My first night on the military base, I get a knock on my door.
No peephole so, “Who is it?” (’cause I’m cautious that way).
Nothing.
“Who is it?”
A muffled something.
We go through this dance a few times and eventually I just open the door (’cause I’m not so cautious that way)
A red-headed woman. Wearing boots. Drinking Red Stripe beer. Strapped with a .45.
Uh…have I died? Am I in heaven?
Turns out she was a cop from Missouri. She and her two chums were out trolling the base looking for officers who were there for training. They were bored.
Made me laugh all night.
I spent a week in Iowa for negotiating training and it was the most intense and interesting single week of training I’ve ever had. We spent time with the basics of negotiation, when and why, when it probably will and probably won’t work, methodologies, theories, etc., etc. We touched on barricaded subjects, hostage situations, suicides, and personality types.
And we got hammered with the first priority: the preservation of life. Everyone’s life; hostage, good guy, bad guy, innocent guy. Everyone comes out alive at the end.
(remember that point, it gets important later)
Wednesday, we did a four-hour, live-time scenario; a simple robbery gone bad with a hostage. I played a bad guy and while I was supposed to respond to whether or not the negotiators did well in their conversations, I was also supposed to piss them off.
No problem. I can push until they want to shoot me. And I can make trades and walk out alive or dead, whatever you need. That was all fun.
But it was also enlightening.
The negotiators knew nothing. Every bit of information they got during the scenario came from their own work. They knew nothing about the bad guy and his motivations.
So while we were talking, I realized my T-shirt had a ripped seam. Without thinking, I mentioned. Not a big deal, just an interesting observation. A toss-away line.
But for inexperienced negotiators, who knew nothing of the scenario and where it was going, this casual line was apparent gold. They came back to it time and time again. They thought it was somehow a look deep into my psyche.
Made me laugh my ass off. Eventually, I tried to tell them, within character and in the scenario, that it had nothing to do with anything.
But the thing that did mean something – my frequently quoting Bob Dylan’s ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ – passed completely over their heads. Either they didn’t know the song, didn’t understand the quote, or hadn’t a clue why I was babbling about that particular song.
The lesson here: listen to every word, but know some of them are useless.
Ultimately, everything came out fine.
Thursday was when the wheels came off.
That scenario had me playing tactical commander for all five negotiating teams (who were running the same scenario in their own little worlds with their own little bad guys on their own little timelines).
That day, the instructor told all the bad guys to be irrational, to give nothing up in trade, to threaten to kill everyone, to not respond even to well done negotiations. In other words, to be as big a pain in the ass as possible.
And all five bad guys were. One in particular kept his conversation at nearly a screaming level for the better part of six hours. He banged on the walls, beat up the ice machine near him, slammed the phone so hard he almost broke it.
I kept most of my tactical-ness focused on him. He was going to the one, I knew, who’d come out of the house guns blazing, dead hostages in his wake.
Throughout the afternoon, the instructor kept amping up the situation. She allowed the bad guy to find better than 20 guns and thousands of rounds of ammo in the house. She allowed the bad guy to cut off phone conversation for almost a half hour. She allowed the ‘hostage’ 16-year old daughter (actually in on the robbery) to start texting the teams begging to be rescued, thus throwing them another kink.
Every fifteen or twenty minutes, everything got more serious and watching the negotiating teams was amazing. To see the bad guys reach through the phone and disassemble the teams so easily was eye-popping.
At one point, a negotiator screamed into the phone, “We’re gonna get you that car. We’re gonna put in a GPS, track you down, and kill your ass.” Then he followed that with, “Well…fuuuuuck youuuuuu.”
Uh…maybe not the best response to a man holding lots of weapons and two kids?
The point is how frustrating that scenario got, which is what the instructor wanted.
What those inexperienced negotiators did was to let the bad guys set the tone and, more importantly, the pace. Nothing the negotiators did could slow things down. That particular day, time was the worst enemy. Time deconstructed our focus and hammered our concentration.
And it was wildly interesting to watch the responses to it. Of the five teams, one fell apart completely and had no idea – five hours in – even how many hostages there were. Two did fine and were just able to keep up.
One, under horrifyingly bad leadership that kept changing its mind, running from one theory to another, then threatening the negotiators if they didn’t do a better job, gave up about 45 minutes before everything was done.
Their team leader came to me and said, “There’s nothing else we can do, you’re going to have to go tactical.”
There’s still a bruise on my jaw from where it hit the floor.
What he was saying, in other words, was that preservation of life meant dick to him. ‘We’re tired, we’re frustrated, we’re angry…shoot him, we don’t care.’
I don’t believe for a minute everyone on that team believed that. But I know – as certainly as I know anything – that the team leader did believe that and had infected, at least temporarily, his entire team.
This is what bad leadership can do. This is the path down which an entire team can be led. Regardless of a team’s make-up, of how smart or dedicated or experienced or willing a team might be, shitty leadership can screw the pooch every single time.
At the same time, in stark counterpoint, the fifth team (made up of absolutely average officers, but with an incredible leader…one of the cops who’d come to my door Sunday drinking Red Stripe), rocked my world.
Their bad guy was the one who’d been such a pain, who’d beaten the ice machine up and screamed his way through six hours.
And he came out alive. Surrendered.
When I asked, shocked, how he was still alive, the bad guy said, “Because they (the negotiators) kept trying. They never stopped.”
That’s how it’s done. Regardless of how the negotiations come out, regardless of whether or not the boys with guns have to go in, you never give up.
Yes, they had great leadership. But I believe that’s the lesson regardless. Even if your team-leader is piss poor, you keep going, never give up.
