Episode 2 – Sid Heal Part 2: Understanding Tactical Science

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations. The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Sid Heal. Sid is a legend in this special tactics community and a key figure in the history and evolution of special tactics in the United States. Sid is a retired CW-05 in the United States Marine Corps, serving numerous combat deployments, including the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and Operation United Shield in Somalia, just to name a few.

Sid is a retired commander of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and has led the Special Enforcement Bureau, the Emergency Operations Bureau, and a wide variety of other assignments. Sid is the author of several books and literally hundreds of articles. Sid is taught at the US Army War College, is a former board member for the NTOA, and is the former president of the California association of Tactical Officers.

So, Sid, the last time we sat down, we ended with the genesis of your book, Sound Doctrine. Talk to me about what the origin story was for Sound Doctrine.

Sid Heal: When I became an officer in the Marine Corps, I had been enlisted for ten years, and so the Marine Corps began putting me on a career path. It was understood that there were certain courses that I was going to be required to complete successfully, and I estimated between 1978 and 1986, when it was the first time I really led as an officer. Troops and harm's way the Marine Corps had conservatively spent over $100,000 on my education. I felt comfortable being in charge. It was not like it was my baptism of fire as an officer.

When I became a captain in the sheriff's department, I got a handshake at a new badge. And so I decided to apply the strategy behind what the Marine Corps expected of me in law enforcement. I signed up for every major school that I could attend, that they would let me go. Command college for California Center of Leadership Excellence, the FBI National Academy.

These were months long or years long courses, and yeah, they did change my thinking. I wish everybody, especially at the command rank, could attend either or both of these schools. And I know we have some other ones, but they're not driven as much by the organization, such as the Marine Corps, as they are by the personal initiative of the students. I think you get a better class of student for that, I will say that. But the trade off is that we've got people that are going to get promoted that have not demonstrated the initiative and do not have the skills, knowledge, and abilities of the people that have gone through these courses. That was really when my research took a serious turn.

As a matter of fact, Sound Doctrine was originally a paper that I wrote for a master's degree called a scientific approach to tactical decisions. And I ended up arguing with a professor. And to his credit, in my opinion, I won the argument by explaining some scenarios where his particular strategy would not apply. And it was the first time that I think that he'd thought about it. What I later coined was looking at it from the inside of the windshield. The vast majority of people that see police actions are looking at it from the outside.

There are a lot of things that are influential that people don't understand, that when you're in law enforcement, I'll just give you one as one example. We're not allowed to flee. When it turns sour on us, we're not allowed to get up and say, I'm not going to play this anymore. I'm going to quit. It's too dangerous. It's too messy. I don't know what to do. We're expected to bring that situation to a position where the public feels safe.

People who enjoy law and order and sausage shouldn't watch either one being made, because, as I've mentioned before, it's messy. I don't have a phaser. I don't have the ability of making it look pretty. We're trying to save lives and injuries. I really don't know how to put it any better than that. And that's probably why somebody that would be more eloquent would be able to explain it, so that even the activists could understand that we are not as indifferent or unfeeling as I think they think we are.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember, God, 25 years ago, having a conversation with Daryl Gates over dinner, and we were talking about Rodney King, and it was after he had retired, and it was, you know, post, post everything. All the litigation was over. And he said, you know, his reaction when it happened was to fire them all, and he couldn't because of the way the rules worked and everything else.

But I said, you know, what was your thought? And he said, you know, people need to understand that you only use. You only win a fight by using more force. The guy that wins the fight is the guy that throws the last punch. And sometimes you misjudge sometimes it's a couple of extra ones. And what she gets at the time was, I know you're going to maybe occasionally throw 1 or 2 too many punches. I don't want you to throw 20 extra punches.

Sid Heal: People think street fights are boxing matches or wrestling matches, but I got to tell you, even the ones that you watch on TV with ultimate force and mixed martial arts don't compare. The closest thing that people might have to judge these, that they might have actually experienced is a dog fight. Growling and biting and scratching and hitting with feet and knees and elbows and biting ears off. And I'm not exaggerating.

