A Marine Officer’s Lessons in Leadership from the 1 Train to Okinawa

Reflections on leadership from a New York City Marine Officer

I. The First Uniform Was the City Itself

Before I ever wore cammies, I wore the first uniform the city gave me:
Shoulders squared against the February wind off the Hudson,
Eyes scanning the 1 train at 6:45 a.m.,
Back straight in classrooms where brilliance wasn’t special—it was baseline.

I grew up on 108th and Columbus, just north of where the avenues start to blur. Most mornings, I’d cut across to 103rd and Central Park West, and catch the downtown 1 train. The platform always smelled like concrete and rain. Some days the cars were packed shoulder to shoulder—Spanish, Chinese, and subway announcements all bleeding into each other like a city speaking in tongues.

I’d press my forehead to the window, watching my own reflection flicker between tunnel lights. Crooked Smile by J. Cole looped in my headphones.
He wasn’t singing about Marines or meritocracy. But I understood him.
That line—“Love yourself, girl, or nobody will”—hit different in a city like this.
Where no one stops to tell you that you matter.
Where the whole place runs on silent competition and casual indifference.

That song became armor. It told me: you can be flawed, tired, invisible—and still show up hard and unshakable. So I did.

By the time I stepped off at Chambers Street and walked past the halal carts to the front doors of Stuyvesant, I’d already run my first gauntlet. A hallway full of future engineers, scientists, and prodigies didn’t scare me. Not because I was fearless—but because I’d trained for it the same way I would later train for war: alone, early, and with something to prove.

New York didn’t care if you mattered.
You had to decide that for yourself—and then act like it was true, even when no one gave you permission.

Before I ever stepped onto a parade deck, I was already marching through rain-slick streets, through crowds that wouldn’t make room unless I made it myself. That was the first formation I learned to hold: one man against indifference, locked into rhythm by headphones and hunger.

I didn’t know then that I would one day wear a uniform.
But I already knew how to stand alone, with purpose—and move forward anyway.

II. What New York Instilled That the Corps Later Honed

By the time I got to Quantico, I already had a working sense of terrain.
Not the kind you study on a map sheet—but human terrain.
Flow, posture, tension, subtext.

In New York, you don’t ask who’s in charge—you just feel it. You know who’s bluffing by the way they shift their weight on the train. You hear leadership in someone’s silence just as clearly as in their voice. You learn to read intent before the first word is said. That’s the terrain I knew.

The Corps would later call it “situational awareness.”
But I’d been cultivating it for years—on subways, in classrooms, at family dinners where everyone spoke but no one said what they meant.

New York taught me how to shift gears without breaking character.

At Stuyvesant, I’d debate nuclear doctrine in fourth period, then be shoulder to shoulder on the 1 train with a construction worker and a violinist on my way home. The city demands versatility. You don’t perform—you adapt. Fluidity becomes survival.

That fluidity became one of my greatest assets in the military.
I could brief an O-6 and then talk to a Lance Corporal who grew up one borough away from me—different world, same rhythm. I didn’t have to code-switch. I was already fluent.

The city also gave me a kind of quiet rigor—the ability to prepare relentlessly without expecting praise.
At Stuy, no one congratulated you for grinding. Everyone was grinding.
What mattered was whether you showed up ready.
That never left me.

Even now, my Marines don’t see bravado. They see consistency.
They see someone who reads the intel packet twice, who shows up ten minutes early and leaves last.
Not because it’s glamorous—because it’s necessary.

And when I talk about pattern recognition, I don’t just mean tactics.
I mean narratives—how stories form in enemy behavior. What they prioritize. What they ignore. What they fear. The difference between a movement and a message.

Oddly enough, Steins;Gate taught me more about this than most PME (professional military education).
It’s an anime about time travel, but not the flashy kind. It's about regret—about how one decision fractures everything else. The lead isn’t a hero. He’s a man trying to undo damage in a timeline he no longer controls.
That’s targeting, too. Just with more radios.

And in moments of doubt, I still hear echoes from War and Peace—especially Andrei Bolkonsky. The officer who thought deeply, led reluctantly, and carried everything without letting anyone see.
Tolstoy didn’t write warriors as caricatures. He wrote them as men. Flawed, proud, idealistic. That stuck with me.

The Corps gave me tools, language, and rank.
But the posture? The quiet execution? The sense that you don’t need to be seen to matter?

That was born on the 1 train.

III. Where the Myth Almost Took Me

After commissioning, every Marine officer begins their journey the same way—first through Officer Candidates School (OCS), where they evaluate whether you can lead. Then through The Basic School (TBS), where they teach you how. TBS is a six-month immersion in tactics, leadership, and fieldcraft. You’re trained as a provisional rifle platoon commander, regardless of your future MOS (military occupational specialty, your job). It's where the Marine Corps begins to shape you in its image.

And for a while, I almost let it.

