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I was a supply officer in the military for twenty-two years. My position encompassed different jobs in the logistical field. As a supply officer, I had seven or eight jobs but they all involved business support for naval aviation. I kept a large inventory of parts, replenished those parts, and monitored shipping, packaging, and receiving. I had to keep track of a financial budget, track sophisticated electronics, and know where those parts went next. Another thing I was responsible for was managing the budgeting contracting process in Washington D.C. for buying naval helicopters. I was also in charge of all of the support elements for those naval helicopters such as training the people, and managing spare parts and all the support equipment. I oversaw everything that comes with a helicopter. That also involved going through the Department of Defense and Congress and getting the approval to buy the helicopters and all of their support equipment. Just as important as getting the approval and the money to buy it was navigating the maze to get a contract within a proper time frame. Another job I was responsible for was keeping track of the profit and loss activities of a number of military bases in San Diego. I was responsible for keeping track of the budgets of things like department stores, gas stations, auto repair shops, dry cleaning, and movie rentals.

The atmosphere where I worked was always pretty good. Contrary to what you may see in the movies, where military people are portrayed as very rigid and extreme, I found them to be pretty fair. It was normal compared to other organizations that I saw. You had to make sure you understood what the requirements were, what you had to do, and how you had to do it. So long as I was diligent about doing the job within those boundaries and if I was going in the right direction, I had a lot of autonomy to do what I wanted to do. For example, I was drafted during Vietnam. I didn't come in because I was drafted but that started the process and I expected to just do four years and get out. I ended up staying twenty-two years because I felt good enough about the kinds of jobs that I had and the way my bosses treated me. It was probably a pretty standard operating environment. Like every organization, it has its unique aspects that you have to adhere to because it is the military and its mission is different. Therefore, some of the disciplinary requirements are different. All in all, I would say it's a very positive environment. It's very good for young people because you get accelerated responsibility at a younger age than you would at a private commercial job. They support you for the most part. It's not very different from other organizations; it's just a matter of how well you fit with that culture.

No, I was definitely a manager and a leader. From the time I came out of college, I was responsible for people working for me. From 5-10 people towards the beginning all the way up to my last job in the military where I had over 1,000 people working for me. I also interacted with contractors. We would delegate the work to them but we still had to make sure they were doing the job correctly. So I definitely had management and leadership experience in all my jobs.

Basically, it started when I was in college during the peak of the Vietnam War. During my sophomore year, I started thinking about what I was going to do after I graduated. I was living in a very small town in rural upstate New York. I attended a small university up there. My father then mentioned to look at the officer candidate school in the military. The closer I got to graduation and the more I investigated, the more I realized it was a great way to get out of small town upstate New York. I could see some other parts of the world, which excited me. I could also get some very good professional management experience that would also help me find my direction. I also had a very low draft number, which meant I could have been drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. If I was going to have to go into the military, I wanted to be on a ship away from the fighting, rather than in the jungles of Vietnam. It would give me a lot of opportunities that I would have missed if I had stayed in that small town.

Number one, I liked the idea of being able to move around. When I got my first job, I came out to San Diego for a year. Then I went back to Virginia Beach, Virginia for a year. I knew I had these opportunities to move around. I felt good about the kind of work they were giving me and the kind of experience I was getting. I was doing reasonably well. Plus, because I was doing so well, they offered me the opportunity to go get my M.B.A. at one of a select number of programs whereby they would send me there for two years and they would pay me to go to school. The only drawback was that after those two years of school, I would owe them four years payback. That was a big incentive for me to have the opportunity to go and get my M.B.A. while getting paid a regular salary. They also picked up the costs for school.

First thing they did was send me to Newport, Rhode Island. They taught the fundamentals of being a naval officer and being on a ship. They can't just send you out there with no clue how to be responsible for 50 people. I went for six months, and after that, I went to Athens, Georgia, where they taught me to be a supply officer. In the Navy, the supply officer does all the logistic support. They are also responsible for feeding all the people and paying all the people in addition to running all of the retail operations. We had to get experience in those particular areas. It's not just being a naval officer, but being specifically a business officer. After that, there was a list of open jobs, and we were able to pick our first, second and third choices based upon our rankings in that business school. I happened to pick a job that was brand new where they were introducing new naval aircraft here at Miramar. Nobody knew about naval aviation because everything was ship-oriented. One of my good friends had served a few years before and told me a naval aviation job would be easier than going on a ship. Once I started that job, they have a well-established career track. You have some say in your path, but the organization also has a lot of say.

