As a young lieutenant on his first training assignment in Germany, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges didn’t yet know the names of his NCOs, but what they taught him about the importance of trust carried him through his career.

During an evaluation at the Grafenwoehr Training Area, he said, he became a casualty, and his soldiers “were dragging me out of there, making sure they hit every rock on the way to the casualty collection point, but I learned who I could count on,” Hodges said July 16 during the inaugural LANDEURO Symposium hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army in Wiesbaden, Germany.

“It was in that training environment, when you’re under stress, that I found out which sergeants, which soldiers, I could really count on,” Hodges told participants in a Leadership Forum held in conjunction with LANDEURO by AUSA’s Center for Leadership.

Building on the theme of trust, Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe who retired from the Army in 2018 after 38 years of service, said that leaders are responsible for establishing their unit’s culture and fostering the sort of trust he learned to embrace as a young lieutenant.

He outlined different types of trust, the first of which is trusting in each other and all the moving parts everyone is responsible for, such as people, weapons, ammunition and vehicles during night movements or on a flight.

“If you’ve ever gotten in the back of a helicopter, that’s a lot of trust. You put your life in the hands of somebody, and you can only see the back of their helmet, but you get in there in the middle of the night and fly around, so there’s that trust with each other,” he said.

Soldiers also must trust a commander to do everything possible to ensure missions are accomplished successfully and with the best chance of survival. Likewise, commanders need to trust that their soldiers will get the job done, even if they don’t have all the resources they need, he said.

“You can be sure George Washington didn’t have all the resources he was supposed to have when he crossed the Delaware River,” Hodges said.

Trust must also be fostered with allies because of “how much we depend on them” for all the knowledge and resources they have access to in their own countries, Hodges said. Because of this, he said, it’s also important at the right moments to share intelligence with allies.

Pulling out a dog-eared copy of the U.S. Constitution from his breast pocket, Hodges placed much weight on the importance of maintaining trust with the American people.

“We take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to the Congress, not to the president, not to your commanding general, to this document,” he said. “This is why the American people trust their military.”