Is it a WAR against COVID-19?
The amount of wartime imagery and vocabulary comparing the COVID-19 outbreak is everywhere. Phrases like “War on COVID-19,” “it’s like a war zone,” and “On the front-lines of the COVID-19 outbreak,” and “We are like lambs to the slaughter” (real quote) are everywhere. you are probably expecting me to get on some old veteran bully pulpit about how “it’s not the same” or “let me tell you what war is really like.” I’m not going to do that because for some people, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to them. They may be losing income or medical insurance. They may have to shelter in place with an abusive family member or not have access to food. They may not have a chance to say “good-bye” to a family member that falls to the disease. These are personal and community fights that will test one’s mettle. Since we seem to be married to this metaphor, if I can humbling impart some advice on my lessons from spending almost two years in a literal war-zone.
WAR IS BORING… and leads to complacency.
If you are in a shelter-in-place as a normal citizen or a healthcare worker that is executing the same life-giving tasks over and over again, boredom will sink in whether you like it or not. People don’t talk about how boring war is. It is extremely boring and when it is at its most boring, that is when bad things happen. People get sloppy and make mistakes. They forget to clear a weapon and it accidentally goes off. In this case, people forget to wash hands, they start taking little risks and nothing happens… until it does. The saying in combat is “Complacency kills” and in this case it might as well say “Complacency kills someone else.” One has to be vigilant for a long period of time to make through a war zone. If COVID-19 is going to be around for awhile, you can’t let the little things slide. The details will matter.
You Aren’t Going to Get What You Need
There have been numerous stories about how doctors and nurses are running out of masks or having to reuse PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Normal civilians have a tough time finding disinfectants, etc. Some of these problems are more chronic than we would like to admit and they won’t be solved soon. Even when the problems are solved, new issues will arise out of that recently solved problem. I can commiserate with this because I think every service-member that went over to Afghanistan or Iraq knows this story well. When IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) became prevalent overseas, our equipment was not designed for that threat. It took years to transition the force from the HMMWVs (Humm-Vee) to MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles). During this time, under-armored vehicles struck IEDs with catastrophic results. People we knew were vaporized by bombs that turned vehicles into burning husks. We didn’t have everything we needed but it didn’t change what needed to be done. Years later, we had the vehicles we needed but many locations required dismounted troops to find IEDs. The low-to-no metallic IEDs in Afghanistan were extremely difficult to find and Marines turned to long canes with scythes on the end to find IED command wires without getting too close to the bombs. Marines found low-tech solutions when high-tech solutions and supply chains failed them. When I see doctors wearing trash bags, I see the same thing. Do what you have to do to get the job done. Keep embracing this approach until there is some sort of return to normalcy. If you are a hospital administrator, you need to protect your doctors and nurses from legal issues or regulators when they have to do these types of things and encourage them to keep finding new solutions.
You Need to Stay Focused and Rested
If you are a doctor, nurse, grocery store worker, etc., you need to stay focused on the task at hand. Detach yourself from your old routine. That routine is dead. You may have had time to stay up late and watch Netflix in the past but now you are pushing yourself harder than you ever have before. Sleep is your best friend. When you aren’t focused on the job at hand, good nutrition, exercise, and sleep go a long way. I’ve had Marines that tried to try to have too much leisure-time overseas (handheld games or too many calls home at weird hours) and it robbed them of sleep and one even fell asleep at the wheel because of it. We often cling to an old idea of normalcy and leaves us in a position where we are not adjusting to a world that has fundamentally changed and we still think that we have time for things that are unimportant. Lack of sleep leads to the death of a 1,000 cuts as operational effectiveness erodes over time until mistakes are made and some of those mistakes are lethal.
Get Comfortable With the Unknown
“The Fog of War” is the phrase used in the military to describe all of the unknown variables that are associated with combat. In war, we only have educated guesses on what the enemy is up to and what they will do next. Even understanding what higher-headquarters is thinking can lead to the same issues. You must be comfortable in chaos. A perfectionist dies a slow death in the environment where no data is static and the situation is ever-changing. The best way to deal with this is to observe the real data within your sphere of influence and aggressively works towards the best realistic solution. Don’t concern yourself with the news or national politics because you can’t affect them. When you focus on the unknown, you remain in an unknown posture on how to move forward. Act fast and then information will start to arise as feedback from your action and it will better guide your next action and the cycle repeats but DO SOMETHING.
If you lead, you are responsible for everything
If you are a leader, lead. If there is a vacuum of leadership, lead. Being a leader means making timely decisions and leading by example. When you don’t know what to do, leading by example will get you half of the way there. You will fail often. Own those failings and move on to influence the next critical point of friction. It will be tireless and everyone gets the opportunity to second-guess your choices on until forever. Live with it. That comes with the job description. You need to get low enough in the organizational structure to see what is going on at the action-level but stay high enough in the organization to help get your people what they need by managing up the chain. The bouncing between those two levels will jade you for years to come. Be ready for that. Know when to pull people off the line and when to push them harder. You will have to do more of the latter but be human enough to know when the former is needed.
Go down swinging
What’s your plan for the end? We create plans in order to accomplish the mission with the least amount of casualties (if we can). Good training and planning can get you 70% there. That last 30% is just the chaotic nature of war. It does not discriminate who lives and dies. The person that makes the mistake is not always the casualty and many times, no mistakes were made but the enemy has a say in it. You can make all of the right decisions and still, you will lose people. How are your going to go down? I always told myself that if things go south, I am going to go down swinging. I am going to ensure that my family knows that I love them and that I had no regrets about the choices I made. Often times, one does not get a chance to relay everything that happened before they pass, then, it is up to the survivors to let that family know that they conducted themselves. Whatever you do, go down swinging.
Learn something from this
Disease is like war. It never really changes. It takes different forms but ultimately a lot of people will die. Learn the lessons from history and learn the lessons from your history that is currently being written. Now, there has been no shortage of opinion pieces on which people or political parties are to blame for the rising death count. If we project all of the issues through that lens of thinking, we won’t learn anything ourselves. If I spent my nine years in the Marines constantly worrying about the President, Congress, or the Senate did or failed to do, I would have just been left with lessons that would be pertinent to those institutions and not my own. There are tangible lessons at the community, hospital, small-business, and family level that need to be digested. Those are the things that most of us can affect in the future. If you do that with the idea that the federal and state levels will learn nothing from this, then, at least, you will be prepared for that possibility and better prepared if they do. Now, what are you going to learn about yourself? If you come out of all of this without a better understanding of yourself, then you are missing the most important lesson. I have often lamented that some of my Marines left the war in a jaded state-of-mind, where they are no smarter about themselves or their experience than they were when they went to war. I came back from each deployment to Afghanistan a little smarter about who I was and what my family meant to me. I learned a lot more about empathy, compassion, and human kindness by being on the business-end of war. When you look back on your hospital shifts, or loss of employment, or loss of a loved one, look at it with a new perspective. Grow out of the experience. Trauma is a great teacher in perspective. So, come out of this as a better person.
