Military officers, speechwriting cadets

In the civilian world, by the time you get a speechwriting job, you usually have experience in lower-stakes communication roles. In the military, they just throw you in.

The two-dozen men and women who came to the PSAโ€™s first Military Speechwriting Training last week were mostly experienced military officers.

But they were green speechwriters, many having received little advice beyond, as one put it, โ€œYouโ€™ll get the hang of it.โ€

โ€œIโ€™m an operations geek with no speechwriting experience,โ€ said one.

โ€œMy background is in physics and Iโ€™m an engineer,โ€ said another.

โ€œIโ€™m an intel guy,โ€ shrugged a third.

Theyโ€™d come to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs from across services and from New Jersey to Hawaii because, as one explained, โ€œWithout any sort of training, you just never know whether youโ€™re doing it right or efficiently.โ€

Or as another said with characteristic humor-by-bluntness: โ€œI want to try to learn to not be an idiot.โ€

In the civilian world, by the time you get a speechwriting job, you usually have considerable experience in various, lower-stakes communication roles. Not in the military, as former Air Force pilot-cum-Pentagon speechwriterย Sue Rossย and former Air Force officer-cum-Pentagon speechwriterย Rosemary Kingย could personally attest.

And though military officers are used to doing what needs to be done with whatever experience and resources are availableโ€”itโ€™s sort of their thingโ€”we thought a couple of days of training could build a foundation under their improvisation, eliminate wheel reinvention and reduce anxiety. We also hoped to create a community of military speechwriters, who might offer one another help and companionship throughout their speechwriting assignment.

Did we succeed? It felt like it.

Here are a few images from the week; a few by me, but group portrait and seminar shots by Kelly Walker ofย Vaughan & Walker Photography.

IMG_1057

Seminar co-leader Rose King (left) took veteran speechwriter Jackie Fearerโ€”Jackie was there because she writes for veterans groupsโ€”and me on a walk to the famous Cadet Chapel.

During the seminar itself, Rose and Sue took our speechwriting cadets on a tour of leadership communication, and how it gets made in the military.

MilitaryRoseMilitarySue
This was not a passive crowd. Especially in the dark arts of getting meaningful communication through the byzantine bureaucracy of the military, these speechwriters mentored one anotherโ€”and certainly schooled me, to their repeated delight.

MilitaryGroup2So focused on the matter at hand were our instructors and our students that even at our informal group dinner โ€ฆ

IMG_1060โ€ฆ the influence of the current administration did not come upโ€”did not comeย closeย to coming upโ€”until I quietly and cautiously asked folks I was sitting with whether the president is on peopleโ€™s tongues in military-base social circles the way he is in civilian conversationsโ€”almost as a form of small talk.

Not really, was the consensus. I didnโ€™t quite get to the bottom of whyโ€”these folks are extremely and admirably discreetโ€”but the sense I got was that it had something to do with: Much Trump talk (pro and con) is a kind of national gossip, and people who have devoted their lives to national well-being do not engage in national gossip, either professionally or socially. Not with one anotherโ€”and certainly not with some solicitous civilian seminar organizer at a dinner party.

I respect that. I respect them. And this Thanksgiving, Rose and Sue and I are grateful that these folks trusted us to help them help their bossesโ€”who are some of the real adults in the American roomโ€”to communicate clearly and compellingly and credibly.

We need these people.ย โ€”DM

PSA@AFANov2018

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