Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Veterans know how to lead. The lessons we learned in the military form the foundation for bigger successes in business, entrepreneurship and community.
Host John S Berry, CEO of Berry Law, served as an active-duty Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, finishing his military career with two deployments and retiring as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard. Today, his veteran led team at Berry Law, helps their clients fight some of the most important battles of their lives. Leading successful teams in the courtroom, the boardroom, and beyond, veteran leadership drives the firm’s rapid growth and business excellence.
Whether building teams, synchronizing operations, or refining tactics, we share our experiences, good and bad, to help you survive, thrive and dominate.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@PTSDLawyers/podcasts
Follow us on social media:
https://facebook.com/veteranled
https://twitter.com/veteranled
https://Instagram.com/veteranled
[00:00:01.600] - Mark Hasara
My first combat mission was the opening out of Desert Storm, refueling what's called the F-4G Wild Weasel. Their job is to go into Baghdad and take down the air defenses with a missile that is appropriately called Harm. That was the gatekeeper, though. If that mission of 12 airplanes and their jammers didn't get their gas and didn't get in there, nobody went in there. No pressure, right?
[00:00:30.000] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. Today's guest is Mark Hasara. Mark is an Air Force Veteran, pilot, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. Mark, welcome to the show.
[00:00:41.440] - Mark Hasara
Thanks, John, for having me. It's great to be here with you guys today. And really looking forward to this. This is going to be a great discussion.
[00:00:47.420] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking about your book, Tanker Pilot. A lot of Veterans, they serve, they talk about their experiences, but they stay away from a lot of the technical stuff unless it's combat related. And what I love about the book is not only does it get into detail about your missions and your lessons learned, but there's some amazing photography. So, for the Veterans that want to talk about something amazing, some special skill they had in service, what's the best way to get started? How did you get started writing this book, which is basically military history?
[00:01:21.180] - Mark Hasara
You know what? It's my kids. Alright, my kids will go, Okay, dad. Yeah, story number 54. A very dear friend of mine, Rush Limba, said, Sluggo, you need to start writing these things down. I said, well, I don't know how to do that. You just figure out a process. And I did. My process was very unconventional. I would go to Brigham Young University, go into one of the study rooms that had the big whiteboard, and you have to do the brain dump first, and get it all out of your head. I would do my outlines on the whiteboard, John, and then I'd look at it and adjust it a little bit, take a picture of it. But, John, I can't type. I never learned how to type. But fortunately, Google Docs has a voice typing function, and I use that a lot. Now, it doesn't know a lot of military terms. You'd say F14 tomcat, okay? It'd say F, spell out the word 14, and then it would be T-H-O-M-C-A-T instead of T-O-M-C-A-T. But it learns, all right? Then I would take it and I would put it into Grammarly and adjust it there and have Grammarly adjust it, all right?
[00:02:36.950] - Mark Hasara
I wrote 53 chapters, 22 are in the book. I didn't have one rejection notice and got picked up by Simon Schuster.
[00:02:45.000] - John S. Berry
Wow. Wow. That's the thing is, like I said, the historical accuracy. If you go through it and look at the photos, the photos are amazing color photos. Let's tell the audience, how did we get these photos?
[00:03:00.240] - Mark Hasara
I kept my camera with me, John, in the cockpit. When I graduated from pilot training, went to Castle Air Force Base in Fresno, California, to learn how to fly the KC-135, on my very first mission, I see the B-52 behind me on the boom, and I go, Holy smokes, this is an incredible picture. I don't have a camera. I went to the BX, and I bought a Minolta maxim camera that had autofocus and everything because I didn't have time to sit there and go like this. Off we went. I shot 60 rolls of film in five days on an aircraft carrier. I had 4,000-color pictures when I left the Air Force. So, Simon Suster says, Give us your best 40. I said, okay, here they are. Hannah, my editor, called back two days later and says, art department can't decide which pictures to use. They've never seen pictures like this, and so clear and focused and everything. And so, I sat down with my dad and went through all the pictures and said, okay, this one goes with this story, this one goes with this story. That's how those pictures ended up in the book.
[00:04:07.040] - John S. Berry
For Veterans that don't know, what is a KC-135?