Jon Becker: No, I think we are. The thing is, we are almost. We've almost risen to a point where we're too physically secure. We are distanced from violence. Yeah, we see it on tv. We see it in movies. It's not a personal thing. Most people have never been in a fight. Most people have never been punched.

And so frequently you have people looking at the actions of an officer that's in a fight who have never been in a fight. Well, he hit him three too many times.

Sid Heal: I wish, and it'll never be seen on reality TV. And I won't mention any names, but to watch a deputy sobbing because we couldn't save the hostage. Sobbing or giving up his marriage. Transferring because he held himself to a standard that was so unrealistic that no one could have done better under the circumstances. He could not face the team members, even though we tried to come back.

And I can't tell you the number of times when they just ended it all. They'd go in the locker room, pull out their gun, and it would be over. It's bad enough going to a funeral because an officer was killed, but we can't tolerate our failures in something that we have dedicated our lives to. And I realize that I'm getting a little upset.

Jon Becker: But it's close to home.

Sid Heal: It's close to home. And the thing is, I'm not using these as hypotheticals. I could see these people, and in one case, this guy had two bronze stars from Vietnam, and he had been wounded twice and could not tell us why he thought he could have done better without sobbing to the point we couldn't understand him.

Jon Becker: I think it's difficult for people to understand. One, how complicated the situations are. Two, how personal they are. But more importantly, I think that everybody looks at these things and they think that there's always a winning solution, and there's not. There's not. You know, it's. You look at how many of these scenarios are just, you know, there's no way to win. You know, I recently interviewed Lee McMillian and we talked about the Pena case.

Sid Heal: There's another giant.

Jon Becker: Right. Yeah, for sure. But it's you. You have a guy with his own kid who's gonna kill the kid and he's shooting at you, and there's no winning situation there. This is not gonna be like everybody high fives and goes home. And I think that it's very easy from the outside to look at these things and say, oh, yeah, this is easy. They should have just done this. It's really easy to win the football game Monday morning. Yeah, it's a completely different experience when you're in there and your life is dependent upon it.

So when did it first occur to you that these two doctrine streams of law enforcement, military needed to come together and you needed to start working on that?

Sid Heal: As a new sergeant, I was assigned to SCB special enforcement bureau as a team leader. And we were encountering shootings. And without belaboring the point too much, it was literally like being in Vietnam again, at least to me.

I realized that there was a lot of things different, like it's not a hostile environment and everything else, but I knew that I was not going to be able to live with the fact that somebody got hurt because I wasn't up to speed. And I was not up to speed, not just in the rural, the urban environment, in actually the thinking.

So I spent a lot of my own money, went to the government library in Los Angeles, which was the cheapest place to get specialized books. And a lot of them were monographs, which I really liked because the author wrote it for the love of the subject, for lack of a better term, rather than how good it was going to sell.

And so as a result of that, they tended to be shorter and more tightly focused. So I bought a lot of monographs and continued to do that through all my reserve training to the point where I got to actually meet some of the authors in the Marine Corps, Dr. Joe Strange and I, Dr .Russell Glenn.

I'm trying to think of him, and I kept notes. It wasn't that I was smarter, it's the fact that I was succeeding because I had already thought through the problem. It was one of the things that General Mattis eventually said was the fact that the most important, five inches or six inches on the battlefield or between your ears, I don't think anybody could put it better than that.

But I didn't put it that way until he had said it, but I understood it intuitively. And so that was really where it started. But I didn't put a pen to paper other than for my own personal use until 1989, when I wrote the first article, and that was at the request of John Coleman.

Jon Becker: And then how far after that? Like, when did you really start writing Sound Doctrine?

Sid Heal: 1999, probably. Well, I know I take it back. It was earlier than that. It was probably where I had made the decision to do it before I died, like on a bucket list. Was on the beach in Somalia, which is a kind of a funny story by itself. I started it when I first got back, and I can't tell you how many attempts I threw away. I'd never written a book, didn't know what a book should look like.

