L.O.G. 184 Inside Abu Ghraib

All right, well, welcome both Greg and Colonel Bill Edwards. Bill, thanks so much for coming on the show today. We've known each other for a little while, going back and forth on a few things, so I appreciate you coming on here.

Yeah, Brian, Greg, thanks for having me. It's always great to see old friends, especially in this type of environment where we can talk about some substantive topics and hopefully have some impact on people and what they're reading and what they're seeing and what's going on. So it's always good having that opportunity when we're not surrounded by lawyers in the same room, Bill, where we can speak frankly and freely on our own.

That's right. That's right. So we'll just jump right into it. I know our listeners got a little bit of an intro, but basically you wrote this book called Inside Abu Ghraib, a memoir of two U.S. Military Intelligence Officers—so you and your commanding officer that you're with. I want to just let you jump right in because everyone's likely heard of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and everything that happened there, or at least an image instantly comes to mind when you hear Abu Ghraib, certainly from the images that came out of that prison.

But actually, that prison was on Abu Ghraib, which Abu Ghraib was also an operating base that was in the key area right outside of Baghdad, Sunni Triangle, on the road to Ramadi and Fallujah. So it was this small, again, what happened in Iraq was like this small little area that had massive operational and strategic influence in the area. And so you got sent in there. I want to let you start the story of how this happened and everything that was going on there.

No, great. Again, thanks for letting me talk about the book. The book was an idea I had in 2019. I was eating dinner in London with a British friend of mine. We were at the Royal Automobile Club because he's a member – believe me, that was a fantastic event. But he said, "Bill, tell me some stories from your Army career." I said, "I don't really have any stories." He's like, "No, no." So I got into this story with him about Abu Ghraib, and he said, "You have to write a book." I said, "I don't know how to write a book."

So he connected me to a really dear friend of his who's a prominent British author. He's our co-author in this book; his name is Paul Zannon. Paul got Bob Walters and me off the ground on how to put this book together. What the book is about is our unit, the 165th Military Intelligence Battalion. We were a Tactical Exploitation Battalion, which was long-range surveillance and human collection teams, so we had a specific mission.

We were sitting in Balad, which is north of Baghdad, after the major combat operations had completed, and we really thought we were going home. We thought we were about 90 or 100 days in, and everything was calm. Then, sometime in late August, early September, we were shocked into this reality of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device). We actually had a soldier in our Brigade that was killed on MSR Tampa (Main Supply Route Tampa) with one of the first IEDs to change the entire dynamics of the conflict. We were told we were going to stay for a year, so we started settling in, conducting operations just like we would do in any disciplined organization. That's sort of the stage setter.

As the book came to life, we wanted to tell the story from our perspective. We also wanted to include our families and our children in the book as well, which, to me, is really the most powerful part of this book. Frankly, people that have read it have told me that this is the story they never hear. They think it's a book about a military operation, which it is in some respects, but it's also about the price our families pay and what the service gets from our families while we're deployed from a support perspective. So I think that's really important.

That's kind of the stage setter of how we got the book off the ground. We started writing it in January or February of 2020, and we finished it the first week of October 2020, after many trials and tribulations of going back and forth and trying to get it right. Shortly after that, it went to publication in November, didn't release in print until November, really Veterans Day, of '21. That's when the story was told.

One of the interesting things I'll comment on real quick is that I think we're probably the only ones that wrote a book about Abu Ghraib who were actually there. We are firsthand, and so we're telling the story from our perspective, right? Obviously, there are many stories, and we all know this was a moral issue, a moral blunder, in many respects, a strategic blunder as well. But we can get into that if you have questions. So hopefully, that sets the stage, Brian.

I would say just for everybody that's listening in, we're talking with Colonel Bill Edwards. William Edwards has done an amazing amount of stuff in his career, and this is one piece of that entire career. We're lucky enough to know him, be able to ask him a couple of questions.

What I found most compelling about reading your book – and I know there was a lot of love and a lot of other people that are in it – what I think was best is, first of all, it is a true memoir; it's a page-turner. There are little mini vignettes all around there about different things that every soldier can relate to. There's not a soldier or a serviceman that's ever been deployed that won't find themselves at some point in this book looking in the rearview mirror.

What I also love is that you're two-thirds into the book before you get to the point where the disc is dropped, and now we're talking about things that happened at Abu Ghraib that gave everybody a black eye that lasted for a good long time. So the relevance to me is that I'm not sitting here reading some kind of exposé or finger-pointer about all these other things. This was a, "Hey, listen, this is part of a huge deployment that we had, and coming home and doing the wrap-up, this thing happened right about here, and this is how we dealt with that thing."

