Did USMC Gen. James Mattis pull duty on Christmas so a Marine could be with his family?

Leaders must project an unshakable belief that the objective can and will be accomplished, or greatly risk reducing their motivational impact. Subordinates will also naturally seek to emulate the behaviors of a successful Leader, and try to equal or surpass his or her accomplishments or skills at their respective level..... For "effective leaders deal not only with the explicit decisions of the day…but also with that partly conscious, partly buried world of needs and hopes, ideas and symbols. They serve as models; they symbolize the group's unity and identity….[as a result] Their exemplary impact is great" (Gardner, OL p29) and unavoidable.

In the realm of Leadership, there is no finer cadre than the US Marine Corps and among that subset, General James Mattis is on the top tier as demonstrated by the enclosed info on how he took guard duty so one of his men could be home with his family at Christmas.

SEMPER FI indeed....This Seabee salutes Gen. Mattis for his "exemplary impact" in leading our Warriors at home and abroad.


Did Gen. Mattis pull duty on Christmas so a Marine could be with his family?
By Jeff Schogol (The Rumor Doctor)- Stars & Stripes
Published: February 16, 2011

USMC Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, is a tough guy. In fact, if you parachuted him unarmed onto an island inhabited by psychotic ninja robots, he would get more kills than famed Scottish warrior William Wallace.

But one reader asked The Rumor Doctor about a story that shows Mattis has a compassionate side to him. The story goes that Mattis stood duty on Christmas back when he was a brigadier general so that a younger Marine could spend the holiday with his family.

Since the privilege of rank makes it extremely rare for general officers to pull duty for their subordinates, The Doctor was intrigued.

Unfortunately, Mattis was unavailable to talk. That’s not surprising considering revolution is sweeping through the CENTCOM theater, putting several vital U.S. allies at risk.

However, The Doctor was able to find out what happened from retired Marine Gen. Charles Krulak, who was commandant when the story took place. Every Christmas during his tenure, Krulak delivered cookies to every Marine duty post around Washington and Quantico, Va.

Back in 1998, he was making his final delivery to Marine Corps Combat Development Command headquarters at Quantico when he asked the Marine on duty who the officer of the day was.

“The young Marine said, ‘Sir, it’s Brigadier General Mattis.’”

Krulak thought the Marine had misunderstood him, so he asked again, but he got the same answer.

“I looked around the duty hut and in the back, there were two cots: One for the officer of the day and one for young Marine. I said, ‘OK, let me cut through all of this: Who was the officer who slept in that bed last night?’

“And the Marine said, ‘Sir, Brigadier General Mattis.’”

At that moment, Mattis walked around the corner.

“So I said to him, ‘Jim, what are you standing the duty for?’ “And he said, ‘Sir, I looked at the duty roster for today and there was a young major who had it who is married and had a family; and so I’m a bachelor, I thought why should the major miss out on the fun of having Christmas with his family, and so I took the duty for him.’ ”

Never before or since has Krulak run into a general officer standing duty on Christmas Day.

“I think it says volumes about Jim Mattis and his leadership style,” Krulak said. “He did it very unobtrusively. He just took the duty.”

THE RUMOR DOCTOR’S DIAGNOSIS: Gen. Mattis once famously said he likes to shoot Taliban, so no one is going to call him a softie. But by standing duty so that a young Marine could spend Christmas with his family, he showed you don’t have to be heartless to be a leader. But don’t expect him to pull that stuff on Presidents Day.

GREETINGS FROM CAMP LEATHERNECK

GREETINGS FROM CAMP LEATHERNECK....

or as we like to call it, MARINE-ISTAN...

I'm no stranger to this type of Camp as I have spent time in Marine Camps and under Marine Command while deployed as a Seabee.

I've come here to continue my adventures while spending time over on the dusty side of the planet..... Middleboro Jones on another adventure in Helmand Province.....enclosed is a good overview of my new Home-Away-From-Home.....From the Marine Times - SEMPER FI

Camp Leatherneck: A land that teaches humility
May 3rd, 2010

Dan Lamothe/Staff

CAMP LEATHERNECK , Afghanistan – Leatherneck never sleeps.