I asked two people, Larry Richards and my colonel in the Marine Corps, Tim Anderson, who was also LAPD, if they would look over my shoulder and give me some ideas. Sound Doctrine is actually a lot more extensive. I have thrown at least that much stuff away. I didn't throw it away because I spent so much time writing it, but it was Tim's idea to keep it short and to write it as a primer, not as a textbook.

And so Sound Doctrine was written for people that had never been in the military, had never been in law enforcement. But these tactics could be explained so they would be understandable. And so we used competitive games like soccer and football and basketball and baseball and chess, because it has a lot of the same attributes and characteristics of any other conflict. Somebody wins, somebody loses.

Jon Becker: That's interesting! I remember you using the analogy of checkers to explain checkers versus chess, to explain the initiative.

Sid Heal: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And it's so I didn't realize that you and Tim, that it was. I knew he was your colonel in the Marine Corps. I didn't realize that that was the genesis. When did Dick Odenthal get involved?

Sid Heal: He got involved when Larry Richards died. Larry Richards had a stroke, and so I asked Odie to look over my shoulder for field command. Field command is actually a text. It's written for instructors or college professors that are going to go into this at a deeper level and to explain stuff. It really duplicates a lot of what Sound Doctrine does. Sound Doctrine explains the concepts and why they're important. But field command actually goes into more depth because it's a textbook.

Jon Becker: So if somebody was to say, well, I want to be a student of the game, I want to understand this. Would you recommend they start with Sound Doctrine and then move to field command?

Sid Heal: I usually. I get that question a lot, and I usually ask them, where are you in your career? What schools have you attended? Sound Doctrine is a primer. It's written as a primer and it's not going to hurt to read it. You could spin through it if you've already gone through that. And some of the critiques that I've had is that it's very basic. Well, that tells me that this guy's at an advanced level. That was how it's intended.

Jon Becker: Yeah. If Chinese 101 is too easy for you, it's because you're in Chinese 201.

Sid Heal: That's right.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sid Heal: Well, and that was the whole point with field command. And so then I would tell them that you can read field or Sound Doctrine, but you're probably going to get frustrated when it's teaching you things that you already know. So I would just recommend start with field command.

Jon Becker: So why don't we walk through some of the key topics in both Sound Doctrine and field command and talk through kind of your perspectives. I mean, obviously, you and I could sit here for days and work our way through field command. And at some point in the future we may do this again to try and go deeper.

But one of the questions that I get most often for you because I went out to a lot of people and said, hey, I'm interviewing Sid. What do you want to know? And there were several topics that came up that people said, hey, please ask this. So why don't we start with in state? Because that seems like a logical place – [Crosstalk]

Sid Heal: That actually is a good place to start. Because if I could pick one concept that is responsible for more debacles is the lack of a clear end state. They haven't thought it through enough to know what it is that they're actually trying to achieve.

I have videos that I show that I divide up the class. You're going to look at this from the administrator trying to explain it to the city council and the public. You're going to look at it from a forced review that's trying to use it to learn from for teaching. You're going to look at it from an activist standpoint, looking for everything bad, whether it has rational logic behind it or not.

The fact that you can identify something that didn't go right and then show them a couple of these videos, probably the single most common missed concept. What was it you were trying to achieve? It's really the metric that is necessary to judge whether your course of action is contributing to achieving your end state. The end state is really what is necessary for this to be a successful operation.

One of the key things that activists miss is the fact that that determination is usually done under risk and harsh time constraints and uncertainty. And as a result of that, they don't understand that we don't have time to look for an optimal end state, the perfect thing, the best situation. We're only looking for a satisfactory one. And we understand that if we had the time and the resources to go back and do it again, we wouldn't do it the same way. Humans do not repeat unproductive behaviors.

So the first thing I would say is, define your end state. What is it that we're here for? What is it we're trying to achieve? If we're sent, and I use one of these as an example that I can see, and this was my own department, to prevent a suicide, what is it that we can do? And in this particular case, the best thing probably would have been get in your car and leave. There's no value added in you being here.

