Daniel P. Driscoll

Our vice chief of staff, General Mingus, I mean, we were talking about it at breakfast, but these guys are my heroes.

I mean, you look at his hands and they're burned and his nails are kind of all funky looking because he ran into a fire to save people in his PT clothes.

Our General George, who is the chief of staff of the Army, has deployed many, many times, Purple Hearts, the entire thing.

I would say the middle is the harder place to spot.

And I live within a couple of houses of most of those men I just referenced.

And we have beers on each other's porches and whiskeys and spouses over and kids and grandkids.

And you get to know the content of the character of those men.

And my wife has remarked to me how amazing it is that as just a civilian, my seven and nine-year-old are getting to

live with and get to know and learn from like the absolute best our nation has to offer.

And I mean this very sincerely.

There are things I can offer to my kids, but those men and women in uniform are modeling behaviors for them that I'm so grateful that they're getting at these formative years.

That is not to sidestep the issue you're referencing, which is the rot.

which is any given individual, or if you look deep in the system, it does exist.

You have a lot of people, particularly in the preceding four years, but probably for the last 30 or 40 years who've been ship bags, you have people that have avoided taking on the responsibility of their title and the duty that they had to the soldiers beneath them and beside them.

I think if you look at the wars that we faced that a lot of us deployed in, yourself included, Sean, I mean, those were not a ton of, like, profiles encouraged sometimes of the people that would come in.

They would mark their territory red.

It would be yellow six months into the deployment.

It would be green when they left.

It would start back to red.

They weren't, I think, telling their leaders, hey, this mission is fucked, and you are risking my men and women's lives and limbs repeatedly with no clear leadership.