[00:04:11.480] - Mark Hasara
The KC-135 is called the Stratotanker, we call it the Stradoblatter. It's basically an airborne gas station. Airplanes will come up underneath us, behind us, and we will connect with them. The Air Force has its method of doing it, where we have a pipe that goes into a receptacle and it locks it in place. But the Navy has what they call a drogue. It looks like a badminton shuttle cock. They have a probe that comes out and they stick it in that way. That's predominantly the way most people refuel. That's been the predominant method of refueling since the 1950s. But you can't transfer the gas fast enough through the probe. You can only do 1,000 pounds a minute. It took 90 something minutes to fill up a bomber when they first tried this. Curtis LeMay said that dog don't hunt. Because a B-52, my largest offload, John, was into a B-52. It was 103,500 pounds, and it took us 22 minutes. With all four pumps going on, 6,000 pounds a minute. The airplane carries up to 195,000 pounds. Our war load during Afghanistan, Iraq, in 2002, 2003, was 180,000 pounds, which a family could drive their car for 27 years on the gas that I used in one mission.
[00:05:37.940] - John S. Berry
That is remarkable. I think about the first time I learned about this midair refueling was in the 1980s when I was playing the Top Gun video game and you had to refuel in the air. That was the hardest part of the video game was refueling the plane. But then you look at the logistical, I think, miracle of being able to do that at the amount of fuel you can push in that amount of time, and let alone midair, hooking up a refueler to a flying plane. Tell us about the training and education that goes into developing the skill.
[00:06:09.940] - Mark Hasara
That's a really great question. I went through Castle Air Force Base. Here's my aviation origin story, John. I was born in Inglewood, California. I was born in Centinela Hospital, which is about two miles from Los Angeles International Airport. My grandfather Andy would take us to Randy's Donuts, the one that has a big donut on the top of it in Los Angeles. Then we would go and park on the end of the runways at Los Angeles International Airport. They have two south runways and two north runways. At that time, it was just rabbits in a big field and runways. That's when I first saw 707s and DC-8s, the very, very first jetliners are flying. This is like 1961, 62 time frame. They're just being introduced. I'm a five-year-old kid standing on the hood of my grandpa Andy's car, and I go, Why work for a living when I can do this? It was a childhood dream to fly this airplane you see here behind me. I wanted to fly 707s. I dreamt of flying 707s. I had teachers tell me, your math scores and your science scores aren't that good. You're not going to get into one of the academies or anything like that.
[00:07:32.580] - Mark Hasara
Don't let people discourage you from doing your dream. Don't let them get in the way. And I didn't. And graduated from Brigham Young University with a political science degree, went right to pilot training, and I flew that airplane for 24 years. And for training in the airplane, you go up, you fly the airplane. Of course, you learn how to fly the airplane. And remember, the airplane was made in 1955 and is still flying. So, you have a B-52 that comes up underneath you. You have a boom harper in the back that's flying that, the flying boom, extends the pole into the receptacle. Then there's teeth that lock us into place and everything, and we just start pumping gas. Here's the interesting piece of this, John. We've been doing this since 1921. The very first refueling was accomplished in 1921 when Wes May went from the wing of a Lincoln standard biplane to the wing of a Curtis Jenny with a five-gallon gas can on his back. That was the very first air refueling in October of 1921.
[00:08:38.620] - John S. Berry
Wow. I'm sure the technology has changed quite a bit since then. But what has always baffled me is, how do you maintain that speed? Both planes are traveling at the same speed. You're keeping that same distance. I mean, at this point, is that all through automation, or does it still take a lot of skill today?
[00:08:58.200] - Mark Hasara
That's a great question because We only have the altitude hold on. We have a turn knob that turns the airplane with the autopilot on. It's just like flying formation when you see the Thunderbirds. It's the same kind of formation. It's what we call close trail, about 60 feet away from us, the other airplane is, all right? Whether it's fighters or bombers or whatever, they're only 60 feet away. You learn it in pilot training, and that's how you refuel. It's just two airplanes close together. There's been a few times where we've bumped, and that gets kind of sporting. I've never had that incident, but the only way you can execute a war now, particularly in air campaign, is with tankers. Because an F-15 fighter plane, John, consumes 8,000 pounds an hour at tactical speeds. When Maverick is an afterburner on the carry deck, get launched off, he's burning 2,000 pounds a minute. An F-15 can burn through its entire fuel load in about 14 to 15 minutes dry, which is why you have tankers. Of course, we have the largest fleet of tankers of any Air Force in the world. To give you an idea, during the invasion of Baghdad, back in 2003, we were flying 265 sorties a day.