So one thing I agree with a lot of the activists is that we need some training in this. And more than training, we need the education. Training helps us do things better. Education tells us whether we're doing the right thing to begin with.

Jon Becker: Well, training teaches us the technique. Education teaches us the why.

Sid Heal: Yep. And that was probably my most asked questions to the point where everybody has actually, in unison repeated it, because I would go, you know, my next question, and they all repeat in unison, why? I don't want you just to tell me what you're going to do. I want you to tell me how it's contributing, why it's necessary. So I enjoy that. But that'd be the number one place I would start.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. One of the ways that I describe instate when I'm talking to somebody is the next time you go on vacation, where are you going to go? And they're like, oh, I'm going to go here. What are you going to do? I'm going to do this, this, and this. Imagine if you started that vacation by getting in your car and making a decision to go right or left, because without an end state, that's what you're doing. And even when you get there, you won't know you're there.

Sid Heal: When I teach the class, I show a picture of a golf course, and I ask the class, what club do you use? And a lot of them play golf. I don't. I wouldn't know if it was a good club or a bad club, except for one thing. There's no flag, there's no hole. It makes a difference how far away it is, which direction the wind is blowing, is it on a slope?

And then on the next slide there's a hole with the slide. And now they all have some idea of how to achieve that objective. That is how important the end state is. I use golf because it's a benign example, but it's absolutely imperative before you can develop a plan to know what it is you're trying to achieve well.

Jon Becker: And so I think that's actually a good segue to the next one, which is maneuvering in time and place. So talk to me about that.

Sid Heal: Most everybody understands that tactics unfold in places. We talk about key terrain and observation and high ground and choke points and things like that, but they don't understand, a lot of them, that time is also a dimension, and as a result of that, doing the right thing at the wrong time is just as bad as doing the wrong thing at any time. For those that have been involved with police work, how many times have we searched an empty building and the suspect has gone? It's not that our tactics were faulty.

As a matter of fact, we're using the same tactics that we would use any other time. And matter of fact, in many cases they're effective when the suspect is there, but the timing was off. You can actually maneuver in time just like you can maneuver in space.

And so we start with illustrating the purpose of initiative. The freedom of action, the ability to choose the time and circumstances under how the next episode is going to unfold. That provides a huge advantage. In some cases, the advantage is so huge, it's decisive in nature simply because we have the ability to exploit the circumstances.

Another one is density. One of the reasons that tactical operations are so much more complex when there's a lot of people involved is because there's a lot of activities that compete with each other and in some cases even conflict. Which means if you do this one thing where we've been deprived of the ability of doing something else, probably a good example with riots is the objective to kettle them and arrest the perpetrators or to disperse them.

Well, needless to say, it's going to take a completely different set of courses of action to achieve depending on what you've decided. And that's something that needs to be cited ahead of time. It's not something you can go halfway through and say, oh, we're going to change direction. Needless to say, we need to be able to change direction. But that's not really leadership with the military, especially the Marine Corps called driven by events. We're simply following the path of least resistance. That is not leadership by anybody's definition.

Jon Becker: No. And the path of least resistance is down the river off a waterfall.

Sid Heal: Yeah. Or overusing a device, like a tactical device, like a taser or a bean bag. It works well, so we'll use it again. It worked twice, so we'll use it 50 times.

Jon Becker: Well, we see this right now with dynamic entry and no knock warrants. This is a raging topic in the media. And actually, recently, the National Tactical Officers association came out with a position paper on no knock warrants that was not all that popular in some circles. What are your thoughts on that?

Sid Heal: I responded to that article. At first I see it. I saw it on Facebook, and I responded right then, I'm all for it. It had become the default. When I became a captain, I was a unit commander at the Special enforcement Bureau.

And one of the things that I told my lieutenants, if you bring me a course of action, and the only thing, when I ask you why we chose this and the only thing that you defend it with, and we've always done it that way, I'll cancel it. I will not allow that to proceed.

