Hi, I’m Jeff Schloesser, and THANKS for clicking onto my very first blog ever. I spent over three decades leading troops in combat, and the last decade working in the no-fail aerospace sector, but I’m a beginner at blogging – I promise I will learn fast, and in each blog provide an insight I have harvested from life and leading.

The capstone of my U.S. Army career was commanding the famous 101^st Airborne Division for almost three years, with fifteen months of that in combat in Afghanistan during the tough years of 2008-2009. I led over 30,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, coastguardsmen, and civilians. I lost 180 of them to war, others to accidents and suicides. It was the most rewarding of times to me, and the most anguishing and heartbreaking – simultaneously. Unlike some, I never came to love war, nor, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, ‘the smell of napalm in the morning.’ But, in truth, leading troops in combat was self-actualizing. I learned something important about leadership, followership, and being “me” each and every day.

Every night I gathered up the days experiences and things I wanted to remember – and many I wished later I could forget, as they hurt so much – and put them into a little green journal. Some “lessons” and much of the pain I swept away, hidden in the attic of my mind, under tarps. Some I could not forget, and so years after my retirement from the Army, I decided to deal with my journals, my lessons such as they were, and the pain. Marathon War – Leadership in Combat in Afghanistan is the result.

In my next post, I will explain why I wrote a memoir about an unpopular war that changed me, changed American, changed the Army and refuses to end…