Memorial Day is approaching.

The Memorial Day weekend will feature a painful ritual known as “the Murph”: To honor the fallen, run 1 mile, do 100 pullups, 200 pushups, and 300 squats, in body armor, if you have it.

I teared up (no actually, I cried)  watching a video of Tulsi Gabbard completing last year’s Murph.

Why is this beautiful woman so sad? Of course, I know why. But I contemplated her path through life for days, and how her approach to remembering the fallen helps make her an effective leader and a role model for women seeking to lead in the military context.

You see, after the attacks of 9/11, Tulsi was a newly elected Hawaii Congressional representative, a Democrat, who had focused on protecting the environment. She felt duty’s call in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and she enlisted in a Hawaii National Guard medical unit which soon deployed to Iraq, just northeast of Baghdad in 2004.

In that first deployment, she was campaigning for legislative re-election, and her commander gave her the choice to stay home. She chose to go with her unit to Iraq.

That year that she arrived in Iraq was one of the worst of the war. The American offensive had toppled Saddam’s government, and now a thousand Saddams had risen in his place, creating a kaleidoscope of civil war, terror, and anti-American resistance that would create almost unfathomable human suffering and years of pain.

One of Tulsi’s jobs was to scan the list of names, the names of those hurt every day, and to make sure those in the unit who had been hurt were getting the care they needed. Being in a medical unit serving in the hardest hit areas at that time meant that she was well aware of the horrific cost of war.

It only takes truly understanding one shattered life to forever understand the abyss of grief in a list of names.

My first deployments were also at that time, and my nights were filled with the sounds of burning convoys, calls for help, roadside bomb attacks and ambushes, and the call for MEDEVAC.

Soon, Tulsi went through officer training, and led soldiers in further deployments and so progressed through her reserve career so that she commanded a battalion of warrior-diplomat civil affairs soldiers.

What I notice about Tulsi’s leadership style is her combination of what I call compassionate competence. The compassion and care for the soldiers she serves is right at the surface.

For example, in 2019, while she was campaigning for president, she made sure to take time to be there as her old unit left again to deploy to Afghanistan. Her prominent anti-war positions are because she cares greatly that we not waste our lives and treasure without great reason.

As for competence, she has over and over accomplished important things, winning numerous elections, serving the people in those elected positions, and achieving national prominence as a political candidate. You also see her competence in the way she shows effortless grace in warrior disciplines such as Tactical Shooting and Rucking.  

By integrating her compassion and competence, Tulsi is a warrrior-healer-mother figure as a leader -- she is good at her job, because she wants her soldiers to return home. Her soldiers know this and perform highly, even perhaps sacrificially because of the family atmosphere that this leadership style creates.

At some level, they must understand the deep personal sacrifice that she is making: as one of the most articulate and prominent foreign policy critics in the nation, she understands fully why she distrusts and disagrees with our government’s decisions, but she still leads her soldiers in the knowledge that she may be able to save their lives.

Her deeply thought-through spiritual practice allows her to exercise her compassion without burning out, as she understands what she needs to maintain emotional and spiritual balance.

Jack Hoban, one of the founders of the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, said once that through all religions and cultures, the way of the ethical warrior is to protect lives.

Tulsi has centered herself on the protection of what is good, and in doing so retains her balance in troubled times. She also is often in the ocean, which cleanses a person of life’s stresses. Like her, each  of us should consider what we must do to maintain balance and purpose.

Quite simply, as a military leader, Tulsi Gabbard is an excellent role model.  This Memorial Day, consider following her example, and do the Murph in memory of all those who have given so much for our great nation.
 

Image: Screen shot from a live television broadcast taken with a camera.