At TBS, the archetype was everywhere: the infantry-minded, physically dominant, loud-but-lovable officer with a square jaw and a gravelly voice. Often Southern or Midwestern. Often athletic. Often certain. They weren’t bad Marines—in many cases, they were brilliant. But they were of the Corps in a way I wasn’t. They matched its cultural rhythm. I didn’t.

Still, it got to me.

I was holding my own in the classroom.
I spoke up often in decision games—usually with a long-view approach rooted in strategy, doctrine, and systems-level analysis.
My peers gave me a nickname—“Vargas Von Clausewitz.”
I think it was half-mocking, half-respectful. I liked it.

But part of me still felt the gravitational pull of combat arms—of infantry as identity. There was a clarity to it. A gravity. A promise of leadership at the tip of the spear. I began drafting my preferences for MOS selection with artillery and infantry at the top.

Then came the night patrol.

I was a squad leader during a field exercise. Under NVGs, poor visibility, terrain I hadn’t mastered—I led my squad straight through our own platoon’s defensive positions. I didn’t recognize them in the dark. Had it been real, we could’ve been engaged by our own.

It didn’t end in disaster. But it could have.

The sting wasn’t just the mistake—it was the deeper truth it exposed:
I wasn’t fluent in this environment yet. My instincts were calibrated for concrete, timing, presence—not fire teams in the treeline. I knew how to read a subway car better than a patrol base. How to navigate moral fog, not physical darkness.

That failure humbled me. But it didn’t break me.
Because I came from a place that had already taught me how to fail forward.

New York doesn’t cushion you. It teaches you to adjust under pressure, to absorb the hit without losing your posture. I wasn’t raised to be tactically perfect. But I was raised to learn fast, adapt faster, and own my mistakes without flinching.

That moment in the field didn’t confirm that I didn’t belong.
It reminded me that I had to earn belonging on new ground—without losing the instincts that had gotten me this far.

And I did.

In our final field exercise—a MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) assault—I was assigned as the machine gun squad leader. This time, the environment felt different. The angles, the structure, the pacing—it made sense to me. I moved my guns through rubble-filled alleys and broken intersections, keeping fire in support of the rifle squads clearing buildings. We bounded across intersections, repositioned in depth, held suppression when others were pinned. My squad followed without hesitation.

We seized the town block by block.
No mistakes. No doubt.

And in that moment, I realized I could lead here, too—not because I was the loudest, or the fastest, or the most natural field guy—but because I had grown into the job. Earned it.

About a week before our MOS preference sheets were due, I paused.

I sat with everything—my strengths, my failures, my ambitions—and asked two questions:

Where am I most useful to the institution?
And what do I actually want to do with this life I chose?

That’s what brought me back to intelligence.

Because the truth is, I never really wanted to be a rifle platoon commander. I had respect for it, yes. But not desire. Not resonance. It wasn’t my tempo. Not my calling. Intelligence had always been the natural fit—the way I thought, the way I worked, the way I saw the world.

It wasn’t a retreat.
It was a return.

Once I chose intel, the pressure fell away.
I wasn’t choosing the easier path. I was choosing the right one.

I wasn’t rejecting the myth of the warrior.
I was just rewriting it with a New York cadence.

IV. The Officer I Became in the Fleet

By the time I reached the fleet, I had stopped trying to become an image. I wasn’t chasing a mold. I was focused on something simpler: being credible. Not through bravado—but through knowledge, insight, and real preparation.

I checked into 1st Marine Aircraft Wing as a new Air Intelligence Officer. I didn’t come in trying to impress anyone. But I did come in ready. And when I wasn’t ready, I studied until I was. That habit had already been forged at the Air Intelligence Officer Course, where I spent late nights refining briefs, digging into programs of record, anticipating questions commanders hadn’t asked yet. I didn’t do it to be the best—I did it to be reliable when it counted.

When I graduated AIOC as Honor Graduate, it wasn’t because I talked the most. It was because I understood that leadership in intel isn’t about flash. It’s about clarity. And responsibility. And showing up over and over again with answers, not excuses.

That carried over into the shop.

I wasn’t the officer who cracked jokes or tried to win the room.
I was the one who stayed a little longer, reviewed the annex one more time, and made sure that when it came time to brief a CO or support an operator, I had more than a slide deck—I had judgment.

And over time, that mattered.

My Marines didn’t care that I didn’t sound like some of the other officers.
They cared that I knew what I was doing.
They cared that when something broke in the kill chain, I knew where to look.
They cared that I could explain things in plain language—and that if I didn’t know something, I’d come back tomorrow with an answer.

What earned their trust wasn’t presence.
It was precision.

I’m reminded of Tokyo Story, the 1953 film by Yasujirō Ozu.
It’s quiet. Almost nothing happens in the way we expect stories to unfold—no dramatic confrontations, no grand gestures. Just a retired couple visiting their adult children in the city, gradually realizing that life has moved on without them. The pain is never shouted. The emotion sits under the surface like still water. It’s a film about what isn’t said—about duty, disappointment, presence, and restraint.

