There is a fine line between "befriending" your Marines (or Airmen or Sailors) and "being approachable"... Alot of this depends on how you carry yourself, and your personality.
For instance-
- Playing spades with your Marines while deployed..... good idea...
- Going over one of your LCpls houses every thursday night in garrison to play spades... bad idea...
- Going out with your Marines as a Platoon to have an informal social night.. good idea.
- Going out with you Marines as a Platoon to have an informal social night and having a few beers... Maybe a bad idea... but maybe a good idea if you carry yourself properly.
Always remember that you are an Officer. You should not tolerate disrespect. And you should not give your Marines a reason to disrespect you. In that regard, getting drunk and acting like a jackass in front of them is a problem. Being out of shape and falling out of a run is inexcusable. Showing an inability to manage your family affairs/ getting visibly flustered when things get hard is inexcusable.
As a leader, it is important to know your Marines. You won't learn quite as much about them if all your interaction is conducted with them 3 feet and centered. Sure, you may know how good they are at their MOS, but you won't know what makes them tick, you won't know what their personal goals are, you won't know what their weaknesses are, and thus you will be less able to anticipate any future personnel problems that will arise in the future... and they will arise. Marines will do all kinds of things, they get arrested for fighting... they come back married to a girl they met last weekend.... One might decide to even go UA the weekend before a deployment. These things can and do happen, and for this reason you need to know your Marines beyond who they are at work.
Trying to balance the respect you need to maintain with the approachability that you want to maintain is an individualized challenge whose answer will be different in varying situations.
Many of my friends from high school enlisted into the various branches, and later, upon hearing that I was pursuing a commission, would say "Just don't act like you know everything", and "don't think you are better than us"... "Just don't be one of those Officers who thinks they are too good to work". As a 19 year old kid trying to get into OCS this was the only advice I had on military leadership. I can relate to your sentiment that not trying to befriend your subordinates is "against your taste"... after all, my friends were real living enlisted men telling me what they like to see in their officers, how can you beat their advice? Why shouldn't I be out there on every working party showing that I don't think I'm too good to fill sand bags? Why can't we be friends?
Well... there are a few reasons...
First, as an officer you need to deal with a larger picture. Your job is no more or less important, but it is different. As a Platoon Commander you need to be concerned with the overall status of the platoon. If you are filling sandbags what are you doing to help the platoon as a whole?
Second, this shows a complete disrespect to the platoon chain of command. Sure, you may motivate a PFC by filling sandbags with him, but you also have indirectly shown your Gunny, SSgt, Sergeants, and Cpls, and LCpls that aren't on the working party that they can't do the job... they need an Officer to come in and help out.
Often times junior Marines may look at Officers as being "too good" because they sit at their desk drinking coffee and doing paperwork while junior Marines do physical labor. This is natural, as a LCpl, you don't need to understand the work of a Lt. To be perfectly honest, as a Lt, I don't really understand the work of a Squadron or Bn Commander. They stay in their Offices and are seen only occassionaly during unit functions and PT... what do they do the rest of the time? I don't know, and I don't really need to know... I'm sure they have work to do though.
Once I actually understood the responsibilities of an Officer and the dynamics of a Platoon it was easy to understand why a 19 year old E-2 would tell me that the best Officer would be one who gets down with the troops all the time and shows that they are no better or worse at all times. They don't understand the different responsibilitie, and they really don't need to. If it makes it any easier, your junior enlisted will develop a more advanced understanding of what increased responsibility means as they progress through the ranks... Just the other day I had a Sergeant who was recently selected for Staff Sergeant (and who has recently started to get the bigger tasks of a SNCO assigned to him) say to me "Sir, I'm finally starting to see what you have to deal with".
In summary, remember that you aren't more important than your troops, you just have different responsibilites. Remember that your job is to accomplish the mission and take care of the troops, not to be their friends... and of course remember that there is a difference between coddling your troops and taking care of them.
