Speakers at the National Character and Leadership Symposium (NLCS), a three-day “flagship event” held at the United States Air Force Academy last February included the highest ranking transgender officer in the U.S. Space Force and the CEO of United Airlines whose defining leadership characteristic appears to be a propensity for dressing in drag. 

The roster of NCLS speakers reveals who the military considers exemplars of “character” and “leadership” (I previously wrote about this change over time here), but if the Academy is truly interested in hearing from diverse voices and viewpoints, then Rob Henderson should be next year’s NCLS headliner. 

A disclaimer: I do not know Rob Henderson. I have never met him. The only things I know about Rob are what I’ve read in his book Troubled. A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

But here’s what I do know: 

Rob never knew his father. His birth mother was a drug addict who, when he was a small child, would tie him to a chair with the bathrobe belt so she could use drugs in the other room without being interrupted. And that’s only when they weren’t living in a car. 

Among his only memories of his mother are from the night she was arrested for drugs and ultimately lost custody of him. He remembered sitting on a bench drinking chocolate milk, his mother beside him in handcuffs. She was soon deported to her native South Korea. Rob was three. 

Rob was raised in the California foster care system. He bounced from one home to another in what can only be described as Dickensian conditions. One woman with whom he lived would make him do chores and nearly allowed him to drown after he went swimming in a backyard pool he was otherwise only permitted to clean. 

A family in rural Red Bluff, California adopted Rob when he was about ten. Even as a child, Rob understood this was an important moment in his life because his foster parents took him to Goodwill for “new” clothes before he met the people who were thinking about adopting him. Until then, everything he’d ever had was a hand-me-down from someone else. He’d never been taken shopping for himself.

Rob loved his new parents, and reveled in the idea he finally had a home of his own. Alas, this did not last. Rob’s adoptive parents divorced a short time later when his adoptive mother came out as a lesbian and left his adoptive father. Stung by the loss, his father refused to have anything to do with Rob, leveraging their relationship (or lack of one) as an emotional weapon against his -ex.

Without much thought for his future and only sporadic encouragement from the adults in his life, Rob was fortunate to find the military after high school. Specifically, he found the United States Air Force. 

Rob enlisted and because of his raw intelligence became an electronic warfare technician. (Note: the flightline techs typically score very high on the military entrance exams and undergo comprehensive technical training for their jobs. In my experience, airmen on the flightline were uniformly bright and motivated.) It was in the Air Force that Rob found a sense of purpose and an environment where, with newfound discipline, he could harness his gifts and advance. It was also in the Air Force where he began to quiet the emotional and substance demons carried from his youth.

When he left the Air Force, Rob was accepted to the Warrior-Scholar Project and eventually enrolled at Yale University where he studied under such academic luminaries as John Lewis Gaddis. After Yale, Rob went on to Cambridge University.

Rob does not attribute his success to skin color or ethnicity and contrary to fashionable dogma, makes no claim of being forced to overcome “systemic racism.” He went to public schools in rural California. His adoptive mother is a lesbian. He had the dual misfortune of living in foster care and is the child of divorce. He overcame substance issues. If there was ever a checklist for victimhood, Rob ticks every box. 

Instead of claiming a mantle of victimhood, Rob points to a stable home life as the launchpad for success. By his account the family structure, or lack of it, has much more to do with the trajectory of someone’s life than the “system” does. 

This folds into Rob’s concept of “luxury beliefs.” These are beliefs people from affluent or privileged backgrounds purport to hold precisely because they are immune from the results of those beliefs. For example, Rob cites an example where one of his Yale classmates told him she believed monogamy was an outdated concept. This classmate came from an affluent two-parent household, and herself intended to marry, but nevertheless said that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone. This “luxury belief” was diametrically opposed to Rob’s own experience of being raised in broken and piecemeal homes and just how much of a disadvantage it was. His classmate would never know the consequence of the belief she espoused, nor did she intend to live her own life that way. It was truly a “luxury belief” that would have no impact on her life or her children’s lives at all.

It would be interesting to hear how Rob might correlate “luxury beliefs” with cadets – many of whom come from stable, two-parent households -- being taught Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) precepts such as avoiding the use of terms like “mom and dad” for fear of offending others. Doubly so from a former enlisted man who likely served under officers who were Air Force Academy graduates. 

A half-Asian, half-Hispanic former enlisted man who started from nothing and advanced to the highest levels of academia despite every conceivable disadvantage might be the most important speaker cadets who have been steeped in DEI and the taxonomy of grievance ever hear. 

Patrick “Kit” Bobko is a 1991 graduate of the US Air Force Academy who currently practices law in Southern California.

Image: Simon & Schuster