Leadership Lessons from a Breakfast Burrito

Jill S. Russell

I take great scholarly and intellectual satisfaction from working in professional military education. In addition to the energy drawn from the maturity and expertise in the classroom is the irrefutable bonus that I am always learning and exploring subjects anew from the students’ experiences. With the least prodding, you can get them to spin dits (1) from a rich library accumulated over decades’ long careers. Some are merely interesting, which is more than enough on its own, but many contain the rough material from which the necessary wisdom for military practice and scholarship can be distilled. In this case, the story of a breakfast burrito taught a Marine officer a critical lesson in leadership.

It didn’t take long into this academic year — the third day, to be precise — before one of them dropped a rare well-cut gem on me related to a facet of the great struggle underpinning the transformation subsumed within the War College experience. This year of learning dangerously, as the students transition from the gritty realism of the tactical to the fuzzy, often unsatisfying sphere of the strategic, is especially challenging. It is a period during which the students, officers of significant service already, shift focus from their experience and expertise to this new — and if we are honest, un-masterable — perspective. To add a contradictory complication, such a process need not mean that they must jettison their accumulated knowledge at the tactical level. Rather, they must learn to use the material in different ways to illuminate new issues.

I introduced this point to my seminar as the year opened, providing them a minute historical point of soldierly derring-do at the most tactical level that could nevertheless speak to higher-level issues of the military history of war and strategy. Using just this sort of seeming conflict to create the tension that drives learning is the good confusion I aim for in the classroom. And so, in honor of the 75th anniversary of its start, I shared a published recollection of how few Marines made limeade on Guadalcanal in the midst of one of those terrible moments of the campaign — and offered a few insights into how even this could fit into their new perspective of war as strategic leaders.

It was in response to this discussion that the anecdote at the heart of this blog arose. As they often do, the story was related to me in further discussion after class, when the students’ minds are still (gratifyingly) churning over the day’s topics. In our chat, I expanded on the idea of the importance of ‘the little things’ — my thanks to Lord Wavell for that greatest advice to guide my scholarship. (2) I explained that I had made the use of the quotidian details of military life and war to form my research, writing, and understanding of all the subjects and issues of military history and affairs. Without the least hesitation, I can say that from this material the bounds of wisdom are seemingly limitless. Reflecting on that, in response the student recounted such a perfectly fitting tale that scripting could not have improved it. Thinking back to his own experience, he realized that he had already learned the lesson of looking for the significant in the seemingly irrelevant. He described how while in command in Iraq he made a practice of taking the time to let the Marines share issues directly with him. One day, a Marine told him that what he really wanted was his breakfast burrito.

Foreshadowing the turn to come, he was at pains to make clear that at first, he gave in to irritation with his Marine’s failure to focus on what was important. Then he explained how this gave way to his own self-reproach. The burrito was not just a burrito. Recognizing that op-tempo at the time did not require extending the watches, the Marine’s gripe about missing the breakfast hot chow indicated that the watch schedules were not being run with due care. This in turn meant that his Marines could neither rely on their daily timings nor anticipate their routine and were, for no good reason, kept from their meals. All of which affected their morale and trust in their leadership, and required the attention of my student as their commanding officer. The burrito was not just a burrito, it was a key piece of information he as a commander needed to know. It conveyed a critical lesson for him in even higher command, teaching him to pay attention even to the little, seemingly irrelevant things his Marines would tell him, as they could easily contain important clues as to the health and dynamics of his unit.

And on that day, in the realm of self-leadership, that mighty breakfast burrito which had already taught him so much, extended it service further to offer my student a measure of comfort by way of an insight into the sorts of leaps the course would ask of him.

Notes

1. This is the British military term for telling stories and I rather like it.

2. Wavell, Generals and Generalship, pp. 45–6.