If I said, “Let’s take a “fast cruise,” you might think I meant four days out of Mobile, hardly time to make it to Cozumel and back. No, I would have been referencing the Navy’s practice of scheduling a ship for a mock underway period alongside the pier before a long deployment overseas.
The ship remains in homeport, tied securely to the pier, but inside she operates as though already at sea. The brow is up and no one goes ashore; watches are set, often port and starboard; systems are tested; routines are practiced; and weak spots are discovered and repaired while it’s still safe to fix them. It’s a rehearsal that prevents real trouble later.
As we approach a new year, that idea offers a good metaphor for life. Rather than prepare, many of us just drift into the next chapter of our lives like a ship without a rudder, hoping that things will “work out,” that we can stay out of trouble, and avoid what I have come to think of as the “one bad mistake.” We like to think that life falls apart suddenly - one terrible moment, one dramatic failure, one headline-worthy scandal; but in real life, disaster usually arrives quietly. One careless decision, one lapse in judgement, one bad mistake, can trigger a chain reaction that launches us on the road to perdition. Our lives can slip into chaos, like slowly falling dominos.
A ship runs a fast cruise not because trouble is guaranteed, but because trouble is possible and preparation is wisdom. The new year gives us the same chance. In the quiet and safety of your own home, before you are beseeched by the vicissitudes of life and the mysteries of chance and fate, you can prepare yourself for the hard choices to come.
To give you some perspective, I can think of several individuals or incidents in the past where one bad mistake resulted in a history changing disaster, and where a little forethought and planning might have changed the future. For example, a few summers ago, I was in Montana and had the opportunity to visit the site of General George Armstrong Custer’s defeat and death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Standing on the quiet, lonely hillside, with the wind rustling the ankle-high grass, amid a few gravestones marking where the victors remembered Custer and other soldiers fell, I thought of the hubris and arrogance which led to Custer’s one big mistake – disregarding the reconnaissance information provided by his Native American scouts and underestimating his opponent. Not only did this mistake kill him, but it also wiped out the other 267 members of his 7th Calvary command.
Japan made its own fateful mistake in 1941when it decided to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor. Instead of weakening the country, Japan awakened American resolve. Rather than crippling an enemy, Japan united a nation, expanded the war, and sealed their own defeat, especially after the subsequent Battle of Midway. Although we civilians pay “lip service” to the memory of the 7 December 1941 attack today, it is still very important to the active U. S. Navy. When a Navy ship from the United States first enters port at Pearl Harbor, a commemorative wreath is dropped into the water and the ship’s personnel are called to attention while honors are rendered. I have been involved in this ceremony numerous times.
More recently, in October 2015, during Hurricane Joaquin off the Atlantic coast of Florida, the master of the cargo ship, SS El Faro, inextricably disregarded all weather reports and sailed directly into the category 4 storm. The ship went down with all hands, and this loss of 33 lives, the result of one big mistake, has been widely analyzed as a tragic example of misjudging hurricane risk at sea.
In my own lifetime, I’ve seen corporations make bad mistakes which, I suppose can all be traced back to some individual or group decision: Blockbuster’s choice not to buy Netflix; Kodak invented the digital camera and decided to hide it; Coca-Cola decided to reformulate Coke, etc. Much more serious was Boeing’s bad mistake to fast track the launch of their new 737 Max airplane without properly informing/training pilots on the plane’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmenting System (MCAS) resulting in two crashes and the deaths of 346 passengers.
There’s good news, however; it is possible to recover from bad mistakes. We all know of individuals who have quietly defied the odds and recovered from major blunders, and the public record is also full of positive examples. A single failure doesn’t have to be the last chapter. Sometimes it becomes the turning point.
How about Saint Peter? He denied Jesus Christ three times which, on a scale of 1-10 for big-time bad mistakes, is about a 12. Matthew 26:69-75 says that when Jesus was arrested, Peter denied Him three times after first running away. Despite this grave and devastating mistake, he went on to become the leading apostle, preached boldly, and was eventually martyred for his faith. Peter came back; stood firm; and finished faithfully.
While I’ve never understood why the British people summarily dumped Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1946 after he’d held the country together against the Germans during the war (“…We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields and the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender…” - Speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940), there was at least one major bad mistake on his record, and that was his plans for the Battle of Gallipoli. This was a major attempt by the Allies to take the Dardanelles Strait from Turkish forces, capture Istanbul and open a sea route to Russia. The 1915-1916 campaign was an utter failure, with over half a million causalities.