Brian, I think what I liked about the way Bill and his team put it together is that in that first two-thirds, all the stress fractures – you kind of were ambushed in a way, and there's a great chapter about an ambush as well near the beginning – but you were kind of ambushed in a way because nobody warned you about the thin ice at Abu Ghraib before you got there. You skinned your knees, it was a learning environment, you figured out what was going on. And then, even during some of the horrendous things that were uncovered, you and your unit had nothing to do with that. But what you didn't do is you didn't turn a blind eye, and you didn't try to walk away. You saw those things, and you went in and you tried to fix it.

So I felt really good all through the book. Bad things happen, and they happen and are exposed during wartime, and then we spend years trying to get people to understand how those occurred. Your book does it in a fast fashion; you get right to the point. Was that your intent? How did you take me through the process of having this wonderful memoir and all of these experiences, and now, all of a sudden, warts and all, you're going to discuss Abu Ghraib? How did that come up? That couldn't come up in a dinner in London, Bill.

So we had to do exactly that. We had to come in that day we were on Abu Ghraib. That first day, we did the leaders' recon, we were really getting ourselves together, we were getting organized, and we took the senior leadership of the Battalion down there. You normally don't do that, especially on trips like that, which are fairly dangerous at the time. But we had to do that; we had to assess the environment, and we had to come up with a game plan.

Leaving Captain Qureshi on the FOB (Forward Operating Base) was step one. When we went back to Balad, I had literally four or five days to get the entire unit – over 400 people – together with equipment and moved down there so we could start setting up operations. When we got down there day one, we were running Ops (Operations). We just literally picked up from Balad. We were doing patrolling that night, we were doing everything that we would have done in Balad or any other location we were in. We were executing the mission.

Basically, for us, it was almost like a battle drill. We just said, "Okay, our mission's changed. We're going to go down to this place, we're going to establish ourselves, and we're going to take charge because we've been given the authority to do so." So when we actually rolled on there, we took control of all the security and the outer perimeter security. I think what was even more important was people that were there saw a good unit come in, and they were like, "Alright, we've got to square ourselves away now."

We leveraged – I mean, I'm a huge fan, after serving in the military for so long, of the Non-Commissioned Officer Corps, and I will tell you that we had the best Non-Commissioned Officers in that Battalion that I would want to be with in combat at any time or in any situation. They just knew what to do inherently, and they started fixing things. As an officer in a unit, I was the Executive Officer (XO) in this unit. My job, I was supporting the commander's intent, and the NCOs were executing the commander's intent. We were just a good organization, and I think it was a smart move to move us there. Professionally, the unit grew while we were there. We got better when we were there, and that was a testament again to the people.

I just want to make sure that we have a lot of listeners that are law enforcement, first responders, fire professionals, a lot of former soldiers, a lot of current military folks. We also have captains of industry and people in all walks of life. So, folks, when he is talking about moving a battalion even an hour and a half away, what you're talking about is accounting for every single person that you have: some people that are on sick leave, some people that are on vacation, some people that are adjunct to other units. You're talking about every piece of serialized gear, every weapon, every NVG (Night Vision Goggle), every NOD (Night Observation Device), everything. You're talking about every bed and billeting option that was a possibility, and you're checking now it's like checking out of a hotel from hell with all of these different things and making sure that all your books are returned to the library.

So we're talking about a huge major operation. That you survived that in five days is a testament to the strength of the organization. Sometimes we say strength, and I think what I'm hearing you say is health. I'm hearing you say that you had a healthy Battalion full of resilient NCOs, which made that lifting and pushing so much easier. Is that a fair assessment?

Absolutely, absolutely. I think resilience is a great way to say it. Everything, at least in my opinion, starts with attitude and how you view. We could have all sat around and said, "This is going to be horrible. What are we doing this for?" and complained about it. But really, the attitude was like, "Let's take it on. Let's go do it. Let's go fix this. Whatever we've got to fix, we didn't even know what it was. Let's go fix it." And that comes from the top. It comes from the commander, it comes from the senior officers, it comes from the Sergeant Major, comes from the NCOs, and they just tell the soldiers, "Hey, look, we've got another job to do. We've got a mission. Let's go. We're going to do it. We're going to take care of this."

It was literally – and I'm not going to lie to you guys – it was literally the worst place I've ever been in my life. It was horrific, and I say that, I think, in the book, but I want to emphasize that. I've been a lot of places. This was absolutely the worst place, and we just made it the best we could. And we have a lot of funny, kind of funny stories around it as well, trying to get. One of the things I may talk about, I don't remember if I do in the book or not, I was trying to get satellite TV into the Tactical Operations Center so that we could put on an NFL game at some point, because we hadn't had a TV connection in months. So we're going through all these things.

The other thing I'll mention is that this specific location was mortared and rocketed every single day, multiple times a day. It was not a nice place. Throw all those things into the mix, and we had our hands full. But I just remember, I smiled to myself sometimes thinking about the people, sometimes thinking about what we went through, and then, of course, wanting to see all of them and capture and be with them again because it was such a great experience even though it was horrific. And then, of course, talking to our wives and children about what they were doing because, again, at the same time, soldiers, people in our unit, were getting wounded, some we did lose some people. Our wives were on the end of helping us in what we called the support area or the rear, helping us with all the family support issues and things that happen in that respect as well. It was a really, really interesting time, and they were going through, they had a lot going on as well. That book does a good job of that.

