Murphy’s Law: Advice for Naval Leaders

I doubt we give sufficient attention to the power of a man’s last words. In November 2013, Captain Steve Murphy died after a more than two-year fight with lymphoma. A 1991 graduate of the Naval Academy, Olmsted Scholar, and destroyer commander, Steve was at the peak of his career when he was taken from us. What he said is crucial.

When Steve was first diagnosed, he was serving as special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, after which he earned a degree at the National Defense University while undergoing cancer treatment. Beyond the professional achievements, however, was the man.  Steve was a scholar and a leader, and he possessed that rare combination of gifts: action, intellect, and eloquence. He loved the Navy and its people. He cared deeply about the institution—its direction, its health, and its future.

Steve and I met in the summer of 2012, after a friend let me know Steve had been diagnosed with cancer and was facing an uphill battle. We had a cup of coffee, then went for a walk on the Naval Academy Yard. As we turned off Stribling Walk and made our way toward the chapel, he described a remarkable experience he had had during his first round of chemotherapy. While in the throes of treatment, Steve did what many do in the midst of trials. He turned to his faith. He opened his Bible and read the first passage on which his eyes fell.

He was stunned by what he saw. The passage was Isaiah 38, the story of a commanding officer who is stricken with a terminal illness. In the prime of his life, King Hezekiah becomes mortally ill and is told by the prophet Isaiah to “set his house in order,” for his days are surely numbered. “Hezekiah then prayed, saying, ‘O Lord, remember, how I have walked before you in truth with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.’” And he wept. Something must have happened to the king in those moments, some reorientation of life, because he is visited again by the prophet, only this time with a different message. Isaiah tells the king that God has heard his prayer and will add years to his life. And that is what happened. Hezekiah was given a few more years to set his house in order and attend to those things that mattered most.

In 2011, Steve posted an essay about his battle with cancer and how this story spoke to him:

The passage traces the arc of Hezekiah’s experience as he reckoned with this reality, from diagnosis to healing. He was crushed and weakened; and it struck me that in the midst of all of this, [as the king declared] “by such things men live.” This turned me on to the idea that in adversity there can be transformative power. . . . I concluded that the will to live is inextricably linked to the why to live. And in exposing life’s brevity, cancer can restore a sense of life’s abundance and meaning.

As I got to know Steve and saw the way he met his trial, I knew I was witnessing a remarkable man; one who not only endures the furnace of affliction but draws from it, then turns to speak to others about what he sees. It was as if Steve, like Hezekiah, was being given a little more time to tell us what matters most.

I will never forget my last visit to Steve’s home. It had been almost a year and a half since our first meeting. Steve was a picture of perfect peace. He pulled out a little black notebook and shared five affirmations that conveyed what he believed were the most important truths in life:

• Cultivate an authentic spiritual life.
• Treasure and invest in relationships.
• Seek meaning and purpose above all else.
• Slow down to appreciate the beauty all around us.
• Courage and humility in the face of adversity ultimately yield personal growth.

A few days later, with the courage and conviction by which he had lived, Steve died. He was surrounded by his family.

His memorial service was held in the Naval Academy Chapel. The Chief of Naval Operations presented the flag to Steve’s wife, and many hundreds came to honor the man who had been such an example of how to live life deliberately—in faith, wisdom, and courage. I shared Steve’s affirmations during the service, as I believe they not only summarize the principles of a faithful life, but also lift up a kind of North Star, by which we might gain our bearings.

In the seven years since Steve’s death, I have shared his affirmations in counseling, during shipboard classes, and most recently while meeting with senior commanders and flag officers. Whenever I tell his story, the response is the same: It resonates. His advice seems to strike a chord in people that for too long has gone unused. Entire books could be written on each of his affirmations, but I would like to draw out a few messages they offer to naval leaders today.

The Value of the Spiritual

Like Admiral James Stockdale, Steve believed the classroom and the sanctuary together form the soul of a person and that one’s mettle is incomplete without both.¹ Steve was not afraid to wrestle with scripture, work out his doubts and uncertainties in prayer, and surround himself with faithful friends, “for in the abundance of counselors there is victory” (Proverbs 11:14). He corresponded with authors who had written on faith and trial, immersed himself in a religious community, and served others. In fact, he sought out people who also were facing cancer to encourage them in their fight. And he did so with humor, helping them find grace and levity in the hard moments. These are the marks of an authentic spiritual life—well-ordered, deliberate, thoughtful, and buoyant—and it was Steve’s way of life. In cultivating this, he not only prepared himself for his trial, he also held up a lantern for leaders who struggle to define, much less speak about, spiritual things.

Talking about the importance of a spiritual life is generally avoided these days. But in charging us to cultivate our spiritual lives, Steve was recalling a history of military leaders who commended spiritual values as a source of strength. In 1996, Commandant of the Marine Corps General Charles Krulak and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson signed the naval services’ Core Values Charter, which still states as one of the tenets of “Commitment” our responsibility to look after the professional, personal, and spiritual well-being of our people.

