"Truth Has a Power Only the Courageous Can Handle"
By Mike Davenport, U.S. Army 2004, Afghanistan, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division
The title of this essay is from Anthon St. Maarten. Here's another pertinent quote for good measure:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
I almost lost my life fighting in Afghanistan. Ultimately, my service saved me. I learned that believing bullshit can get you killed.
The Army told us the Taliban were a bunch of ignorant goat farmers. Bullshit.
They told us the Afghan people were eager for the United States to help them build a secular democracy. More bullshit.
If I had kept on believing this bullshit after my first firefight, I’d be looking up at six feet of dirt in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery.
By the end of my first month as part of Operation Enduring Freedom (a bullshit name), I understood the real battle and the real stakes. The real battle was to stay alive without disgracing myself. The real stakes were to keep everyone in my platoon alive by using my native wit and guile to engage Terry Taliban in battles where we had a better-than-even chance of surviving.
This was tough. Once we were ordered into a village to meet their council of elders to build a school for their kids, a place where girls as well as boys could learn to read and write, only guess what? When we got there, no village elders. It was a set-up. There were fifty Taliban on the high ground unloading on us with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47s. We’d bumbled into the perfect kill zone. Our only hope was to run like hell for the gun trucks and start firing back. I didn’t make it. I got hit in the shoulder, and it was bad. I knew I was dead. I mean, who was going to run across open ground in a kill zone, unable to fire his weapon because both arms were engaged dragging my sorry ass back to safety?
The answer was my best friend Dave Bratton. He got me out of there but got hit twice as he did. One round blew his helmet off and creased his scalp, the other hit him in the chest. The last thing I remember before I passed out was this trickle of pink stuff coming out of Dave’s ears. Turns out his brain was bleeding. Back in the world, the VA refused to take him seriously when he told them about the headaches, the ringing in his ears, and the dizziness. They were, of course, willing to over-prescribe the Oxycontin that killed him.
Who killed Dave Bratton? My gullibility put us in that firefight, but it was the hubris and willful mendacity of our command structure that kept us in Afghanistan. I mention this because of this New York Times opinion piece from last Sunday’s paper: “America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion.”
After I let out a primal scream and punched a wall, I drove to Dave’s gravesite and propped this up against his headstone. Here are some highlights:
A perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to General.
They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success.
Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.
Ultimately, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.
The core group of folks who created the civic miracle of Prosperity, Pennsylvania are in the Quixote Institute. This is an inspired gaggle of wounded healers, reluctant heroes, and unreasonable idealists—people filled with the crazy spirit of Don Quixote. The philosophical bedrock of the Q.I. is a commitment to tell the truth, even when it’s hard. ESPECIALLY when it’s hard. That’s what makes it courageous.
I fooled myself into thinking that my superiors in Afghanistan would treat American soldiers with honesty and respect. This was toxic bullshit that killed my friend Dave Bratton and almost killed me.
I have a quote up in my home office from Buckminster Fuller.
“Integrity is the essence of everything successful.”
Our continued success in Prosperity, Pennsylvania will come from our ability to summon the power of intention to be kind, generous, loving, and constructive as we build our “beloved community” on the bedrock of unshakeable integrity.
AUTHOR NOTE: Mike Davenport is a character in the book “Prosperity, Pennsylvania.” You can get your free review copy of “Prosperity, Pennsylvania” from BookSirens here:
You can buy a copy here and here.
You can find the Audible version here.
The book is about how an everyday collection of optimists transformed a downtrodden Rust Belt town. The town isn’t saved by a miraculous intervention of government or big business. The people save themselves by imagining a society that works together to work for them and then gets to work to make this vision a reality.
I intend this book to be a ‘how-to’ manual for how we can all get beyond the stale ‘hate-your-neighbor’ red-blue, right-left narratives. What do we all want? The love of family and friends, enough to eat, a home, health care, and a loving community where we belong. We can create these things for ourselves.
I didn’t make anything up. Everything that happens in the book happened somewhere in the world. I just put it together in a new way.