Blithering On

In early 1996, I was a member of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 162 (HMM-162), the aviation element of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) on board the USS Guam (LPH-9). We were operating in the Adriatic Sea and ashore in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania as part of the peace enforcement force, the "implementation force" (IFOR), during Operation Decisive Endeavor. We were wrapping up our work in the Adriatic in early April, preparing to head to Israel for some exercises, when we received an order to prepare to redeploy to the west coast of Africa for potential operations in embattled Liberia. As we steamed toward the southern end of the Adriatic, we were either going to turn left toward Israel or right toward Liberia. By the time we reached the Mediterranean, it was a right turn. We arrived at "Mamba Station" off the coast of Liberia early in the morning of April 20th. When we arrived, fighting around the U. S. Embassy was pret...

In his book Basic Economics , economist Thomas Sowell observes that despite their “economic woes and worries,” middle-class Americans are “one of the most affluent groups of human beings ever to inhabit this planet.” He underscores the point with a August 1, 1999 New York Times column featuring a middle-class American family photographed in their own swimming pool under the headline: “The American Middle, Just Getting By.” That image and its caption mirror the ongoing narrative about a middle-class in crisis, but certainly not reality. The problem isn’t that middle-class families face tough financial decisions. The problem is the assumption that a middle-class family’s need to make those decisions itself is evidence of a crisis. It isn’t. It’s economics. At its core, economics is the study of how people use scarce resources which have competing uses. That definition from economist Lionel Robbins is a description of everyday life, not some abstract theory. It applies to all economies la...

When I was flying in the Marine Corps, we talked a lot about compartmentalization . For a pilot, that meant recognizing the stressors in your life—family, finances, relationships—and understanding what it takes to cope with them without carrying them with you into the cockpit. You didn’t ignore those pressures. You dealt with them. But when it came time to brief, pre-flight, and fly, you left them where they belonged—outside the aircraft. If you didn’t, you risked being distracted. You could be dangerous. At an aviation safety event, a psychologist gave a presentation titled “The Failing Aviator.” In it, he focused on compartmentalization and how poorly managed stress—especially from strained relationships—can erode judgment, focus, and ultimately safety. He told a story about a Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot. His wife struggled with the realities of his job—the late nights, the deployments, the uncertainty and danger of his job. Over time, the strain wore on both of them. She pressed him ...

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle introduced the idea of potentiality and actuality—the notion that everything exists somewhere between what it is and what it could become. Fifteen centuries later, Thomas Aquinas carried that idea into a theological context. In his Summa Theologica , he argued that we aren’t static, but that we’re in motion, always moving from our potential toward our fulfillment. And ultimately, he said, that fulfillment isn’t found in comfort or achievement alone, but in coming to know God more perfectly, having been created in His image. The idea was that because he is a potentiality, he wouldn’t achieve true happiness any way other than in coming to know God more perfectly. But strip away the philosophy and the theology, and what remains is something we recognize in our own lives: We aren’t finished products. We’re works in progress—living somewhere between what we are and what we could be. The problem isn’t that we fall short. The problem is when we stop...

I think we all have had times when we did something, or thought about doing something, that didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time, but then later its importance grew over time, and the decision you made to either do that thing or not turned out to be more meaningful than we had imagined at the time we made the choice. One such time for me was the time some friends and I climbed Mount Fuji in Japan. We were deployed to a camp at the base of the mountain from Okinawa. It was July 4, 1976 and we had a military parade in honor of the 200th birthday of our Nation and about a dozen of us thought it would be cool to climb it to celebrate the day after the parade. Mount Fuji isn’t a difficult mountain to climb, there’s just a lot of it: a little more than 12,000 feet of it. A lot of Japanese successfully make a pilgrimage of the climb every year. You can climb it in about eight hours if you follow a trail. It’s certainly no Denali. We wanted the climb to be special though, so we ...