Then you can either come up with a different course of action or defend that one. The idea was that we can't accept things at default. We've become lazy. We accept risk that we should have no business accepting. We normalize it. Well, swot's a risky business.

And therefore, it's just because of the nature of the assignment that used to light my fire. And the lieutenants will tell you that I became passionate about that. So when I talk about maneuvering in time and space, the space is the easy one. They can see it. They can touch it. They can feel it. The maneuver elements are physical people and things and weapons and vehicles and planes and all kinds of things. But time is a notional dimension, meaning that it exists really only as a mental image.

And so as a result of that, you're dealing with abstract concepts that are actually manifesting themselves in different ways that we can exploit. The objective, for instance, in maneuvering in space, is to gain and maintain control of key terrain. Terrain that provides a market advantage. But the objective in maneuvering in time is to create and or exploit opportunities. Opportunity, in the simplest form, is really a window. And time where circumstances provide a temporary advantage.

And so as a result of that, in some cases, we can create them with distractions and things like that. But in other cases, we need to recognize them, exploit it. And I'll just tell you that it's been frustrating for a lot of my students that have completed a full length course. And I got to tell you, I'll be the first one to admit it's grueling, but they end up in a tactical situation where they know more than the people that are leading them.

And I have to tell them, don't give up your career over this. Make your case without an argument. But unless it's a safety issue, you are honor bound, duty bound, to remain subordinate to your superiors. Your day will come. And that's one of the things I try to soothe them with. It's kind of interesting.

I've been retired for some years now. I can't tell you the feeling of euphoria, ecstasy, exhilaration that I get when one of my now commanders incident commanders calls me or sends me an email and says, thanks so much, I remember. And he will cite something that I might have just used a metaphor to illustrate it or an anecdote or an illustration.

Rarely do they cite the concept verbatim, but the fact was that they remember it from the story or the exercise that we. That we did. I don't even know how to explain it. It makes every hour that I've spent studying this or writing about it or teaching it worthwhile instantly.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You have a unique ability to capture complicated concepts, and I think this is part of the reason that you've been able to fuse these things and put them into a way that people understand them. You have a unique ability to capture a complicated scenario and paint it in a very simple, frequently funny story that stays with you. And I'll give you one. I'll give you a couple, actually.

First one is that guy couldn't find a giraffe and a flock of sheep. I cannot tell you how many times after the first time you told me that I've used it, but if I had to pay you a licensing fee, you'd be a rich man. The second one. And going back to kind of dynamic entry, I remember when you went back to SCB and we were having that was, you know, what year was that when you went back as a captain? When I went back as a captain.

Sid Heal: 2000, early 2000, I think I was promoted in 1999.

Jon Becker: So that's 20 years ago. And we were having conversations about dynamic entry and no knock warrants and how, you know, you didn't really believe in them. And you said something that was profound. It was just kind of a classic sit off the top of your head.

You said, here's the problem with dynamic entry. The guy inside the house has made so many bad life decisions that the sheriff is knocking down his door with a SWAT team. Giving that guy 30 seconds to make the right decision is not going to yield the right result. Let's give him an hour to think about it. Right? He still may make a bad choice, but I mean, that's a perfect example of maneuvering in time.

Sid Heal: At least he made an informed decision.

Jon Becker: Yes, exactly. But that's a perfect example of maneuvering in time. You're slowing the event down to get to a point where you are more likely to have a positive resolution.

Sid Heal: One, I've had so many mentors over my lifetime, and many of them are accomplished and recognized on an international level, one of which was eventually major General Alec Ron from Israel. And he was at Entebbe and I asked him about dynamic entries. This is clear, back in 1987 or 1988, and we were debriefing in Tebby in detail, far more than any of the books I've read.

But one of the things he said in his heavy Israeli accent, and I will probably insult him by trying it, but he says, I'll tell you something, Sid, you cannot control everything. If you continue to do this, you will lose people. Boy, he could not have said anything that grabbed my attention with the Marine Corps, who would grab me by their stack and swivel than that. These people were following me because they trusted me. I needed to be worthy of that trust. And that was a major impetus. I was already doing it.

