Experience outranks rank.

Matthew, thank you for this powerful personal story! Here are some comments on it.

This writer chuckled over your personal, painful story about the clash between rank and experience.

There is a story in the British army about this.

The old sergeant major reports to the incoming youthful regimental commander. The sergeant says standing at attention and saluting:

"I will call you sir; you will call me sir, but you will mean it."

In fact, and this writer is not a veteran, but he has studied principles of military leadership, e.g. Sir John Keegan's "The Mask of Command."

Your career noncommissioned officers are the backbones of any military force. In them reside the operational, practical knowledge that we ignore at our own peril!

We call this Knowledge Management now. Pay attention to "lessons learned," and your non-coms have those "lessons."

Also, this is one of the reasons this writers gets upset when we do not pay our career non-coms decent wages and invest in useless corporate welfare weapon systems