Responsibility

Do you take responsibility for your actions? I must admit that there have been times in my life where I have found myself wanting to hide from my actions, rather than own up to them. Almost every one of us has this ghost in our closet. Here is a tale of one man who took his responsibilities very seriously. It is a humbling tale for the rest of us!

I seem to have a patriotic theme going in this blog. Sorry, that is me being the retired Air Force officer. (No, I am not sorry for that at all! I am pretty proud of my service! And, I think we all should be more patriotic, and support those who serve this nation!) Here comes another such tale, one I admit I did not know.

It all started on a Spring Break driving trip up to Kansas City. My wife and I were driving through Boring, Oklahoma. (Never heard of that place? I believe it extends from border to border along I-35.) To be fair, there is a lot to see on that drive, but looking at field after field gets pretty dull, eventually. The only good thing about traveling along the Interstate system these days is the reasonable cell phone service. So, in a fit of borebom, my wife fires up my iPad and surfs for something interesting. The radio seems to be playing a bunch of James Taylor songs, so she Googles James Taylor and we discover that it is his birthday. So, we spend the next bunch of miles learning everything there is to know about him. (Actually, everything there is to know about him on Wikipedia.) Soon, we are experts on his life. Back to the boring drive.

Soon, we hit the Kansas border, and I am wondering who we can learn something about next. Well, what famous person hails from Kansas? Dorothy and Toto come to mind first, then Dwight David Eisenhower! Naturally, “I like Ike”!

Now, I will not go into his life, since most of us are familiar with that to some degree. Instead, I will talk about the defining moment in his life. D-Day, the 6th of June, 1944.

If you know your history, Eisenhower was appointed the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force by President Roosevelt, and in that position directed the planning for Operation Overlord. This was the allied force’s attempt to retake Europe from the German occupational forces. This was a huge responsibility, one that consumed the allied nations for months in the planning. It was a do or die operation. If it succeeded, we had a good chance to drive Hitler back and defeat his plans for world domination. If we lost, well that was a possibility too dire to even consider. Or was it.

Obviously, we won the war, and Eisenhower went on to become President of the United States. But in those last days before the invasion, he was the the kind of man we all wish we could be.

If the invasion failed, far too many would be looking for scapegoats. Someone to blame for the disaster. There would be plenty of places to lay the blame. Commanders who did not carry out orders as directed, troops who did not fight hard enough, supply systems that broke down, even the poor weathermen who never seem to get things right. So Eisenhower was covered, right?

Instead, he wrote this:

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

Now, that is class! This note was never published. It was found in the pocket of one of his aides long after the invasion had succeeded.

Who do you know today who would even think to do such a thing before some huge event that they were responsible for? Find that person, and make that person your role-model. Not some overpaid celebrity skating on the edge of jail of worse.

I sat in a huge auditorium as a kid and listened to Ike in person. I was too young to know what kind of man I was listening to. But I am thankful for men like Ike who served as my role-models when I was growing up. Since my mom worked in the Pentagon, I got to meet a bunch of pretty impressive veterans from that “Great War” (if there is such a thing!) I grew up with their kids in Washington, DC. We were the real “baby boomers”.