If you’re looking for a good way to describe the Marine Corps’ major forward operating base in Afghanistan, that’s a good start. The wee hours of the morning here are filled with everything from the staccato thumping of helicopters in flight to the deep groans of big-rig trucks hauling heavy loads. The chow hall is open 24 hours per day.

I arrived on this dusty, sprawling installation early Monday with photographer Tom Brown, hopping a ride with a Navy public affairs officer to Leatherneck after flying in from Kabul to nearby Camp Bastion, a major British base that abuts it. We came in on a C-130 flight shortly after midnight, riding down with about 50 NATO troops and civilian contractors, mostly Royal Marines. I’ll geek out for a minute: As a first-time war zone correspondent, there was a definite thrill to disembarking the C-130 under eerie moonlight onto the barren, dusty runway at Bastion. I quickly found myself in a labyrinthine maze of armored vehicles, cement traffic barriers and hulking metal shipping containers that stretched for miles.

Plant life is an afterthought here, and row after row of tents fitting up to 20 people dominate the landscape. Actually, call it a moonscape. That’s more appropriate. As FOB life goes, Leatherneck has improved in the last year, but it’s still relatively austere. Portable toilets dot the installation, and there’s little more than card games and reading to amuse Marines in their free time. There’s a commissary on base, but a visit today showed it was out of everything from several kinds of basic T-shirts to wet-wipes, which are popular downrange to help troops stay clean. Marines also improvise to get exercise, as the makeshift heavy bag shown in the photo above illustrates.

There’s also this: Most rank-and-file Marines I’ve talked to at Leatherneck say they hate the base because it means garrison life in the most mind-numbing sense of the phrase. It’s a hustling, bustling place, but many Marines filling billets here long for something dirtier and more glamorous.

Initially, Tom and I expected we could be at Leatherneck for just a single night before going downrange to Marjah, but our planned flight aboard an MV-22 Osprey today fell through. It’s part of the famous military game, Hurry Up and Wait, and it can affect anyone right up to and including the moment they reach the flightline with bags in hand. That’s what happened to us today. As I write this, it’s about 10 p.m. here, and the weather has finally mellowed out. The temperature reached 104 degrees this afternoon, and the heat was followed by a small sandstorm that may have played a role in grounding our flight.

....If you can’t have humility and patience waiting for things to line up, you probably don’t belong covering the military.

(AMEN to that Brother...no need to be impatient here as everything is in "Hurry-Up & Wait" mode)

K-9 VETS can have PTSD Issues

Even K-9 VETS have trouble with the battle - Poor pups have it rough and do an awesome job but still can have issues - Hats off to the Marines & their K-9 Battle Buddies !!

Even His Red Squeak Toy Can't Get First Sgt. Gunner, USMC, to Fight

Despite Rehab, the Yellow Lab Won't Sniff for Bombs in Combat; He's 'a Lover'
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS - Wall Street Journal

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan—When the Marines cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, one remains in his kennel. Quivering.

Out of the 58 bomb-sniffing dogs the Marines have in Afghanistan, only one—a brown-eyed, floppy-eared yellow Lab named Gunner—is suffering from such severe canine post-traumatic stress disorder that he had to sit out the ongoing offensive in central Helmand Province.
Marines' Troubled Pup

"He's the only combat-ineffective dog out here," says his kennel chief, Cpl. Chad McCoy.
Like their human comrades, some war dogs can handle combat, and some can't. One Marine Corps explosives dog, a black Lab named Daisy, has found 13 hidden bombs since arriving in Afghanistan in October. Zoom, another Lab, refused to associate with the Marines after seeing one serviceman shoot a feral Afghan dog. Only after weeks of retraining, hours of playing with a reindeer squeaky toy and a gusher of good-boy praise was Zoom willing to go back to work.
"With some Marines, PTSD can be from one terrible event, or a cumulative effect," says Maj. Rob McLellan, 33-year-old operations officer of the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, who trains duck-hunting dogs back home in Green Bay, Wis. Likewise, he says, the stress sometimes "weighs a dog down to the point where the dog just snaps."

Gunner snapped.

