DON BROADWELL

            My military career was noteworthy only in that it was cut two-thirds short.  In 1959, I finished Marine Corps O.C.S. in the top 5% of my class, earning a twenty-year contract.  That put me in the ranks of academy grads, and, having grown up to newsreels of Marines in the Pacific, fulfilled a childhood dream.

             My first assignment was with the First Marine Division.  There my company commander handed me over to the finest platoon sergeant I’ve met, before or since.  Gunny MacDonald made me a Marine.  The uniform, however, became that much harder to take off.

             When my unit moved to Okinawa, I took an offer to join the mountain warfare section as a guide.  I was one of thirteen men who led military teams – Marines, Army Rangers and Navy Seals -- through 108 thousand acres on the northern boundary of Yosemite.  We worked above 11,000 feet in summer, and skied on thirty feet of snow in winter.  It became the happiest time of my life, and remained so until I began to work for peace.

             The rub came when I got my first company at the recruit depot is San Diego.  Knowing that the Corps’ two-year old grading system saw the Recruit Training Regiment (RTR) average jump 4.5 points in 24 months meant we were recruiting Nietzchean Ubermench, or the D.I.s were cheating the system.  Naturally, it was the latter.  A buddy at Camp Pendleton had written me at the Mountain Warfare Center with words like, “To get along, go alone.”  Not!

             My first meeting with drill instructors contained this order – Do not come to me to set a recruit back in training.  He will be lost to his unit and to the unit he joins when he overcomes his weakness.  Your job is to make every kid here into a Marine.

             Six months later, returning from a twenty-mile forced march, I passed a corpsman on the tarmac giving aid.  I crossed the finish, but when I went back, the incident had passed.  Later I learned a trainee had suffered a heat stroke.  He was, in fact, supposed to be resting in bed. Three days later, he died.

             At the court martial of his D.I.s, I believed, and still believe, I had set the tone that made Pvt. Yen saddle up for this march.  That’s what I told the court.  The D.I.s were found innocent of wrongdoing and the press went ballistic.  “Oh, we fixed him,” the PR guys said.  “We reassigned him to where he won’t get near another recruit.”  As Base Safety Officer, I counted fire extinguishers for most of 1965 while weaseling my way back to the Fleet Marine Force, or FMF.

             Assigned a company of military police bound for Viet Nam, I finally got my relief.  Again, not!  We were a skeleton crew for four months, and then dis-banded.  Having completed my six years, I took this as a sign.  I resigned and flew east to a Theological Seminary in New Jersey.  The town, the university and the seminary carried the same name, Princeton.  [Einstein’s Institute for Advanced Study stood across the street.  One quote from this man has never left me – “You cannot solve a problem with the same means used to create it.”]

             Problem solving and my divinity studies drew close enough to overlap.  Though I am degreed in Practical Theology, my three years at Princeton were spent almost wholly in Humanistic Psychology.  This was simply an early sign of ‘progressive’ religious study.  To more traditional seminaries, our department was the home of the antichrist – a moniker we preferred over counting angels on the heads of pins.

             The therapy part was heartbreaking, but the uniform and the white collar had to come off.  Every one in the department went through this, but that doesn’t mean we were close.  We were scared to death.  Nevertheless, “You are here not to make sick people well, but to make well people better,” a foundation plank of Humanistic Study then as well as today.

             After two years in the church and two as a construction worker in Austria, I came home, married and divorced – all within eight years.  By then I’d decided a little knowledge was dangerous.  Once more I immersed myself in the work of becoming human.  This time, I studied with Thomas Gordon’s Leader Effectiveness Institute.  Gordon was a natural inspiration; a combat B-17 pilot, Columbia PhD under Carl Rogers and years of training with Abraham Mazlow who’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is the benchmark of human potential today.  It was Gordon who derived the model for contemporary (non-hierarchical) leading.

·        The leader is the person who solves problems

·        Whoever solves problems will be viewed as the leader

·        When groups solve problems together, the leader is that person

who moves the process forward at any instant in time.

            Since 1984, I have published a succeeding synthesis on Gordon’s work, rebutted Hersey/Blanchard’s Situational Leadership and taught weekend workshops for three universities.  I have used (and copyrighted) an experiential teaching method for interpersonal behavior and taught introductory seminars for the Association of Federally Employed Women, the Association of Experiential Education and countless others, including recovering alcoholics, the WA. Home School Assn, WA Parents of Foster Children and more.  I am a student still.  I have taken my own course hundreds of times and, to be effective, would probably need a hundred more.  No matter.  Learning to lead others is a lifetime job.  We are just not very adept at it . . . .yet.

ON POWER:  “Power is the capacity to experience yourself fully, coupled with an effective response to that experience – the capacity to know who you are and to take action in the world that represents that inner experience.”                               John Thomas Wood, THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK ON POWER.