Platoon Book, a Valuable Resource
Heroes Remember
When you are, although you are in a
position of responsibility over people,
you are a part of this group.
And with this group you share everything.
And, of course, my mother knew a lot of
other women because she was very
political where she lived at that time
in Lakeside, west allied place.
She used to send me a lot of goodies and
I used to get a reasonable box of goodies
about every week. And that was a time to
get all together. Some people never got
any goodies and you have to know that.
You have to observe that as a leader
for these people. One of the tools we
had as a leader was a platoon book.
In your platoon book you had a couple of
sheets on everyone in your platoon.
You are asking me where you were born
and so on, I had that. Were they married?
Did they have a girlfriend?
How were their parents?
Where did they come from?
What made them tick?
What they liked, what they disliked?
You have to have that in order to know
your people from the back.
And then you explore that afterwards.
And your job is to give them at least
the means and at least the little tools you
could have for them to make them better.
And the sharing gives you this connection
with people. I’ve got these goodies, you know,
it was like having a big picnic and sharing
the goodies. And then, of course, you could
observe when the mail distribution came.
That was another point of focus where you
could say, hmm, he got bad news or whatever.
Then you have to find out what the
hell was his news. You didn’t go direct,
you had to find out some other way.
Because everyone on the line shares
something with somebody else and you try
and establish those circumstances where
people talk to one or two others more
than they would talk to the rest and so on
and they’re confident. They share that also.
They share their good things.
They share their bad things and then you try
and find out so that you can foresee that
maybe something is going to happen to that
person or maybe oops, I have got to take him
apart at night. If I can spend twenty
minutes of darkness in this bunker,
you know, or in this trench and say,
“How are you tonight, your girlfriend
didn’t write to you this week or something?”
That type of thing. Because people get
very touchy that way when they are
deployed because this is their anchor
board. Their anchor board is not there.
The anchor board is back home.
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