[00:10:37.280] - Mark Hasara
We were transferring about 12 million pounds a day. Over the 26 days of the air campaign, we transferred 417,233,000 pounds of jet fuel into other airplanes. That will allow a Ford F-150 truck to make 2,685 round trips to the moon or seven round trips to the sun. That's what we did in 26 days.
[00:11:00.980] - John S. Berry
Yeah, we all got to see the shock and awe campaign and seeing all the news and all the artillery and the planes. But we didn't see the logistics behind it. No idea. We were watching the theater of it, But I didn't get to Iraq till 2005, but I cannot imagine the logistical support required.
[00:11:22.620] - Mark Hasara
We ran United Arab Emirates out of gas. We ran a Gulf Coast country out of gas because they weren't capable of making the amount of jet fuel we were using at one base. The KC-10s were taking off with 320,000 pound fuel loads. They're using 1.8 million gallons a day, and the United Emirates, it could only produce 1.2 million gallons a day. How do you solve that problem, John? You bring in a supertanker full of jet fuel, and we parked it in Dubai in the port and pumped it straight to the base, and that's how we kept the base going. And these are all things that people don't think about. They see the fighter jets going in, like in Top Gun Maverick, going in, going after the SAM sites and everything like that. Well, how did that airplane get there? It got there because it probably refueled going in and coming out. There was a lot of mission planning that goes on before you go on a mission like that. Like Venezuela, you can imagine the mission planning that went on to coordinate B-1s coming out of Texas, tankers coming out of the States, out of Puerto Rico, airplanes coming out of Puerto Rico, airplanes coming off an aircraft carrier, and then the slow moving helicopters from the 160th Soar.
[00:12:40.760] - Mark Hasara
To make all of that work takes an incredible amount of coordination and timing.
[00:12:47.600] - John S. Berry
Yeah. As a ground pounder, as a mechanized Infantry Lieutenant going out, you don't realize the logistical planning until you get to the field for the first time, and all of a sudden, people are really concerned where those fuel tankers are because if you run out of fuel, you're done. Unfortunately, sometimes that happened in training because we were not that good at logistics. I learned at the National Training Center as a, my second job as a support platoon later, how important that fuel was. At the time, JP8, and we had to make sure we could get enough of it, and we had to transport it. It's things that as you plan the mission, the logistics often becomes a constraint. As you said, you're running countries dry of fuel during the shock and awe campaign. Tell me, logistically, from your standpoint, where you've got to refuel your KC-135 to refuel those planes, how flexible do you have to be in terms of your logistical plan?
[00:13:53.260] - Mark Hasara
Here's the very interesting thing. The KC-135 is not irrefuelable. Only the KC-10 is. We only had 59 of them. So, my airplane had to land and regenerate. And normally, by the book, John, it took four hours. But a good fuels crew could do in about 45 minutes. And that's the key to this. What do they always say? Smart men study tactics, brilliant men study logistics. And it's so true, okay? Because we had to keep you guys filled with fuel, ammo, all those kinds of things, keep you fed, water, all that kind of stuff, which we could air drop to you from C17s or C-130s. But a lot of times, those C-17s and C-130s were being refueled on the way in and on the way out. The other key to this logistics problem is, where do you find places to put tankers when you're going to use 1.8 million gallons? It's only military airfields or international airport. When we had to figure out where we were going to put the tankers, John, we had to look at the airfields very closely. The first thing we said, how much fuel can we store at the base? That was an immediate checkmark, no.
[00:15:14.520] - Mark Hasara
For a lot of places. Like I said, at Al Dhafra, the 20 KC-10s were flying 38 missions a day with 320,000-pound fuel loads. Do the math. We were flying 265 sorties a day. Again, just do the math on all the gas. But, fortunately, not one airplane ran out of gas. I have a leadership story we're going to talk about a little bit later where 6 F-117s missed their air refueling, which I'm the chief of the air refueling control team. I'm in charge of all gas, and the general that's running the air campaign goes, Hey, Mark, 6 F-117s didn't get gas last night. Can you tell me why? I'm like, Oh, oh, oh, oh. And I had to find out, but we'll talk about that here in a little bit.
