Monthly Archives: November 2012

Chapter 45

Leave a reply

Ah, it’s that time of the year again.  The lights are going up, the air is crisp and the stores are packed.  It must be Christmas!  So what’s on your wish list?  Wish lists are interesting things.  Over the years I’ve known lots of people who have wanted very specific things.  They’ve made lists, searched for days or months or years but, in the end, wound up with something totally different.  Let me give you an example.

Years ago we had some friends who were looking for their first home.  They sat down, put together a list and off they went on the hunt.  They wanted a brick home, on a corner lot, off-street parking with a garage, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, older, with character, and a great school district.  We all pitched in and directed them to every house we thought might be a contender.  After months of searching they bought a wood frame house with 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, on-street parking, in a sketchy neighborhood.  When we asked them why they picked it, they said it had a nice front porch.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with cars.  People have asked my opinion. They’ve told me they want the best gas mileage they can get because they drive a lot.  Something nimble, great handling and reliable but, in the end, they bought a huge SUV.  They then tell me they got “a great deal” and it gets the best mileage “in its’ class”, 20 mpg instead of the 19 mpg the others get.  But I think the most disappointing choices people make are the everyday ones that lead to consequences they don’t really think out to a logical conclusion.

Folks want to save for their future, be financially responsible, not have to worry so much about retirement, but “wanting” to do it and making the day to day choices to make it happen are completely different.  It’s really all about simple math.  We are not the government.  We just can’t spend as we please and print more money when we run out or steal it from someone else.  Our finances are a zero-sum game.  You really only have two choices, earn more or spend less.  If you like to eat out 4-5-6 times a week, enjoy several nice vacations per year, always drive a new car, and give your kids everything they ask for, I don’t want to hear whining about not being able to pay for college, having no money for retirement, or me not being taxed enough.  Dave Ramsey says it best, “If you want to live like no one else later, you have to live like no one else now”.  In other words, every dollar you spend on something you “want” now is 3-4 dollars you won’t have for something you “need” later.

Let’s take the car example.  If you’ve resigned yourself to having a $250/month car payment for the rest of your life, that’s $30,000 every 10 years.  But if you spend $15,000 on the right car, new or used, and keep it for those ten years, treat it well, spend $5,000 to maintain it, you come out $10,000 ahead.  Invest that, plus the $10,000 you’ll add to it every 10 years, and you see how much you can save.

Define the goal, make a plan, execute the plan, and make day-to-day decisions within the framework of the plan.  Organizations should work the same way.  Earlier this year the Air Force came up with a poorly conceived plan to save money and restructure its’ forces.  It produced the plan in a vacuum and then dropped it on the country with little or no pre-coordination.  I think we all remember the results.  There was a blistering wave of protest from all sides and Congress sent the Pentagon back to the drawing board.  Several weeks ago the Air Force decided that, since the last method didn’t work so well, they would try a different tact.  They sent out briefers to Congressional staffers to float a trial balloon.  Nothing in writing, just “talking points”.  The problem was that there was still no strategic planning done, just political maneuvering and an attempt to appease the Council of Governors.  For example, for some bizarre reason they added aircraft back into the 908th at Maxwell but still proposed closing the 911th at Pittsburgh.  The only reason for proposing to close Pittsburgh is that they mistakenly calculated that it has less than 300 civilian positions but, in reality, the 908th actually does have less than 300 civilian positions and they could be closed unilaterally without a BRAC or Congressional involvement.  In fact, AETC has been trying to defund the maintenance and operating costs of the airfield for years which would save the Air Force budget millions per year.  This all comes back to keeping your eye on the goal and thinking long term.

There are plenty of ways we can personally and, as a nation, save money.  We need a safety net in our country but that net has become a hammock for way too many people and raising taxes never solves fiscal problems.  What works for you on a micro basis also works for the country on a macro basis, stop spending!  But that’s a discussion for another day. If there’s something you really want or need it’s never too early to start planning and saving.  Make a list, check it twice…..

Next week, more on goats.

Chapter 44, The Moral of the Story

Leave a reply

For those who are reading this without having read Chapter 43, you’ll need to go to scroll down to fully appreciate the context!

The gauntlet has been thrown!  Mark asked the question last week, “So, where’s the moral in the story?”.  That, my friend, is a good question.  I like to think there’s an object lesson in almost any story so, after much thought, here we go.

