Recognition Training in the Latrines

When his 1979 Air Force interviewer asked Bob Burns about integrity — expecting, perhaps, a tidy homily — he reached instead for the story of how he had once cheerfully falsified a training report. It is one of the most revealing things he ever said about command.

An Order From Above

Headquarters, Eighth Air Force, issued a directive: every unit would conduct formal aircraft-recognition training and log the hours. It was a sensible-sounding order from a desk far from the flight line. But Bob’s group was at war, flying combat around the clock. Pulling exhausted crews into a classroom to study aircraft silhouettes was, to him, a useless maneuver — time and energy his people did not have, spent on a box to be checked.

Silhouettes in the Latrines

So he found a way to satisfy the order without obeying it. He had recognition silhouette sheets tacked up in every latrine on the base. Then he did the arithmetic a quartermaster would admire: average time a man spends in the latrine per day, multiplied by the number of men on the base — and he reported that total as the unit’s aircraft-recognition training time. On paper, the group was studying constantly. In practice, the men were merely, and inevitably, looking at the wall.

“Fraudulent to Some Degree”

What makes the story Bob’s rather than just a clever war anecdote is that he refused to dress it up. He knew exactly what he had done.

It was, he admitted, “fraudulent to some degree.”

And yet he stood by it — because, in his judgment, it shielded his people from a directive that would have cost them something real in exchange for nothing. That he chose this as his answer to a question about integrity is the point. For Bob, integrity was not the same as obedience. Sometimes it was the willingness to take the weight of a decision onto yourself.

“Acting as God”

He had a name for that willingness. He called it “acting as God” — overriding a superior’s directive on the strength of your own judgment about what was right. He did not pretend it was free. Such defiance, he said, carries consequences, and the officer who indulges in it had better be prepared to pay them. For the ultimate example, he reached past his own latrine sheets to the largest case he knew: General MacArthur defying President Truman — and being relieved for it.

It is a startlingly honest piece of self-knowledge from a career officer: that the chain of command is not a substitute for conscience, that conscience sometimes requires you to break the chain, and that doing so is a kind of presumption you answer for. He had quietly “acted as God” over a stack of recognition sheets in 1943, and he was still turning the morality of it over thirty-six years later.