[00:16:08.040] - John S. Berry
Yeah. And let's get to the lessons from the cockpit. This is what I like about the book. In Veteran Led, we have the after-action review, but you have the Lessons from the cockpit. Some of these lessons, we've earned them the hard way, and we paid the price for these lessons. And pain is a teaching tool. So let's get into some of those lessons from the cockpit that have helped you not only develop as a military officer, but beyond.
[00:16:29.520] - Mark Hasara
Okay. The very first chapter. You never forget your first combat mission, do you, John? The first time that you're in front of rounds coming at you, you never forget that. You're seeing the white elephant for the first time. My first combat mission was the opening eye of Desert Storm, refueling what's called the F4G Wild Weasel. Their job is to go into Baghdad and take down the air defenses with a missile that is appropriately called HARM, high-speed anti-radiation missile, that has quarter-inch tungsten steel cubes in its warhead. That was the gatekeeper, though. If that mission of 12 airplanes and their jammers didn't get their gas and didn't get in there, nobody went in there. No pressure, right? The very first time I flew that mission, and on the radio for the very first time, Iraqi fighters were taking off. Everything is getting really busy, okay? You're scared. You are. You have to be, but you have to deal with it, okay? John Wayne, courage is waiting one minute longer. Just keep going. That's what we did. We had one of the F-4s couldn't get gas because they had a fuel system problem. My job is to make sure that Coors, they were named after beer, 3-1 through 3-4, were full of gas.
[00:18:06.080] - Mark Hasara
We got to the end air refueling point, and I kept going with two other tankers behind me as a three-ship. We had Coors, LoneStar, and Michelob. They're all named after beer. The jammers were all named after household tools. It was Drill 71, 72 and 73. But that was my job. I dropped them off two miles from the Iraqi border. But that was my job. Sometimes you have to look at, Hey, I'm scared out of my wits, but I've got a mission to do. You compartmentalize that fear and that trepidation, and you just do the mission. That is the first lesson on courage that I had in the book. That was the very first lesson learned of my very first combat mission. It takes some courage to go out there and do this and put your life on the line. As you know, there is no time stamp on our oath of office. Even after we retire, they can call us back. But still, that courage piece, I think, was the most important of that particular mission. Then after you flew a couple of missions, it was like, Okay, now it's boring again. You want boring All right.
[00:19:30.880] - Mark Hasara
The airplanes come up, get their gas and leave. Come up, get their gas and leave. But every once in a while, it gets sporting where you have 32 F-16s that didn't get pre-strike refueled, and We had to go 40 miles into Iraq to pick these guys up as a five-ship of tankers. The guy that came to my boom, the first guy that came to my boom had 800 pounds of gas. He was going to fly for six more minutes and then run out gas. So things are tense. But again, your mission is to offload the gas. And sometimes that requires you going into bad guy airspace. But all of those guys got to sleep in their own beds that night, nobody was taken prisoner. Nobody had to punch out.
[00:20:18.480] - John S. Berry
Well, let's talk about the... Obviously, the courage lesson, I think, is something that everybody in the military learns at some point. But the other lesson is that, uh-oh, moment, where there's a problem that you didn't know about. Let's take us to those 17 planes that didn't get fueled, because I'm sure most of our listeners can relate to that moment.
[00:20:40.900] - Mark Hasara
Perfect. See, this is really, this talks to the flexibility of our military. I walk into the building with my crew of three other people. I've got my boom operator who manages the refueling boom in the back, a navigator, a copilot, and myself as the aircraft commander. We're walking in, and D. Wright, we called him, he was the deputy of the mission planning cell, is up on top, the second floor, looking down at us that's where we come in. He goes, are you coming in to fly? Yeah, sir, I'm coming to fly. Your mission is canceled. Go straight to mission planning away from me there. We're like, D. Wright, what the heck is going on? He goes, A package of F-16 didn't get... Sixteens didn't get pre-strike refueling, and you are the lifeline that's going to get them home. We're like, Wait, what? He goes, Yeah, they didn't get pre-strike refueled. They're going to be so low on gas, you guys may have to go into Iraq. I'm thinking, Okay. Two other crews had already been tagged. It wasn't five, it was four airplanes. Then a guard airplane from Lincoln, Nebraska, was the other airplane, all right? I know Dan Favreut was the aircraft commander in the first one.
