Quick answer: What does a Special Forces singleton teach about integrity?
A singleton is a Green Beret who has to decide alone, with no higher headquarters to call. John Fenzel argues that integrity is settled before that moment arrives. Elliot Richardson fixed his line months before he was ordered to fire Archibald Cox, while the Vietnam-era Joint Chiefs gave ground one meeting at a time.
Early in the Army's Special Forces Qualification Course, candidates hear that although they will serve on a team, a time will likely come when each of them is a singleton, facing a fast decision with lasting consequences and no higher headquarters to consult. John writes that this question, whether a soldier could be trusted to do the right thing alone downrange, was the basis of selection as a Green Beret, and the regiment's shorthand for it became a kind of mantra: integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking. He adds that the moment does not always come somewhere remote. It can come in a crowded meeting or over a telephone. On Saturday, October 20, 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused an order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, after President Nixon warned him that his resignation might cost a ceasefire in the Middle East. Richardson had made the decision in May, when he promised a Senate hearing that he would not countermand or interfere with the special prosecutor's decisions. Three days after resigning he told reporters, "I could not discharge him. And so I resigned." Twenty-four years later a serving Army major, H.R. McMaster, published Dereliction of Duty, which argues that the Vietnam War was lost in Washington. McMaster does not say the Joint Chiefs of Staff should have resigned. He says they should have given their best advice, and instead they gave the President a series of small agreements. Admiral David McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations, believed the strategy would fail and said so only privately to the other Chiefs, and later admitted in his oral history that he was part of it and ashamed. General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff and a survivor of the Bataan Death March, is said to have once set out for the White House to resign and changed his mind on the way. Near the end of his life he told his biographer Lewis Sorley that he was going to his grave with that lapse in moral courage on his back. John closes by recommending Season 4 of Netflix's The Diplomat, released October 15, whose creator Debora Cahn describes an ambassador asking whether a string of understandable choices adds up to an outrageous pattern.
Why it matters for leaders: A leader who waits for the hard order to find out where the line is has usually waited too long. Richardson could refuse in a single sentence because he had committed in public months earlier. The Joint Chiefs treated each request as a separate and reasonable step, and the sum was a strategy several of them believed would fail. Writing your limits down early, and saying them to the people above you before the pressure comes, gives you the footing Richardson had.
Q: What is a singleton in Special Forces?
A: In John Fenzel's account, instructors in the Special Forces Qualification Course told candidates that although they would serve on a team, a time would likely come when each of them would act alone as a singleton, deciding quickly with no higher headquarters to consult and living with lasting consequences.
Q: Why did Elliot Richardson resign as Attorney General in October 1973?
A: Richardson resigned on October 20, 1973, rather than fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. At his Senate confirmation hearing in May 1973 he had promised not to countermand or interfere with the special prosecutor's decisions, and he kept that promise when the order came.
Read the full essay on Substack → https://heroespath.substack.com/p/singleton
By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation