Episode
60: A Full Rich Day
Hawkeye: Smithy,
I’m going to have to go serious on you about this thing. We have a different perspective on the war as
a whole than I think is possible for you.
To a line officer with 30-40 guys lives depending upon him, and your
life depending upon them; the war is not some big geo-political conflict
between nations and ideologies. It’s not
just China and America sticking their tongues out at each other. To you there’s maybe 30-40 guys in that high
grass out there trying to kill me and my 30-40 guys. It’s that concentrated. To you that’s the entire war…But it’s something
else in our little heaven. To us the war
is trying very hard to control chaos. We
are up to our bottoms in other people’s bottoms here. We can’t afford the same kind of fierce
personal loyalties that you and Sergeant Brian feel for each other. Can you understand that?...It’s the size of
the wound, who’s bleeding the most buckets who we give priority to. It’s the only place I know that being the
worst is the best.
Hawkeye records a message to his dad about the events
of a very eventful day. Among the
variety of casualties presenting to the 4077th is an infantry
soldier who demands the doctors treat his friend first by threatening them at
gunpoint.
While loyalty to a leader or a
team is a highly valued virtue in any organisation, there are times when blind loyalty
can distort our view of reality and become a liability. I’ve worked in teams where loyalty to long
standing relationships has compromised right decisions or covered-up wrong
behaviour. In both cases truth and
integrity became casualties of blind loyalty.
In contrast, John Maxwell says “loyalty means giving me an honest
opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not.” From this position loyalty becomes more about
faithfulness than friendship and the priority of leadership stays focused on
the grander vision rather than allowing personal agendas making us vulnerable
to being loyal to a fault.
No comments:
Post a Comment