Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Fick on leaving the Marines

I left the Corps because I had become a reluctant warrior. Many Marines reminded me of gladiators. They had that mysterious quality that allows some men to strap on greaves and a breastplate and wade into the gore. I respected, admired, and emulated them, but I could never be like them. I could kill when killing was called for, and I got hooked on the rush of combat as much as any man did. But I couldn’t make the conscious choice to put myself in that position again and again throughout my professional life. Great Marine commanders, like all great warriors, are able to kill that which they love most — their men. It’s a fundamental law of warfare. Twice I had cheated it. I couldn’t tempt fate again.

Fick, Nathaniel. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Houghton Mifflin; Boston. 2005. p. 364 (hardcover)

Fick on the mask of command

“Sir, what the fuck were the commanders thinking, sending us in there with no armor to clear a fucking town? We could have all been killed, and for what? We’re sitting in the same goddamn field we were in last night, as if nothing had happened, except we got the shit shot out of us and lost a great team leader.”

I walked a fine line. As an officer, I couldn’t badmouth decisions the way a lance corporal could. Even as a lowly first lieutenant, I simply had too much rank, too much authority and influence. It would be disloyal and insubordinate, a transgression both moral and legal. At the same time, though, to smile in the face of stupidity and say something about liberating the Iraqi people or living up to the example of Iwo Jima and Hue City would neuter me in the eyes of the men. Men shrink in combat to little circles of trust: us versus them. A platoon that puts its commander in the “them” category is a dangerous place to be. Every young officer learns the difference between legal authority and moral authority. Legal authority is worn on the collar — the gold and silver rank insignia that garner salutes and the title “sir.” It doesn’t win firefights. Moral authority is the legitimacy granted to a leader who knows his job and cares about his men. In combat, I learned to rely on moral authority much more than on legal authority.

So I conceded part of the Marine’s statement. “That was bullshit, bad tactics. After all the artillery prep and with the air escort, no one expected that ambush to happen. We were all wrong. I can’t speak for the battalion, but I can tell you that will never happen again in this platoon.” I paused and locked eyes with the Marine to be sure he knew I wasn’t just talking. “I’m sorry about Pappy. I don’t know if we’ll be fighting for another three days, three weeks, or three months, but I can tell you one thing. We have to learn from what we do right and what we do wrong, then move on. There were twenty-three of us, back to back. Now there are twenty-two. We have to get each other home in one piece.”

The Marine nodded, accepting this line of reasoning. Strong combat leadership is never by committee. Platoon commanders must command, and command in battle isn’t based on consensus. It’s based on consent. Any leader wields only as much authority and influence as is conferred by the consent of those he leads. The Marines allowed me to be their commander, and they could revoke their permission at any time.

Fick, Nathaniel. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Houghton Mifflin; Boston. 2005. p. 276 (hardcover)

Memory under fire

At company headquarters the captain had no further instructions for me — just settle in for the night and be ready to move in the morning — so I returned to the platoon. By now, the Marines had hacked sleeping holes from the soft dirt and had begun the daily routine of security, cleaning weapons, eating, cleaning feet, and sleeping.

And storytelling. Every fight is refought afterward. Sometimes quietly, sometimes boisterously; sometimes with laughs, sometimes with tears. The telling and retelling are important. Platoons have institutional memory. They learn, and they change. Most of that learning happens after a firefight. Some officers squelched the stories, considering them unprofessional and distracting. I encouraged them, as psychological unburdening and as improvised classrooms where we sharpened our blades for the next fight.

But something about the retelling unnerved me, too. Faith in our senses is what anchors us to sanity. Once, in college, I went cross-country skiing during a snowstorm. As I crossed an open meadow, the blanket of snow on the ground merged with the snow falling from the sky. With no horizon and no depth perception, I got vertigo. A twig poking through the snow near my feet looked the same as another skier hundreds of yards away. My head spun, and I had to sit down.

Combat is a form of vertigo. I was trained to thrive on chaos, but nothing prepared me for the fear of doubting my own senses. Frequently, I found that my memory of a firefight was just that — mine. Afterward, five Marines told five different stories. I remembered turning left off the dirt road onto a paved street running west through Al Gharraf. I saw fire coming from buildings to the right and remembered a drag race of four or five kilometers out to the highway. That was my memory, my accepted truth of what had happened.

But the map showed the distance was only about fifteen hundred meters, less than half of what I’d estimated. Some in the platoon remembered armed men standing to our left as we made the turn; I never saw them. The domed mosque was burned into my memory, but only Colbert and Wright could remember seeing it as I described it. Person was adamant that we had driven across a bridge during our sprint to the highway. Not one other person in the platoon remembered a bridge, but there it was on the map.

Fick, Nathaniel. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Houghton Mifflin; Boston. 2005. p. 219 (hardcover)

An Unquiet Mind

I just finished Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. This eloquent, captivating, and informative book provides an intimate account of her life with manic depression, including her work as a doctor and a researcher of mental illnesses.

At times the book is lyrical and poetic, both when providing rich accounts of specific experiences and relating broad syntheses of what it all means and how it should be judged in the end. Particularly in the detailed descriptions of coming out about her illness to colleagues and romantic partners, Jamison also gives the reader some practical lessons about how to make such disclosures, as well as how and how not to receive them.

I would expect the text to be valuable for sufferers of manic depression / bipolar disorder, as well as for people who know sufferers and wish to better understand the experience.