[00:22:04.680] - Mark Hasara
Heidi Hernandez was in the second one. My crew was in the third one. A guy named Walrus, because he had this big handlebar mustache, was in the fourth airplane. They told us, you're going to have to go into Iraq to pick these guys up. We don't know how far. Sure enough, we turned and went north. Of course, we're telling AWAC, the command-and-control airplane, you tell us if anything's coming close to us, all right? Do you have people that can support us. They said, we're gathering all those people right now, the F-15s to protect you from the MiGs, the Wild Weasels to protect you from the ground defenses. All of this is coming together at 545 miles an hour, 28,000 feet. Actually, we were 21 to 23,000 feet. We turned north because the AWAC said, Go as far north as you dare go. Well, what does that mean, as far north as I dare go? Just keep heading north. Dan says, Okay, make sure we've got this support around us and we could see the airplanes joining on us, particularly F-15s up above us. When we got to the air refueling frequency, the mission commander of the F-16s said, I'll call your turn.
[00:23:21.200] - Mark Hasara
We're heading at each other with like a thousand knots of overtake, all right? In about 23 miles, he said, Turn south now. We go into this turn, and as we're turning south, it's raining F-16s, 32 F-16s, because they were up at 48,000 feet hanging on the blades that max conserve to conserve their gas. We had it was Pug 1 through 8, eight airplanes on each tanker. They come down and they're asking, Okay, How much do you have now? How much do you have? This one captain comes to our boom with 800 pounds, and he says to us, Boom, we got one chance to do this, and then I'm going to have to go over the side. Because you don't say, Eject over the radio unless you're going to do it. The boom operator said, Come straight to the nozzle. He did. It came right to the nozzle. Rick plugged him, and we gave all eight of them about a thousand pounds of comfort gas, and then we cycled them all through for their get home gas. As we kept going south, they refueled, got all their gas, and they said, Thank you, guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming up and getting us, all right?
[00:24:39.800] - Mark Hasara
Then AWAC calls us and says, Turn heading 270 now. We're like, is somebody going to shoot us down? Something going to happen here? We go, and Dan in the first jet goes, what's going on? He says, we need you to move over to Western Iraq now. We thought, okay, what's going on? An F-14 crew had gotten shot down the night before, and they found him. Unfortunately, the Iraqis found the F-14 back seater first, but Boots Jones was in the middle of getting picked up. Again, John, this is all on the fly. This is all happening real-time, all these changes. We had to refuel F-4 Wild Weasels and the A-10s, and there's a hundred knot difference between their air speeds for refueling. We just went into this big circle so that the back guys refueling the hogs could use angular cutoff to stay in position. You're thinking about all this in your head while you're doing all this, okay? Sure enough, they get Boots Jones up off the ground, and they get him back to the USS Saratoga. It's about, let's see, 2004. I'm at the Joint Force of Staff College teaching campaign planning. Captain Brooks Boatright, our Commandant, says, Hey, you need to go over and talk to that guy right there.
[00:26:16.360] - Mark Hasara
I go, why is that? He says, just go over and look at his name tag. It was Boots Jones. I said, Boots, I'm one of those tankers that was above you trying to get you out. He said, Sluggo, drinks are on me. As long as I'm here, you'll never have to buy another drink.
[00:26:31.580] - John S. Berry
That's great.
[00:26:34.420] - Mark Hasara
But again, all of this is happening on the fly. It's intuitive expertise, as we call it, okay? You intuitively know what you need to do because you've been trained so well, and you're trained to use all of these different concepts to help you perform a mission like that, because all of this, everything we did that day was on the fly. It wasn't pre-planned, it wasn't anything. But yet we were able to maintain a four-ship of formations, refuel these F-16s, get them out of Iraq, turn, go over Western Iraq, get a pilot off the ground. Unfortunately, we didn't get his back seater, Larry Slate. But again, all of this is happening. Then you get on the ground, and you go, okay, what just happened to us? But the wing commander from the F-16 unit called our wing commander and says, these guys wouldn't have gotten home if it wasn't for you guys. Thanks. That's the satisfaction, I think, of flying on the tanker was. We have a lot of saves, a lot of people we've saved that were low on gas, and you just audible at the scrimmage line and go for it.
[00:27:57.960] - John S. Berry
The great thing is you capture these lessons learned, you captured the stories, and of course, you captured the lessons from the Cockpit, which is also a podcast. Yes, it is. I got to ask you, where did the Call Sign Sluggo come from?
