We're a few months shy of Father's Day but I'm feeling particularly paternal right now so herewith some thoughts on raising other people's children. Mother Corps made me a father for the first time some forty years ago when I became a corporal and entered the ranks of noncommissioned officers. Likely believing that was too much way too soon, my Sergeant Major handed me an excerpt from an old Marine Corps Manual and ordered me to absorb it before I dared strut outside the barracks bearing my new chevrons.
Back in 1921, drawing on forty years of experience in war and peace, General John A. Lejeune, 13th Commandant of the Marine Corps, said the connection between leaders and the people they lead "should partake of the nature of the relation between father and son." That got my context-free adolescent attention, so I read on to discover that General Lejeune thought good leaders had responsibilities far beyond simply issuing orders, taking objectives and winning wars. Military leaders influence people "in the formative period of their lives, and officers owe it to them, their parents, and to the nation, that when discharged from the services they should be far better men physically, mentally and morally than they were when they enlisted."
Those words changed my perspective and changed my life. With General Lejeune's thoughts in mind, I was able to conduct an insightful review of my personal trek from rebellious juvenile delinquent to Marine leader with special appreciation for a certain few relatives, teachers, coaches and counselors who understood their influence on a young life ran deep and might be pervasive. And it didn't take much effort to see the difference between solid officers and NCOs around me and self-centered ladder-climbers willing to reach the top on the bloody shoulders of their subordinates. I made a promise on that day when I officially assumed the mantle of leadership by Marine Corps decree to emulate the former and eschew the hell out of the latter.
What brings all this to mind before the time of year when we are supposed to think about such things is the steady influx of letters, phone calls, text messages and emails I get from people who served with me in one capacity or another during my days in uniform or fell under my influence in making military movies. It's truly rewarding when I hear from some aging man or woman who recalls in embarrassing detail how I influenced or motivated them in one command or another during our time together in uniform. It's a little puzzling but just as gratifying when I hear from young actors who claim their lives or perspectives have been changed forever by the training I put them through to portray military people on small or large screen. That's better than an Academy Award in my book. It proves that General Lejeune was right and - for a special period of time in the lives of some people - so was I.
There's a lot of verbiage blazing through the media just now as actors who portray World War II era Marines in our new HBO mini-series "The Pacific" reflect on the training and motivation that brought them through a year-long monumental project that looks to be as big or bigger than its ETO predecessor "Band of Brothers." Many of them credit me and my staff as having a big influence on both their performances and their lives in general. That's a gracious reflection on our leadership philosophy but no surprise. Like my old Sergeant Major years ago, I gave every one of our Warriors cadre the same excerpts from General Lejeune's treatise on leadership as a guide to how I wanted them to lead, teach and mentor throughout the production. The real lesson, of course, is that those we manage to influence for the better give us much more in return than we can ever give them in execution.
There's some painful irony in this when I look at my own children who got a lot less attention from their father than they deserved during formative years. Fortunately, none of them hold it against me -or at least they say they don't - but there's no escaping the fact that I was too often away fighting wars or chasing dreams when I should have been home helping them realize theirs. I don't feel as full of myself pondering that but the offspring have mainly prospered in spite of my failings. And maybe that's why I'm so concerned with leadership and why I put so much effort into mentoring my young charges in movie and TV projects. If so, I owe my kids a lot for lessons in tenacity, determination and independence. I didn't do much for them but they have certainly inspired me.
While I'm proud of all my kids, watching middle son Chris survive and thrive after a long, dirty struggle without his father's guiding light is particularly rewarding. As a talented and successful performer and composer in LA's tawdry rock music scene, Chris became intimately familiar with the euphoric highs and ugly lows of that brutal business. Fortunately, I was able to step back into his life during one of those low points and lend the hand that should have been there when he was growing up and I was chasing different demons in Vietnam. He's on an exciting path now, managing our ranchito in Texas, working when he wants to as an accomplished finish-carpenter and managing our new production entity, Dye Hard Productions, down in the Lone Star State. He's full of enthusiasm for life and living these days and that shows in the new music he's composed with a group of truly talented pals who call themselves - for reasons known only to rockers - Fire Violets.
My musical tastes run more toward Willie and Waylon with a special place in the middle ear reserved for Texas Troubadour Gary P. Nunn, but I've got to admit the tunes cranked out by Chris and his buddies make for really good listening to some seriously hard rocking. They've pressed a self-titled CD featuring a dozen original songs and it's available through the link on our Warriors, Inc. website (www.warriorsinc.com). I think you'll be amazed at how good this music is. I know you'll be amazed that one of Captain Dye's kids could produce it. Where he gets the talent, I'll never know but there it is. And I hope you'll give it a listen. The boy did it his way, and I'm more than a little proud to be his Dad.