You know, we're talking about how you had a unit that was just, okay, you guys are good order and discipline, a resilient unit, everyone's, "We've got everyone on the same page." I feel like this simple, sort of, commander's intent, basically, is what all you got. "Fix it," that sort of becomes the mantra for everyone at the unit. Then it's like, you're clearly going into a situation that needs to be fixed because you just mentioned, "Hey, you have these NCOs that just stood up," and it's like they inherently knew what had to be done because they know if something's broken. And if all you're saying is "fix it," great, you're not telling—you're sort of allowing them to do it on their own, which only happens if you have that good, healthy unit.

Meaning whatever organization we go to – because we do this in the private sector as well, and they're like, "Well, what do we need to learn? We need to go over this." And we're like, "We pull off all their little manuals and everything they got, and they're like, 'Hey, you got really good stuff in here.'" They're like, "Where'd you find that?" "We're like, 'On your shelf. You just have to brush the dust off.'" You haven't trained your people and given them the sort of the competence and the confidence to make their own decisions. Most places where you go, you can go around and just ask the people that work there what the problems are; they'll know because they're the ones dealing with it every day. And so if you sort of let them do that.

There was one story, I don't want to get it wrong, but one story highlighted in there about the significance of Abu Ghraib too is you had someone walk up to the base and give some very, very important information regarding the location of some people that were very, very high value targets that you're looking at. Can you kind of give that story a little bit because it kind of goes to show how things work at a low level of someone sort of empowered?

That was a strength. I talk about this a lot after being retired now for several years and working in private sector and business, and trying to get my head around equating military service and then transitioning to business. Really, everything is about people, and if we lead—I think the Marine Corps has a great saying, and I'll have to give the credit to Marine Corps—"We manage things, but we lead people." That's a Marine Corps thing, and I say that to myself all the time. When you give that ability to have initiative and to be innovative and to be creative, and you inculcate that into the culture of your organization, you will see great things happening.

I think that's what was happening in this organization at the time. We experienced a lot of things on Abu Ghraib. Frankly, I've probably forgotten; we probably didn't even cover everything in the book that was going on there. So we had all of these instances where soldiers and NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) and young officers were doing things, taking the initiative themselves. I'll give you a great example: the infrastructure on Abu Ghraib was horrific. We had no services, we had nothing; it was like living in a true field environment.

The first day we're on the FOB, one of the senior NCOs in the unit, Staff Sergeant First Class Bob Wells, he says, "We've got to get after infrastructure. We've got to start building this place up so we can stay healthy," because he was, we were really worried about just being sick and getting sick in this environment, not to mention all the medical waste that was coming out of the ground. Literally, we had to give an order that soldiers could not wear flip-flops or flimsy types of shoes outside of any sort of hard structure because we didn't know what was coming out of the ground at that place. It was just things we had to take care of, and people understood why we wanted to give that direction so that they could stay safe that way. But those are the type of things that were happening.

I think the incident you might be referring to was Uday and Qusay (Hussein). Is that the one you referred to?

Yeah.

So that walk-in was actually up north. It wasn't at Abu Ghraib. It was our unit; it was the folks from our unit. They were operating with, I believe, the 101st (Airborne) at the time, and that walk-in came in to them there. So that was an interesting event, but I think that's something that's pretty well known at this point, what happened after that.

Oh, yeah, for sure. But they walked in, and I know someone in your unit, and then the guy's like, "Hey, I think you're looking for these two guys, and they're on my street." And that was Uday and Qusay Hussein, which, if it goes to show you, some of that street walking, if handled properly, you never know what that's going to lead to.

No. I think the point you're making is that those people were in our organization, and they were decentralized from—yes, so they were not connected to us, but they were still doing the right thing. So this goes back to the point of, "Do you do the right thing when someone isn't watching?" That's something my dad used to tell me all the time, "Do the right thing when someone really isn't watching." And that's a true testament of if you've got it right or not. I think that was what we're talking about here: these guys were living with a whole different organization, functioning under a whole different culture and organization, and were still doing their job, doing their mission correctly.

One of the things, Bill, we talk about when we go to a unit – and we'll talk about whether it's a "battlefield to boardroom," whether it's a battlefield unit or a boardroom unit – when we drop in on there, we do what's called a CTA (Cognitive Task Analysis). We like to look at what they already have, what are the underpinnings, what's the infrastructure they have. Brian alluded to that earlier. Many times, we say we're not going to be able to teach anything new, but we will be able to create an efficiency in this line of communication that you're weak in, and this is what's causing most of your drain. Most people do that, and most educators understand hegemony and pedagogy and why that's critical to the structure. Most of them don't understand that there's also an andragogy, which is, pedagogy is teaching kids so that they'll proliferate; andragogy is going in and teaching the adults because the adults are actually the ones that still are in control of those old folklorish things that make the shadows dance in the cave.

