Posted on Oct 12, 2014
Family and Leadership. How do you deal or handle it.
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How do others deal with the fine line of being a family member to another Soldier not in your command and as a Senior Leader who knows you would never let your Soldiers get away with the things your family member talks about doing. Here is an example: I recently found out that a Soldier took a hammer to a friends, while he was drunk and told his friend to hit his toe hard, so that he didn't have to take the APFT. My first response was pure anger, seeing red. My second response was what an idiot. My third response was these are the type of Soldiers we are entrusting now and all that anger turned to pure sadness and tears. I felt helpless. As a family member, sometimes sticking your nose into their business causes a lot of conflict within a family. As a Senior Leader you want to treat them as any other Soldier. I don't know what to do. I am honestly disgusted. What do others do to handle this???
Discipline
Leadership
Family
Honor
Integrity
Posted 10 y ago
Responses: 5
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This happens a lot. My wife is an E5 and is dealing with stupid stuff all the time. We have come to an understanding that if she doesn't want me to try and fix it she either will not tell me about it or start with " I just need to know what you would do or think about something " this makes it easier for us to keep us to an understanding. I know so many people in the guard due to the time I worked at the USPFO so I know that I can help if it is really needed.
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MSG Sommer Brown
First I am not married, but I can't say much more, I was trying to keep it vague. I am sorry if my vagueness mislead some of you.
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OK, um, WTF?! I think my first couple responses would have been the same as yours...anger, disbelief. Sometimes you just have to wonder what kind of idiots we have running around (not just in the military) our society and hope that they don't influence others to act like them. I think if my family member had Soldiers like that, I'd ask her what she or her chain of command was doing about it. If the answer is nothing, I think I'd ask that particular family member not to discuss that kind of stuff with me as I don't want to know about commands taking no action in the face of this idiotic stunt. Hopefully something was done to that Soldier for deliberately causing harm to himself and purposely avoiding an APFT. Can't fix stupid. But maybe we can show stupid the door out of our military!
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MSG Sommer Brown
That is not the only story I have heard about this same Soldier, who is now deployed and stationed at basically the reception center. I will give you another one I heard about this person. They were in their motorpool conducting daily activities and this person got bored so they went and crawled up underneath a truck and went to sleep until they were done with their duties. A friend came and woke him and said it was time to go; He has also reported that he has left and went fishing to return at the end of the day. I am absolutely furious. There is either a total lack of leadership in this company, the Soldier is lying to sound cool to his buddies, or is not able to adjust. Any of the above is detrimental to his unit. I just needed to hear what others thought on the subject and maybe what others have experienced similar or heard about.
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1SG Chris Brown
I'm not sure I'd want to hear about it. I have enough issues day-to-day with my own Soldiers. If I had to come home and listen to a family member say these things were happening, it would just increase my stress. Then I'd want to get involved and figure out what the unit was doing about these Soldiers, which I don't care to do. Good luck on dealing with being told about this information; I'd tell the person to stop telling me I think.
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That's a tough one, Sarge.
I'm boldly presuming that you are disinclined to pick a fight with your spouse over his friends' misconduct, but I'm an ornery cuss on some subjects and this would be one where I'd (at the least) explicitly ask my enlisted love to please, please reassure me that they didn't and don't condone that sort of misconduct.
I'm boldly presuming that you are disinclined to pick a fight with your spouse over his friends' misconduct, but I'm an ornery cuss on some subjects and this would be one where I'd (at the least) explicitly ask my enlisted love to please, please reassure me that they didn't and don't condone that sort of misconduct.
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