Crafted by Valor

My Thoughts on Power and Control 

There’s no doubt I grew up in an environment that taught me I had control over outcomes. My initiative, my drive, my decisions, they all had consequences. And because of that, I believed I could influence how things turned out. Good or bad, it was on me.

When something went wrong, I leaned into the mantra: “It’s what you do with the situation that makes the man.”

After that near-death flight early in my first warzone deployment, I had to strap on my big boy boots. I saw that night as a failure, my failure. I thought I’d nearly killed everyone on board. Thought I wasn’t the badass I’d spent years becoming.

For a long time, I never looked at it differently.

But recently, I’ve realized… maybe I did have what it takes. Maybe it was me who took the right actions. Maybe I saved us.

It didn’t feel like me at the time. I called it PFM; Pure Fucking Magic.

Still, what I felt then is what I felt. No hindsight. No guidance. Just chaos. I didn’t know how long we’d be in those horrendous conditions. I didn’t know what was waiting over the horizon. I just knew one thing:

I had to survive.

Two beautiful people were waiting for me alone in a massive, echoing apartment in Germany. I had to get back to them. That desperation became my fuel.

So I turned to what I knew: control.

I had no option but to turn to total control.

I was an IP in this unit. It’s a respected position, one that comes with built-in trust. Not a formal Platoon Leader role, not an O-grade billet, but something more subtle and, in many ways, more powerful. The majority of the unit looked at the IPs with a deeper level of respect because of what the title meant. What it took to earn it.

All I had to do was embrace the leader in me. Be the ball. Take charge when others showed hesitation.

It was a role that consumed me and it felt incredibly natural. It was easy to bulldoze right through the formal leadership. Everyone knew I had the battalion commander’s ear. We were kind of beer-drinking buddies. I was always respectful, always formal in uniform, but I also felt loose around the boss. He made me feel that way. He told me to always be honest with him. He liked my style. Said he trusted me completely.

Didn’t matter that I was still just a two-spotted Warrant Officer. I was intimidating. People fell in line around me.

Company leadership never tried to correct me when I went on a rampage. I think they felt relieved that I could be the confrontational one when they couldn’t. I think they were scared of me.

And if I’m being honest; I liked that very much.

As usual, I took it just past the line but never faced consequences. We had just moved into Iraq. We were living worse than animals inside a massive hangar at Baghdad International Airport. Standards of appearance weren’t enforced. Nobody cared.

So, naturally, a few of us decided to hold a mustache-growing contest. Shaving was nearly impossible in those early days anyway.

We were still taking what could loosely be called showers out on the bombed-out runways of that massive airport complex. We’d position water cans on the external wings of our helicopters and loosen the caps. Then we’d strip down, bare-ass naked, one guy per side, standing beside our aircraft.

The mustaches started to get out of hand.

I’ve been blessed, or cursed, with the ability to grow hair fast. Shaving once a day barely kept me within regulation back in garrison. But here? Out in Iraq? I didn’t care anymore.

What were they gonna do; send me to Iraq?

My mustache was red. It got huge. It became legendary. Absolutely out of control.

And still, I was the one flying the assistant division commander and often the division commander himself. That meant I had to go to the division Tactical Operations Center (TOC) regularly to coordinate with the general’s aide and prep for upcoming flights.

There were four of us who made those daily visits. All pilots. All Warrant Officers. All in one-piece desert flight suits. All with massive, unruly mustaches. We stood out like a pack of wild animals.

The Warrant Officer community had been trying for decades to shed the image of the “loose cannon” pilot. But there we were, poster boys for exactly that.

And honestly? We loved it.

We thought we were keeping the cool legacy of the war-fighting Warrant Officer alive.

On one such visit to the TOC, the Division Command Sergeant Major jumped in front of our motley crew. He was furious and about to blow a senior NCO gasket over our mustaches.

But before he could light into us, the division Chief of Staff stepped in. They moved off to the side. I could hear every word.

The full-bird Colonel told the CSM that MG Dempsey loved the mustaches. Said he hated flying, it scared him, but he felt safe because of these “old school” Warrant Officers. Said he didn’t trust a Warrant Officer who didn’t have an out-of-regulation mustache.

We were suddenly granted complete freedom. In fact, it became a new duty to keep the mustaches, and let them get even more out of control.

So that’s exactly what I did.

Nobody dared say a word to us about shaving after that. Instead, they gave my mustache a name:  The Angry Beaver.

And I absolutely loved it.

I was so in control of things. Or at least, it felt that way.

It helped me forget just how many things were actually out of my control.

When I flew, I was absolutely in control. My plan? Chaos.

I flew those Hawks aggressively. No straight lines ever. My course to any destination was untraceable. That was the plan. And the plan was working.

I threw away all the doctrine I’d learned in countless NTC and JRTC rotations. That stuff didn’t apply here. Not in this war.

There were no neatly distributed graphics of enemy positions. No coordinated boundaries. The enemy was everywhere. We didn’t know who they were or where they were. So, to me everyone was the enemy.

Flying the generals around was actually the toughest mission set we had. Most air assault pilots hated General Support missions. They were seen as VIP runs; boring, political, for ass-kissers. Not the job for combat warfighter bad asses.

But in reality, those missions were hard.

The generals always needed to go right now and the plan never held. Every incident in theater triggered a visit from senior leadership. And there were plenty of incidents back then.

Once we got the general to his destination, there was always a long wait followed by a sudden, no-notice spin-up and departure. We never really knew where we were going until the general was on board and told us.

The times we spent on the ground were usually pretty intense. We never landed in improved areas. It was almost always somewhere out in the city, right among the population. Crowds would gather and form a huge circle around our two aircraft. We’d sit there with our door guns and M9 pistols for protection.

In other words, we were sitting ducks.

And we knew it. We felt it.

Remember, at that time, we believed everyone was the enemy. I believed it. I thought every person out there wanted to see us die.

Our helicopters made a hell of an impression whenever we arrived. Our position was instantly known. We were mortar magnets. Always cocked and ready to spring into action, ready to get the hell out of there fast.

And we did have to take action. Many times.

But no matter how tense those ground waits became, no matter how surrounded we were by people we didn’t trust, I always took off my flight vest and body armor. I’d fire up a cigarette.

I was transmitting a signal—to the crowd, to the world, and to myself:

Stay the fuck back. Don’t fuck with us.

It was the only way I could feel in control of the situation.

The myth that I had control over something completely uncontrollable somehow helped me get through it.

And that recipe? It worked. At least, it seemed to.

Situation after situation reinforced the same lesson: take total control. Make sure everyone knows you’re in control.

Nobody got in my way.

And truthfully, I think I made it easy for others to back off. They could take the easier path because they knew I was going to give everything I had to ensure we were successful.

To Be Continued………..