Badges of Honor: Stories of the Head, Heart, and Hand

By John Hinck

Through chapters penned by thirteen individual instructors in the U.S. Air Force's Leader Development Course, Badges of Honor weaves together a tapestry of moving narratives that capture the most challenging lessons of each unique career. These distinct and diverse voices offer insights into what successful military leadership requires, lessons learned as often from bad mistakes as from big wins, each culminating in moments of deep personal growth.

Hear from officers and senior NCOs in aviation, weapons systems, support operations, medicine, psychology, deaconry, intelligence, command, maintenance, engineering, public affairs, edu- cation, and more, as they juggle the personal alongside the professional to navigate one of the most sprawling and dynamic organizations in history. For civilians as well as warriors, this collection of stories of triumph and mirth, defeat and tribulation—stories of the head, heart, and hand—will send your spirit soaring like a fighter jet and deliver it safely to the ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookPress Publishing
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781947305366

Book preview

Introduction

Who doesn’t like a good story? They can make us laugh, smile, think, cry, and sometimes in a matter of moments. This volume of stories of the head, heart, and hand showcases fourteen selected authors, all leaders in life and teachers in the U.S. Air Force’s Leader Development Course. Together, they share The LDC Way of leadership with incredible, unique, moving, challenging, and heartfelt stories from life, leadership, and command in the military.

Each author pens an individual chapter that weaves together leadership, character, and values with the personal intersectionality of gender, identity, challenges, and triumphs. While the narratives are diverse and the writing styles are different, each chapter also includes an author biography and leadership lessons to share at the end. This book is built so you can start anywhere and read a chapter at a time or the entire manuscript in an evening. No matter where you open the book, you will be moved to smile, think, laugh, cry, cover your mouth, scream, take notes, nod, and more.

At the end of the book, we offer a few pages so you can contribute to the work and write a few lines of your own stories. You are our fourteenth author!

Enjoy the journey, and as always, thank you for your work!

Go find your story!

Everyone Has a Story

by Martha J. Sasnett

The Weight of Command

I took command of the 42d Force Support Squadron in January 2015. The previous commander was relieved of command, and the squadron had been without a commander for four months. After many conversations with the Group Commander, I understood that I had my work cut out for me. The squadron was demoralized and distrustful of senior leadership. None of the group or wing leadership had explained to the squadron why the commander had been relieved. She was simply there one day and gone the next. The squadron loved this commander, and later I would find out through conversations with squadron members that they felt they had let her down and were the reason for her firing.

Therefore, on the day I took command, I physically felt the weight of my new role. As I looked out among the audience, I knew these Airmen were looking at me with so many questions. Would I be a good commander? Could they trust me? Would I stand up for them? Was I going to care about them? I felt this sense of responsibility and knew that I was going to do everything I could to take care of this squadron and make it successful. One thing I never stopped to reflect on and consider, however, was why this was so important. Taking care of Airmen and their families was always a priority to me as I truly valued service and helping Airmen and their families flourish. I had just never taken the time to examine and reflect on why this was so important to me. I did not know it at the time, but a situation would arise with an Airman that would force me to reflect on my story in order to reconcile what I personally valued against what the Air Force, and my squadron, needed me to value as a commander.

As with any large squadron, there were issues that needed to be dealt with. Fortunately, discipline was not a real problem in my squadron, but we did struggle with physical fitness failures. TSgt Smith was a personnelist in the Commander’s Support Staff, and she was a great asset to my admin team. She was a superstar performer who took great care in doing the things I needed before I knew I needed them. Other personnelists on base would seek her advice and her help because she was truly knowledgeable and dependable. She was married with two kids, and her sister lived with her as well. I got to know them well since they visited the squadron regularly. I found out that TSgt Smith was the only one in the family who was working or could drive the one family vehicle. She had a lot of responsibility as the sole provider for the family. This could have contributed to her problem with fitness, though I gave her as much on-duty time as she needed to work out. Even with this, she could not pass her physical fitness test, and by six months into my command, she had failed her test four times within a twenty-four-month period, which is not good. Per Air Force Instruction, this required me to recommend whether or not she be retained in the Air Force and, based on my decision, possibly some sort of disciplinary action. I had a large range of options, but it was clear from my group leadership that the expectation was the most severe discipline, which was a reduction in rank.

