“I arrived in Qatar March 11, 2003,” Navy Lieutenant Sean McDougal noted. His job there at CENTCOM was to take night watch at the Navy desk, which meant anything dealing with Navy assets and friendly forces.
“Someone would turn to me and say ‘Navy desk, tell this country to send this ship here,’ or ‘what is the status of that ship there?’ That sort of thing,” he said.
McDougal became friends with Major Randolph Winge called “Troll,” who had the same job at the Air Force desk. And because they shared the same twelve hour shifts, they spent a lot of time together, especially mealtime. They had something in common; both prayed before eating.
“Didn’t make a big deal of it,” McDougal said of his low-key approach. He simply bowed head and said grace silently.
“I noticed that when Troll and I would start praying, other people who sat down with us, they would pray also.”
The habit caught on, an unexpected leading by example. But the custom also brought out cultural differences with America’s allies. A British captain told McDougal he would never fit into the British Army because they “don’t display such things in public.”
The openness of Americans verses the privacy of Britons was soon strikingly apparent. At the beginning of the war, an American reporter gave away a location of troops on LIVE television. Something similar happened with a British reporter regarding an amphibious landing.
“The British put that reporter in a fighter jet and flew him out. They told their newspapers they couldn’t print some stuff,” McDougal said, noting that the Brits don’t truly have freedom of speech and press the way Americans do.
“If a helicopter goes down, we (United States military) are trained to give away information immediately. If we don’t know the answer, we say we’re working on it. The Brits won’t tell you anything until they have the whole story. They hold everything until they have all the facts,” McDougal said.
McDougal learned from a British watch officer that because Britain is so small in landmass, that one newspaper in Britain can reach a tenth of the population there. “That was the beauty of working with foreign governments and foreign people on what we call a deck plate or grass roots level. I now understand why other countries do what they do.”
Little did he know that taking stock of these seemingly small cultural differences praying before meals and freedom of speech was preparing him for a moment requiring courage. He was building crucial relationships with the Brits that would enable him to stand firm in the future.
Keep me from being so self absorbed today that I miss discerning the needs of those around me.
“He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.” (Daniel 2:21b)