And he just put it in words better than I could have. But here's a guy that was in situations that they wrote books about that was validating the same conclusions that I had reached. Stumbling and bumbling along.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think what's lacking in a lot of cases today, and this was a conversation that I had with Mike Hillman as well. When you guys inherited the problem, you inherited the problem.

Sid Heal: That's right.

Jon Becker: And there was no solution. There was no how to book. So you had to build a how to book. And the process of building a how to book means building a y book. The problem is that the y book has not been handed down. The how to book has, and to some degree, Sound Doctrine and field command are the why book that people need to read. They need to understand. It's things like in state maneuvering, in time initiative. That's the part that I think people really, it's lacking today. We're teaching the how, we're not teaching the why.

Sid Heal: One of my real heroes was a guy named John Schmidt. He was a major in the Marine Corps. He was certainly more higher ranked later. Eventually retired. He was the primary author between one of the first books that we were required to read as officers called war fighting. It was war fighting. FM, FM1, Fleet Marine Force manual one. Then it became MCDP1. Marine Corps doctor publication one. He had a gift, and I thought it was a gift of being able to make it so I could understand it.

After having personally experienced it and talking with him, it wasn't so much of a gift as it was willing to drill down so that you understood it well enough to explain it, not just reiterate what somebody else had said. When it came time to write feel command, I used one of my kids textbooks, for instance, I bowl printed the first time a concept was introduced. I italicized the explanations so that they would jump out. I realized that that's third grade stuff, but that's where we're at with some of the people.

When I was talking to General Zinni and General Conway and General Mattis, these people were so far ahead of me that had I not read, I would not have understood anything that they had described to me. They were at a level far beyond what I was going to be able to translate.

And so, as a result of that, I tried to take these concepts and make them as easy to understand, even at risk of overgeneralization. In many cases, I've made it obvious that in the simplest terms, or the simplest, so that people understand that the concept itself is more complicated than I'm explaining it. But for our purposes, you can understand the essence.

When I was asked to explain, in fact, I got asked several times to condense this down. I couldn't condense it. It's not a condensation. It is a distillation. I had to leave things out to be able to get the essence of this. If I could leave people with just this one idea, it would be this. Concepts are universal. It's only the applications that are contextual.

I can explain the concepts, and most experts, even if they disagree about a lot of things, will agree on the concepts. And this includes activists. It's the applications, though, that are really the true art of war. The concepts are the science. I can explain it. I can prove it in many cases. I've got exercises and games that I play with students so that it becomes intuitive. But there may be a thousand different ways that it actually applies in real life.

Jon Becker: So if you were looking back at 30 year old Sid, 40, 35 year old Sid, where would you start teaching yourself tactical science?

Sid Heal: I'd start by convincing people that there was a tactical science. The sad part about it is that we've got most law enforcement officers without any understanding that they can support their decisions with solid, reliable science. Tactical science is probably closest related to military science, but as soon as you say military, you can drop.

Jon Becker: Yeah, everybody freaks out.

Sid Heal: That's right. I have several games to illustrate how this works. But tactical science is a soft science and that's problematic. Hard sciences like mathematics and astronomy and…

Jon Becker: Yeah, math is easy because there's answers.

Sid Heal: That's right. You can build a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter who puts the data in, it's going to give you one answer. But soft scientists like economics and sociology and psychology and other things don't use algorithms or formulas to give you one answer. They use probabilities and interpretations to give you a range of probabilities.

The fact that you didn't pick the best one is not your fault, it's the nature of the science. But the sad part about it is because there's more than one rand answer is problematic with many administrators because they believe that if there's more than one right answer, there can be no wrong answer, simply some answers that are better than others.

Well, I can tell you if you understand the science, there's wrong answers and we have the debacles that we have to live with in law enforcement that cannot be justified. I make a very lucrative sideline out of testifying in court.

