NCOs who "care more about themselves than their Soldiers"

Recently, I read a discussion on RallyPoint about “NCOs who care more about themselves than their soldiers.” It was a complaint that I often heard from the collective mouths of our junior enlisted when I served in both the Reserve and Active duty side of the house. Sometimes, the complaint was unwarranted because it was some immature “Joe” who didn’t get his way and got put in his place by a NCO who knew better. But most of the time, you had to step back and wonder: what made these soldiers come to the conclusion that their NCOs didn’t give a damn about them?

To start off, not all NCOs are like that. I have worked with NCOs who really cared about the welfare of their troops, especially when the issue was outside the company area. Personally, as a NCO myself, I would check in with my E4s and below to make sure that everything was running smoothly for them. They made sure that their troops had food to eat and got to work on time, to ensuring that they were trained to standard so that they wouldn’t make costly mistakes on the battlefield and didn’t combatively engage with each other or their significant others. I counseled them off the record or offered the negative reinforcement to steer them back on the right path.

Then you had NCOs who were just sergeants. They really didn’t give a crap about the “Joes” in their charge and would grudgingly share their knowledge and act as if they were nuns vigorously defending their virginity from Viking raiders.

In one Reserve unit I served in, I ran across NCOs like that. They treated you as a nuisance if you wanted to hone your skills and become a better soldier. They were just there to attend drill and collect that check. So your only option, as pointed by others before me, was to break out the manuals and learn OJT or seek out and find that one NCO who would behave as they should and mentor you correctly until it is your turn one day to do the same with a new batch of soldiers.

Generally, I believe that it’s the lack of following traditions that produces sergeants that don’t take the NCO Creed very seriously. Political correctness is now the new tradition in the U.S. Army and I believe that makes some NCOs not want to care. But this brings us to another issue: junior enlisted who behave as if they are entitled to everything under the sun. Why should I, as an NCO, try to do my job when PFC So-and-so is such a sensitive creature that he/she retires to his/her imaginary pillow fort or calls the congressman because I yelled for some infraction?

Instead of allowing misguided politicians and military personnel who are out of touch with reality to use the Army for social experiments, we need to go back to our traditions and let the NCOs be NCOs and do what they do best: their jobs. We also need to stop promoting inexperienced E4s to that spot until they are taught how to be followers and leaders by example. Writing a counselling statement doesn’t make someone a good NCO - it just shows others that you couldn’t have solved that issue in another manner.

It’s sad when the junior enlisted are griping about NCOs that don’t care because, those E1s, E2s, E3s, and E4s are going to mimic that sergeant and wind up hearing their own soldiers make the same complaints that they had made, perpetuating the cycle.