To Grit with Grace, Episode 4 — Curt Cronin: Saving the Space for Grace
Randy Kaufman: When we think about war stories, we tend to think in terms of Saving Private Ryan — heroism in the heat of battle, the willingness to face down death for the sake of our fellow soldiers.
My guest this month, Curt Cronin, calls that “valorous courage.” Curt served as a Navy Seal in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Through some trying times, when the U.S. was conducting combat operations in unfamiliar terrain and against an unfamiliar enemy, Curt realized that “infinitesimal courage” — the courage to have tough conversations — was much more valuable. In Curt’s case, that meat telling his commanding officer what he really thought about his orders, unsure of the outcome, not once, but three times.
Curt Cronin: My background — I was born and raised in a small farm town, went to the Naval Academy, and went straight from the Naval Academy into Seal training. As 2001 kicked off, and I finished my selection and training program, they picked up my troop over in Afghanistan and then we came over to Iraq.
As we started to set up, it was the first time we’d ever had improved explosive devices — IEDs — coming out of Syria, down the Euphrates River Valley, and into Baghdad. The belief at the time was, we can’t possibly win because these IEDs were a threat. The guidance we got was the guidance many of you would get in any entrepreneurial/new venture: “Hey, see what you can do, kid.”
We didn’t have a solution. This was something we’d never faced before.
So, we started out at the city that was closest to the Syrian border. We said, “Well, if we can stop it at the inflow point, then potentially that would stop the rest of the chain.”
As we were developing our targeting components, my boss said, “Hey, I want you to go after this target tonight.”
From what we could see at our outstation, this didn’t appear to be a valid target that would lead further up the chain. We thought there was a high risk of that not being a fruitful use of energy. The goal is, if you’re going to put lives on the line, you want it to be for the highest impact possible.
I told my boss, I said, “Hey, we can go hit this four-walled structure, but we don’t believe this is a target.”
I got very clear guidance: “I understand your opinion. I want you to go execute.”
The bus ride to the helicopter, for our situation in al-Assad, we would leave the planning space completely jocked up with body armor and everything ready to go. We’d get on the bus, and it was about a quarter-mile drive to where the helicopters were.
The hard part was the planning, deciding what we’re going to do, who we’re going to take, who’s gonna do what. Now, we’re moving to action.
You’d see those seven helicopters start to spin up. In the desert, you’d start to kick up the dust. As the sand hit the outside of the rotors, you’d get this little ring of lightning around the outside of the rotors. It’s completely pitch-black, and then you can see two circular lightning bolts spinning as you get ready to get out there.
As you get on, you can feel the adrenaline welling up, and then as you sit down, you give a quick head nod. That head nod means, “My life in yours, and yours in mine.” That’s where, as those seven helicopters — and those pilots were amazing — they’d simultaneously tilt and fly off into the darkness together, you’d say, “Wow — Curt, can you take on anything that comes your way tonight?” Absolutely. “Do you have any idea what’s coming?” No idea.
You could feel that unit cohesion, you could feel that we were in this together. There was that dynamic subordination where each person brought to bear their strength, or their superpower, at the moment it was required. Then, you had to surrender it when it was someone else’s turn. That was the key component that allowed our team to function: the ebb and the flow. That’s what allowed everyone to act at that speed of trust.
The easy part was the part you often hear about, the courageous component. Now, it seems asymmetric. You’d think the life-risking components would be the most difficult, but for those, at least you have complete clarity, and you have the entire team aligned with you. Your greatest fear is you’re not gonna serve the person to the right or left of you.
We were operating always at night, so we got back at five or six in the morning. I went into the conference room, called my boss, and said, “Hey sir, I believe it’s my obligation to tell you when we’re doing something that’s not optimal. I believe tonight we put a lot of lives at risk for very little intelligence gain.”
We had a fairly short conversation. He told me, “Curt, I understand your opinion. It has not yet changed my decision process, but I’m still open and considering.”
