Workplace Traditions Matter

Think your company is too young for this stuff? Wrong. Traditions can be found right under your nose.

The top picture was taken on Christmas Day, 1944 in Bastogne, Belgium. The 101st Airborne Division, which gained fame six months earlier on D-Day would ‘hold the line’ against German Panzer divisions racing to seize the port of Antwerp in order to cut off the allied supply line. Bastogne was a strategic crossroad for the German attack. It was there the 327th Infantry Regiment (the 1st Brigade of the 101st) would plant its flag and where Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe (fourth on the left) the acting commander of the 101st would reply to the German commander’s request for surrender with, “Nuts!” The spirit and bravery displayed by the men in this photo and the soldiers they commanded still live in the ranks of the 101st and its 1st brigade, the 327th Infantry Regiment, known today as the “Bastogne Brigade.” The 327th has a long and continuous war record following World War II. When deployed over Christmas which is often the case, it is tradition to snap a photo like one taken in 1944.

And so, the tradition lived. The second picture is 70 years later to the day, Christmas day, 2014, in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Once again, the flag of the 327th was planted on foreign soil and I was its commander. I directed this photo be taken in a 1960s era brick building called the Taliban’s Last Stand. It had a gaping hole in its roof from a bomb, a sign of the early battles to seize yet another piece of strategically important terrain. Today both of these pictures hang, along with many like them, on the walls of the Bastogne Brigade headquarters at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I was humbled beyond words to have commanded the soldiers of the 327th and to be a part of this treasured tradition.

Traditions are important for several reasons.