As an expert on tactics, I can be honest with you. I could triple my income if I wanted to do it more often than I do. I don't enjoy it. I usually limit myself to two cases per year because it keeps me sharp, it keeps me on the edge. Anybody that has ever gone through a deposition by a well trained, experienced attorney is going to get a level of detail that you will never get from a report or from a PowerPoint or anything else. So I do that.

But I got to tell you, I don't enjoy exploiting it. I would rather avoid it altogether. But every once in a while, and I don't take retainers and everything and I give them the first 30 minutes for free. And the only reason I limit it to 30 minutes, if you can't explain it to 30 minutes, I'm not going to understand it and you're not going to understand it, but I'll just tell them, and I've said we're not going to win this case.

I'm going to tell you that I'll help you with damage control, which, by the way, is almost always the kiss of death. I've had several attorneys hire me even after I told them, we're not going to win this. I'm not going to say that we did everything right. I've actually read cases where I've called up and said, you don't want me on the stand. If this guy makes you an offer, take it.

Well, that is not how most experts that I've dealt with, especially the opposing experts, think I get paid the same whether we win or lose. But my contribution largely has been simply explaining the rationale behind the decision making, because I could articulate it. And the person that actually had to make the decision made the right decision without the ability of explaining why. If I can get that jury to look at me and say, you know what? I don't agree with that decision, but I understand why he made it, we're done. We can do that because there's more than one right answer.

Jon Becker: If you were going to develop a young officer now, you know, through lieutenant, what would your reading list look like?

Sid Heal: I hate to say it, but it would be voluminous. It's hard for me to read a good book and dismiss it. Now, I have had some books where I've said, read at least the last three chapters.

Jon Becker: Where do I start?

Sid Heal: I'd ask if you're looking for leadership. I got to tell you, there are a lot of really good books from the business community that have applications in law enforcement and tactics. One of the game changers for me was in search of excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman management by wandering around, catching people, and doing something good. I mean, this is a book I read 35 or 40 years ago, but still had such an influence on me that I can quote from it to this day.

Most people, it's out of print, wouldn't even know another one was information anxiety by Richard Saul Wormande. Really, the context that comes out of this book is the fact that you don't need to know everything. You need to know how to find it.

One of the things, though, that really hit me with this book is the truth is not enough. It's only important if you believe it. It can be completely inaccurate, but if you believe it, you're going to act on it and pay the consequences. So it's to your benefit to make sure that the sources you're using are something that you can rely on, because they've actually changed your ability to think in certain ways.

Men in mission, Tony Kern's book, I'm trying to think of this one going pro. It's basically what's going to be necessary for you to be a true professional. I could go on and on and on, and I'm a hate to do it under this forum because I'm going to forget something. And I got to tell you that we put reading lists together on crisis decision making. Crisis decision making. Gary Klein, sources of power, intuition at work. Power of intuition. Malcolm Gladwell.

Jon Becker: Which one? Blink?

Sid Heal: Oh, Blink's one of the ones that come to mind. What the dog saw, freakonomics. I could go on that.

Jon Becker: Do you have reading lists? Do you have a recommended reading list?

Sid Heal: I also keep my library, the list of my library eventually became too large for my memory, so I put it into an excel spreadsheet so I can remember where I put the book. Nowadays, a lot of my reading is electronic, and the advantage of electronic is the fact that I can do an electronic search.

So if I remember one concept that I want to amplify or get into, all I have to do is remember the book. And then I typically have several books that I have in three formats. Hard copy, electronic copy, and the….

Jon Becker: Audiobook.

Sid Heal: Yeah, the actual book, the software.

Jon Becker: The software. So I would love, if you wouldn't mind sharing kind of Sid's recommended reading list. I would love to get it.

Sid Heal: I'll dig it out if you want.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I would love to have one of the show notes because we're going to, we'll do detailed show notes that as we go through concepts and talk about things, we'll reference out. So I would love to include at least a link to, hey, here is, you know, Sid's recommended reading list.