Operant conditioning

When I see people out walking dogs, I like reaching a hand out to the creatures and seeing their reactions. Usually the humans are happy about this and volunteer information about the dog’s name and breed. Occasionally, there are people who pointedly ignore me and yank hard on the leash to punish the dog for noticing me.

These people are bad animal trainers.

On the amazing AnimalWonders Montana YouTube channel, Jessi Knudson has done an amazing job of building relationships with a wide variety of animals. She is easily able to encourage a Brazilian prehensile-tailed porcupine to get into his crate for a veterinary appointment, and has taught a dog how to painlessly have its nails cut.

She has a video about clicker training: a form of operant conditioning where the sound of a click is used to teach an animal about the precise behaviour which you are tying to encourage or discourage.

She has two videos specifically about operant conditioning: Law of Effect and Operant Conditioning.

Learning more about operant conditioning seems potentially helpful when it comes to motivating climate volunteers, working with photographic subjects, and teaching students. When things are a bit less hectic, I will need to make a preliminary foray into the literature.

Astronauts and human limitation

It’s interesting to note that, with all the technical challenges involved in sending people on interplanetary journeys, managing interpersonal conflicts remains a key requirement:

The eight-month mission [locked in a small dome to simulate a trip to Mars] members went through some issues, for instance, though they thankfully solved them and made sure the project would go as planned. “I think one of the lessons is that you really can’t prevent interpersonal conflicts. It is going to happen over these long-duration missions, even with the very best people,” HI-SEAS chief investigator Kim Binsted told AFP. “But what you can do is help people be resilient so they respond well to the problems and can resolve them and continue to perform well as a team.”

It reminds me of my favourite fact about astronaut Julie Payette, who tells audiences that she has never been able to touch her toes without bending her legs. As someone who received (poor) grades in high school for (lack of) flexibility, it’s a relief to know that someone who flew on the Space Shuttle twice was similarly incapable.

A plea to housemates

A supposed value of the Boy Scouts is to leave every place they visit in better condition than when they arrived. ‘Better’ is the critical word here. This is not a matter of walking into the ruins of a depraved binge and bringing it to Martha Stewart’s standards. Rather, it’s about the courtesy and precaution where, regardless of the state in which you encountered a room or a counter-top or a sink or a shower, you depart only when it is in a state marginally better than when you arrived. Wash a fork and put it on a drying rack; wipe away the hair from the edges of the tub; empty the odorous waste bin.

Wilkins Micawber, in Dickens’ David Copperfield illuminates a related point:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

The applicability of this to living with housemates is clear. Doing just a little bit of damage to the state of a shared facility – leaving the detritus of your shaving around the bathroom sink, adding some unwanted food to an overflowing garbage can – produces an effect out of proportion with the seriousness of your contribution to the mess.

People function largely through some conception of social license. They judge their behaviours less with reference to logic, external and abstract questions of morality, or personal moral codes than by the immediate responses of people nearby to what they have done. In this way, every little contribution to shared filth is interpreted by everyone sharing the space as license to do the same and worse.

Life is generally unkind to those who live by the dictum I am suggesting. Once you realize that the single empty cup sitting unwashed in the sink is an invitation to leave the burned pot full of failed tomato sauce in the same position, you will be endlessly cleaning up the messes of others. That said, it has always been the fate of the least filth-tolerant in any living situation to do more than their share for hygiene and, furthermore, if you can convey this basic ethical framework to the people around you (both words and your good example are always necessary), it’s possible a few souls can be rescued from the reckless socially-reinforced worsening of the quality of life for all.

Burial wishes

A limited effort expended to try to find the comment thread where I explained my preference to be buried in a simple sheet without being embalmed – so as to better return to nature – hasn’t been immediately simple to find.

I really like this idea of making soil from the bodies of the dead. It reinforces the essential point that we are part of the biosphere of the Earth. Putting your remains temporarily in some sealed box is futile and unnatural. The relationship between a particular batch of atoms and molecules with consciousness remains a philosophical and scientific quandary, but it’s surely better to quickly become part of life again rather than be a toxic corpse in a box.

Obviously, any usable organs I possess should be used for transplants or research or practice by doctors, but whatever they don’t want I would like to see composted in the way proposed by the Urban Death Project.

On grading university essays

Grading is an intellectually and morally challenging process. A task that will affect how people are judged in the future and what their life prospects will be isn’t simply a commercial transaction, even if grading is your job.

No single essay or exam grade determines how a student’s transcript ends up, or what consequences that has for their life. There is some comfort in knowing that if a bunch of well-meaning people grade a series of efforts over several years with decent methodologies and all make small errors, there is reason to hope hope that the aggregate result will be basically accurate.

Nonetheless, it is challenging to be presented with a succession of analyses which vary across multiple axes (quality of argument, quality of writing, theoretical stance, use of references, etc) and then try to rank the set in a way that is fair and justifiable.

It’s certainly the case that people approach grading with different philosophies. For instance, I know some TAs attribute importance to whose paper they are looking at, and the history of their interaction with that person. Does this represent a lot of effort on the part of the author, based on everything you know? How does it fit into a general pattern of effort?

Personally, I think it is fairer and more justifiable to ignore the author to the maximum possible extent. I would prefer if papers bore student numbers only, to avoid the bias that necessarily accompanies name recognition (or recognition that the author of a paper has never attended a tutorial).

I spend a lot of time hand writing comments and corrections on every paper I grade, despite knowing that only a small fraction of students ever collect them. Next year, I will suggest to the professor who I am TAing for that they include the following in the syllabus: one week after essay grades are posted, your papers will be available for pickup. Papers which are not collected will have 5% deducted from the grade.