We’re given tasks every day.  Whether it’s from your boss, or your wife, or even your Dad.  We all have work to do and, usually, a limited time to do it in.  The confusion with difficult taskings come when it’s not clear how to accomplish the job or what the end results should be.  In the military we call it “commander’s intent”.  You need to know what the desired end result is.  For instance, if my Dad had said that we need to find some way to calm down the nasty goat then we might have come up with another solution.  Maybe we could have drugged the thing, or bought a female goat so that he would have an “outlet” for his goatly passions.  We might have just put a round in his head and served up some cabrito for dinner. But, we knew he wanted the goat to continue to be available for mowing duties.

The other half of a tasking is the method.  When there is something to be done there is often a preferred method or, at least, a limited number of options.  If my Dad had instructed us to remove the goat’s offending appendage we could have used a variety of more expedient techniques.  Pruning shearers, machete, chainsaw, or my Mom’s butcher knife, any would have adequately accomplished the job.  But the goat would have either bled out, died from shock, or ended up with a nasty infection.

The Air Force has been given a task.  Whether or not you agree with the national security objectives of the administration, we find ourselves in the position of trying to maintain the security of the country with an ever shrinking budget.  The goal is to maintain as much capability as possible at the lowest possible cost.  Sounds simple but, even with our nation’s future at stake, the Air Force has continued to play politics and failed to even try to apply any cost benefit analysis to its recommendations.  They were given an opportunity to go back to the drawing board after the utter failure of the Force Structure Announcement earlier this year but instead of working to meet the tasking professionally with data and common sense they have, again, attempted to apply a pure political solution to, what should be, an apolitical recommendation.  The states have a voice when it comes to the ANG but the Reserves finds itself in the position of the bastard stepchild.  For example, AFRC is saddled with three incredibly expensive wings on facilities fully owned and operated by the reserves yet the Air Force seems to be blind to their fiscal responsibility and continue to recommend the most cost effective units for closure.

Either senior Air Force leadership is executing a brilliantly conceived plan to convince Congress that they are incapable of doing their job and the BRAC process should be initiated so they can blame someone else, or someone has used the little rubber band on them and they care more about their own careers than the security, financial and military, of the country.

I do hope it’s the former.

As always, comments welcome, and feel free to link to your Facebook page.

Chapter 43, Goats and Gonads

Leave a reply

I remember a lot of things before the age of 6.  I remember the first house I lived in on Venture street.  I remember going to Kindergarten, my best friend Biff, getting those little live, dyed chicks for Easter.  I remember my great grandparents at Christmas time when I was only 3 or 4 but, for some reason, I really don’t remember my Grandpa Hartman.

I was talking a little genealogy with my Mom last night and I asked her about him.  Her immediate response was, “He was a little different”.  As it turns out, he came from your classic, stoic German stock.  He didn’t care much for kids so our interaction with him was minimal at best.  However, as I find out more about him, I realize that he is probably the source of much of the creativity in my family.  He was an inventor, an engineer, though he never went to college, and was always looking for creative solutions to difficult problems.  What he lacked in social skills he made up for in intellect.  I think my Dad, very intentionally, took the opposite social path but he inherited all of his father’s creativity and inventiveness.

One day, I think I was 13, my dad came home with a very odd package in the back seat of the family Studebaker.  We were all outside playing in the yard when he pulled up, and when he opened the back door out stepped a little billy goat.  My dad wasn’t much for pets so we were more than a little surprised until we heard why.  Our yard was, well, a Pittsburgh yard.  There was hardly a flat spot on it and mowing could be hazardous at best.  There was lawn, but there was also woods and semi-woods and everything in between.  My dad’s idea of a lawn was anything that was some shade of green and you could run a lawnmower over.  So he decided that if we had a goat and a twenty foot chain, we could save our toes from potential amputation via Briggs and Stratton and just stake the goat in a different spot every couple of days.  The goat would mow and we would feed the vegetable garden with the inevitable organic fertilizer shoveled from the goat pen.  Eventually it turned out to be a great plan, but not without a steep learning curve.

As it turns out, male goats are not very pleasant animals.  He got the thing really cheap because, like chickens, they usually kill the males when they’re very young.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re very cute when they’re little, but once puberty sets in, it’s a whole different ball game.  Goatser (not a very creative name) grew very quickly and the bigger he got, the nastier he got.  He started out butting anyone he thought he could push around (a 2×4 to the head stopped most of that) and then moved on to urinating and ejaculating on himself and anyone within squirting range, usually my mother and sister.  He grew to a pretty enormous size and he stunk to high heaven.  Needless to say, Dad wasn’t happy.