So when we go in, we talk about KSAs (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities), but we've added over time aptitude and attitudes to that. What folks that are listening right now, what Bill is talking about and Brian's talking about is literally addressing the attitudes because even though people have the ability to carry something out, and they have the aptitude to fix what's broken, their attitude may be a lingering malaise which causes them to delay or look the other way or not answer the call. Somebody's always going to look at it and say, "It's not my job. It's somebody else's job that was broken before I got here."

What I loved about your book, your book was a mea culpa of sorts, "Hey, I'm the guy that's in that chair now. It's not going to go past my desk without me touching it." I think that even in education and specifically in training that we do, the book is a great testament to how you did your own OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) on lessons learned and fixed what was broken in stride. So if you understand that long-winded approach into what I was trying to say, Bill, would you agree with that? And would you agree that you also epitomized that with the stories out of Abu Ghraib?

No, I totally agree. I think what we found at Abu Ghraib was it was—I call it leading through adversity. We knew we were going to be in an adverse situation, and we didn't sit back and say, "This is not our job." No, it was our job. We were given that job, and we went down there, and that's what we did. We took it head-on. It starts with—it always starts with leadership. One of the basic problems of the organization before us was that leadership failed. That's what happened, leadership failed, and then at that point, there was no control. There was no way to keep the unit focused.

We had a strong sense of pride in what we did as an organization. Again, those are things that were built over time. Look, I joined the organization after the unit had deployed into OIF 1. I joined, I was at CGSC (Command and General Staff College). I was in school, and they pulled us aside and said, "Hey, you've got to go to these units now, and you're going to take over these specific leadership roles." When I rolled into that organization, I think I might have told the story in the book, but they—I'm sitting at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport). I had flown in from Rhein-Main Air Base. I called up to the unit. Somehow I found the phone number. I don't know how I found the phone number; it was some crazy way to do it. But anyway, because it's a tactical phone, you know how it is. Anyway, I call, I find the unit, and they say, "Yeah, no problem. We'll send a lures team down to pick you up in a few hours, et cetera, et cetera."

But my first encounter with this organization was with junior NCOs who came to get me to bring me to the organization, and every single one of them just made me smile to say, "I'm going to a great unit." The story I think I tell is, we flew over without a weapon. So we went over to in-country because the weapons were all in-country, the rifles and the pistols and things. One of the junior NCOs walks up to me, and he says, "Hey, sir, you don't have a weapon." And so he hands me his nine mil and some ammunition, and he says, "Hey, take, carry this as we go up MSR Tampa back to Balad. I'll jump on the .50 cal (caliber)." So it was just almost like it didn't even phase him. He's like, "Here's my weapon, you're good to go. Now I'm going to take this position, and now we're rolling." That's it. To me, that was the organization, and that was my first encounter with the organization, and I was extremely happy at that point.

People don't understand—and this is one of the things you bring back to industry—high-functioning units are efficient, and they have an efficacy about them that you feel, you can actually sense it walking into a building or into a room, that it's not these hollow epithets that they hang, the statements on the wall. They embody those principles, and I love that that air of confidence and competence comes across, but it's not bravado. So that's wonderful that you got to feel that immediately.

The other part of that story that's really funny is when he's handed me the pistol to carry, he said, he asked me, "You do know how to use it, right?" He was just joking around with me, but he had never met me, and I'm a Major in the Army. I'm going to be his Battalion Executive Officer, but he had the confidence just to kind of joke around. I looked at him, I said, "Well, I hope so. I hope I can." What happened on that trip back was, and I think we tell it in the book, is we were ambushed on MSR Tampa going back to the unit. So I'm in country less than three hours or four hours or whatever, and we're already in a small firefight on the highway. Frankly, every single one of those guys that was leading me back to the unit, they had their battle drills down, they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was like just taking care of business.

That's incredible. I love that. So we see that too because everyone talks about, "Well, in the military, you've got this, you get trained, and everyone's on the same page." It's like, "Yeah, but no, like you still need to have that strong leadership." My opinion is, if you have the greatest team ever put together, if they don't have a really good leader, they'll do okay, they'll still do well, but they're never going to see their full potential. But if you have an average team of just a bunch of people thrown together, maybe never worked before, but you have a really good leader who can articulate what they want, what they need, people will accomplish more than you could possibly imagine.