It shouldnt be a shocker, I suppose, but early reaction to The Pacific, our new HBO mini-series debuting on premium cable next month, has left me drooling on the keyboard when I try to describe it. Understandably, Marines past and present are generously sprinkled throughout the cheering section and leading the wave as we all wait anxiously for the opening gun on 14 March, but some recent sneak screenings have convinced me we are about to strike an unexpected cord with this production. Its about war, that most brutal of human events, with gobs of gunfire, devastating high-explosive detonations, and gut-wrenching close combat. Thats what youd expect from an epic about World War II in the Pacific. What you probably wouldnt expect is chicks dig it.

Maybe it has to do with episodes that follow our Marines off the battlefield, in between the epic campaigns for places like Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu and Okinawa, during which they chase - and often catch  female companions in desperate attempts to live their lives to the fullest before they must face death once again in combat. Maybe it has to do with latent sexual tension and the quest for pleasures of the flesh among young men barely beyond puberty and the women who want to ease their burdens in one of the most comforting ways possible. Or maybe its the tragic, magical love story between Manila John Basilone and his strong, independent-minded bride Marine Sergeant Lena Riggi that touches the women who have seen some of our production. Frankly, I dont know and I dont care.

Whats important to me is that we are about to absorb a whole new audience in a ten-part TV saga which by all standard measures ought to be a strictly male bastion. During a sneak preview of just one episode we showed during the 1st Marine Divisions annual convention down at Camp Pendleton, I noticed a number of women  and these were civilians; not female Marines  seemingly enraptured as one of our characters traded innocent juvenile flirtations with a young girl who becomes his wartime pen-pal and civilian touchstone just before he ships out for Marine training. And interest didnt wane among the females in the audience when the episode inevitably took that character into shocking sequences of night combat on Guadalcanal. They were with us all the way and I took a moment after the screening to ask about that.

It was the innocence, you know? Not like the smart-ass kids you see today. My respondent was about thirty or thirty-five who said she had a favorite uncle that served with the division in Korea. I just felt like those two were looking for&companionship, I guess&for something comforting in hard times. I get that. I want to see where it goes. If she got that little taste of what makes this mini-series different from anything else weve worked on in the past twenty-some years, then she and women like her are going to love the passions on display during the divisions hedonistic sojourn in Melbourne, Australia. And there wont be a dry female eye during the episodes that include the classic wartime romance between Sergeants Basilone and Riggi that leads from a mess hall encounter to a wedding chapel in Oceanside.

If it pans out that way  and Ive got a reliable gut feeling that it will  then weve hit on something even broader, more enticing and insightful than our previous mega-hit efforts with Band of Brothers. As I keep telling the media-oriented reporters that are all over this thing like a cheap suit on a fat body, The Pacific is as different from Band of Brothers as war in the ETO was different from war in the Pacific theater of operations. Its like apples and oranges, folks, night and day. In its earlier stages, war in the Pacific was an afterthought, something to be dealt with when the Nazi juggernaut was stopped from conquering the ancestral European homelands of most American families. That added a note of desperation to the people fighting out of headline sight and mostly out of mind across the broad expanses of the Pacific Ocean. It was war on the cheap and campaigns were always a dollar job to be done on a dime budget.

War on the miniscule coral flyspecks of the Pacific and in the jungles of tropical atolls was brutal, ugly in the extreme, against an enemy that fought to the death from a cultural perspective that western-oriented Americans couldnt perceive. And combat on those remote islands and in those verdant jungles was not just against a fanatical enemy. There were the insects that brought debilitating disease, mud, slime and torrential rains, heat and humidity that turned the slightest lesion into a festering sore. There was malaria, dengue fever and varieties of tropical rot and corruption that never made the medical journals until the survivors came home and begged for relief from a puzzled medical community.

Thats all covered frankly, honestly and openly in The Pacific with an intentional emphasis on what such deprivation and desperate close combat did to the minds, bodies and souls of the players. Its becoming a bit of a bromide now that Ive repeated it so often in interviews but I keep going back to the orders Executive Producer Tom Hanks gave me before we shipped out to Australia to begin an epic tour of duty on The Pacific. Get up under the helmet of those Marines, he told me and the Warriors Cadre, and take the audience on the trip they made to hell and back between 1942 and 1945. Its been a long, hard two years since those initial orders were issued, but I believe weve done just that in a limited but admirable, accurate and honest look at World War II in the Pacific. From an even more personal perspective, it was a genuine thrill and an honor to work on a project that tells the World War II story of the 1st Marine Division. I served proudly with that unit during two combat tours in Vietnam

And just to bring this screed around full circle to my original point, Im aware that the rugged good looks, raw talent and passionate performances of guys like Jon Seda (Basilone), James Badge Dale (Leckie) and Joe Mazzello (Sledge) might have something to do with chicks digging The Pacific. These guys and a number of the supporting players featured around them are going to launch like rockets into stellar careers. After all they poured into training and performance, they deserve it.

