The Beer Wasn’t the Point

What the Air Force Lost When We Stopped Knowing Our Troops

At the end of a particularly miserable day on the flightline, sometimes your supervisor would be waiting as you headed out the door. He might reach into a cooler and hand you a cold beer. If you didn’t drink, there were sodas. Nobody made a speech. There wasn’t an award package involved, and nobody was collecting names so they could report participation at the next staff meeting. It was simply a small gesture that said, I saw what you did today. I know it sucked. Good job.

The beer wasn’t really the point. I spent all of my Air Force career in aircraft maintenance, where long days, bad weather, broken airplanes, changing priorities, and seemingly impossible deadlines were simply part of the job. Maintenance people complained about all of it, of course. That’s practically part of the career field. But we also knew each other, and looking around Air Force installations today, I sometimes wonder whether we’ve lost some of that.

I’m not talking about squadron picnics, mandatory Christmas parties, commander’s calls disguised as morale events, or organized “team building.” Most of us hated those things back then too. Putting 200 people in a room and ordering them to have fun has rarely created much morale, unless someone did something really stupid and it made for a great story. I’m talking about something much smaller: a supervisor sitting down with three or four troops after a difficult shift, a staff sergeant buying an airman a beer at the club, two maintainers sitting at a table complaining about the airplane that just consumed their entire day, or a supervisor noticing that the normally talkative kid sitting across from him hasn’t said much tonight. Those moments mattered.

Knowing Your Troops

There is a difference between knowing someone’s personnel record and knowing the person. A supervisor can know an airman’s qualifications, training status, PT score, leave balance, and performance history without knowing much about the human being standing in front of him. Informal interaction filled in the rest.

When you spent a little time with your troops away from the immediate pressure of the job, conversations happened that probably weren’t going to happen while standing in the office. You learned whose wife was having a difficult pregnancy, who was having money problems, whose marriage wasn’t going particularly well, who was homesick, who hated their assignment, who was thinking about reenlisting, and who was counting the days until separation.

Sometimes you learned absolutely nothing important. You talked about cars, airplanes, football, fishing, motorcycles, or whatever else people talk about when nobody has an agenda. That mattered too, because relationships aren’t built exclusively during crises. If the first meaningful personal conversation you ever have with an airman happens after he gets into trouble, you’ve already missed a lot of opportunities.

Sometimes It Was Just One Beer

Over the years, the military became increasingly concerned about alcohol, and there were good reasons for that. Drunk driving killed people. Alcohol abuse destroyed careers and families. The military had legitimate reasons to become far less tolerant of behavior that earlier generations sometimes dismissed too casually.

But large organizations have a tendency to deal with complicated problems by eliminating situations rather than managing them. It’s easier to say don’t do this than to say exercise judgment. Gradually, many supervisors got the message that socializing with subordinates was something best avoided entirely. From a risk-management perspective, that’s understandable. From a leadership perspective, something was lost.

Having a beer with your troops didn’t mean getting drunk with your troops. There were boundaries. A supervisor who became falling-down drunk in front of his airmen wasn’t demonstrating leadership. Neither was the NCO trying to be one of the guys, buying endless rounds, or encouraging an airman who had already had too much. Good NCOs generally understood the difference.

Not everybody drank, either. That’s something easily forgotten when people look backward at military culture from another era. If somebody didn’t drink, you handed him a Coke. The point wasn’t that everybody consumed alcohol. The point was that everybody was welcome to stay for a few minutes.

The Five-Minute Morale Program

Some of the most effective morale programs I ever saw probably lasted five minutes. Imagine a maintenance crew that has just spent twelve hours fighting an airplane. It’s hot, everybody is filthy, the original problem turned into three other problems, Production has been calling every twenty minutes, parts didn’t arrive when they were supposed to, and somebody dropped a tool into a place apparently designed by an engineer specifically to prevent human hands from reaching it.

Eventually, somehow, the airplane is fixed. The supervisor could simply say, “See you tomorrow.” Or he could reach into a cooler and say, “Good work today. Want one?” Beer or soda. That’s it.

That small gesture communicated quite a bit without anyone needing to say it: I know today was hard. I noticed what you did. We’re finished. Sit down for a minute. There was no PowerPoint presentation about resilience. Nobody needed to explain the four pillars of wellness. Nobody was required to participate. A group of tired people simply stood around for a few minutes and decompressed together, and then they went home. You would be surprised how much loyalty five minutes can buy.

The Conversation You Didn’t Schedule

The most important part often wasn’t the group interaction. It was what happened afterward. Maybe everyone else left and one airman hung around and finally said, “Hey, Sarge, can I ask you something?” Every experienced NCO knows that sentence, and whatever comes next may have absolutely nothing to do with aircraft maintenance.

