The Superman Complex

CEO describes the post-Vietman trauma and its effect on his business.

Tweet

If it hadn't been for the added stress of trying to save his company, says the author, the grief and fear he'd buried from his Vietnam War days might never have surfaced

Max Carey was a golden boy. He came back from Vietnam a hero. He single-handedly saved his business from going under. But the trauma of both experiences eventually caught up with Carey and forced him to take an unsparing look at who he was -- to admit that he was not a superman, and that he could not go it alone anymore. -- The Editors

The episode began on a bright Saturday morning in 1984. I went out on my deck with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper, ready to ease into the weekend. When I opened the paper, there was a picture of the second Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington -- not the famous wall, but the statue of those three combat soldiers. Immediately, something happened to me. I got a cold chill, a twisted knot in the pit of my stomach. My wife found me a few minutes later, sobbing uncontrollably. She was horrified. Since I could not explain to her what was happening, I grabbed a pen and paper. All I managed to scribble was a single word: "Vietnam." And then I really got scared.

Fear, you see, was as foreign to me as failure. The world had always known Max Carey as a winner, number one -- able to do it all, anytime, anyway. Fifteen years before, despite being the smallest football player in the league, I'd been an All-Ivy defensive halfback, setting five school records at Columbia University. As a U.S. Navy pilot, I'd graduated number one in my flight school and was the first in my class to qualify for high-risk missions. From 1971 to 1973, during the last years of the Vietnam conflict, I'd piloted an A-7 off the aircraft carrier USS Midway. I came home a decorated war hero: a golden boy. My business had almost failed in 1982, but I'd turned it around. There was no mission I couldn't fly, no challenge I couldn't overcome.

So my instinctive reaction to this episode was to push it aside. Vietnam? Well, it must have caught me at a weak moment. Within a few hours I was back to normal. Or was I? Driving to work some weeks later, I felt tears trickling down my cheeks. What on earth had happened to make me cry? Nothing I could put my finger on. Now, fear -- real fear -- overtook me. I thought: Oh my God, I'm having a nervous breakdown. Visions of Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest flashed before my eyes. "Max," I told myself, "you can't deal with this right now. You've got a wife and three young children counting on you for their sustenance. You've got eight people in the office who've put their future in your hands, and a world that's always expected the impossible from you. Oh Lord, not now. Please give me more time." But it was not to be. The episodes increased in frequency, and at times I was totally incapacitated.

In simple terms, I'd always been a "stuffer." Rather than deal with difficult emotional issues, I stuffed them deeply into my subconscious. This meant I'd stuffed all the grief and fear brought on by the horrors of combat and death. I had never told my family or employees there was anything I couldn't do. In combat, it was "Keep up the bravado. Don't tell anyone you're scared or weak." In business, it was "God forbid anyone should know you're not perfect.'

In retrospect, I might have been able to go on indefinitely without dealing with the war and my grief. But the cumulative stress of my business is what broke me. It forced me to do something I'd never done before: ask for help.

In 1981, when I began Corporate Resource Development Inc. (after being top salesperson at Ryan Insurance Group, in the Midwest), I was an optimist whose ego exceeded his capabilities. My partner and I had borrowed $150,000 to start the company; yet, as it turned out, we had no idea how to target our sales and marketing services.

Coming home without a paycheck for the first time was far more destructive to me than trying to avoid my first surface-to-air missile in a combat mission into Hanoi. It hadn't been my fault that the guy on the ground was shooting at me, but it was my fault that I couldn't bring money home to my family. When you're the daddy and you're the husband and you walk in and you have no money and you have to look at your family eyeball-to-eyeball -- I couldn't handle it. That's when my partner and I started drinking after work instead of going home.

The company hit bottom in January 1982. We'd been in business eight months and had forecast $50,000 in revenues that month. January was going to make us, was going to heal us -- and we did no business. That's when it came apart. It broke my partner's back. He couldn't stay any longer. I couldn't believe that I'd parlayed a great career for this mire. If I were as strong as I said I was, and as smart, the company would work. Because the ideas were good.

One night in February I took my wife out to dinner on my overextended American Express card. Driving home, I apologized to her for what I'd done to the family. I told her I didn't believe I'd given the business my all yet, and that from that point forward, as long as we could keep the doors open, I was going to give it everything I had. I wanted to build this company; I wanted to build something that would be around after I was gone. And she gave me her unconditional support.

Since I knew it would take two or three years to get on top of things, I was even more determined, more single-minded, more compulsive than ever. I got more dogmatic, less willing to delegate, less understanding, more domineering. I was driving myself further and further away from everybody -- at home and at work. I dealt in staccato communication:

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: