of command that we were ready to commit if called upon.  But the United States was not interested in getting involved, so we continued to build and train for other contingencies (of which there were no shortages).

     By July, it was getting harder for the world to deny that a genocide was in progress.  But a U. S. reaction was only precipitated by news coverage of the resulting cholera epidemic in nearby Goma, Zaire, one of 20 or so refugee camps of Hutus who had fled Rwanda in the wake of the civil war then raging alongside the genocide.  So, we were alerted and, after a few days of uncertainty, committed to Central Africa.

     An infantry company and support units were sent into Goma (along with the general commanding the Southern European Task Force, SETAF, Major General Jack Nix, my immediate superior); CNN was in Goma by that time, so much attention was focused there.  The airborne battalion (minus) was staged in Entebbe, Uganda as a backup force (under command of LTC Mike Scaparrotti, USMA 1978, later SACEUR — Supreme Allied Commander, Europe as a four-star general), and the Brigade (minus detached elements) itself went into Kigali, Rwanda, staged at its largely destroyed national airport.  Overall commander of the effort was the Deputy Commander of the United States Army Europe, LTG Dan Schroeder, also based in Entebbe.

              

AOR (Area of Operation) for the Lion Brigade

     Overall, it was a clean distribution of forces, but even as we boarded the planes in Aviano, Italy, the mission was unclear and the intelligence of conditions on the ground almost non-existent.  Somewhere over the Sahara, I received a static-laden call from an unidentified speaker into the cockpit of the C-141 that was trying hard to give me the latest iteration of both, all to no avail.  In a final desperate attempt to give guidance, three words came through clearly – “Stop…the…dying.”  That was good enough and that became our duty.

     The mission was apropos.  Dying was everywhere.  In Goma alone, five thousand died from cholera within the first day of our arrival, the survivors standing beside the decomposing bodies in Lake Kivu, drinking the cholera-infested waters (a practice we immediately put a stop to as we sought a way to have the dead buried and the water purified).  In Kigali and elsewhere in Rwanda, it at first seemed as if nobody was alive, save warring military foes advancing or retreating and a skeletal UN peace-keeping force holed up in its headquarters beside a major killing-field intersection in the city.  Indeed, everything seemed dead, to include all livestock and all crops in the field.  Everything was in ruin – the electrical grid, the water systems, the abandoned hospitals, communications systems, banking systems, etc.  Land mines were ubiquitous.  Bodies were everywhere, almost all of them defiled by machete, bludgeon, or fire (the official count was 800,000; I believe it was closer to a million).  The rivers were so stuffed with corpses that they created natural dams at bends or other constrictions in the water.  It could not have been bleaker.

Destroyed Rwandan Church, Site of a Massacre (Design Indaba)

There were survivors and bit by bit they emerged from hiding, some from the marshes, others from the bush (forests), some from cisterns, some from places so vile they beggar description.  All had needs, most of them extreme – water, food, medicines, shelter.  The mission remained:  Stop the dying.  How and what to prioritize was itself a priority.  Who gets the water we brought in with us?  How do we get the airport up and running?  What power grid do you restore first?  What do we fly in and in what order, or how do we clear roads to let trucks get in?  Where do you bury the dead?  How do you off-load the large transport planes coming in (soon at a rate of 50+ a day)?  What orders do you follow when they conflict with one another (and there was plenty of that, some with escalated risk if obeyed or not obeyed)?  As you find survivors and put them to work, what wages do you pay them (we had suitcases of money for that, essentially creating an economy)?  How do you protect your troops?  How do you hold the airport if attacked?  Where do you apply your medical detachments yet keep them safe from attack and from disease (over 50 % of those we treated had HIV infection)?  What side in the civil war do you support (eventually it was the Tutsi dominant Rwandan Patriotic Front)?  How do we protect VIPs as they arrive once they believe it is safe to do so?  Who do you work with and how – UN officials/peacekeeping units, non-government organizations (NGOs), orphans (about 700,000 Tutsi children were orphaned), other militaries (French, Belgian, Australian, many others), returning ambassadors and their staffs, the press, religious leaders (some who may have been complacent in the genocide) and so on?

            Such is the nature of duty.  The definition is easy, the fulfillment of it complex.  In Rwanda and the surrounding areas, we did the best we could and with the support of many others believe we collectively made a significant impact for the better.  We didn’t ‘stop the dying’, but we did slow it and gradually improved upon that and then even more.

            So many years ago, as a cadet at West Point, I had envisioned duty as clear and straight-forward.  Some higher authority would tell me what I was to do, and I would do it.  By the time I served in Vietnam soon after graduation, I came to understand it was more complex than that.  By the time I served in Rwanda, I began to understand more fully the disparate pulls as one tries to see what duty demands of you.  I had entered this part of my military career with the expectation that when committed to operations, tactics would dictate the courses of action to undertake as I looked to fulfill missions while taking care of soldiers.  Some of that would lie ahead, but in this instance the full weight of doing one’s duty came to light.  Perhaps that is why it stands first in order of those three key words, ‘Duty, Honor, Country.”