I wrote a book

When I took command of an Army company back in July 2014, there were two books that I relied on heavily for guidance: Company Command: The Bottom Line and Taking the Guidon. They were good books, but they were dated -- the former was from 1996 and the latter was from 2001. While the Army was migrating its inventory processes from the old PBUSE system to the new GCSS-Army system, these books were still talking about the legacy systems in place even before PBUSE.

In addition, the Army had moved on from its "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies, which made some of their advice flat out illegal. Yet because of the Army's education system, they remained the best texts out there for comprehensive advice about company command. Surely, I thought, we can do better than this.

So after finishing up with the JLOTS exercise in the summer of 2015, I contacted the publisher and asked if they had anyone working on a revision. They said no, so I offered to do it myself. They accepted, and we signed a contract to develop "Mechanics of Company Command."

To start, I developed an outline based on my experience in the job. Because I was the commander of a logistics battalion headquarters (which was a difficult enough as a first command), in Korea (which experiences high turnover), with no XO for the final 12 months (which was a handicap), there were a lot of things I had to take care of myself. But by codifying what I'd learned, I had a framework for how the book would be organized.

Over the next year (and particularly while I was in the Philippines) I took it chapter by chapter, submitting each one as I completed it and making revisions as my editor/publisher recommended.

I finished the text of the book in late 2016, and went through a couple rounds of editing and layout adjustments. By January 2017, the first printing was finalized, and I received my first copies on February 2nd. Today, I finally saw it at Schofield Barracks' Military Clothing & Sales store.

It's also available online through Mentor Military publishing.

Being able to do this has been very meaningful for me. On paper, I didn't have a very successful command -- I received two center-of-mass evaluations without any enumerations despite finishing with no property loss investigations or Inspector-General complaints against me. By comparison, my predecessor lost accountability of about $72,000 worth or property, and yet still received a top block in his final evaluation.

Over the past year and a half, I've gone though periods of anger at how unfair the Army is. I'd catalog all the ways my job was harder than everyone else's -- that I had to move down to Daegu with only two weeks notice, that I wasn't even assigned to my company when I took command, that I was selected by one person but had to work for someone else whose priorities I often didn't understand, and that I didn't get a chance to do the company commander's training course until after I'd done the inventory.

But in the back of my mind, there was always the fear that I was just a barely mediocre captain who wasn't measuring up. And with my attempts to transfer to the Foreign Area Officer branch not working out, those fears seem to be confirmed.

So the book's been fulfilling on three counts:

1. It allowed me to codify all the stuff I'd learned over the 19 months I was in command -- something I'd struggled to grasp at the beginning.
2. It has allowed me (hopefully) to help others in their command time, so that they can have an easier time than I did.
3. It's dispelled a lot of the insecurity that I've felt about my competency.

So the way I see it now, if the Army doesn't need a guy like me, that's cool -- it's just means there really are a lot of very high quality officers floating around out there who are more than capable at defending the nation.