You go in early because the military likes to start early, about 6:30 or 7 a.m. The navy had its own communications system and you would have all these messages that deal with your activity. You have to go through them and determine if any needed immediate action. Then you go through and review the status reports from the previous day. From there, you might have a morning meeting either with your staff of employees or with your boss and his key staff to go over what happened the previous day and what we need to do today. From there, you're just looking at your calendar to see what needs to be done, or what steps need to be taken to finish a bigger project. A lot of times, you're also dealing with many things that just pop up throughout the day, like an angry customer who doesn't like the way their dry cleaning was done or your boss has something for you to do. After the beginning of the day, it's dependent on a combination of your daily, weekly, monthly calendars and what needs to be done. This is all in addition to all the little operational jobs that pop up throughout the day. How long the day lasted depended on if you were on an operational job, like on a ship, or if you were on shore duty. If you were on a ship, you worked around the clock. When I worked on a ship, the hostages were taken in Iran in 1979 and held for over four months. We were over there off the coast of Iran, and we were working around the clock. It was just eat, sleep and work. However, on shore duty, we worked normal office hours. We worked nine or ten hours a day and then went home at 5 or 6 p.m.You always might be on call. For the Navy, we would always have people that were there around the clock. We would rotate that duty and you may have to stay overnight two times a month just in case an emergency came up.

It’s surprising, the more junior you are, the more flexibility you had. The more senior you get, the more parameters are involved in telling you where to go. As a younger person, it was less important to the United States Navy as to where I served within an established career track. However, as you get more senior, those options lessen and it becomes more political. When you're in for the first twelve or thirteen years, the jobs are operational in nature. But after the first twelve or thirteen years, you become more of a senior officer and politics enters into it. Your image and what you should be doing and how you should look becomes more important than some of the operational aspects of the job. I had less choice in where I went as I became more senior because there were fewer choices within the parameters of what a person at that level should be doing. The reason I ended up going to the east coast was to move up and become one of the very senior officers in the Navy. You have to have Washington D.C. experience to move up. It's the headquarters of the military and the government and you have to know how to work in that world. It’s pure politics. It ultimately made me realize I would have to retire from the Navy because I didn't want to have to keep moving against my will. That was my next to last job, and my last job was as a supply officer managing all the profit and loss businesses.

The salary level in the military as a naval officer is numerically lower than counterparts get in outside companies. On paper, it doesn't look like a lot of money without benefits; especially for the responsibility you're given. However, you get a lot of accelerated responsibility that is rare for anybody else outside to get. When I was 25, I was responsible for 125 people and you can't find that in the real world. If a person in the real world were responsible for 125 people, they might be getting paid $125,000. Whereas, the military is paying them $40,000. The salary looks low as a junior person but as you become more senior, it looks more and more palatable. The other part of the salary equation is the benefits, which becomes part of total compensation. The benefits are very good, especially the retirement system. I think they have a retirement system that is unequalled. The salary combined with the benefits and the accelerated responsibility makes the military a worthwhile option.

The key thing to me is always the retirement. The military can start sending out what I believe to be very nice monthly checks at as early as 42. You have to put in 20 years to get it. Once you put in your time, some if not all of the financial sacrifice is worth it. When you look back, you're glad you did it. Another nice benefit that I have is the medical program. For our family, we have a very good medical situation where my family and I can pick our doctor. We can go to any doctor we want and we only have to pay a certain amount. In the last 10 years, that has become a much better medical plan than most.

The other incentive that used to be a big benefit, but is becoming less and less so because of the Internet, is the retail system. I was responsible for all the profit and loss facilities on base and we still use those facilities today. The merchandise used to cost typically 30 to 40% off what it cost outside, and you didn't have to pay sales tax. It was a big financial benefit going to the Navy base; you could buy things much, much cheaper. Now because of the Wal-Marts and online shopping, the benefits are reduced, but they're still there.

Directly, there was not really a big change. Part of it is personal with how you manage the change and how much you're willing to delegate to other people. Can you be gone or do you always have to be right there when everything is happening? The biggest difference that I see is political in nature. When you're a junior person it's okay to be your own person and do things your own way as long as you're successful. How you do your job and how you look doing it doesn't matter. However, as you become more senior, and this is true with other organizations too, there's a threshold above which it becomes much more political and you have to do the right things. You need to go to the right places, wear the right color tie, and say things the right way. That was the primary difference, and again, that's true everywhere.

