All posts by Jim

Notes from the Southwest Corner-4

Notes from the Southwest Corner

This post is a day late. This old man forgot Dirty Harry’s admonition, “A man’s gotta know his limits.” i spent the weekend lugging boxes down from the garage attic and then moving them about several more times, followed by a day of golf and and a major stretching session. Such going-ons are not recommended for folks my age. By Wednesday night, i could barely walk. But the doc did wonders. i am now almost back to old man good health.

The Demodrat column below is timely. Next Tuesday, i will lunch with Dave Carey in Georgetown, Texas before i present my book, Steel Decks and Glass Ceilings to the Texas A&M NROTC unit the following day. Dave remains an incredible friend, mentor, and inspiration. Did i mention hero? It also follows my post about Dave earlier this week.

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – This past Monday, I left the cleanup from the San Diego fires and flew to Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It was not an escape. It was work. I was co-facilitating a team building workshop for a California police department with my friend, Dave Carey.

Dave is not your ordinary business associate. On August 31, 1967, Dave Carey’s A-4 was shot out from under him over North Vietnam. He spent five and a half years as a Prisoner of War (POW), most of the time in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

Dave and I met in 1985 at the Naval Amphibious School in Coronado. We worked together for just shy of a year as I transitioned into Dave’s position as the head of leadership training for the West Coast and Pacific Rim. Together, we help create a two-day workshop on leadership excellence for senior Navy officers.

Dave retired. Four years later in 1989, I followed suit. After my initial dive into my new job as Mister Mom, I soon started to look for ways to generate income in the quiet hours.

After some discussion, Dave and I agreed I would write a book about his POW experience, or more accurately, about his motivational speeches concerning his experience. After completing the draft, we decided it really should be written in first person. The original draft is on my office bookshelf.

Eight years later, Dave holed up for three weeks and completed The Ways We Choose: Lessons For Life From a POW’s Experience.

Part of my approach to writing was generated from conversations with Dave. He and I were driving to another workshop about fifteen years ago when I asked him about what outcome did he expect the audience to have when he gave a speech.

Dave said he had expectations initially, but discovered his listeners made their own connections. Early on, Dave had completed a luncheon speech when a huge Texan came up to him, put his big arm around Dave’s shoulder and drawled, “Can I talk with you? Dave? I understood every word you said today. The fact of the matter is, in this life, we are all going to get shot down, and some of us more than once.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve managed to get shot down several times. Dave’s book and his ideas have been significant guides to me as I have wandered through living. The book not only applies to San Diego, Lake Tahoe, and Middle Tennessee; it worked in the Hanoi over 40 years ago.

Dave’s book revolves around a question he is most frequently asked, which is, “How did you do that? How did you and the other POW’s get through that?” He maintains they did that in a similar way to how we get through our daily process of life and work.

Dave’s assessment of how he and his fellow POW’s made it through boils down to five factors:

  • We did what we had to do
  • We did our best
  • We chose to grow
  • We kept our sense of humor
  • We kept the faith
    • In ourselves
    • In each other
    • In our country
    • In God.

His anecdotes relating to those factors are humorous, inspiring, and thought provoking. I have had the wonderful opportunity to discuss these things in depth with Dave.

So I check myself against his factors almost daily. They have even become part of the value statements for my consulting group.

I will not ruin the book by parroting it here. However, I am particularly fond of Dave’s pointing out how the POW’s trusted each one of them would do the best they could, would resist the severe interrogations to their limit; recognizing each of them had their own limit levels.

I now try to consider folks I work with are doing the best they can do. This puts a whole different shape to the way I work with these people. Fewer rocks are thrown; fewer lines are drawn in the sand; fewer chips are put on shoulders.

I would encourage everyone to read’s Dave’s book. Your connections should be yours, not mine, not Dave’s. I know folks in Middle Tennessee also get shot down every once in a while.

Note: Dave’s book can be obtained on-line through the Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes and Noble; web sites, and Dave’s website, www.davecarey.com. You may also be able to order it from a Borders or Barnes and Noble bookstore.