In 1940, General George C. Marshall described “those latent forces of the soul that the ordinary educational process sometimes fails to reach.” He was pointing out the failure of institutions to address the spiritual values so vital to human development. In his view, any diminution of this will result in a weakening of those internal resources on which people and events rise and fall. As Marshall said, “The soldier’s heart, the soldier’s soul, the soldier’s spirit, are everything. Unless the soldier’s soul sustains him, he cannot be relied on and will fail himself and his commander and his country in the end.”²

Contrary to the popular adage, there are “atheists in foxholes”—and in main spaces, too. However, countless testimonies from the front show that tightly held identities tend to fade in the crucible of war. The battlefield creates a fluid spirituality that defies facile categories. Military chaplains see this firsthand. The offer of prayer before a combat patrol or a vessel boarding, or the moments of gratitude after getting through alive, can open spiritual doors that have been slammed shut for years. Not every experience in battle leads there. Some lead to moral injury or even disillusionment with faith. But even these wounds can become doorways to something more. Marshall understood this and was never afraid to commend faith and spiritual values to those under him.

In this vein, the Marine Corps has made some headway. In 2016, Marine leaders codified spiritual fitness as one of the components of leader development. Marines are encouraged to wrestle with how they think of faith, clarify their values, and sharpen their character, all so they can be ready for the fight.³

Spiritual fitness is a bold and helpful initiative, but it is a rare line drawn in an ever-secularizing sand. Captain Steve Murphy’s message to naval leaders is to join in this fight, to not be afraid to both cultivate and commend the spiritual life to their people.

The Deadly Dissection

In his seminal essay, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis described the insolvency that results when institutions charge their people with living up to high ideals and yet rob them of the very things needed to get there. “We continue to clamor for those qualities we are rendering impossible. . . . We remove the organ and expect the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue.”⁴ This sort of “deadly dissection” is what we are facing in our culture and in our Navy.

The transcendent themes Steve offered are the things missing in our best efforts to help our people. And yet they are vital to our capacity to endure and to hope. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl made this case clear in his account of imprisonment in a German concentration camp during World War II. Frankl observed the paradox that prisoners who were “less hardy” than others, but who cultivated a deep spiritual life, often managed to survive when those of a more robust nature did not.⁵ The difference came down to whether one nourished the inner life of the spirit. Today, we hesitate to talk about these things, and our people are suffering for it.

In 2019, despite all the time and investment to prevent suicides, the number of sailors and veterans who died by their own hand only went up. It was an all-time high for the Navy, with numbers more than doubling since 2006.⁶ The past year fared slightly better but still nearly doubled our losses from 2006. “What we’re doing is not working,” one national director said.

Survey the leading analyses and interviews regarding this crisis and you will find almost every possible answer except the spiritual. You will hear about the need for better resiliency training, better coping skills, more interactive education, mandatory prevention training, financial planning, social safety nets, good mental health care, more research and funding, therapy, crisis hotlines, better identification of social determinants, assigning a personal navigator, and so on.

Absent is any trace of the kind of resources Steve encouraged.

Issues of the Heart

Destructive behaviors—and, in particular, suicide—are often issues of the heart. I use “heart” here in the way the ancients did: as the ruling center of a person, the spring of all desires, the seat of the will, or, as in Plato, the “spirited element.”⁷ It is the heart where one begins to hope, to believe one was created for a purpose. It is the heart where the knowledge that we are loved by another sinks deep and bears the fruits of joy and the desire to please, to give, and to sacrifice. While many suffer from clinical imbalances and reel under the pressure of external factors, I suspect that many more simply lose heart.

It is the heart that British writer A. Alvarez addressed in his book, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. Fifty years ago, Alvarez argued that the clinical analyses to which we typically turn may be helpful, but they also can be elegant “superstructures” that say nothing about the “terminal kind of inner loneliness which no amount of social engineering will alleviate.”⁸

Demands of the job, little sleep, broken relationships, financial strain, multiple deployments—these are, according to Alvarez, more like “border incidents” in a person’s life, never the major war. Indeed, “external misery has relatively little to do with suicide,” he says.⁹ The numbers are always higher in wealthy industrialized countries and, in contrast, exceedingly low where people have endured the worst kinds of deprivation and suffering.

Another psychiatrist who survived a concentration camp noted that those who suffered from depression and psychotic complaints fared remarkably well in the most egregious conditions. The reason: Their internal anxiety receded in light of the real threats surrounding them.¹⁰

The greatest battles are almost always internal. This suggests that people do not take their lives because they work long hours or because of family separation or hardship or because their supervisors do not understand them. They take their lives when they decide life no longer is worth living, and, by a sort of downward reasoning, they lose heart.

This is why Steve’s message is so crucial. He gives us back our hearts. He reminds us that we are more than so many atoms firing in response to stimuli, that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” He calls us to cultivate our spiritual lives and to commend them to those who follow us. Steve reminds us that meaning and purpose are woven into the fabric of our souls, and to seek them is to gain vision and strength that we might stand in the day of trouble. He calls us to seek beauty and the transcendent.

Over the years, I have asked myself if there is one idea that Steve gave us that stands out among the rest. One that captures all the others, that we can rightly call Murphy’s Law? When I consider the man I knew and what he said to me years ago, I keep coming back to a principle that seems to rise above and inform the others: “Set your house in order.”

What could be more important than this?  To set our house in order is to follow Steve’s example and attend to the things that matter, “to watch our heart with all diligence,” as the Proverb says, “for from it flow the issues of life.”

Our time is short, perhaps shorter than we know. As James told us, “Our lives are but a vapor, here today, gone tomorrow.” Things are more urgent than we realize—for us, our Navy, and our nation. We do not know what great crises, battles, struggles, and losses of life may be waiting on the other side of the horizon. Every indication is that a gathering storm is approaching. Can we not hear Steve speaking to us? Can we not hear his appeal? His advice is as timeless as the one who first spoke it: “Set your house in order.”