So Dad went to the guy he bought the thing from and asked how he could stop this, less than desirable, behavior.  “Well”, the guy asked, “did you castrate him?”.  This thought never crossed my dad’s mind so the answer was, of course, “no”, followed by the obvious, “How do we do that?”.  Dad came home that day with a envelope full of little tiny rubber bands, he called the 11, 13, and 14 year old into the room and presented us with a mission, if we chose to accept it or not!  We were instructed to take a tiny rubber band, stretch it to the size of a large soup can, and snap it over the sizable gonads of, the soon to be unhappy, Goatser.  With wide eyes and a very unpleasant feeling in our nether regions we accepted the challenge.  We decided that there were three challenges in this task, all of which would require all of our imagination.

1)  Stretch an incredibly strong rubber band to roughly 30 times its current diameter.

2)  Figure out some way to either restrain the 200+lb goat or distract him while we sneak up behind him and spring the trap over the offending organ.

3)  Get out of the way after the deed is done.

We worked for hours trying to get that rubber band big enough.  We tried rolling it gradually up a funnel and then rolling it onto a can, but it wouldn’t stretch enough.  We tried get getting six fingers into it, but we weren’t strong enough to pull it big enough to get our fingers out.  We tried clamps and pliers and every tool in the house but to no avail.  After two weeks of wasted summer vacation we went to dad, with heads hung low, and admitted defeat.  Luckily, Dad didn’t seem that disappointed.  I think he, like us, had been feeling, vicariously, the effects of a rubber band on your stuff and he was having second thoughts.  In the end, he found someone who was looking for a new stud on his goat farm and dad traded in Goatser for a much more mellow female.

Years later I was talking to a guy who raised goats and I told him this story.  He looked a little shocked and then told me that those rubber bands were for baby goats and if we had actually been successful the goat would have died, almost instantly, of shock.  I’m still feeling a little funny down low!

Chapter 42, Academy Boards

Leave a reply

Over the last several years I’ve had the opportunity to participate in several Congressional Academy Selection Boards,  For those not familiar with the process, every Congressman and Senator gets to nominate young men and women to the service academies.  How the selections are made is up to the individual legislator but the process seems to be pretty standardized. The nominees submit an application with their school records, letters of recommendation, a short essay, and a resume including community involvement, sports participation and whatever else they’d like to say about themselves.  They’re then interviewed by a board of 2-3 individuals selected by the congressman who have a variety of backgrounds including current and former military members, local community leaders, parents of former academy graduates and whoever else the congressman believes would be equipped to discern what it takes to be successful at an academy.  The great thing about serving on these boards is, that no matter how negative I feel about the direction our country is going when I walk in, by the end of the day I have renewed hope in what America was and can be again.

In spite of video game addiction, pop culture, and the general entitlement mentality I see today, there are some truly amazing young people out there.  I’ve interviewed kids that maintain a 4.00+ grade point average, work nearly full time at the small family business and letter in multiple sports.  These kids could do anything they put their minds to yet they are choosing to serve their country and make a lifelong commitment at a very young age.  The hard interviews are the kids who are missing one of the critical elements.  What I mean is this.  You’ll get a kid who has great grades but that’s, obviously, all they can manage.  They’re not involved in anything else and it’s hard to figure out if they’ll make it physically or socially.  Or there will be one who has an average academic record but is involved in everything in their school, church, and community.  Those are the tough ones.  Academics aren’t everything.  History shows that many of our greatest military leaders didn’t graduate anywhere near the top of their classes.  But, if they’re going to struggle academically you don’t want to set them up for failure. Lots to consider, but a very rewarding process none the less.

I like to ask questions that actually get the kids thinking.  I usually start by asking something totally off subject. To both break the ice and to make the poor sweating kid a little more relaxed, I’ll ask something like, “Milk, dark or white, which kind of chocolate do you prefer?”.  It’s one of my favorite interview questions.  There’s no right answer (although dark really is the right answer).  It takes a minute, but most of them realize that it’s OK to express an opinion and that this isn’t the Inquisition.  I’ll then ask questions like, “If I stopped a random kid in the hall at your school and asked him to describe you, what would he say?”, or, “When you take the oath of office, and become a military officer, you’ll be abrogating some of your constitutional rights.  Which right do you think you’ll miss the most?”  I’ve heard some amazing answers and occasionally some not so amazing ones.

Once, at the end of a very long day of interviews, we reviewed the last package and realized that this one might be the hardest one.  The kid’s grades were pretty abysmal, but his involvement in scouting, skiing, scuba-diving and social activities in general were the best we’d seen all day.  We read between the lines and it occurred to us that he was probably the “cool” kid at school who finally realized during his senior year that there was life after high school and he really hadn’t prepared for that eventuality.  He was behind the power curve, approaching stall speed, and frantically throwing the throttles to the wall.  But, we were committed to objectivity, so we invited him into the room with open minds ready to give him every opportunity to present his case.  He walked in introduced himself and I immediately realized that this kid was Eddie Haskill.

