Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Chain of Causation

Chain of Causation.

I am reading the story of Marcus Luttrell a brave SOF warrior who was the sole survivor of an operation that went sour. It was a four person recon/shoot mission in the mountains of Afghanistan. After being inserted their location was compromised by three civilians who happened upon them. They had to decide whether to kill them in cold blood or let them go. They chose the latter and their location was promptly reported to the Taliban. A firefight ensued, many of the Taliban were killed and in the process so were Lutrell’s three fellow Seals. Marcus was able to evade and was helped by sympathetic Afgans enabling him to survive and tell the story of what happened.

In the book he questions the wisdom of not killing the civilians. He attributes this decision to the compromise and death of his fellow team members. It’s a story everybody should read and decide for themselves if they did the right thing.

In Vietnam I was a rifle platoon leader and the story he tells is a haunting one. It is every soldier’s nightmare to be cut off and in the situation he found himself. It is natural to ask the question, “How did I get myself into this mess?” both during a patrol and afterwards. In my Division the junior officers would get together after a disastrous encounter involving the deaths of fellow soldiers and discuss the events leading up to it. Invariably we came up with not one suboptimal decision or move, but many in the chain of causation leading to the catastrophic event.

We had a theroy that the more mistakes you make in a given day, the more likely it is that the consequences of one or more of them are going to catch up with you. That the key to being an effectie leader was to keep the number to an absolute minimum. For those who have never been in combat I will use the analogy of a professional football game. In a close game there are many actions and decisions made before and during the play that lead up to the final outcome. Still it is human nature to focus on the last one in the chain…. Where the receiver drops the ball or the kicker misses wide. It is so easy to forget all those other moments and opportunities up the chain, that have a huge influence on how the game comes out. Those Seals were incredibly brave men; I salute them and nothing in my resume can justify saying more.