The Work is a memorable read that I highly recommend. It creates a desire to evaluate what we think about life's events on many levels. Wes Moore shares his own internal thoughts plus allows many others to share their own experiences and the lessons they've learned from their own life events.
It is a timely book because the experiences of those in the book relate to current international and national events. When he spoke of civil rights and Martin Luther King, it was a reminder of this summer's events in Ferguson, Missouri. King and his teams of civil rights workers were labeled "outside agitators". Many who have recently tried to march in peaceful protests and their leaders have been labeled the same. It is frustrating to see that in 2014, we are dealing with the same issues faced by others in the 1960s.
Here are some examples of why I found the book so appealing. The book should appeal to a wide audience of readers.
"SPOILER ALERT"
(p. 7) Colin Powell wrote the following letter to one of his children upon turning sixteen. This is good advice for anyone. I would like to read his biography entitled My American Journey.
"You now begin to leave childhood behind and start on the road to manhood. . . . You will establish definitively the type person you will be the remaining fifty years of your lifetime. You know what is right and wrong and I have confidence in your judgement. Don't be afraid of failure. Be more afraid of not trying. . . . Take chances and risks-not foolhardy actions, but actions which could result in failure, yet promise success and reward. And always remember that no matter how bad something may seem, it will not be that bad tomorrow."
(p. 30) Daniel Lubetsky CEO, KIND
"People tend to confuse determination and positive attitude with false optimism or naivete."
(pp. 69-70)Abdullah was an interpreter who worked with the 82nd. Airborne to which Wes Moore was assigned during his deployment in Afghanistan.
"In Afghanistan, a person's loyalty was first and foremost with the immediate family and then the extended clan. After family, loyalty spreads) to one's tribe. Abdullah fought as much for the legacy of his family as anything else. I remember on one patrol we were handing out supplies to a group of Afghans, and among the items we were distributing were flags that carried a beautiful silhouette of Afghanistan filled in with black, red, and green, Afghanistan's national colors. One villager started speaking to Abdullah in Pashtu, with a clouded expression on his face. After their conversation ended, I asked Abdullah what was the conversation about. Abdullah explained to me the man had not understood the significance of the image on the flag, so Abdullah told him it was a picture of Afghanistan-a picture of his country. At that, the man had shrugged and walked away. That's when I started to understand that our goal of establishing loyalty to a national government was possibly in trouble."
(p. 73) Edmund Burke
"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing."
(pp. 80-81) John Galina and Dale Beatty founders of Purple Heart Homes
"We saw other units come back into the base, washing blood out of their trucks after a really bad mission. We'd drive down the road and seen vehicles-a Hummevee mangled and burned down to nothing. We destroyed the vehicle and wouldn't leave it for them. Our training was clear and certain. Trained to react to contact. Trained to react with overwhelming force."
"They honed their ability to take in everything around them, looking for IEDs, insurgents, and snipers."
"Every day I thought, 'All nine of my guys in my squad are going to come home alive.'...'I would try to be more loyal to my squad than to leadership and the directives we got. We still got the mission accomplished, maybe just not the way the orders were given.'...'I was obviously doing the right thing. Bad commanders play by the book all the time; good commanders let their people make decisions.'"
"Only 2 percent of the population in Iraq were our enemies. The rest were scared or hated us because they'd been programmed to hate us."
(p. 98-99) Wes Moore drew some of the following conclusions upon returning to the states after leaving active duty.
"I had stumbled-always grateful-from Oxford to finance to the army, always at the behest of others and out of a desire to do the right thing, the best thing, the unimpeachably correct thing. Prestige, financial security, duty. But coming back home from combat, sitting in this conference room at the pinnacle of American power, was maybe one moment of whiplash too many."
"I know I am coming off of one of the most important and life-changing experiences of my life and I want to continue serving in some way....But I know in this year I hope to learn a lot and help some as well."
"We have well over two million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in this country....I'm one of them, but I don't think I fully grasped, in those weeks right after my return, how that experience changed all of us. I don't know if I ever will, I didn't see yet that it would be impossible to simply go back to being the person I was before my deployment. I wasn't broke, I wasn't irreparably damaged, but I was different."
Sargent Bowe Bergdahl has been in the news since he was traded for five terrorists held in Guantanamo. Bergdahl has been accused of being a traitor. Men died trying to bring him back when he left the battlefield. He was held by the Taliban from 2009-2014. (p. 99) Wes Moore comments that post-traumatic stress can strike before a soldier leaves the battle zone.
(p. 108) Moore discusses American policy in the international arena.
"And even when things go right, the massive indifference of the American public can sometimes shift into resentment over the amount of resources being spent. Some people would prefer that fewer-or none-of our resources ever leave this country at all."
"Americans became fatigued by stories from Afghanistan and the procession of American-flag-draped coffins that the honor guard escorted back to Andrews Air Force Base. We became frustrated by the slow progress of the country's developments toward democracy and stability. Afghanistan. . . started to seem like a sinkhole."
"If we are impatient about an exceptional case such as Afghanistan, then how much more impatient will we be when our efforts are driven more by humanitarianism and compassion than self-interest and security? Even when you talk to aid workers or workers at nonprofits whose philanthropic work takes them overseas, they will tell you that Americans ask them: Why don't you just focus your work on America? Why go to Africa or Asia or South America to help kids or help with disasters: Why not do it right here?"
(pp. 108-109) "I'm not a warmonger-like many who have worn the uniform, I am particularly averse to war. I'm also not someone who believes in empire building or imperialistic or paternalistic attitudes about the world outside of America. But our passion, influence, and responsibility as humans can never end at our borders."
(p. 120) A trait common to successful people is their passion for the work they do "... in business, in philanthropic work, in human rights, in government, or in raising a family." They "...shared one common trait: they were fanatically passionate about the work they did. They breathed it. They needed it. It was their lifeblood."
It was interesting traveling into the mind of someone who asks many of the same questions we ask ourselves. Wes Moore doesn't try to slant your vision in any direction. He does share his own quest which is the same expedition that many of us share making this a worthwhile real-life adventure.