Mentoring is obviously not just for the military, although the highly social aspect of military life can create an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to learn from one another.  How much mentoring and learning takes place depends on command climate and the way people connect.  Mentoring can be mandated, which has the advantage of getting everyone, or at least a fairly high percentage of people in a unit to participate.  It can be overdone, like anything, or viewed as a panacea, but it can be very valuable.  We are often blind to our own shortcomings and limitations, the gaps in our knowledge, and startling things happen when we listen to each other.

When I taught at Kings Point, the term “mentor” was officially limited to assigned academic mentoring aimed at keeping midshipmen out of academic hot water.  I also mentored midshipmen in a more informal and a broader sense. Looking back on it, the one-on-one conversations I had with midshipmen, especially the continuing conversations I had with certain midshipmen, were among the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences of my 15 years at the Academy.  I wish I had been more aware that having these conversations constituted a distinct field of expertise, something to cultivate and get better at. The ongoing conversations would sometimes begin because we had been placed together by circumstance.  A conversation might start because a midshipmen was in one of my classes, or on the Honor Board, or connected with one of the clubs or activities that I supervised, like the “Moral Science Society,” a kind of ethics club I started. We’d start talking and then, something would click. We found interests in common, or a way of talking, or the same kinds of things struck us as  funny (about the Academy, for example) or we just liked each other. I had some very interesting and sometimes difficult conversations with members of the Honor Board. We discussed how the rules of Honor applied in a particular case, which wasn’t always obvious. Or we’d talk about the psychology behind violations of the Honor Code. Some of the best talks were about Honor education, which isn’t just about informing or even securing compliance but about shaping peoples’ values, combining empathy and firmness, maintaining and even slowly raising the standards.  This makes Honor education what some of the people at the Harvard Kennedy School call an “adaptive challenge,” and the greatest leadership challenge of all: getting people to change the way they think about something. I sometimes learned that my expectations of the midshipmen were excessive, although at other times they were way ahead of me.

I think that the great mentors have an instinct for what the protege needs and how to approach the subject. General Fox Conner was mentor to junior officers Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall in WWI and after. Conner recognized the talent in both men, but also what they needed to grow.  He made sure consummate staff officer Marshall got out to the field  to see things for himself. He introduced Marshall to the technique of having officers work competitively on the same project to get the best out of them. He saw that Eisenhower had an antipathy to military history because of how it had been taught at West Point, so when they began reading together, he started Ike on novels, proceeding later to military history (Civil War biographies were favorites).  They also read Clausewitz, the plays of Shakespeare, and the philosophy of Nietzsche.  When they were stationed together on Panama in the 20’s, Conner had Eisenhower write a daily operations order for his command, an experience that Eisenhower would later say was invaluable in preparing him to craft operations orders for the organizations that he commanded in World War II.  Conner had retired from the army by WWII, but the two men he mentored went on to form a war-winning partnership, and both became post-war statesmen.  Maybe it was thanks partly to Conner that Marshall and Eisenhower were both more than highly successful officers and public servants.  There is a wisdom, vision, and humanity in these two men that sets them apart.   Reading about them, one is in the company of greatness.

If you want to read more about Conner, Marshall, and Eisenhower, try Mark Perry’s Partners in Command or Grey Eminence: Fox Conner and the Art of Mentorship by Edward Cox.

I alluded briefly to The Aeneid in my last post, and I said that I’d be posting more on this work.  The Aeneid was written expressly for Augustus when Rome was on the verge of empire. As a work on statesmanship and leadership, it deserves more attention than it gets.  Virgil’s work depicts the Trojan nobleman Aeneas in flight from his city as it is falling to the Greeks. It is his destiny to found the city that will become Rome. I taught a course combining The Aeneid and another favorite, the 1950 edition of The Armed Forces Officer, to a class of Kings Point plebes a couple of years ago.  I had taught the AFO before but never Virgil’s work, and I was glad to see the midshipmen take to it well, some saying that it should be required reading at the Academy.  I was sorry that I never had the chance to teach it again.