On the surface, it might seem that this decision should have been easy. She didn’t meet the standards, and the common punishment was a reduction in rank. I knew that was what my commander expected me to do, but I was very conflicted. In fact, I was more conflicted than I thought I should be, and I did not understand why this was so hard. I am ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t fully realize why I struggled with this until years later, when I was attending a course that asked us to reflect on experiences in our past. In the end, I made the decision to reduce TSgt Smith’s rank to SSgt, which meant she would have no choice but to leave the Air Force. I didn’t realize it at the time, but after much reflection about this situation, I now understand that my personal story that formed my own values was in conflict with those of the organization. I valued families and taking care of Airmen. As a child of divorced parents, with a mother who suffered from substance abuse and mental illness, I spent a lot of time being the adult, always worrying about my two half-sisters. In fact, at one point, they were homeless, living in my mother’s car without knowing where their next meal would come from. As I struggled with the decision on TSgt Smith, all I envisioned was sending her family out to the street to be homeless. In my mind, this was not taking care of families. However, the Air Force and the squadron valued accountability, and I had assured the squadron from day one that I would enforce accountability, and I expected them to do the same with me. Without realizing it at the time, I was struggling to reconcile this conflict of values.

I brought TSgt Smith in and told her my decision. She listened, obviously upset about the consequence of being required to separate from the Air Force, especially since she was planning on eventually retiring from the service. She took responsibility for not performing up to the standards and asked me if she could say just one thing. She said, Thank you. She thanked me for holding her accountable and for following through with what I said I would do. With everything the squadron had been through, she noted, this is exactly what they needed. I was not expecting a reaction like that, but it drove home to me that words may be important, but the actions you take to back up those words (or not) are invaluable. When you tell the squadron something, such as that you will take care of Airmen, it is imperative you think about what that looks like. The squadron will hear you, but they really are watching, so make it count.

Never Judge a Book by Its Cover

While the previous situation ended on a positive note, this was not always the case. I made many mistakes as a commander, and this story is one I think about a lot. I have always felt that I give people the benefit of the doubt before I judge them. Regardless of what I am told about a person, I always try to form my own judgment. I feel that everyone has a story that makes them who they are, and you have to get to know them before you can judge what kind of person they are. However, I am not perfect, and I failed to follow my own advice at a time when I could have possibly had a lifesaving impact on a person.

During my first year of command, my squadron struggled with safety violations. Needless to say, the wing Safety Office was not loved by the leadership in my squadron. The people who had been in the squadron a while made it a point to drop by my office or tell me in meetings about the injustices they were suffering at the hands of our assigned Safety Inspector, TSgt Jones. According to members of my squadron, TSgt Jones was overly gung-ho about safety, and he set out to try to find violations so he could stick it to the squadron. According to them, he obviously had no life, safety was his only interest, and no matter how well they prepared, he would find something wrong during the inspection and would make it seem to me as the commander that the squadron was failing miserably.

Not staying true to my own morals, I took them at their word. At this point, T.Sgt. Jones and I had never sat down and had a conversation. Since we resided on the same floor in our building, we might pass in the hallway and offer a quick hello, but that was the extent of my knowledge of T.Sgt. Jones. October was the month my squadron was due for the annual safety inspection. I had been given a copy of the previous year’s report with the warning that T.Sgt. Jones was out to get the squadron. Therefore, when it came time to sit down with T.Sgt. Jones to review his inspection report, it was evident that I had come to the meeting already irritated and on the offensive. I let him give me his input while offering a few curt questions, with the words of my flight leadership echoing in my mind the entire time. He was just an over-the-top, gung-ho safety officer with no life who was trying to find ways in which we were not in compliance. I listened, and when he was finished, I shook his hand and for the most part dismissed him in my mind.

Life in the squadron went on. I tasked the flight chiefs to look at the write-ups, and I continued to see T.Sgt. Jones periodically in our building with only a quick hello and that was it. That is, until January came, and I was forced to see myself in the absolute most shameful way possible. It was right after the new year, in the afternoon on a Sunday, when my phone rang. My group commander was on the line to let me know that we had the death of an active-duty member that I needed to work. As the FSS commander, I was also the mortuary officer for the base, and any active-duty death in our wing would be my responsibility for mortuary and casualty affairs. This was not my first case, so I calmly asked him for additional details and almost hit the floor when he said the name was TSgt Jones from the Safety Office. He had attempted suicide and was currently on life support at a local hospital with little hope for survival. I needed to be ready to proceed once he passed.

All those times I had passed TSgt Jones in the hallway and offered a curt hello washed over me. I thought of the meeting in my conference room where I took no effort to even find out anything about him. Did he have a family? How long had he been at Maxwell Air Force Base? What kinds of things did he like to do? Where was he from originally? All those things that are part of normal conversation to form a connection with someone had never happened. I let other people form my judgment for me, and I never even gave him a chance. Could I have made a difference in his situation? If