That’s the advantage of informal relationships: they create openings. An airman who isn’t comfortable walking into your office and announcing that he has a problem might mention it while you’re sitting beside him drinking a Coke. Sometimes you didn’t even need him to say anything. If you’ve spent enough informal time around people, you learn their baseline. You know who’s normally loud, who’s quiet, who jokes constantly, and who rarely does. When somebody changes, you notice.

Maybe the conversation begins with a simple, “What’s going on with you?” The first answer will often be “Nothing,” but a supervisor who actually knows the person may know better. Sometimes that was the beginning of the conversation the airman needed. We talk constantly today about looking out for our people. It’s considerably easier to recognize that somebody isn’t acting like himself when you actually know what himself looks like.

Professional Doesn’t Have to Mean Distant

Somewhere along the way, I think we began confusing professionalism with distance. Certainly there must be boundaries between supervisors and subordinates. Favoritism is destructive, inappropriate relationships undermine authority, and supervisors cannot become drinking buddies with selected subordinates and then expect everyone else to believe that treatment at work is impartial. Those are legitimate concerns, but the alternative doesn’t have to be isolation.

A supervisor can maintain authority while still knowing his people. In fact, I’d argue that good supervisors have always done exactly that. My troops knew I was their supervisor, and they also knew I was a human being. Those ideas weren’t contradictory.

Sometimes familiarity actually strengthened authority because people understood the person giving the order. They knew what he expected, what he would tolerate, and, perhaps most importantly, whether he would stand behind them when things went wrong. You don’t build that kind of trust with emails and mandatory fun days.

What Replaced It?

Walk around some military installations today and something feels different. That’s admittedly subjective. Every generation looks backward through its own experiences, and today’s Air Force faces pressures that mine didn’t. But I sometimes sense more tension and less ease between people. Everyone seems busy and careful, and when the workday ends, people disappear.

The military has responded to concerns about morale, resilience, isolation, and mental health with programs, training, surveys, briefings, apps, and organized events. Some of those efforts undoubtedly help people. But institutions have a tendency to create formal programs to replace things that once happened informally, and rarely for the better.

You can’t schedule friendship or order trust, and you can’t create genuine concern between a supervisor and an airman by adding another annual training requirement. Those relationships are usually built in dozens of tiny encounters that don’t look important while they’re happening: five minutes after work, lunch with two troops, a conversation beside a toolbox, a Coke at the club, or a beer after a particularly miserable shift.

Reasonable Boundaries

I’m not suggesting the Air Force return to an era when excessive drinking was shrugged off as part of military life. Some things needed to change. But there is an enormous amount of territory between tolerating alcohol abuse and treating every informal interaction between supervisors and troops as a potential problem.

Leadership requires judgment, and judgment means accepting that rules cannot anticipate every human interaction. A good supervisor knows that having one beer with an airman isn’t the same thing as getting drunk with him. He knows that talking about someone’s family isn’t an invitation to pry into their private life. He knows that being approachable doesn’t require becoming someone’s best friend, and he understands that rank creates responsibilities that remain in effect whether you’re standing on the flightline or sitting across a table.

Those aren’t complicated concepts. We trusted NCOs to make decisions involving multimillion-dollar aircraft, explosives, weapons, classified information, and people’s lives. Surely we could trust them to figure out when to stop at one beer.

The Beer Wasn’t the Point

I still remember those small gestures. After a brutal day’s work, somebody reached into a cooler and handed you something cold. If you wanted a beer, there was a beer. If you didn’t drink, there was a soda. There was no ulterior motive and no leadership theory behind it. Your supervisor was simply telling you that your effort had been noticed.

Maybe you stood around for five minutes and complained about the airplane. Maybe everybody laughed about something that had happened that day. Maybe one person stayed behind because he needed to talk. Then the next day you went back to work. The airplane would break again, the schedule would change again, and somebody would need people to stay late again. When your supervisor asked for a little more, you were often willing to give it, not because of the beer, but because you knew him, and you knew that he knew you.

That’s the part I worry we’ve lost. The Air Force didn’t become less professional when supervisors occasionally shared a beer with their troops. Done properly, those small moments helped create the relationships that made professional military organizations work.

We were right to address drunk driving and alcohol abuse, and we were right to demand appropriate relationships between supervisors and subordinates. But perhaps, somewhere in our effort to eliminate every possible risk, we eliminated some things that were worth keeping. The beer was never the point. Knowing your troops was.

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Dave Chamberlin runs a consulting and training company and brings more than 40 years of civilian and military aviation experience to his work. He retired as a Chief Master Sergeant after 38 years as an aircraft crew chief in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard, and has also worked in technical, instructor, consultant, and leadership roles. He holds an FAA Airframe and Powerplant license and a master’s degree in aeronautical science, and his writing often focuses on military issues, especially those affecting aircraft maintenance personnel.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.