Lessons From the Band of Brothers

Being right for the right reasons happens only 25% of the time. How do we consistently hit that sweet spot and avoid the 75% wrongs? There is an answer.

Yesterday, I did as my tradition demands and watched Band of Brothers (BoB), something I try to do each year on Veteran’s (Armistice) Day and Memorial Day. HBO, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks released BoB over two decades ago (2001) and I have watched it at least twice each year since.

That series, in my opinion, is the best made chronicle of the best examples of the best America has ever had to offer. It still gives me chills and stirs the patriotism in my heart – and honestly, triggers a little guilt for never having served.

It makes me deeply sad and intensely proud at the same time to just know that the people portrayed in that series existed.

Each episode is preceded by snippets of live interviews with actual surviving members of Easy Company and in the prelude to Episode 5: Crossroads, Joe Lesniewski said of Major Richard “Dick” Winters (played by Damien Lewis), that it “Seemed like he always made the right decisions…”

Around Episode 7: The Breaking Point, Lesniewski’s comments came back to mind, and I wondered how people, when placed in intense and morally ambiguous situations, can know what is “right” and can make the “right” decisions. Every episode of BoB includes some situation where that discernment must be made – it is about war, after all, and war is the most morally ambiguous situation any person could face.

And on top of that, the decisions required were often immediate and life or death. In war, decisions can fall in two categories – survivable and not survivable.

One scene in “Crossroads” illustrated that situation. Dick Winters leads a charge on a German SS position and due to a defective smoke grenade used to signal the men to charge, he is the first to reach the German position. Standing at the top of a dike, he encounters a very young, stunned German solider on the other side. In that spilt second, one on one, Winters must make the call to shoot or not – he shoots.

I keep a notebook for work use, but I also use it to capture my (often) random thoughts. I’ll take a clean page, date it, and write “Independent Thoughts” at the top of the page and throughout the day, when enough of the stray voltage running through my brain form a thought, I’ll jot it down. Last night, I picked it up and jotted down a 2 X 2 matrix with “Outcome” on one axis, and “Reason” on the other. The basic result was these combinations:

• Right Outcome – Right Reason

• Right Outcome – Wrong Reason

• Wrong Outcome – Right Reason

• Wrong Outcome – Wrong Reason

When those possibilities are considered, I began to wonder how it could be that some individuals (and leaders) consistently scored in the “right outcome” boxes and avoided the “wrong outcome” ones. When you look at the spectrum of possibilities, three out of four boxes contain either wrong outcomes or wrong reasons, and even though the right outcome happens 50% of the time, being right for the right reasons is only a 25% chance. When you are right for the wrong reasons, that is just luck.

So how do you know what is right for the right reasons?

In that moment of stress, danger, or crisis, how do you make the right call?

I happen to believe that skill is based in the core of your being. I think something Dennis Prager wrote is true: “…there are moral truths — objective moral standards — to which every person is accountable. In America, this has meant accountability to the Creator, the God of the Bible, and to Judeo-Christian values.”

I would argue that it isn’t just moral standards, there are also objective rational standards as well.

These objective moral and rational standards once were so ubiquitous and commonly understood, they were simply ingrained in the American conscience. Even people who eventually became “not religious” were exposed to Sunday Schools, religious training via other faiths, American values in schools or at least other people who had undergone such training and shared the same values.

But that isn’t true any longer. A 2015 study found most college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. It happens because leftist ideology rejects religion and God, and views believers as people who can’t think for themselves – that they need a God and a religion to tell them what’s right and wrong - when it is quite the opposite. These taught values are based upon principles that have been proven tried and true since man took his first steps on two legs.

When a civilization reaches the point where, as Marx wrote, “Man is God,” and therefore each human being is the author of his or her own moral standards, there is no transcendent source of morality.

My point being that making the right decision depends on knowing the right reasons and since that comes as a 1 out of 4 chance and the other 3 out of 4 contain components of “wrong”, is it really that surprising that we witness so many decisions, actions and policies that are objectively wrong?

I think the most seductive aspect of the “Man as God” proposition is that if there is no “right or wrong”, there are also no consequences attached to the decisions.

That simply isn’t true.

I don’t think there is a better current example of the belief that we have lost that basic ability to innately make the right decisions than Biden, both domestically and globally, running around pledging trillions of “free money” to everybody, money America simply doesn’t have.

These are things we once viscerally knew were wrong and even when we chose to do them, it was under extreme situations, and we knew there were consequences.

Until America returns to a confidence that we know what is right and what that “right” is based upon, we will continue to worship man as God – and continue to fail.