You don’t walk away dazzled.
You walk away moved—in a way that sneaks up on you later.
The weight is in the pauses. The integrity is in the details.

That’s how I try to lead.
Not by dominating the room, but by knowing the terrain.
By doing the work behind the scenes so the mission moves forward cleanly in front of it.

There’s still a lot I’m figuring out.
But if I’ve learned anything so far, it’s this:

Respect isn’t granted by billet or tone.
It’s earned by showing up sharp—and staying sharp when it counts.

V. Elegance in a Martial Life

The Marine Corps didn’t erase who I was.
But it did change how I talk.

I curse more than I used to. I say “send it,” “say again,” and “tracking” without thinking—sometimes even to my girlfriend, before I catch myself. I try not to swear around her. I still slip. But I’ve kept some lines between who I’ve become and who I still am.

Because beneath all that—beneath the brevity, the abrasion, the stripped-down syntax—I still carry a rhythm that came long before the Corps.

That rhythm came from music, movement, and memory.
From Crooked Smile on solo train rides down the 1 train.
From Ain’t No Sunshine in my grandfather’s car in the Philippines, the windows half-down.
From brushing my dress shoes before a ballroom comp while Sinatra sang Fly Me to the Moon.
From the lead-and-follow logic of dance, where control only works when it’s felt, not forced.

That’s where I learned tempo.
How to hold tension in stillness.
How to carry longing in time with a beat.

When I’m back in the field, that rhythm is still with me. Quiet. Functional. Measured.
When I’m writing, or walking the beach at dusk, it rises to the surface.
It’s in the way I brief. In the way I walk. In the way I lead.

Not everyone picks up on it.

It’s not that I don’t speak well—I do. Debate taught me how to command a room, when to shift tone, when to press and when to pivot.
But sometimes, people expect fire when what I offer is focus.
They expect passion as performance—outward, obvious, loud.
And when they don’t see it, they mistake stillness for distance.

I’ve learned not to overcorrect.
To let my clarity speak. To let consistency do the work.

I can cite Clausewitz, but Steins;Gate lives in the back of my head too.
That anime taught me more about cause and consequence than most PME.
Every timeline fractured by one choice. Every decision a weight.
That’s targeting. That’s narrative. That’s leadership, too.

None of it feels like conflict. It feels like integration.

People assume you have to choose:
Be hard or human. Be sharp or graceful.
But I think the best Marines know better.

They know violence and elegance can live in the same spine.
That precision is a kind of art.
That rhythm doesn’t weaken authority—it deepens it.

That’s what dance gave me. What music protects. What writing clarifies.
None of it is rebellion.
It’s rhythm I bring into the mission—because beauty doesn’t cancel discipline.
And structure, at its best, is a kind of choreography.

VI. Belonging Without Blending

I’ve spent years inside a system built on standardization. Rank, billet, doctrine—everything designed to reduce variables. And there’s real value in that. There’s power in shared language, in rhythm, in rigor.

But I never wanted to disappear into it.

I never wanted to blend so cleanly into the Corps that the city I came from faded behind me.
Because New York shaped me in ways no schoolhouse ever could.
Not just in how I move—but in how I see.

It taught me to read a room before I speak.
To lead with presence before volume.
To show up like it matters, even when no one’s watching.

It taught me to carry contradiction:
Elegance and edge. Silence and strength. Art and war.
To be bilingual in posture and tone.

Some people love New York for its noise. I loved it for its rhythm.

The thud of train wheels under 42nd Street. The crackle of a halal cart at midnight. The click of dress shoes on wet pavement outside Lincoln Center. The sound of possibility in all its competing frequencies.

You don’t grow up in that without learning a kind of emotional sonar.
You tune your leadership the way you tune your walk—intuitively, strategically, with just enough give to keep moving.

New York taught me to lead without needing to be liked, and to be steady without being seen.

I carry that with me still.
In Okinawa, in an operations center lit by the dull glow of computer screens, blue and red tracks inching across them.
In front of a commander who’s never heard my name, waiting on clarity I haven’t finished building yet.

I don’t talk like most officers. I don’t always act like them either.
But I lead.

And I lead the way New York taught me:
Deliberately. Decisively. Without needing to adjust the volume on who I am.

I don’t need to blend to belong.

I belong because I’ve earned my place—step by step, line by line, without dropping the thread.
And if you asked me where I learned that, I wouldn’t give you a doctrine reference.
I’d tell you the truth:

On the 1 train. Uptown. Alone. With purpose.
Just a kid watching the city blur past the window,
deciding—quietly—to become someone who could carry it.

And if I lead long enough, I hope to teach others the same: that strength doesn't always speak first—and that purpose can ride quietly, like a train at dawn.