[00:28:12.060] - Mark Hasara
The Call Sign Sluggo came actually during pilot training, okay? I struggled through pilot training because I didn't have any flying time before I got there. You have to bring your birth certificate with you to prove you're an American citizen. The nurse looks at it and goes, 10 pounds, 14 ounces, 23. 5 inches tall. What a Sluggo. You're not going to live that down. That's going to stick with you for a while. I actually got mine in pilot Training.
[00:28:45.830] - John S. Berry
Got it. What I love about your story, Mark, is that you're a man of conviction, which is more important than confidence. Going in, people told you couldn't do it, you couldn't be a pilot, you weren't smart enough, but you put in the time, and you completed the mission. I think sometimes as leaders, we have to have the conviction that we will win the battle. Yes. In our own personal lives, we will win that fight. We will achieve our own personal missions. I think a lot of times someone can come in confident, but it's pretty easy to beat down their confidence. But when someone has a conviction like you did, that since you were five years old, you knew you were going to do this, then no one was going to stop you. I think this is a very important lesson to that. And obviously, it bleeds over into what you accomplished in combat and in the military, because you knew that lives were on the line and that you had to be able to think on your feet. But also, it's not like you were just winging it. I mean, you were an expert, and you put in the time, studied, and then when things happened, you were prepared.
[00:29:47.820] - John S. Berry
And that's what I like with the lessons from the book, is that it's not just about, yes, you have to be flexible, but the way you get the flexibility is that you understand mission planning. You're an expert in the areas where other people expect you to be an expert. Then when the problem happens, you're ready.
[00:30:05.480] - Mark Hasara
Yeah, it's that intuitive expertise that kicks in. I'll tell you one more story. It was the worst four years of my career, but actually the greatest learning opportunity for me. Everybody's heard of Top Gun. The Air Force has its program. It's called the Air Force's Weapon School at Nellis Air Force Base. I got to stand up that school for the Air Force tanker community. I actually staffed the package, found the location, picked the initial cadre, and then we put a syllabus together. It had never been done before. There was a lot of naysayers for that. You guys don't have weapons. Why are you going to do this weapon school thing? But we had to take all of this knowledge that we had in our community and put it together at a school where we could train all of that intuitive expertise into people. Again, we had a lot of stab in the back. You're not going to ever be part of the school or anything like that. But guess what? We did it. Now we're part of the Air Forces Weapon School. This is the patch we wear right here, the bullet on target. Now we have a group of extremely well-trained people at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels that can put a system of air refueling together, literally in like 45 minutes to an hour.
[00:31:39.680] - Mark Hasara
Sometimes that's all the time you have. That's what these schools are for. My school was built to build, teach, and lead. That's the Air Force Weapon School model, build, teach, lead. To take that information that people like me with all this experience had and give it to everybody else so that the job is your faster, lighter, stronger as a community when it comes time to do things like just happened in Venezuela. Not only are, we call it the patch wearers. Not only are they doing the planning, but most other patch wearers are flying the missions. There's an extremely highly trained group of folks out there that are planning the missions, leading the missions. In the Venezuela case, you can see how successful it was.
[00:32:39.460] - John S. Berry
Absolutely. Where can Veterans learn more about your book, Tanker Pilot? Where can they get a copy?
[00:32:48.440] - Mark Hasara
You know what? I'm going to have them contact me because if you go to Amazon, I don't know why, but the softback reprints have black and white pictures instead of color pictures.
[00:33:01.260] - John S. Berry
Oh, yeah. You got to see these color pictures. They're glossy. I mean, these are amazing. The black and white doesn't do justice.
[00:33:14.500] - Mark Hasara
Hold that up one more time real quick. Hold that up one more time real quick. Because I got another great story. Because, John, this is another lesson I learned from being in the military. The Air Force is really there to serve you guys. Yes. The Air Force is really there to help you guys on the ground. The pictures of the tanker in the turn and the two Tomcats there. That gentleman is now a very dear friend of mine. The first time I went out onto an aircraft carrier, he was my escort because both of us love taking pictures of each other or taking pictures. We both had our cameras in the cockpit, all right? And so that picture right there, the two pictures, were taken within just minutes of each other. I'm taking pictures of him while he's taking pictures of me on the same mission out over the Red Sea with a fully loaded Tomcat with a full load of air-to-air missiles, okay? And everybody talks about inner service rivalry and everything, but when it comes time to do the mission, we all work together, don't we, John?
[00:34:19.820] - John S. Berry
Absolutely.