To avoid a kinetic kneejerk reaction that would likely get me arrested by the PC Police, I've held off making public statements about the Fort Hood debacle. I was just learning to live with an elevated blood pressure and wear an NFL mouthpiece to keep from grinding my teeth down to nubs when this mind-boggling story broke about Navy SEALS up on charges for manhandling a terrorist during an authorized take-down. The resultant back-pressure blew the lid off my boiler, so stand by for a barrage or get the hell out of the shrapnel fan.
Spotting shot falls on corporate minions of the U.S. Army who had every reason to discover - not to mention a swivet of evidence to prove - that they had a seriously unbalanced individual holding a field-grade commission and serving in a psychiatric counseling billet where his actions had serious effect on soldiers headed for or returning from combat zones. But this guy has a Middle Eastern provenance and a name like Nidal Malik Hasan that scores big points on the all-important diversity meter. So he gets a pass that leads to twelve dead and thirty-one wounded in a shooting spree that the Army is tap-dancing around calling what it obviously is: A wanton act of terrorism facilitated by a failure at practically every level of Hasan's chain-of-command. And don't even get me started on the crucial command obligation of force protection that was so clearly flaunted in this travesty.
If you think I'm being harsh, ponder this. If lily-white Major Rupert Lee Brimstone, a devout, snake-handling fundamentalist Christian, started spewing racial epithets and telling soldiers it was his way or the highway to hell, how long would he have lasted in the U.S. Army? Granted there's strength in diversity but there's also dangerous ignorance in using that concept to justify keeping snakes in your sleeping bag. This PC crapola has got to stop and a good place to start applying the brakes is in a controlled environment like the United States military. It's either that or stand-by with body bags and toe-tags for the next "isolated incident" at one of our bases.
And don't start in on me with the argument that attacks like the one at Fort Hood and a fragging in Kuwait by a Muslim soldier in 2003 which killed one soldier and wounded thirteen from the 101st Airborne Division don't have ties to radical Islamic theology. They do and they are not going to stop until radical Muslims stop spouting hatred and preaching jihad. I've heard most of the arguments from Muslims who say these attacks don't represent the true teachings or philosophies of mainstream Islam. Well fine, I'm willing to go with that but I'm weary of hearing what Islam is not. How about our peace-preaching Muslim kin step up and show us what Islam is for a change?
It would go a hell of a long way down the peace and love track that many Muslim scholars claim is the true teaching of Islam if the same mobs who take to the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet showed similar zeal in protesting Muslim suicide bombers who mostly kill fellow religionists. Until that starts to happen around the world, we'd be well advised to know the enemy and admit that he is among us.
And speaking of the enemy among us, let's crank on a handful of elevation and fire time-on-target on the U.S. Navy, specifically - and of all absurd targets - the Navy Special Warfare Command. I would really; truly like to know what mind-warped PC brass-hat in that chain-of-command actually signed a charge-sheet against three SEAL enlisted operators who punched out a Tango in the process of a tense, covert take-down where their lives were hanging by a very thin thread. I'd bet a devalued Yankee dollar against a dog-turd that he or she was a lawyer masquerading as a naval officer.
In this case, you've got three shooters from a SEAL team tasked specifically with tracking and taking down high-value terrorist targets, who finally manage to get their hands on Objective Amber, a veteran Tango who planned the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater security guys in Fallujah in 2004. In the process of bringing this maggot to justice, one of the shooters bounces a fist off the guy's face resulting in a split lip or some other minor boo-boo. Most veteran terrorists would be happy they weren't leaking from multiple bullet-holes, but Ahmed Hashim Abed knows the ropes. Abed knows his enemy and he knows how to play the PC Card, so as soon as he's turned over to authorities for processing, he begins to do a pee-pee dance about manhandling and maltreatment. "I killed those four Americans, mutilated their bodies and hung them up on a bridge span so my brothers could hoot, holler and celebrate," he whines, "but that's no reason to hit me!" And in about thirty seconds, he's lawyered up to his evil eyeballs and the three SEALS are up on charges.
If nothing else, these three outstanding operators now understand the way the game is played under Rules of Engagement established by PC apparatchiks and their JAG Corps bloodhounds. These warriors have taken a torpedo amidships and they are liable to go down hard if someone in the chain doesn't step up and do the right thing by quashing this travesty before it goes any farther. They were wise enough to refuse non-judicial punishment and demand court-martial, but that's not the point. I'm fairly certain the convening authority in this case will be PC enough to understand the American public won't support a conviction and a way will be found to a not guilty verdict but these charges should never have been filed in the first place.
Regardless of the outcome in a court-martial - if there eventually is one - all our special operators and line troopers now have tangible evidence that they are involved in a thankless pursuit and in doing the dirty job they are asked to do, they are as likely to wind up wearing an orange jumpsuit in Leavenworth as they are to wind up wearing a medal. That's a crying shame and the current administration that has waffled for months on whether or not to support a wartime commander's request for more troops ought to step up and put a stop to it. This PC stuff is literally sapping our military strength. We either decide to fight - including whatever it takes to win against radical Islam - or we footrace into isolationism, worldwide scorn and wondering where the next blow will fall and leave us bleeding on the ropes. Rounds complete.