For hundreds of years, the humanities were considered essential in the education of a future leader in the legal, military, or political arenas, or for a career combining all three, which was somewhat characteristic of lives in antiquity. Boys and young men in classical times and into the modern period were instructed in the classics in order to equip them for public service. The texts they read and memorized were intended to imbue them with the values of service and to serve as examples of vigorous and compelling language.  The Aeneid was perhaps the most highly-regarded work for this purpose. It provides no simple formulas, but rather shows that all glory is fleeting and all success temporary, that appearances often deceive, and that the unceasing pursuit of character and wisdom is vital in an often hostile and unpredictable world. It is a warning to empires, an appeal to humanity even in hazardous times.  In the poem, Virgil in effect humanizes the Roman virtues of strength and dutifulness which Aeneas displays so abundantly.  Aeneas setting out to found a city after a crushing defeat and Augustus the first Roman emperor after decades of civil war are both instructed (and through them, us) that more than skill and stoicism are needed for leadership.  Also required are the “pity for the world’s distress, and a sympathy for short-lived humanity,” that Aeneas sees in the painted depiction of the Trojan War that he encounters in Carthage, waiting for Queen Dido, who will tragically fall in love with him under the influence of Aeneas’ mother, the well-intentioned goddess of love Venus.  Venus gets it right sometimes too, of course, as when she tells Aeneas to spare Helen at the end of the war, telling him that she is not to blame for the war or the defeat.

The translator of the Penguin Aeneid, W.F. Jackson Knight, writes that Virgil is telling us that, “moral goodness is necessary for the spiritual discernment which is in turn necessary for wise and progressive statesmanship.” We likely need this reminder now as much as in any time since the birth of Rome.

Next Post: Mentoring

Source: About the Book

These are the Damned is a 1963 film made by Hammer Studios. I remember finding it very disturbing when I saw it on TV as a kid. With its grim predictions and its tragic end, it is an unusual film, even among the others of this genre.  It presents a morally complex picture too, raising difficult questions . How do we prepare for the possibility of nuclear war, or for some other existential crisis affecting the planet, the whole of civilization? Do our efforts center on prevention, or do we also prepare for the worst, adopting a bomb-shelter mentality, setting aside, like Aeneas feeling the burning city of Troy, what we feel to be most worth saving in a civilization that is coming to an end?  TATD seems to address these issues. It also introduces some military characters. This gives the film added interest for me, since it is one of the themes of my book that soldiers have sometimes been called on to preserve values when a civilization falls, or in other times of great change.  In this, Aeneas is perhaps the prototype, with historical examples occurring in late antiquity and the early modern period.  Will the soldiers of our time or of the near future be called on to perform this function?

The movie begins with an American tourist docking his boat at an English seaside resort town. A pretty young woman lures him to a back street where he is beaten and robbed by her brother and his gang of thugs. Later, the tourist is helped by some people at a restaurant. One of the people, a government official of obscure function, observes that England is seeing more random violence of this kind. He seems to take a very dim view of the modern world and future. Two of the other people in the group are army officers, and another is an artist. It turns out that the officers and government official are engaged in a project involving mutated children who are capable of surviving nuclear fallout.  The children are themselves radioactive, so that exposure to them is fatal to ordinary people, and their own health can be precarious. They are being carefully schooled in the western tradition of art, history, and culture so that they can preserve these things after the nuclear war that the people responsible for the project believe is inevitable.

The government official is the true believer in this. The artist is his mistress, but she doesn’t really know what is going on in the project.  She makes sculptures that evoke the corpses after Pompei or Dresden and that also seem to warn of a nuclear war.  Her modern, allusive, admonitory sculptures are arguably more in keeping with and even preservative of the values of civilization than is the rather dismal activity of stuffing facts into lethal, sickly children in a remote-controlled classroom.  (See picture.) The two officers are very different. The older one seems overly willing to resort to violence, and the younger officer strongly implies that his senior is merely a bully capable of commanding obedience but not loyalty.  The younger officer is more humane and even intellectually curious. He views the artist’s sculptures appreciatively, saying that he hopes that looking at them will improve his mind.  One of the other characters observes that the young officer is the type that made the empire. Perhaps it is also true that his combination of civility and open-mindedness is closer to the real values of civilization than the pedantry, subterfuge, and manipulation that characterize the government project.  The movie also calls into question the T.S. Eliot-like pessimism that is behind the whole project. There are still some decent people left: the young officer, the artist, the American, and even the young woman (she and the American become somewhat unlikely lovers). Maybe civilization isn’t doomed. It can be redeemed, like the young woman. (She and the American try to rescue the children from their captivity.)

I was reminded of TATD when I recently attended a conference at USNA on the ethics of future warfare.  This was a sobering experience.  Threats and new weapons are combining to make the world a highly uncertain and hazardous place, even more than it was in 1963.  Almost in response to this, some today seem too willing, like the government bureaucrat in the film, to embrace apocalypse, to spurn present and future, or to say Apres moi, le deluge.  Our emphasis must be on preventing WWIII, not on scraping callous survival out of conflicts likely to be terribly destructive to everyone. And if soldiers are ever again required to salvage the wreck of a doomed civilization, we must keep in mind what is really worth saving.   If we survive without love, what has been saved?     

Next: Back to The Aeneid.