[00:34:20.980] - Mark Hasara
We all work together, okay? We sit down around the table with our cigars and our whiskey, okay? I'm a member of the LDS Church, so I am always the designated driver. We work the problems out, all right? The reason I wanted you to hold that up is because I would tell all of your listeners, never, ever pass up an opportunity to learn how your customers do business. A lot of people say, Okay, our customer wants this and wants that and everything like that. Do they really? Go out and find out. I spent a couple of days on an aircraft carrier. I've got 10 catapult assistance take offs and 10 arrested landings on eight aircraft carriers. Because I had to learn how our customers did their business. I was a better tanker pilot for it. All of you business folks out there, I want you to learn that. Sit down with your customers and let them ask the hard questions. Are we serving you correctly? What are we not doing? What are we doing good? But more importantly, forget all the good stuff. What are we doing that we should be doing or are not doing?
[00:35:31.020] - Mark Hasara
One of the reasons that we were so successful during Desert Storm and subsequent air campaigns is because we finally realized we had to go out to the aircraft carrier, talk to the people that were planning their missions, flying their missions, and coordinate all of our customer support into that Navy culture, and it worked fabulously. Then in our weapons school, I taught that portion because I'm the one who had been on all the aircraft carriers. I knew our customer. I knew how our customer operated. I didn't realize that they had a classified manual that had all this in it. Here we are at an Air Force School teaching out of a Navy tactics manual, but they were our customer, and this is how they do their business. That's one of the lessons from those two pictures right there of Dave Parsons, Call Sign, Hey Joe, and me and the tanker, learning how our customer does business. Again, do it face-to-face. Sit down, let them ask the hard questions or say the hard things. This is really good, but you're lacking here because, again, you take those lessons learned, and those lessons learned now become the standard operating procedure.
[00:36:49.200] - Mark Hasara
Every lesson learned is a problem solved. That's what I tell everybody when I speak. Every lesson learned is a problem solved. But you have to write that stuff down so that it perpetuates in to the next generation and the next generation.
[00:37:02.760] - John S. Berry
I think that is outstanding advice. Even for me, a guy who was an infantry officer who had my blue cord taken away and told I was going to become a logistician, as a logistician, I thought, Well, I've done this before. I know what you're doing, but I still had to listen. I think that that is the key. Even if you've done the job before, a couple of years prior, things change. Keep listening. Always listen, because it's the only way you could really provide great support to your customers. You're right. Hey, I love I'm not being the Infantry guy, but when you start supporting the Infantry, you realize like, Oh, my gosh, I've been there. I've been in that situation where I did not have the logistical support. I don't want to be that person. I want to be the person that delivers. And you're right. Unless you know what they're going through, you cannot do That's what we're doing. We're going to look at that. Mark, I'll come back to it. Where can our readers find your book and where can they learn more about you? And more importantly, where can they listen to or find the Lessons from the Cockpit podcast?
[00:37:57.220] - Mark Hasara
Okay. It's on my YouTube at Mark Hasara. If you want a book, here's the thing about the book, we have a second printing, and I have them downstairs. They have the color pictures in them, all right? So, I will give you permission to give out my email and have your listeners just email me and we'll work out. Here's the good thing about this, okay? All the money goes to a 501(C)(3). I'm not making any money off this. The Airlift Tanker Association, I'm the chairman of the Heritage Committee, where we focus on identity, belonging, and legacy. We reprinted the book, and I take it to all these different bases and everything. I sign the book and give it to people. I charge 25 bucks if I have to mail it to you. If I see in person, I don't charge it for the postage and everything like that. But again, just have them email me at mark@markhasara. Com. It's my name. My email is my name, mark@markhasara. Com. It's that easy.
[00:39:01.720] - John S. Berry
Outstanding. Well, Mark, thank you so much for sharing your lessons here today. We'll end this with the after-action review, your example of great leadership and your example of horrible leadership. We'll start with the bad and then with the good.
[00:39:15.340] - Mark Hasara
Okay. Bad leadership. You know what? The good and the bad I'm going to give you go very hand in hand. I have worked for a leader who said, You will only do it my way. He wasn't from my community, didn't fly my airplane, didn't understand the nature of some of the missions we were doing. In this particular case, the missions that we were doing were all from Washington, DC, and they were all what we call SAP/SAR missions, Special Access missions. I'll never forget standing in front of him and him just pointing at me going, You will never fly any of these missions unless I know about them. You will never fly any of these missions without me being a part of the planning process, yada, yada. He was very close-minded, had a very large ego, as you can tell. My boss and I walked out of that meeting and went, What did we just learn from this? We learned that we got to keep him out of the loop. That is a breakdown of the system. When your leader's leader is one of those type of very toxic leaders who must micromanage everything. He had been there very long, had never flown in a tanker, didn't want to fly in a tanker.
