Candidates, please follow the great things former servicemember Dale Wilson is doing at COMMAND PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP, his wordpress blog. Enjoy this example of his recent work:
Last week, Don Gomez, of the blog Carrying the Gun, posted The Junior Officer Reader – two down. The post was a plea to fellow bloggers and readers for titles of books written by junior officers or soldiers about their military experiences. He listed a few that he had in his library, but wanted to know of other books he may not be aware of. There are two purposes for this post: 1) What books are you aware of to answer Don’s question?, and 2) To answer his question with a few resources recently posted on the internet.
One of the blogs I follow is Time Magazine‘s Battleland, where there are quite the opinionated blog posts about the United States military and defense policy. But, this morning, they sent out their daily digest of articles which included an article entitled, Not (Just) Another Reading List. Within this article may be a few of Don’s answers. From the article:
…I have a shelf of books I own solely because some previous commander put it on his mandatory reading list. These lists are handed down as part of the boilerplate leadership model every commander (in the Army at least) learns early on…I thought it might be interesting to put together a list of literary works that soldiers and others would find helpful or at least interesting and worthwhile…I won’t make this a top-ten list, but rather just a list of a couple handfuls of books and why I think they’re worth including on soldiers’ reading lists…
Related Articles –
H.R. McMaster: The Warrior’s-Eye View of Afghanistan (online.wsj.com)
Professional Reading is Essential – An Introduction (commandperformanceleadership.wordpress.com)
The Development of a Reading Program (commandperformanceleadership.wordpress.com)
I went thru PLC when it was still in the boonies at Camp Upshur. One thing happened the first couple of days we were there that I think is still important today. I was in 1st Plt. From our squad bay we could see the doors to the company offfice. We noticed two of three groups of 2-5 people going to the office to DOR. One of our guys (I wish i could remember his real name and give him credit,but he always went by “Polack”) came up with “We should make it a platoon rule that if you want to drop you go do it yourself, You don’t try and talk anyone into going with you” We all voted to make it our rule. We had a very low drop rate. Somehow that rule bound us together very early in the program. No one wanted to be a rat and drop. This may be a more importand piece of advice for females due to the tendency of females to want to do things by committee.