Empathy and selflessness are two indispensable qualities for a successful military officer. In reflecting on his extraordinary career, from the halls of the U.S. Military Academy and into the United States Navy, Rear Adm. Michael Shelton returns to these principles again and again in his memoir. West Point Admiral: Leadership Lessons from Four Decades of Military Service (Acclaim Press, 368 pp. $29.95). For him, any successful leader must respect those he commands, as well as those who command him.
As a boy, Mike Shelton was deeply inspired by the World War II experiences of his father, a career Navy man. Hoping to follow him, Shelton learned that he was not qualified to attend the U.S. Naval Academy because he didn’t have uncorrected 20/20 eyesight. Determined to serve—and knowing that a USMA graduate could apply to become an officer in any other service—Shelton applied to West Point and was accepted.
With stark clarity, Shelton, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, illustrates upper classmen’s efforts to get him and his fellow plebes to quit. With spirit, and even humor, Shelton grasped the purpose behind the harassment, which was to make him stronger and better. He became both.
The art of military engineering is the bedrock on which the USMA was founded, and the field Shelton hoped to pursue. Yet when his grades weren’t high enough to qualify, his father persuaded him that the Navy could provide what the Army would not. So in the spring of 1967, Shelton became an ensign, and went to the Navy’s civil engineering corps officer school in San Diego as an aspiring Seabee.
The transition provided challenges great and small. After four years of studying the makeup of the Army, Shelton had a new service with its own quirks and protocols to get accustomed to. He continually encountered rigid formality among his peers which he felt was at odds with the dynamics necessary for any operation to succeed, let alone an engineering one.
Too often, including during his two tours of duty in Vietnam in I Corps, he found enlisted men being subjects of disdain, although they had priceless abilities and experience. He vowed to give men under his command his full respect and to be lavish with praise.
That conviction grew stronger when he encountered complex problems and his men routinely solved them.
Over the next 34 years Shelton participated in naval construction projects all over the world in peace and war. One striking example was Operation New Life in 1975, when – in seventeen days – Seabees on the island of Guam converted an old Japanese airbase into a camp that eventually housed more than 50,000 Vietnamese refugees.
Retiring as a Rear Admiral in 2001 with unshakable faith in his men, in West Point Admiral, Mike Shelton offers his wisdom to anyone smart enough to follow it:
“The resourcefulness of the senior enlisted in all services is what makes the military work, and officers of all ranks who interfere with this equipoise do so at their own peril.”
Well said, Admiral.
The book’s website is westpointadmiral.com
–Mike McLaughlin
Books in Review II 