Beyond that, you have more responsibility, but you also have more people that, in my case, I always felt comfortable delegating to. Some people could never delegate so that kept them working all the time and kept them from going on vacations. It's just a matter of how you deal with it.

The military was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Whether you're a younger officer coming out of college or a young enlistee coming out of high school, it gives you a structure to grow up. And it gives you accelerated responsibility. The combination of those two just make a lot of people mature rapidly. That's what happened to me in my twenties. A lot of people in the military will tell you that. For young people, it just does a great job of maturing you, and it can even be transformational for your life. For young people, it just does a great job of maturing you and it can even be transformational for your life. The Navy transformed me from a naive, small town kid into an adult that is confident in dealing with the world. In addition, as I said, there are some other benefits like paying for my M.B.A. while also paying me a salary.

The biggest drawback is fundamental. A military organization can force you to do things, like go to Iraq and possibly lose your life, and you can't do anything about it. In a private job you can resign, but in the military, you can't walk off the job. If you do, you're a deserter and there are serious punishments for that. For me, that is the biggest drawback. You really are at the service of your country, and if somebody somewhere in the military organization says that your unit needs to go to Iraq, you need to go. There is a noble purpose in potentially sacrificing yourself for a greater good. On a personal level though, that's really tough, especially if you have a family that you don't want to leave.

During my last five years the country was going through a real recession because the Berlin Wall had fallen and Russia had fallen apart. All of a sudden this huge defense organization that had been built up to defend against communism had nothing to defend. Congress started making deep budget cuts, which caused lots of people to be released from the service. San Diego was a town very dependent on the defense industry. That caused a lot of problems. It caused a problem for me because you had less people coming into the stores and costs were going up. There was pressure on me to layoff people, which I fought successfully, but that made it difficult. Then there was technology; the Internet was just starting to go from an academic communication network to something that was becoming available to the public. When I was retiring, we were stringing ourselves through buildings and hooking ourselves up to other commands around the country. You could see that that was coming. I'm sure for everyone else the instantaneous communication was a huge issue. For me, I would have to say it was tough to deal with an organization that was cutting back. It's tough to deal with the feelings created in your organization. As the leader, you're trying to manage the organization even though people are worrying about whether they are going to keep a job. That's always tough in any organization when you have to reduce workforce.

Well, I think many things in life go in cycles. When I first came in during Vietnam, we were in a down cycle where nobody liked the military, so we were getting smaller. Then in the 1980s, partly because of the Iran Hostage Crisis, people realized we needed a strong military to protect our people worldwide so it became an up cycle. The military got bigger. Then the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and then Russia fell. All of a sudden, we didn't have anybody we had to fight, so we got smaller. Then, 9/11 happened, and all of a sudden we had to get bigger. The military just goes through up and down cycles. I personally can't see how the military can get bigger in the future because of a lot of issues in the Middle East. I don't know if it's going to get much smaller in the meantime, but I don't see it getting bigger because I think we're past the peak for a while. But again, I think it's just a cycle.

Number one, I think I was somebody my subordinates enjoyed working for. I think I treated them well in the sense that we made sure we had some fun, but at the same time, it wasn't playtime. We knew what we had to accomplish. If I saw individuals that were having problems accomplishing what had to be done, we would quietly go off to the side and talk about it. In general, I would get a lot of feedback and people would say I was the best person that they had ever worked for. The other thing is reliability and integrity. You had to stick with what you think is the right thing to do rather than giving into organizational pressures. For instance, if the person above you tells you that they want you to fire ten people, the easy thing to do is go and fire ten people. But if I didn't agree with it, I would fight it. That may be something that hurts your career over time, but in the long run people respect you for that.

If you're not looking to become an officer, you can go down to your local recruiter out of high school and just sign up. However, people with college degrees have two ways to do it. You can start in college with ROTC programs where, in return for participating in ROTC things in school, the military will pay for part, if not all, of your tuition. Then you owe them five years after college as payback. The other thing, which is what I did, was when you're in college; you can apply for officer candidate school. If you're selected, they will send you to these schools where they will teach about the basics of being an officer, and the basics about whatever specialty you're going to be in afterwards. Again, the ROTC way is uniform through the years but the officer candidate school is more difficult sometimes. That door is more open when the military needs more people, but if the military is getting smaller, there are not as many openings for that.