You've got these different examples. Now you do a lot of stuff with the private sector, and you've been with a bunch of different companies, both as consulting and directly working with them. You've introduced us to some amazing people as well. So I always ask people, because to us, Greg mentioned the "battlefield to boardroom," and it's like a tagline we use, but the way we approach it, it's the same problems, the same issues. Yes, this might be about your bottom line versus people getting killed—the consequences are different, but the problems themselves are similar. So I'm curious how you take that approach to the private sector stuff that you do. What translates well? What doesn't? What issues do you see? Because we get those questions a lot, and people go, "Well, yeah, but that's military, and it's structured that way." It's like, "No, but it's still about people. It's still about those people first." So I'm curious what you see coming from, you know, think about you going into Abu Ghraib to fix it to you going into a company that's going, "Hey, here's our issues." I mean, there's got to be so many similarities that you see.

That's a great question. I run into it all the time. It comes down to two things, I think. One, people in organizations and businesses, they need to see themselves. So you have to see yourself, and culturally, you need to see how your organization functions. When you transition from the military, especially in leadership roles, your role changes in the private sector. You do have authority, accountability, and responsibility as a leader in the military, but you may not have that in the private sector directly. But you do from a leadership position or a leadership role.

Then, how you articulate that in an organization that is not structured like the military is to be aware of who you are, to see yourself as a company, as an organization, as a department, whatever it may be, and then to understand how you function from a cultural perspective. Then, what is your true vision for your business and the mission of your business? What are you trying to accomplish? In the private sector, a business is put together for a specific reason. The company I'm working with now is Software as a Service (SaaS). So we have to rely on our product; it has to be a good product that functions and meets the needs of our clients in order for us to do well as a company.

But then, culturally, inside of our company, how are we going from articulating what our product can do and what it does all the way through the cycle of implementing it, putting it into practice, putting it into play, but then getting the rewards culturally inside so everyone feels like they're part of the team, like they've done something that's going to provide a security service for a specific client, or it's going to provide safety for the public, because that's what our SaaS is about. Our software is about security and safety. So I'm just talking from my personal experience and perspective. But in every business, understanding it's always about seeing yourself first, and then understanding the culture you're working in, and then bringing it all together so that you can then have success.

A lot of people are different. They want to have individual success, but I always talk about the difference between morale and esprit de corps. Morale is individual; esprit de corps is team. Esprit de corps will always make your individual morale better if you have good esprit de corps. So if you can focus on the team idea, everyone benefits from it. Here's why: morale changes by the minute, by the hour. If I trip over something walking to the kitchen and I scrape my knee, like Greg alluded to earlier, I'm going to be a little upset; it's going to change my morale. But if I have a great esprit de corps environment, my team's going to pick me up. Someone's going to say, "Hey, Bill, you're going to be alright, that's okay, go get a drink of water, take some aspirin or something," whatever it may be. And then I've already forgotten about what happened, and my morale is back to where it was. That's why I talk about the difference between esprit de corps and morale, and that's a simple explanation, but you can apply that in business, you can apply that in the military, you can apply it almost anywhere.

If anybody was listening, I hope they're taking notes of that too because the idea is, we constantly drive home to everybody, "Culture is context." Why is that important? Because culture becomes a lens with which you can conduct Predictive Analytics. You can take a look and project where likely stress fractures will occur in an organization, how an organization will do when they meet an outside influence, what outside stressors or agitation will work to our benefit and work to our detriment. Because what happens is, when you're in an organization, as much as your individual accomplishments are key, it's the intellectual acumen that's regarded collectively that defines your organization. And so you can see that in the individual, but it's a magnification of the larger. And therefore, we do nothing but predictive analysis.

So we go in, and somebody says, "Fix the broken organization." Sometimes we don't need to fix anything. Sometimes we just need to shine the light on where the knowledge resides, and once the people go, "Aha! That was our center focus. That's where we went off track," then they can backtrack on their own and fix it. So I love that you can take that from the military to the corporate because, folks, don't get us wrong, they're all vets on the call, and thanks everybody for their service, but at the same time, the military doesn't have everything right. There are still mistakes, they still learn. And there are still bozos that go off the reservation and do something stupid. But the idea is, if you look at the structure, the structure has lasted for this long through so many challenges because the structure's sound. And when the military finds out that the structure doesn't work, they update it, fix it, or abandon that strategy. That's different somehow sometimes with the business world rather than military. I think you both would agree with that.

I want to make great points, by the way. One thing I think in Abu Ghraib, which was clearly evident in the 165th, our unit, was we were responsible and accountable, and we knew that at that point when we were given the mission, we became responsible and accountable. What I tell younger officers and NCOs is that you can never delegate responsibility. You can never delegate. It's not something that's—I'm not delegating your responsibility; I'm telling you that this is our mission, we still own it. And so we have—and that's what's going to happen.

