Lessons from the past: Navigating difficult times with conviction and moral clarity

"Clear the Landing Area"

My colleague Ed Walczak (a.k.a. “The Bear”) and one of the founding partners of our Quality Growth boutique told me about his experience as a young man during the 1960s in the heat of the Vietnam War – “These were turbulent times; young men were being drafted randomly based on their birthdays. I remember anxiously listening to the radio as they called out numbers. By pure luck, I wasn’t chosen. A good friend of mine from college was.”

Apple TV recently released a six-part documentary, Vietnam- The War That Changed America. Unlike many war documentaries, this one focused on the human side of the conflict, using personal stories to illuminate its different phases. 

In the waning days of the Vietnam War, amid the desperate scramble to escape Saigon before its final collapse, the story resonated the most with me—not for its military might, but for its moral clarity.

On April 29, 1975, a small, battered Cessna O-1 Bird Dog circled over the USS Midway, its pilot searching for a way to save his family. Inside the cramped two-seater were Major Buang-Ly, his wife, and their five children—seven people fleeing a country that was about to cease to exist as they had known it.

The carrier was covered with helicopters and there was no space for the plane to land on the deck. Unable to radio the ship, Buang-Ly did the only thing he could. He scrawled a note, weighted it down, and dropped it onto the deck below:

"Can you move the helicopters to the other side? I can land on your runway. Please rescue me."

Captain Lawrence Chamber, the officer responsible for the landing deck, received orders from his superiors to ditch the aircraft in the water. Captain Lawrence realized that the chances of passengers surviving a water landing were minimal, so he decided to go against his orders.

“You gotta to do what the hell you think is right. If you got a moral compass, you gotta believe in it. And so, I said - CLEAR THE LANDING AREA.”

At the risk of being court martialed, Captain Lawrence ordered the crew to throw the helicopters in the water, more than $100 million dollars of equipment sunk to the bottom of the sea. “My thought was, okay, what are you gonna hang me for? Destroying a little bit of equipment or letting women and children drown? All I thought was I did my job.”

The plane landed safely, Captain Lawrence saved the family, and he was decorated for doing the right thing.

It is during difficult times that people and organizations demonstrate their moral compass. In 1999, at the peak of the Internet bubble, Ed Walczak, then portfolio manager of the Vontobel US fund, was under tremendous pressure from clients, the fund was 30% behind the benchmark. “The valuation and the fundamentals of Internet stocks at the time did not make sense to me and instead, I decided to overweight unloved insurance companies that were trading at a large discount to book value.”  The Internet bubble burst, the Nasdaq collapsed by almost 80% from top to bottom and the Vontobel US fund came out as one of the best performing funds in that period. “You must have conviction in what you do”, Ed always reminds the investment team, "If you get fired, you get fired. You’ve got to be prepared to go into the gutter for what you believe in.”