Risk Management Magazine

As the staff sergeant walked into the military courtroom to hear his fate, he had no idea what was about to happen to his military career. If he had only stopped and thought about what could go wrong, the sequence of events would certainly have been different.

While in Afghanistan on my fourth deployment, I was stationed at Forward Operating Base Findlay-Shields, which was one of the safest locations I’d been over the past 10 years. The FOB was just across the street from Jalalabad, and nothing much happened there during my entire stay — except for that one day.

What do more than 900 combat flight hours, four deployments, over 30 presidential protective details and 22 IEDs disabled have in common? The answer is none gave me the kind of angst as a decision I had to make in the summer of 1998. Sound strange? Read on.