Accountability, you can delegate accountability if you think about property or you think about things that have to be accounted for by someone else. But when it comes down to responsibility, it is something that you cannot delegate. Second, I talk a lot about flexibility versus agility in organizations. I think you really need to look at the definition of agility and why agility is so important in an organization. Agility gives you a lot more than flexibility does. At Abu Ghraib, we were agile. We had to change with the environment every single day that we were there. It was one of those lessons learned when I was still fairly young in the military because this happened when I was a Major. I still went on and served another 10 or 12 years and actually deployed back to Iraq as a Battalion Commander in 2010. So I took all those lessons I had learned and then applied them to my Battalion and tried to function as best that I could in another stressful environment where we were transitioning out brigades and then starting to change operations in Iraq from OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) to New Dawn. All of these things have been pretty important concepts for me. So I talk like I said, responsibility, accountability, and agility—those are things I like to mention as well, tied to the Abu Ghraib lessons learned.

You guys both hit on a bunch of points, and a few things, when we drop into that private sector, again, people go, "Well, that's different because in militaries this and you have an overall mission," and, "we have this." Sometimes it's, "We have a sales team, and they're motivated by obviously making more sales, and sometimes they don't collaborate well." It's like, "Yeah, we get it." That's why we always call it "writing for the brand." It's like, "Okay, well, it's almost that version of esprit de corps. What are we doing here? What's our actual goal here? What's our mission? Where do you fit in?" Because everyone, when we talk to individual departments or individual agencies or people at an organization, they always go, "Well, the problems are here, we can't ever get this done over here." It's like, "Uh-huh, it's that person's fault, got it. It's that other department's fault, got it." And then you go to that department like, "Oh, and it's that department."

It's just a simple, like, they're not communicating across a lot of the times, or people aren't empowered to make those decisions. And so we try to boil things down to, "Here's what your mission statement says." That saying, that quote you have at the front of your building when you walk in, "This is what that means." And a lot of people just literally have that light bulb moment, they're going, "Oh, okay, I see what you're saying now. No one ever explained it to us." Everyone's got the Notre Dame, "Play Like A Champion Today." They're actually taught what that means. You can't just put the quote on the wall and then hit the board as you go by. You have to know what that means to your role. Sometimes we just have that simple job of explaining where someone fits in with that, to help support the overall mission.

You brought up the good one of seeing yourself in all of these different ways to look at it. Most people, when put together and given a challenge, they're going to come together and want to defeat that challenge. It's inherent in human nature that we kind of do that, and we do that really well. So I think having that grounding is like, we get focused on all of these different issues. Even within the military, even with that other organization we're talking about before we get on the call, I don't want to name it on here, but it comes down to those values. If I relegate my values to some online, "Oh, did you read it? Did you check the box? Okay, got it," or "That's part of the HR (Human Resources) processing or hiring process here. Yeah, you had to fill this stuff out, you signed, said this is the core values of the company." It's like, if that's actually the bedrock of everything that you're doing here, it really is in a lot of cases. And if I don't get really good training of what those values are for our organization, I actually won't make informed decisions. I could be really good at my job, but it might be counter—and I might be doing something that's counterintuitive or goes in the opposite direction of where we're paddling here. And that's where you cause those issues. I think if you focus on those things, on what it means to operate in a company or a team or this environment, what our actual values are, and what that mission statement plastered on the wall means, you can figure out the rest of the stuff. You don't need all the little answers; you'll figure that out when the time comes. It's just something, as both of you are talking about it, I'm going, "Yeah, these are the same things we see everywhere."

Brian, I think to capitulate, listen, the difference, I think one big difference about the military, is remember, it's a volunteer military, but you're obligated to finish the mission. You're obligated to the fellow soldiers and the Marines that are around you. You have to do this because if you let that line go slack, somebody's going to die. I don't think that Corporate America understands that that's the value of hiring a veteran in there, is because that veteran will never knowingly disgrace themselves or the name of the corporation. They will always give you 100% when they show up. Those are great values.

I would say this, and this is not a sales pitch, everybody knows that we're in 200 flipping episodes, we're not trying to sell. I would tell you that Christmas is coming up, and get this book because this book is a conversation starter on those conversations you didn't even know you haven't had yet with your family, with your co-workers, with your friends. If I was a cop, I would definitely get this as an FTO (Field Training Officer), and I would share little vignettes out of it each time that we're out on patrol. So I would look at it because you've got an incredibly long, wonderful, illustrious career, and you're doing stuff now that I like to follow when I'm on LinkedIn, the whole time that I'm sending a thumbs up or a light bulb moment or something like that, Bill, is when you're talking about drones and how people get that information wrong and where that's going. So I take a giant evolutionary step back and say, "You need to read Abu Ghraib, and you need to see Bill's perspective on it," because it'll open your eyes to how organizations work and how they can fail, and how that failure can stain an organization for a good long time, but it also doesn't embody or epitomize your great body of work, Bill. You've had stuff before that you did, and this thing that you've done since then has defined you, and the book is just a collection of those great thoughts that anybody could use. So don't get it because it's about the Iraq War, and don't get it because it's about that area west of Baghdad. Get it because it's a great story about people and how people can deal with other humans. Brian, I just want to make sure that comes through loud and clear that we're both huge fans of the book.