Night two rolls around. We find another low intelligence value target, and again we’re told, “Hey, go hit the target.” Prior to launch, I did one rep of, “Hey sir, I don’t think this is a valid target, I think there’s other components we could go after,” and I was again told, “Curt, you need to execute.”
So, we did the entire component again. Flew off into the darkness, came back. Again, I did that 6 a.m. pre-dawn call with my boss, and said, “Sir, I know you only get one or two chances per deployment to express your concern to your boss, and I want to again say that we’re putting people’s lives at risk in a way that’s not optimal.
Again, got, “Okay, understand your point.”
By the time we get up the next day, we’re about to have a riot. If you can imagine the pitchforks, and, “Hey, we don’t want to do this anymore, we don’t agree…”
I could say to my boss, “This doesn’t work for us, we’re not doing it.” In the military, you can protest, but if it’s a lawful military order, which in this case there was nothing unlawful about what we were being asked to do, then I could get fired and sent home, the whole troop could get fired and sent home, or worse, we could get margined and sit while there’s risks to the United States and all of our coalition of forces, and we’re contributing nothing to it.
To me, that felt like complete failure, because we weren’t going to be able to function within the system that would have allowed us to provide the impact that we were trained to provide — the whole reason we were there.
So the third night, virtually the same scenario. I placed that same phone call that night. Without any words, any exchange, the next day, my boss called my intelligence department, and said, “You guys run the targeting.” Fundamentally gave us complete control of the targeting development.
It was a complete shift that, we were able to find a strategy that allowed us to work together for the next 90 days.
Never another word was said until finally, at the end of deployment, we happened to be in the same spot for the debrief as we get ready to fly home. I talked to my boss, I said, “Sir, I thought I took a lot of risk in the conversations that you and I had early on in the deployment, in expressing concerns about how we were operating.”
I’ll never forget what he said. I had thought I was taking risk, but as a much more senior and experienced leader, he said, “Curt, the fact that you called meant you weren’t calling around me, and that’s when you earned my trust.”
It was a fundamental shift in my entire perspective. Oftentimes, it’s the price we pay when we’re not willing to pay the price. The reason I call it “infinitesimal courage” is because there were so many places where, if the leader gives in, the outcome is asymmetrically different. It’s either, I get sent home, the entire troop gets sent home, the IED threat doesn’t get mitigated and all those troops in those bases die because no one stopped the IEDs from getting planted, or the United States fundamentally fails in its mission.
It’s all games of inches where small impacts done at outstations, that butterfly flaps its wings and has massive impacts later. We would never know if this failure of relationship or this failure to act with courage to have a conversation was the domino that affected all the way down the chain.
People often ask, “What was the heroic or the amazing operation where, under a hail of gunfire, did these three acts…” I often find that in today’s world, because people see sensational news headlines all the time, it leads to the belief that the only things that we do that are impactful are sensational.
I can tell you about the nights where I saw men run into a hail of gunfire and do incredible acts of courage and love in the harshest conditions. My experience has always been, it’s usually months upstream where someone did an action that will never be known that fundamentally changed the course of the ripple effects that you see later.
My son is my oldest, he’s 12. He’d probably tell you that this lesson is terrible for him because he’ll be like, “Dad, it’s just swinging a bat at a ball into a net.” I’m like, “Yes, and, swinging the bat at a ball into a net means you either can or cannot support your team when they’re at bat, which means you do or do not win the game, which fundamentally alters your beliefs about what is or is not possible in life, which fundamentally…” etc. For me, I always take every action that I’m looking at, and thinking, how does this telegraph out across time.
The fourth night, if that happened, it all might have broken. You never get to know if it’s going to work or not, but it did. That’s been my experience in life, if I switch to the meta level for a moment, is if we’re willing to give that space for grace, if we’re willing to follow the principles that we believe will most likely lead to the greatest outcome for all, even though it looks like in the short-term it may not lead to a good outcome for anyone. In the end, someone, something shows up to carry us across the gap from what we can logically see as possible into the outcome we desire that would could not achieve via our own means.
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