Credits: Adam De Rito
There are things you learn in military service that do not translate cleanly into civilian language. Not the tactical details or the operational specifics — those are frequently overstated in the public imagination — but the deeper habits of thinking that military service builds over time in people who take it seriously.
Adam DeRito is an Army Civil Affairs Captain, a veteran, and the author of The Guy in the Yellow Tie. He is also an energy professional, a farmer, a former volunteer firefighter and EMT, and a political candidate. His military service is one chapter among many — but it is a chapter that shaped everything that followed.
Civil Affairs: The Human Side of Military Operations
Most people, when they think about military service, picture combat roles. Civil Affairs is different. Civil Affairs soldiers operate at the intersection of military operations and civilian populations — building relationships, understanding local context, facilitating communication between military forces and the communities in which they operate.
It is work that requires a specific kind of intelligence: the ability to hold complexity, to listen carefully before drawing conclusions, to understand that the story you walk in with is almost never the complete story. Civil Affairs soldiers have to be comfortable operating in ambiguity, in environments where the rules of engagement are not always clear and where success is measured not in territory gained but in relationships built and trust established.
Those are skills that transfer. They transfer to managing teams in the energy industry, where the ability to understand multiple perspectives simultaneously is an operational asset. They transfer to agricultural work, where reading the environment carefully and adapting plans based on conditions is the difference between a successful season and a failed one. They transfer to politics, where the ability to listen to people who disagree with you — actually listen, rather than wait to respond — is both rarer and more valuable than most politicians seem to understand.
Service as an Operating Principle
DeRito talks about service not as an abstraction or a value-statement but as an operating principle. He chose service early — as a volunteer firefighter and EMT, before military service, before a professional career in energy — and the pattern of that choice has run through everything since.
The interesting question is why some people make that choice and others do not. DeRito’s answer, at least implicitly, is that service is a practice rather than a quality — it develops through use, deepens through difficulty, and becomes more rather than less important after it has cost you something.
He has paid those costs. The Guy in the Yellow Tie is, among other things, a story about what it means to remain committed to service when the easy thing — the self-protective thing — would be to step back, to go quiet, to let the critics have the last word. He did not do that. The book is the evidence.
What Veterans Know About Resilience
Military culture, for all its complications, teaches a specific lesson about resilience that most civilian contexts do not: that the mission continues whether you feel like continuing it or not. The conditions are not going to improve on your schedule. The situation is not going to wait for you to feel ready. You either move or you do not.
That sounds blunt because it is. But it is also, for the people who have genuinely internalized it, a source of considerable freedom. When you have learned to separate your emotional state from your capacity to function, you discover that you are more capable than you thought — and that the obstacles that feel definitive rarely are.
DeRito applied that lesson in contexts that had nothing to do with military operations. When his public life became the subject of scrutiny and criticism, he did not retreat. He rebuilt. He continued working, serving, building, and eventually writing — because the conviction that your worst day is not your final word is not just a phrase in a book. It is a thing he has actually practiced.
The Leadership Conversation Veterans Bring
One of DeRito’s consistent themes is a critique of the way leadership is discussed in American public life — the tendency to define it by charisma, by title, by the number of followers or the size of the platform. Against that tendency, he offers the military’s more demanding standard: leadership is what you do, not what you say about yourself.
That standard is not unique to the military. It is visible in the best blue-collar workplaces, in the best farming operations, in the best emergency response teams, in the best community organizations. But military service tends to make it explicit in a way that other contexts do not — because the consequences of failing to meet it are immediate and visible.
The Guy in the Yellow Tie is, in part, DeRito’s argument that this standard — leadership as demonstrated conduct rather than asserted identity — is exactly what American public life needs more of, and that ordinary people living ordinary lives with genuine integrity are already modeling it, mostly without credit or recognition.
Written in partnership with Tom White