I really appreciate that. So I want to ask you, with everything that's in there, because again, there's stories, so much family that are wild, especially I think it was Colonel Walters' family and daughter situation in the hospital in Germany. And you're just like, "What in the F?" They're knowingly giving her a lower standard of care because they're pissed at the United States for being in Iraq. You're reading these incredible things that a family has to deal with while you're forward deployed doing all this, and it really shows both at a tactical, operational, strategic level, at a global level, at an individual level, how these things affect everyone in so many different ways.

Something that, again, which is why we appreciate the book too, is I knew none of this about Abu Ghraib. I didn't know all of this stuff. I've been around in that area, I've spent a lot of time in the Sunni Triangle, in the Anbar Province there outside of Ramadi and everywhere around there. It's like, man, you had this significant event that is not defined, or there's one thing that seems to define Abu Ghraib, there was so much more to it. Out of everything that you kind of learned there, and again, like Greg said, you retired as a Colonel, so you have a large career in the Army, not just this one thing, this one deployment that you talk about in this book. I'm sure there are so many other lessons learned in there, but what is it out of this experience at Abu Ghraib? Is there something that is your overall takeaway? I know everyone wants that, "What's the drop on the tongue? What's the boil it down to one thing?" And there never is, there never is, but there's usually something overall that carries you through in other experiences that you took away from that, that you can kind of point to and go, "Hey, this is one of the most important things I've learned out of this experience."

So I think for the audience, and then for those that are in the military still that may see this, is that we've really got to value the role our families play in support of what we do when we're away. My wife and I were driving the other day, and we were trying to count how many years I spent away from the family during the career, and then how many years I actually spent in training. We came to the conclusion that of close to a 30-year career, I was probably gone 15 years of that and then spent at least six of it in pure training. So by the time we went to Iraq in OIF 1, we were a well-oiled machine in the U.S. Army, and I know the Marine Corps is the same way, the Navy's the same way, the Air Force is the same way. All the services were very well trained.

But the families were also well trained at this point. Those families that have gone through all of these years of service because it really is service in both aspects. The Army, I always used to say, gets two for one: they get me, and they get my wife to run the family support groups and those types of things with help with others. They never do it alone. But the things that were interesting to me, the takeaway is the strength of the family, and that's super important. I think we need to try to do a stronger job, or a stronger push, pushing how important that is and recognizing our support structures. Because if you're worried about something, Brian, and you know this, if you're downrange and you're worried about something at home, your mind is not where it needs to be. And that goes for if you're in law enforcement, or if you're a firefighter, or you're an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), or whatever it may be, it's really important to support what the family does for us.

Number one. Number two, what came out of Abu Ghraib for me personally was my belief in people, my belief in what people can do and what people are capable of doing, and all of those strengths that come when you're in—we have a chapter in the book called "Embracing the Suck." When you're embracing the suck together, those are memories that will live with you forever. That's another strength: just recognizing people.

One of the things I took away from that was when I later commanded a battalion in Iraq, I was making decisions on critical missions for my unit based on people's strengths. Everyone has their own strength. We as leaders have to find what those strengths are and get people into positions where they can thrive. That's super important to me in private sector business, but it was in that time period in Iraq as well, that time when I was in command. My point is, a quick story: when we had crew systems finally come to theater—crew systems are these counter-IED systems that were in our vehicles—the smartest person in my Battalion was a PFC (Private First Class) who understood the crew systems better than anyone in the organization. And I made him the NCO in charge of crew systems. Now he came to me and he said, "Sir, I'm a PFC. No one's going to listen to me." I said, "You don't need to worry about that because you have now the authority to quality control our crew systems, and everyone clearly knows you're the expert, and they don't want to go outside the FOB unless their system's working. Believe me, they're going to listen to you, brother, they're going to listen to you."

So it was this idea of empowerment is what I'm talking about: finding those places where we can empower our teammates to do great things. Not only is that good for the organization, but it's good for the person. A lot of times, I think people make quick decisions on people, and this is, I think, immature leadership. They'll make quick decisions on people, and then that's it. I've had someone tell me before, "I can make a decision on a person in 30 seconds." I think that is not true. I think that is not true because you don't have the time to actually see what their strengths are. So, to answer long story long, Brian, those are some of the things I took away from Abu Ghraib just as a person.

I was very shocked. I tell people all the time when my children and wife wrote for the book, I had never seen what they had written until the book was published. And so when I read it, I was in shock. I could not—because they didn't want to do it, for one, they didn't want to be a part of the book, but I had to sort of coax them into doing it because it was a memory for them they didn't want to relive. They didn't want to do it. So, but they did it for me, and then when I read it, I was incredibly shocked, especially when my daughter—she was old enough, my oldest daughter was old enough to understand when I was getting the Combat Action Badge post-deployment for what we had gone through, and they read the citation, and she didn't—she didn't know what it was all about.