My Writing

A Pocket of Resistance

The last poem i posted here, “fine, ” drew some unexpected reactions.

Nearly everyone who responded liked it, thought it was well written, and found it melancholy. Some thought it was closure. Some thought it was tragic. Some thought it meant i was in some dire train of thought.

Initially, i scratched my head.

i have finally accepted i am a writer. Sometimes, i’m a pretty decent writer. Sometimes, i’m not. Having escaped the word limits of print journalism, i am not terse, far from it. Occasionally, my writing is short, i hope to have deeper meaning than most of the longer stuff i write. Or, in some cases, it is more humorous shorter than longer.

My lone non-fiction book, Steel Decks and Glass Ceilings, is one of the few pieces i’ve written for a specific purpose and in its writing, morphed into more than that purpose alone. The morphing was not intentional.

My other writing nearly always begins with some strange thought, unassociated with the other things bouncing around in my head like in a pinball machine, popping into my head. When i expand on that magically appearing thought in my head, i usually have a purpose, my purpose. i am writing primarily for me.

i hope you enjoy what i write. i love to get feedback. i prefer positive feedback, but negative feedback usually, i think, makes me better. i write for you to read, yes. But i really don’t write for you. i write for me. i break a lot of rules for writing. That’s really me.

i used to think writing was a great career…if i made it a career. Never happened. i was too busy off at sea looking for Fiddler’s Green.

i used to think i had a “passion” for writing. Had it really been a passion, i would have stopped doing everything else, like living, and just write. i enjoy all of that other stuff, especially living, too much to ever do nothing but write.

Writing, for me, it’s just there, coming from something inside, a need, a desire, a never ending demand. Don’t know where it came from. Don’t know how i was infected. It’s just there. And when i’m writing, i am in my briar’s patch — ha, we’ve politically correctly taking that definition of “briar patch” out of existence, which is a dog gone shame.

When i began puzzling over the responses to “fine,” i recalled something Dave Carey said to me once a long time ago.

Dave Carey, in case you don’t remember, was a POW in Vietnam. His experience became the source of a marvelously positive motivational speech, which he turned into a book, The Ways We Choose: Lessons for Life From a POW’s Experience.

i joined Dave in the Leadership training for the West Coast and the Pacific Rim in 1985 at the Naval Amphibious School in Coronado. We were the primary Navy guys who shepherded the creation of “The Command Excellence Seminar,” for senior officers, which replaced the one-week Prospective Commanding Officer, Prospective Executive Officer Leadership, Education, and Management Training course, (a mouthful and as with nearly all things military, became PCO/PXO LMET) — hmm…perhaps that is what took that wonderfully thoughtful and useful two-day workshop into extinction: no one ever turned Command Excellence Seminar into an acronym.

When Dave retired to provide motivational speeches and work in team building and executive coaching, i followed him into the lead facilitator role of the seminar and the director of the leadership training out of the amphibious school — now folks, if you have to have a Navy twilight tour, Coronado is a great place to waltz into retirement.

After, i retired, i worked with Dave on a number of team building projects. i had written the first try at capturing Dave’s speech in print (we determined it would be better in first person, which Dave achieved a couple of years later). One team building workshop was for the Fresno Police Department. We were headed there in Dave’s car.

i asked, “Dave, when you give your speech, what do you want the audience to get out of it? What thought to you wish to convey.”

Dave drove north through the Tulare Basin of California, thinking thoughtfully before he answered.

“Well, when i first started, i had some specific points i wanted the audience to learn from the speech,” he began.

“Then, i had an engagement at a luncheon in Texas,” he continued, “At the conclusion, folks were gathering around, and this big Texan comes up to me. He shakes my hand, puts his arm around my shoulder, shakes his head knowingly, and says, ‘Dave, you know everyone gets shot down once in a while.’

“After that, i realized that folks get out of my speech what will be helpful to them. It may not be what i had intended, but it will be positive for them. And that’s enough,” Dave concluded.

When i write anything, anything, i turn to Dave’s thoughts and know i want folks to get out of what i’m writing, what will be helpful, useful to them.

That’s enough.