He graduated from bomb-dog school in Virginia. He could hunt and tolerate gunfire. He could sniff out explosives, including the homemade ammonium-nitrate fertilizer bombs that inflict most allied casualties in Afghanistan. But he was skittish even before he arrived in the combat zone in October and was posted to a front-line battalion. He reached a crisis soon afterwards.
He reacted so nervously to the rattle of gunfire and deep boom of artillery commonplace around military outposts that he never even got a chance to test his mettle on a real patrol. His handlers aren't sure what pushed Gunner over the edge. His official record is damning, however: Gunner, it reads, "is not mission capable and is a liability if he is to leave the wire."

Capt. Michael Bellin, an Army veterinarian working with the Marines, says he's seen canine post-traumatic stress disorder cases before. "I think it's possible, depending on what they went through," says Capt. Bellin, 33, from Delafield, Wis.

Gunner was sent to the main kennel at Camp Leatherneck, a rear base. There, bomb dogs recuperate from illness or injury, under the care of Cpl. McCoy, a 25-year-old member of the famed feuding clan from Hickman County, Tenn.

Cpl. McCoy, a sandy-haired man with sunburnt cheeks, tries to strike a balance between encouraging the dogs' natural whimsy and keeping his own emotional distance. The handlers can't grow so fond of their charges that they hesitate to send them into danger's way.
Still, it's hard to stay very aloof from the slobbering, enthusiastic Labs. Although the dogs generally live in 9-by-9-foot aluminum cages, Cpl. McCoy sometimes lets Gunner sleep on a camouflage-patterned sheet on a cot in his tent.

A security detail that includes bomb-sniffing dogs is working to protect Iraqis, but these canines had to overcome some cultural roadblocks. Video courtesy of Agence France-Presse.

The Marine Corps gives each dog a military rank, one notch above his handler's, to reinforce the idea that the dogs deserve respect. Gunner is formally assigned to a gunnery sergeant, so he's a first sergeant, a high rank among enlisted Marines, human and canine.

For weeks after he arrived at Camp Leatherneck, Gunner refused to leave the kennel compound. Even now almost any sound sends him into a panic. If a shipping container door slams somewhere nearby, Gunner hunches down and bolts for an open cage door. If an artillery round goes off in the distance, he races into Cpl. McCoy's tent, then weaves around the cages, his tail low and twitchy. Even the click of a camera shutter can send him flashing back to some bad experience only he can recall.

Lately, the corporal has been able to persuade Gunner to take walks around camp, though the dog tugs at his leash in fear and appears to take no pleasure in the activity.

There are moments, however, when Gunner resembles his old self. On a recent day Cpl. McCoy drove him out to the training area to try his nose at finding hidden bombs. The corporal buried three sticks of C-4 plastic explosives in a few inches of dirt.

"He won't make it 20 feet," Cpl. McCoy predicted, letting Gunner off the leash some 100 yards from the hidden C-4.

But Gunner surprised him. Despite the roar of helicopters overhead, he ventured out in the direction of the buried explosives, dodging left and right in response to the corporal's whistles and hand signals.

At no time, though, did he drop his nose to the ground to sniff for explosives. "It's a miracle he did that well," the corporal said afterwards, tossing Gunner his red-rubber toy as a reward for his effort.

Next he let another Lab, Mag, give it a try. Mag was in rehab for a condition from which he tired quickly and lost mobility in his tail and legs. But Mag is an enthusiastic bomb hunter.

At Cpl. McCoy's command—"Back!"—Mag sprinted across the rocky desert, sniffing and searching in instant response to the signals. Soon he caught a whiff of something and dropped to his belly—directly on top of the spot where Cpl. McCoy had buried the C-4.

The corporal assured him he was a good dog and let him play fetch for a few minutes. "This is a constant game to them," says Cpl. McCoy. "They don't know it's life or death."

Gunner gives the impression that he understands exactly what's at stake. On the next trial, Cpl. McCoy dispatched him to find explosives buried under a soda can on the side of a dry ditch. There was machine-gun fire audible in the distance, and Gunner got no more than 20 or 30 feet before he changed his mind and circled back to the corporal's side.

"Gunner's a lover," Cpl. McCoy says. "Mag's a fighter."

The corporal holds out little hope that Gunner will one day be fit for combat, searching for hidden bombs amid the din of war. He'll consider it a success if Gunner casts his demons far enough aside to be a good pet for someone back home.

"We're trying to get him into the dog mind-set," Cpl. McCoy says.
Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com