That's amazing. Incredible. It just reproves my point, Brian. The book has to come out in your family between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it'll make a direct impact in the way how you think and how you talk to your loved ones. It's not surprising that your answer boiled down to support structures, and that's both at a family level, at an organizational level, as a leader how to look at that. Most people, if they're trained to do their job, you usually just have to get the hell out of the way and let them do their job, and give them the support that they need.

And you have people, "Well, what if I do all this stuff for them and they turn out to not be a good employee, not doing this?" It's like, "Well, that'll be obvious right away, and then you can find someone that will." That does not surprise me that, again, it goes back to, you can throw the best team in the world together. If they don't have the support to accomplish their mission, it's never going to happen. Or if you can take an average team, put them together, a mix-matched group of people, and you give them the support that they need, get out of their way, give them clear direction—they will, again, like you said, they'll surprise you every time. And I mean every time. People will rise to the occasion if you let them, if you give them the support they need.

I think the last thing I would say about that is if you're in a leadership role—this is just my opinion—you have to have energy. You have to show that energy. It has to be out there that you are energetic about what you're doing. You love what you're doing. You're in that position because you know you can make that difference, and you can provide—really, leadership is about support. It's really what it is. Like you said, Bob Walters was great. Our commander, he'd give us guidance. He did it really succinctly, a couple bullet points, and he'd say, "Alright, go take care of business." So we were very, we were well trained at doing that, and he was never micromanaging that process because he knew we were going to give it our best effort.

What you really want as a leader is you want to count on people giving their best. Because at that point, when you're a Colonel—when I tell people, and I hopefully there's Generals and Colonels listening to this as well—but when you're at that level of leadership, you have to determine what is a challenge and what is a crisis in your organization. You have to define challenge versus crisis. If you define challenge and basically 99% of everything you do is a challenge, you relieve the stress of your organization and you relieve your personal stress. If everything is a crisis, nothing is. We've all heard that. But the point is, what is crisis and what is a challenge? For me, again, you just made me think of something really great out of Abu Ghraib: I understood the difference between challenge and crisis.

It's amazing. What a gem. What an amazing gem to take away with. That's great. That's incredible.

Well, we really appreciate you coming on here, talking about it. There's so much more in this book that you can read through and get these great little insights. Greg said it right off the bat, every chapter I read, there's something in there where I went, "Oh, that, yeah, dude, I get that," or, "I knew that before," or, "Hey, man, that's pretty cool. That's kind of a similar reason why I do." You see all that throughout there. And then, of course, the family side is always good to see because that's not a perspective I ever had. I've only had it from, "I'm the one out there doing stuff," and then family back at home. You do really forget how much is—I mean, you do know, but until you sit down and read someone's, "Hey, well, this is what I was going through during that time," it's absolutely powerful. And you forget that, too.

I mean, it was still in the same way where I'm out traveling, doing stuff all the time, and I've got to make sure the family is good at home, and that's a process. You have to learn how that works. And now that's, like you said, there's just no difference in some law enforcement officer going out there, dealing with the worst people that the city or county or state has. They're the ones they have to deal with it every single day, day in, day out, and then come back home and trying to lead a normal life. It's like, "Well, there's balance there, man. It's going to spill over." So having that process helps.

Talking about all this stuff, I really appreciate you coming on. I definitely want to have you on again because one of your areas of expertise, also, like we mentioned, is this commercial drone use and the rise of it, and how much it's changed. And now again, like we talked about at the beginning before we started recording, everything that's going on in Ukraine and coming out is revolutionized. I think a lot of people, probably like you, saw a lot of this coming, but we'd love to get you on to talk about that. So we do appreciate you coming on here, Bill.

Thanks so much. I'll leave you with this: the day after I got back from Abu Ghraib, I was in my apartment in Germany. This is literally 12 hours after we had gotten off the airplane, and I went into the kitchen. My wife tells the story, and I knew I didn't know where anything was in the apartment because I never lived there. I didn't know anything about, like, "Where was the coffee? Where were the cups?" All the simple things that people take for granted. But I—she tells the story where I got up and I made her a pot of coffee or a cup of coffee or something at the time, and she woke up and cried because she hadn't had anyone help her for over a year, and she got up and there was Coffee Mate. Something so simple. I think people listening, don't take the small things for granted. Listen to a guy. I'm an expert in nothing, but I have a lot of experience in some things, and I'm just giving you my lessons learned. But that point, of what she told that story, was very powerful for me. It's in the book, and I had no idea that it was so powerful for her.

I would say, first of all, it's all the small things. Life is a rich tapestry of small things, not major events. Those will age with time, but those small things are what makes life livable. That's amazing. Great, great story, and thank you for sharing that. I know how emotional that must have been.

Well, we appreciate you coming on again. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Bill. We'll have you on again, and thanks, everyone, for listening in. Don't forget that training changes behavior.