I’m going to date myself, but do you remember the TV show “Leave it to Beaver”?  For those of you who are too young or don’t like retro TV, you’ve really missed out. Eddie Haskill was a character in the show who was the best friend of the Beaver’s older brother Wally.  I think all of us have known an Eddie Haskill.  He’s the kid who usually stays out of trouble, but talks everyone else into doing bone-headed things.  When he’s with kids his own age, he’s the guy everyone listens to.  He’s the ringleader, the center of attention.  But when an adult shows up he turns into mister polite and innocence.  He’s the very definition of “smarmy”.

This kid was the 2012 version of Eddie.  He had piercing blue eyes, perfect hair, and a very expensive suit.  He actually interviewed very well, but there wasn’t an ounce of humility in his personality and when I asked the question about how a kid in your school would describe you, he didn’t even hesitate.  He said that everyone knew that he was the “go to” guy in the school.  Everyone’s friend, everyone’s mentor.  The source of all knowledge.  The solution to all problems.  I think I actually vomited a little in my mouth.  When the interview ended we all stood up, shook hands and thanked him for applying.  He turned towards the door, but then stopped, turned to us and asked, with a big smile, the worst question I’ve ever been asked at an interview.  “So, did I dazzle you?”  I’m rarely at a loss for words but I was that day.  I could only stare at him and hope that I would never see him again.

I get to do it again this Saturday.  I can’t wait!

Isaiah 30:15

Chapter 41, Retirement Speech

Leave a reply

Alright, sorry about the tirade last week, but I had to get some things off my chest.  Many folks have asked for a transcript of my remarks from my retirement ceremony but, due to a technical glitch with my digital recorder, there is no recording.  I don’t do verbatim speeches so I’m going to give ya’ll a transcript as best as I can remember.  Here goes……

“I’d like to thank everyone who came today.  Especially those that came from very far away!  I’m not going to take a long time today, but there are some things I’d like to say and you’re a captive audience.  I’ve always thought that words really do have meaning and I hear so many wasted on meaningless chatter.  On May the 7th 1978 I stood up in front of crowd of people including some that are here today like my mom and my, then future, wife Peggy. I’m going to ask everyone here who is serving, or who has served, to stand up, raise your right hand, and repeat after me. “I, Daryl Hartman, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. So help me God.”  At the time all I could think of was the adventure ahead and the struggle and hard work behind.  I didn’t give a whole lot of deep thought to the words I had spoken.  Years later, while pulling late SOF duty one night, I was asked by a recruiter to administer the oath to a new guy and after hearing the words again I decided that I needed to really understand what it meant to “uphold and defend the Constitution”.  So I got hold of a pocket constitution and this one in my jacket has been with me for over 25 years.  What does the oath mean to you?  How do you intend to defend it against enemies foreign?  What is an enemy domestic?  To that end, I’m going to ask ten volunteers to come forward and pass out a pocket constitution to everyone here today.  I encourage you to study it, discuss it, memorize it and be ready to execute that oath every day.

On 11 August 1979 I stood up in front of another large group, looked into Peggy’s eyes, and said, “I Daryl, take you Peggy, to be my wedded wife. To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish ’till death do us part.”  I made a commitment to my wife to be true and honest and faithful to her and to put her needs before my own.  But I was saying more than that.  I was committing myself to my kids and my family and her family.  My career of moving from Youngstown to Pittsburgh to Youngstown to Pittsburgh was a direct result of Peg’s need to be here for her parents and my obligation to be here for my family.  My parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephews.  I have no regrets and I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to see my kids and their cousins grow up to be mature, godly adults.

In the reserves, we talk a lot about the three legged stool of Family, Reserves, and civilian Employer, but my experience is that three legged stools don’t pass the OSHA test.  My fourth leg is my most important one.

On the 7th of December, 1969 I stood up in front of a large group of people and said, “I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God”.  With those words I made the most important commitment of my life.  I made a decision to live my life filtered by what God had in mind for me.  I made a commitment to a congregation which I have been a part of for nearly 56 years.  I have tried to lead in a way that honors God and to make decisions prayerfully and consistently and to have an even and honest temperament.  I hope I’ve had a positive impact on the people I’ve served with and I want each of you to know that I will continue to be available for you.  You can’t turn caring off.  I wish you all the best, and may God bless you all and the United States of America.”

That’s it as best I remember.  If I missed anything please feel free to comment.

Defend against enemies domestic and VOTE!