Author Archives: Douglas R. Satterfield
[March 19, 2020] For my birthday in 2001, my dad sent me a new book by Tom Brokaw titled, The Greatest Generation. It covered many of the extraordinary stories of a generation that gave new meaning to courage, sacrifice, and honor during WW2. This generation gave so much and asked so little. Today, our young men and women,… Read More »
[March 18, 2020] For those not living off the grid (by definition you are not reading this), you’ve been following the up-and-coming great isolation. The infectious and deadly Coronavirus – origins in China – has been spreading like wildfire on dry canyon grass, causing us to isolate ourselves from one another. At least that is what medical experts… Read More »
[March 17, 2020] Looking through the “free new movies” section of Netflix last night, I ran upon the movie All Hands on Deck (1961) starring Pat Boone, Buddy Hackett, et al. Decades ago, when it first came out, my dad gathered up our entire family to see it at a drive-in on a hot and humid evening in… Read More »
[March 16, 2020] I was a junior military officer and saw many self-inflicted mistakes made by my peers. These errors formed a pattern, and, at the time in the 1980s, I wrote them down in my notebook (that I found recently tucked away in an old footlocker). Here are the 12 biggest mistakes junior officers can make: Thinking… Read More »
[March 14, 2020] I’m a little late to the party with this post. Several of my readers have pointed out that I have not written a comment on avoiding the Coronavirus. I would not want to disappoint. Besides, government public health officials have been full of advice about how we can minimize the risk of catching the virus. … Read More »
[March 13, 2020] One thing the U.S. Army Infantry School taught me back in 1983 was that you had better be aware of your operational environment. This requirement meant that each of us Second Lieutenants had to understand and deliberately plan for the conditions, circumstances, and influences that will affect our military unit’s mission. In this article, I… Read More »
[March 12, 2020] Rudyard Kipling once said that words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. He was talking about how communication is the peak human achievement, and our use of it is unimaginably powerful. Many decades ago, beginning in the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the new radio medium to connect to millions… Read More »
[March 11, 2020] Back in November last year, U.S. Presidential candidate Joe Biden called a woman in his audience a lying dog-faced pony soldier.1 Darn it; I wish he had called me that name. If he had, I would be the envy among my combat veteran peers. I like the expression, and I thank Joe Biden for saying… Read More »
[March 10, 2020] It has said that leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. But some ideas work and some don’t work. There is a long-standing controversy about whether the views of Robert Owen, one of the founders of Socialism, actually work. Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer and social reformer,… Read More »
[March 9, 2020] Lessons from the past are frequently overlooked or consciously discarded for a variety of valid-sounding reasons. The Spanish Flu of 1918, however, can give us some clues on how to survive the Coronavirus (COVID-19). While I am about to layout those very lessons, one of them stands out above all the others. The first lesson… Read More »