Old Shadows

'The greatest of leaders is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
Next comes the one they love,
then the one they fear,
and finally the one with whom they take liberty.'

["Tao Te Ching", Lao Tzu]

In the summer of 1988, I spent six weeks in Cold Lake, Alberta, attending the Air Cadet "Senior Leadership Course".  It was done like a military-style boot camp that had us polishing the 48 little brass knobs in our rooms at night and in the morning making hospital corners on our beds tight enough to bounce quarters.  There was plenty of marching and plenty of yelling and occasionally washing buses that had returned from a bog as punishment for the quarters not bouncing high enough.  It was hard.  It was very hard.  And there were plenty of times when I thought I'd fold, but I persevered.  I learned a lot.  I learned a lot about leadership and a lot about myself.  By the time the end of summer rolled around they had produced 187 proud, cocksure graduates well-acquainted with the age-old mantra "Mine was the last good year; it was easy after that."

The year following, I was hired as a staff cadet in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, to be a drill instructor.  I arrived with a smile on my face, proud to be one of the select few chosen to be part of the prestigous parade square crew.  Drill instructor was the first choice of most who applied but only 14 could be selected.  Boots shined and well-pressed uniforms donned, drill manuals tucked into our clipboards and god-complexes bursting in our chests, my 13 comrades and I went to that parade square on the first day of the indoctrination period ready to become the new overlords of the parade square.

But what we found was not what we expected.

The Parade Officer was unimaginably frightening.  He bellowed in our faces scant inches away, and with a hell-bent fury that made all the confidence borne of those six weeks in Cold Lake shrivel away into the darkest recesses of memory.  I'm not even sure what the difference was.  It's not like any of us weren't used to being shouted at, but somehow, from him, it felt like being struck with the hammer of Thor.  We squirmed and quivered.  We felt less than ants.  Nothing we did was good enough, not even remotely close to good enough.  Our drill was not satisfactory in its performance.  For our theoretical knowledge he had us writing exams on the finer points, and everyone failed miserably against his unimaginably high standards.  We retreated in fear at day's end, and the next day was no better.  More marching, more shouting, more re-writes.  Each day was worse than the last.  We fell asleep each night at 3 AM, our cadet drill manuals on our drooling faces, though the sleep-deprivation helped dull our senses against the bawlings-out we were sure to face the next morning.  We rose each day at dawn with three hours rest and scrambled to polish and press and - god help you if you were late - make it to the parade square on time.   He would get up in your face so close when dressing you down that attempting to maintain eye contact with him would make you go cross-eyed, and his two eyes would appear to merge together into large angry one on the bridge of his nose.  I still remember scrambling for answers to his questions in my head while being distracted by that one, terrible, cyclops eye.  In secret, someone dubbed him 'The Cross-Eyed Cunt' for this.  How we hated him.  I cannot describe the depth of the spite that we developed in mere hours of meeting him.  If he'd turned his back just once we'd have painted a scene from a William Golding novel with his entrails.

And he broke me.

He broke us all, but he broke me the worst, and first.  Teary-eyed, I marched into the Deputy Commanding Officer's office - skipping about five rungs in the chain of command - and demanded I be returned home.  I was not returned home.  None of us were.  We were told to suck it up and endure.

Then something different happened.

Having been broken, we were rebuilt.  With his assistance and some additional counsel from others, we were rebuilt to be better, stronger, and more confident.  We were sharper in every way.  There was no such thing as good or even good enough.  There was only correct or incorrect.  Accuracy and precision were the order of the day.  We became exacting. Drill had never been performed so well, or more importantly, so correctly.  We became the lords of the drill square we'd dreamed, only far sharper than we'd dared aspire.

In the year that followed, I returned again for drill staff.  On the very first day, when the new Parade Officer ordered us to fall in, I did.  I marched to my position and remained at Attention.  The others all halted and Stood at Ease.  The Parade Officer ordered Right Dress, and the others did not move, but I did.  (You cannot perform a Right Dress from Standing at Ease.)  He came at me, screaming in my face asking why I'd performed Right Dress, and I answered that he'd ordered me to.  He pointed out that the others were Standing at Ease and asked why I'd been standing at Attention.  I responded by quoting page and paragraph.  There was an awkward pause.  He consulted his drill manual.  He returned to scream at the others asking why they were all Standing at Ease.  It took all my self-restraint to keep from smiling.  He never again confronted me on the accuracy of my drill.

More importantly, we all began falling in at Attention, after years of doing it incorrectly.  In the camp, in our home squadrons, to my knowledge all across the country, we'd all been doing it incorrectly for as long as anyone could remember.  But now, the drill staff of Greenwood 1990 were doing it the way the manual said.  We taught it the way the manual said and sent cadets back to their home squadrons saying 'but no, it's right there on pages 19 and 34...'.  Within a year or two, throughout the region - likely across the country - everyone was doing it correctly. 

Like a pebble in a pond, it rippled out.

Years later I moved from instruction into the Standards department, and then in the private sector into a career in Quality Assurance and Quality Control.  Many of my skills in QA/QC are self-taught, cobbled together from things going back as far as my time in cadets and adapted for use with software, hardware, or firmware testing.  I've been doing this for 15 years now, or 20 if you count the time I spent in Standards (and I do).  I am regarded by many as an expert in my field.

Now and then I think back to where certain ideas or attitudes of mine began, and how I came to be the person I am today.  Which experiences, great or small, easy or hard, have contributed to my success?  Where did the things that brought me here begin?

I look for the pebble, you could say.

I remember how I hated "the cross-eyed cunt" but later came to respect and even admire Lieutenant Essiembre.

I think about how I effect change in the workplace not simply by teaching my coworkers skills, but by injecting them with contagious ideas about the importance of accuracy and precision, of not just good enough, but correct.  I know they take a little amusement - and admiration - in the passion that I have for what I do; I, meanwhile, take amusement in overhearing them repeat my ideas to others and watching how infectious these splinters of the mind can be.

I watch things change slowly for the better around me.

I look for the pebble and I know that inside me, deep down, a shadowy presence lurks where a little part of my soul was changed forever during one particular week of the summer of 1989.

So I aspire to influence others the way he did me.

"JC", as his friends call him, has made ripples in a larger pond than he may ever realize.