Sid Heal: I cut it way down. The people that I usually deal with don't like to read. They definitely don't like to study. They don't see it as contributing, especially to their careers. They'll go out and spend two and a half hours picking up weights, but they won't spend a half hour reading. And so I've cut it down to, if you read this, a book a month, which to be honest with you, is not difficult, you will be light years ahead of where you were this time last year. So, yeah, I've got it. I've got a leaders, team leaders. I've got one for crisis decision making, I got one for risk management.

Jon Becker: I love that! If you'll share them, I'll actually put them up.

Sid Heal: I'll send it to you tonight.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'll put it up on the recommended reading list. So I think what I would love to do to kind of conclude our time together is go through some rapid fire questions. Short answer, give me Sid’s off the cuff. Quick thought, what's your most important habit?

Sid Heal: Reading and writing. I say reading and writing. You can't write if you don't read, but writing it also forces you to put it in your own words, which means that you have to understand it.

Jon Becker: Leader versus manager. What's the difference?

Sid Heal: The leader is far more developed and is able to handle things that won't fit into a management profile, particularly in commanding. One of the things that's emphasized to us in the Marine Corps is that I don't care if you know anything about bask and weaving or not. If you're in charge of this project, you better find somebody who does, but you're still responsible for accomplishing this end state.

Jon Becker: What do you think the most important thing is for building an effective team?

Sid Heal: Trust. I don't really have to think about that too far, but if they don't trust you, nothing else is going to matter, and if they do, nothing is going to stop it.

Jon Becker: What do you think the most important characteristic of an effective leader is?

Sid Heal: Character. We can teach the skills, but if they don't come with a sense of obligation as responsibility, as part of the package, they're just keeping the seat warm for their next promotion.

Jon Becker: If you could have any, you could have dinner with anybody, live or dead. Historical figure, who is it?

Sid Heal: Boy, that is a tough one. Dealing with tactics or. Yeah, life in general.

Jon Becker: Let's go with dealing. Dealing with the – With this topic.

Sid Heal: I have been privileged to have dinner with a lot of the people that are dead now. One, and probably not for the reasons everybody think of, would be Gunnery Sergeant Harris, who was really the one that got me started. He broke me into Vietnam. He was a Korean war veteran, and he punished me. I was the champion sandbag filler of northern I Corps, but he never busted me. And I got to tell you, I deserved it.

Now, I had office hours. I was private twice, PFC twice, Lance corporal once, and corporal twice. The sergeant major would literally shake my hands one day and call me a shipbird the next day. I'm using the exact terminology. This is the thing. I had office hours. I had company office hours and battalion office hours. I was on a suspended bus when I got out of Vietnam, and the deal was if I would stay in the bush where I excelled, I could go home as a corporal.

But if I came back and screwed up, I was going home as a PFC because I was on a suspended bus. I would like to meet that man once where I could thank him for putting up with me and setting the tone. The information that he gave me not only saved my life so many times, I can't begin to describe it. It was always understood that it was not a gift. It was entrusted, and I was expected to pass it on.

If at some point in time somebody writes a eulogy, I think the highest compliment they could give me was that I was a teacher, I was a mentor. I took the information entrusted to me and made it available to people that also needed it and benefited from it.

Jon Becker: Anyone that has ever known you would write that eulogy?

Sid Heal: What's that?

Jon Becker: I said, anyone that has ever known you would write that eulogy.

Sid Heal: I hope so, and I think that's a problem. It's interesting. I have lots of medals. I don't have a single award hanging on my wall. I don't have a certificate. I have a number of college degrees. I've never hung them on my wall. But I have a picture of my team in the first Gulf war where one of the troops wrote on the picture, thanks for getting us all home.

It's almost impossible for me to describe that without the feeling of pride that this guy, who was 19 years old, has now got kids and grandkids and is home. I don't even know how to describe. I have no words for the feeling that it means to me that I wasn't always successful. But I can say that I held nothing back. I did the best I could with what I had, and I was better as the years went by. I don't expect perfection from any of my troops, but I expect dedication, feeling of responsibility.

Jon Becker: I don't know that I can end this on a better note than that.

Sid, thank you so much for sitting down and having this conversation!