Blog #8

A group that I was apart of that became a community was my last deployment team. We started off in the pseudocommunity because everyone got along with everyone and none had any problems as of yet.  Once we left for predeployment training I knew that this was probably the last time we would see all these smiling faces for awhile. Once we got to Texas we started Physical Training (PT) every morning at 0500, followed by 14-15 hour training days in the hot summer. You mix that with being around the same people 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 2 months and you start to grow intolerable of people.

Stage 2 or "Chaos" insued when people started have different views on the ways we should be going about doing things. Well for example, when it came to how to assault the village for training our senior leaders put us junior leaders in charge. There was 5 of us in charge of about 60 other troops that we had to lead. Well all 5 of us had our own way of doing it and we bickered back in forth until we came up with a general idea we could all agree on. This may have solved our accomplishing the mission issue however it only created more tension between us junior leaders. We started growing shorter and shorter with each other and ultimately came to a point where our senior leaders called us in a meeting and chewed us out. This lead to an emptiness feeling because we felt we let the rest of our team down because we couldn't lead them the way they needed to be led. In the military perception is everything and we didn't feel any lower then getting chewed out by our mentors.

Senior leaders then choose one of our group members and placed them in charge (because he had been in the longest) and said from here on out he's in charge. Although the rest of us didn't like it we all know how to follow orders so it made future missions end up being easier since we only had 1 voice to listen to. This helped the team come together and form a true community because for the rest of the training we knew who was in charge and who was giving the orders. That's the reason why a chain of command is so important because so often everyone wants to be a chief but no one wants to be an indian. Leaders can't make it without the support of the rest of the team.