If you’ve ever been to Australia, you know about the popularity of the song, “Waltzing Matilda,” their unofficial national anthem, which gained popularity with wounded troops returning from Gallipoli. Just down the Dardanelles from Gallipoli is the site of the ancient city of Troy. I’ve written in these pages before how I got pressed into tour guide duties as my ships passed this famous city from the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”
I’m dating myself, but what about Chuck Colson (1931-2012). I met him at a book signing during his “second life.” An attorney during the Nixon administration, he had served as Special Counsel to the President and gained a reputation as Nixon’s “hatchet man” or “fixer.” His bad mistake was to get caught up in the Watergate scandal and make an over-zealous defense of Nixon. For his questionable efforts, he was sentenced to serve seven months in Alabama’s Maxwell federal prison. His experience there, among the ill-educated and underprivileged inmates, made him a changed man. He devoted the rest of his life to prison reform.
And there’s Tiger Woods. Personal scandals brought on by bad mistakes destroyed his health, reputation, and career. The rumor was, and I don’t know if it was true, he was undergoing treatment at a facility here in Hattiesburg. In any event, after many wrote him off, he overcame his demons and went on to win the Masters golf championship a fifth time in 2019.
I guess it’s no surprise that one of my favorite novels is “Things Fall Apart” (1958), by the Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, He borrowed the title from W. B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming” (1920), where Yeats wrote in the aftermath of World War I:
Things fall apart, the centre
cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world…
I can’t speak for the world, but I do know that things fall apart and that bad mistakes have caused anarchy in my own life. I would also like to think that I have at least learned a little from my mistakes. As a Navy chaplain for thirty years, I stood with hundreds of sailors at Captain’s Mast for non-judicial punishment and listened to every excuse under the sun for fighting, drunkenness, theft, AWOL, missing movement and, most often, drug violations. Almost without exception, the sailor made one bad mistake which then spiraled out of control and ended up with him in front of the Old Man for punishment.
As I stood by the sailor as his advocate and friend and heard the charges read, I would often think to myself: “There, but for the grace of God go I.” To counter recidivism and for my own edification, I worked out the following simple ways to avoid making bad mistakes which I often shared with sailors in the aftermath of their legal proceeding. If you are wondering about my qualifications to give such advice, about my Bonafide’s, here’s a short list: I am seated in the Pantheon of the Immortals of Bad Judgement; I’ve been awarded the Presidential Medal of Misjudgment, and my picture hangs in the Bad Mistake Hall of Fame.
- Think! Bad mistakes thrive in a “hurry up” situation. Don’t let anyone rush you into deciding or doing something that your gut tells you might be sketchy. Let your wisdom catch up with your emotion. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You will always get caught. For what it’s worth, my mama always said: “Nothing good happens after midnight.” And, oh yes – stay out of Tijuana.
- Ask the right questions. Good outcomes are rarely accidents. They come from asking good questions. A good example from my past is the “Light of Day” test. Back in the 1970s, I taught formal Ethics classes to the midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. When confronted with a decision about whether some action is right or wrong, give it the Light of Day Test: whatever my decision, would I be embarrassed or ashamed if my choice were made common knowledge? If so, I should probably decide something else.
- Get counsel. To avoid mistakes, don’t make important decisions in a vacuum. We all have mentors, people who influenced our lives by advice and example, and I had a master chief petty officer on my first ship who, with a straight face, gave me his philosophy of life: “A sailor’s hat will always blow off in the wind; women rule the world; and things change.” It sounds trite, but if you think about it, it’s rather profound, especially coming from an old man who had been at sea most of his life. It’s a fatalistic worldview, but some things are inevitable and it’s best to figure out the power structure and work within it.
- Tell the truth. One of life’s great lessons is that the cover up ruins far more than the truth. If I might make an analogy – you often hear that “defense” wins football games, and I would offer that this is especially true in personal behavior, in avoiding the “one bad mistake.” On the other hand, no one could argue the value of a good offensive football team. This is particularly on the minds of my family this week as my daughter-in-law’s nephew, Ty Simpson, is the quarterback for the Rose Bowl-bound University of Alabama. The young man doesn’t know me from Adam, but as I watch and listen to his comments and interviews on television, I’m impressed with his humility, dedication to his craft, and obvious spirituality. He exudes truthfulness, and I imagine that’s what makes him a good leader of his team.
So, looking back on 2025, what distinguishes a good year from a bad one? How do you quantify success? Money? Relationships? Grades? Promotions? I think it’s whether we learned anything from the bad mistakes we made. Hopefully, in the new year, neither you nor I will make the bad mistake that cannot be named. But, if we do, we must own it; work through it; learn from it; and grow with it. As for me, at least I’ve learned to stand on my own two knees.
Light a candle for me.
