see what they can do

Once a year, all Navy ships undergo a thorough assessment, in which outside inspectors validate the ship's readiness. The ship as a whole and the crew's abilities and proficiencies are rated in twenty-four categories, on a scale ranging from basic Level One to advanced Level Four. 

The purpose is to determine who much additional training the crew needs to be ready for combat. But if you assume that the higher a ship's level, the less time it would spend training at sea, you would be wrong. In fact, regardless of its readiness rating, every ship spends the next six months training at sea. 
Thus there was no incentive to reach Level Four, and in fact, no ship ever did. Level One was the required minimum, and that was usually considered good enough. 

Then Benfold came along.

Originally, my goal was to reach an overall rating of Level Two, but when I recognized the enormous potential of my crew, I raised the bar to Level Three, much to the chagrin of those who saw it as a quantum leap in their labor and my hubris. 

I must also admit that, in addition to my noble motive of making the ship as good as it could be, I wanted to blow my archrival out of the water. Their assessment was scheduled to begin the basic Level One. The CO had no idea that we were laying the groundwork to shake things up a little. In fact, we were about to rock his world.

Our first challenge was finding enough senior people to supervise the twenty-four areas of testing. My combat systems officer hit me with the unexpected news that we had only twenty qualified people who were not involved in other critical operations. 

Thinking fast, I said, "Fine - pick supervisors from the next group down. You don't always need a senior person in charge. It could be a young, third-class petty officer."

"That's never been done before," he said.

"See what they can do," I said. "The alternative is to do nothing, right? Let's assign senior people to the most demanding areas and work our way down to the junior ones. If we don't get Level Three in some categories, so what? We will get Level One or Two. We have nothing to lose."

As it turns out, the third- and second-class petty officers were so honored to be chosen that they worked hard enough for several of their teams to outshine those supervised by senior people. The search-and-seizure team was particularly impressive. We assigned it to one of the ship's most junior sailors because we suspected he had the ability to honcho it. The outside inspectors protested, saying they could not validate the work of an important team that wasn't headed by a commissioned officer. But I insisted, and the young sailor did such a fantastic job that the inspectors ate their words and placed us at Level Four in that category.

Breaking out of our stratified systems to trust the people who work for us, especially those at or near the low end of the hierarchy, was a useful, progressive change. It let us unleash people with talent and let them rise to levels that no one had expected, simply by challenging them: Make Benfold the readiest ship afloat. In that context, how could we not have done well?


D. Michael Abrashoff
It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by D. Michael Abrashoff. Grand Central Publishing. 2007. p.146-148

do the right thing

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

Cold or warm.

Tired or well-rested.

Despised or honored.

Dying… or busy with other assignments.

Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: “to do what needs doing.”

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Modern Library. 2003. P.69, Book 6, #2. Also see The Internet Classics Archive | The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (mit.edu)

the heroic dead

There were no medals for survivors in the Japanese army, only for the heroic dead.


James Bradley (c. February, 1954-) is an American author, specializing in historical nonfiction chronicling the Pacific theatre of World War II. Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley with Ron Powers. May 2000. P.137

Pundonor. Many languages have cultivated special meanings for the word honor, and nations using those languages have developed particular connotations for this word. I think one would agree that in France, with its tradition of dueling, the concept of honor has had a rather more delicate definition than in America. In imperial Germany, where the dishonored infantry officer was left with a revolver as the only solution for having transgressed the code, the definition was also specialized, and no other nation has been able to enforce the strict interpretations that England observes regarding a businessman's word of honor. In Japan a whole culture, the samurai's, grew around this word. However, in other countries in which I have lived but had better not name, none of the above concepts has any currency, and in the United States we have been rather more lax in our application than Germany and France and markedly more lax than England and Japan. But it has been left to Spain to cultivate not only the world's most austere definition of honor but also to invent a special word to cover that definition. Of course, Spanish has the word honor, which means roughly what it does in French, but also the word pundonor, which is a contraction of punta de honor (point of honor). At any rate, it is not sufficient for a meticulous Spaniard to worry about his honor. Many things that an American man can in all decency forgive, the Spaniard cannot. If he is a man of pundonor, he must take action against insult. A young man with four unmarried sisters had better cultivate a nice sense of pundonor. A politican, a businessman engaged in intricate dealings, a stage idiot and above all a bullfighter must be studious of their pundonor, and in this book, where I deal with several men noted for their pundonor, I shall make use of this unique Spanish word, for I have found that whenever I am perplexed about what a Spaniard might do under certain circumstances, or the nation as a whole for that matter, it is instructive to ask, 'Under these circumstances what would a man do who subscribed to an acute or even a preposterous sense of honor?' And from endeavoring to answer this question I often find clues as to what the Spaniard will do. After all, Don Quixote is an engaging study of Spanish traits not only because it lampoons the concept of pundonor but because it demonstrates that no man even possessed pundonor to a greater degree than the doleful knight.


James A. Michener, Iberia. 1968. Random House. 71-72

Death Of A Pair Of Shoes

They're dying on me! They've lived
Faithfully, Christian
Servants honored
And happy helping

And pleasing their master,
A tired traveler
Ready to quit
For peace of soul and foot.

These soles know. They know
Step by step long rambles
And wet days, floundering
Among slop and cobbles.

Even the color drains
From the sad skins
Which, plain as they were, livened
Some forgotten festival.

All this announces a ruin
I don't grasp. The affliction
Of living corrodes honor.
They're running. Specters! Shoes!


~Jorge Guillén (Translated by Philip Levine. Roots & Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975. Hardie St. Martin, Editor. Harper & Row. 1976. p.137)

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murders carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.


Peter S. Beagle. Preface to The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

ought to be something more in terms of personal involvement

We live in an age of specialization. When I was a boy, many people had Model T Fords. Compared to modern cars, they were relatively simple mechanically. Many people were able to fix their own cars by grinding the valves, changing the rings on the pistons, putting in new brake bands, and using a generous supply of baling wire. Nowadays automobiles are so sophisticated that the average person knows very little about how to repair them. The mechanics of today use a computer to diagnose engine problems. I mention this example to encourage you young men to get training and education in order to keep up. Technical education is very important, and the same thing is true in fields of higher education. Any kind of skill requires specialized learning.

I do not care what vocation you choose to follow in life so long as it is honorable. How you provide for your family is your decision. Acquiring a skill is a good way to pay the bills, but there really ought to be something more in terms of personal involvement. Do not become so preoccupied with the material things of life that you lose the essence of your humanity. You may recall Dickens’s character Jacob Marley, who lamented his obsession with work when he exclaimed: “Business? … Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business.” Each of us ought to play some role in strengthening society, especially in doing the work of God.

I have learned that for those of us who hold the priesthood, the best formula for success is “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” Success will not come immediately because it requires preparation and hard work. There really are no shortcuts to success.


James E. Faust, “Message to My Grandsons,” Ensign, May 2007, 54–56