Monday, August 18, 2014

Geronimo the Motivational Murderer

Football coach and now biographer Mike Leach thinks the Apache warrior can teach us a lot about leadership, but he has to overlook a lot of unsavory details to make his case. Born in 1829 near the Gila River in what is now Arizona, the legendary Indian warrior Geronimo was a Chiracahua Apache. The Chiracahua in the 19th century were a nomadic people who lived by raiding, trading, and a bit of hardscrabble farming in the mountainous lands of northern Mexico, and in the Arizona and New Mexico territories. It was against the forces of Mexico, not the United States, that Geronimo made his initial reputation as a frustratingly elusive warrior-raider-outlaw who struck terror and dread into the hearts of thousands of ordinary Mexican settlers, as well as other Indian bands. Later, American settlers came to feel just the same way about this fierce Apache. Driven by a thirst for vengeance over the killing of his wife and three young children in 1851 in a horrific act of brutality by Mexican troops, and later by other myriad betrayals—or perceived betrayals—by U.S. authorities, he wreaked no end of havoc over a wide swath of the Southwest. No question about it: Geronimo was a master of ambush, hit-and-run attack, deception, evasion, and all the other tactics we associate with guerrilla warfare. Atrocities of a quite grizzly sort were part and parcel of many of his “engagements.” Leather tough, squat and muscular, with deep-set piercing eyes, Geronimo was capable of feats of exceptional endurance and martial skill even by the standards of the Chiracahua—and that’s saying a great deal, for they were truly Indian Spartans, groomed for war from childhood in some of the most unforgiving terrain in North America. He had that indefinable sixth sense that distinguishes gifted warriors from good ones. He could read subtle signs of an enemy’s presence on the hard Apache landscape with uncommon precision. And he could kill without compunction, using whatever implement was at hand, whether it was a knife, bow and arrow, a Winchester rifle, or simply a pair of hands. The Marines, who know a great deal more than most of us about such things, would call him (approvingly) a “hard-charging, trained killer.”...more

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