[00:40:47.580] - Mark Hasara
I just remember walking out of there going, Oh, my gosh, if we ever have to do one of these things, either I'm going to get fired or he's going to get fired. Because the folks from Washington, DC, that ran two of these programs, which believe it or not, later on, we exercised one of them, they're never going to let him stick his finger in this. It's going to get ugly. When the captain, the '03 and the '06 butt heads, that's usually a proposition for failure for the captain.
[00:41:27.680] - John S. Berry
Right.
[00:41:30.000] - Mark Hasara
But then, right behind him, came one of the best leaders I've ever worked for. His call sign was Biggs. He replaced this guy, fortunately. When Kim Il-Sung died back in 1994, he went to what's called a Hot Wash, an after-action review, just like we're having now. They said, you guys are the 18th Imperial Wing. You couldn't fight You had two wars on two fronts if your life is dependent on it. He was just mad and frustrated at people telling him that. He came back home, and I had a sticky note on my desk. It said, Sluggo, see me ASAP, Biggs. He's the third in command of the base.
[00:42:21.080] - Mark Hasara
There's only two outcomes of a sticky note like that on your desk, good or bad. I went to Mary, his exec. I walked in and I said, I'm here to see Biggs. Why are you here? I said, and I held up the sticky note and she goes, Oh, Sluggo, there's only two outcomes of a note like that on your desk, okay? Yeah, I know. My boss said the same thing. He comes out of his office, he goes, Oh, good, good, good. You're here. Stay right there. I got to make a phone call, and he goes back in. Well, one of the other colonels was there, and he goes, what are you doing here, Sluggo? I held up the note and let him look at it. He goes, Oh, Sluggo, there's only two outcomes of a note like that on your desk. Okay. I walk in. He says, Okay, come on in. I walk in, and not knowing if I'm in trouble, I go, Sir, Captain Mark R. Hasara reporting as ordered, sir. He goes, what are you doing? I said, Boss, when you leave a sticky note like this, there's only two outcomes. Am I in trouble?
[00:43:22.280] - Mark Hasara
And he goes, No. Should you be? No. I said, I said, Biggs, why am I here? He goes, I'm tired of being told we're the 18th Imperial Wing who can't fight two wars on two fronts. I want you to make me an exercise where we have a war down here and we deploy a package somewhere else and we fight a war there. All right? Use your imagination. I've never had a colonel tell me that before, John. Use your imagination. Come to me if you need stuff signed out that need to go, messages that need to go out, all these kinds of things. Go back to the office, and I was in weapons and plans at the time. Go back to the office, get Boomer involved, who was an F-15 guy. But I want this secret no cadena. Nobody on the base can know this is happening. I want you to use your information warfare group that I had because I was the head of the information warfare tactical deception was a call back then. We built an exercise that lasted for a week, and we used our imagination. We actually brought a carrier battle group up.
[00:44:42.060] - Mark Hasara
We had a downed airman scenario. We even let the Army bring those little smokey sands and the Stinger missiles to track the F-15s that were trying to find the pilot in the water before they got rescued. All right? I would tell all your listeners, when you let your subordinates use their imagination to solve some of these complex problems, you'll be floored and stunned at how good they really are and how they can put all of the pieces together, and synthesis, one of the higher levels of learning, synthesize, how do all these pieces fit together so that I can put them all together in one exercise, and we exercised the entire wing, the helicopters, the tankers, the F-15s, the AWACs, everything. And we did it. We had only six weeks to do it, Boomer and I. We had to do this really fast. But you know what? I came out of that with an incredible sense of confidence, all right? I felt bulletproof, John, because I had a commander who said, Use your imagination to build this exercise. I've never forgotten that.
[00:46:06.300] - John S. Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we seek to help Veterans build an even bigger, better future after military service. Unfortunately for some of our Veterans, the roadblock to a better future is that they are not receiving all of the benefits that they earned. If you need help appealing a VA disability decision, contact Berry Law.