ON CHARACTER

The former general offers nostrums for how to be a better human in a worsening world.

Character, McChrystal writes, is “the appropriate destination of our life’s journey,” something that’s learned along the way and that results from the confluence of one’s convictions and the discipline needed to live up to them. Discipline means, at one level, that you decide to undertake a challenge, you undertake it, you do it again, and pretty soon it’s ingrained. “The most effective people I know can’t help themselves—disciplined pursuit of their goals is an unshakable habit,” he writes to underscore the point. It’s altogether too easy to shirk, to pass the buck, to fail—and then to leave the field to someone else. Most of his lessons have a martial bent, and there McChrystal often draws from the same well as he has in other books. He clearly hasn’t recovered from the psychic blow of being relieved of his military command for incautious comments made around a scoop-hunting reporter, for one thing. But there’s a new, subtle critique at play here, too: One doesn’t have to read too deeply between the lines to know who he’s talking about when he writes, “When the best, most qualified people are silent, the field is left to the less principled and less qualified—often the demagogues.” Even less subtle is his passing remark on the events of Jan. 6, 2021: “Rhetoric, in person and online, trumpeted the need to stop ‘them’ from stealing an election.” Like a good soldier, McChrystal blames the foot soldiers less than “those who stayed on the sidelines.” Suffice it to say that although he doesn’t profess to be woke, he urges that the opposite of wokeness not become the norm again and that the military remain above the daily fray, since “a politicized military is a dangerous institution in any nation.”

It’s not Marcus Aurelius, but there’s plenty of thoughtful, soldierly advice to chew on in McChrystal’s pages.