Where did we lose our collective sense of purpose? The importance of organizational narrative.
and happy Veterans Day week!
In the last year of the last century, I was assigned to a small military base in the north eastern part of South Korea, in a beautiful Korean vacation area known as Chun Ch’on. Our base held only our Apache helicopter battalion— 24 attack helicopters— and the small contingent forces that supported us: a company of military police and a few administrative professionals. Camp Page sat on the edge of the city, which was itself surrounded by mountains, deceptively steep. It had once been a hold out in the Korean War: South Korean forces had held Peacock Hill in the middle of the city while forces from the north pushed down on either side, until those on Peacock Hill were forced to retreat.
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Flying above Ch’un Ch’on in Korea
Peacock Hill was and I assume still is a park in the middle of the city, and fighting positions from the war remain, hardened with concrete and including brass range cards that indicate to a soldier which direction he or she should point their weapons. The mountains around Ch’un Ch’on, similarly, still had fighting positions from the war just a half century before, though those remained simply by the proximal time of use, holes dug, some connected by trenches, where soldiers in that cold and bloody and forgotten war had fought and likely died.
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Camp Page was only ten kilometers south of the demilitarized zone, the swath between North and South Korea heavily mined and guarded on either side— a no man’s land still today. We were the furthest north deployed attack helicopter battalion. Though North Korea was not strong enough to sustain an attack beyond 24 hours, we assumed they’d target us in the first round of artillery. Our job was to support OPLAN 5027: the defense of South Korea.
With my 1st Sergeant at the 38th Parallel in Korea
The first weekend at Camp Page, I took the train for two hours to Seoul. The train station was just a short walk from my base. I crammed in with the Koreans, the only caucasian on that train, for the trip to explore the big city to the south west. At the end of that day of exploration, I boarded the train back to the north east. Though I was lucky to find a seat on the way back north, a man who had had perhaps quite a bit of soju, the hard rice liquor in Korea, passed out on my shoulder. I sat motionless until we arrived. We pulled into the station and I let myself be moved along in the jostling crowd.
Before disembarking the train, a tiny old woman grabbed my hand forcefully. I looked down and smiled but felt a heightened sense of alarm; we’d been warmed that public sentiment didn’t always support American presence. She looked up at me and would not release my hand. The mass of people moved down the steps of the train car and onto the platform. Still, the woman held onto my hand, and I stood facing her and smiling carefully. Several other people stood next to her— family, I assumed.
Looking up into my face— she must not have stood above the middle of my rib cage— she squeezed my hand with both of her hands and asked: “You GI? You GI?”
I nodded, feeling a quickly rising sense of anxiety. I didn’t see anyone I recognized. I wasn’t far from base, but I was the only American— the only caucasian anyway— anywhere around.
“GI,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears which started to trickle down her face, channeled by deep wrinkles. “Korean War…thank you GI,” she said. I smiled at her in relief and appreciation and a sense of unworthiness and a sense of gratitude. I was needed here, or at least representative of people who had been needed once. I had a purpose in making the world a better place. There was a common good that I was a part of, even if tangentially in my late arrival to the scene, the war having ended— if not officially— over forty years earlier.
Purpose.
It seems to me that even when I was younger we had a more cohesive sense of purpose in our country. Our narratives— not without their flaws, certainly— at least hung together. We might disagree about how to reach common ends, but at least there was agreement that we did or should have common ends. This is important to the well being of any community. We have lost this.
If you’re running an organization of any size— from your family to a Fortune 10 company and everything in between, defining your institutional narrative is a critical component of your success. It must include two things: allowing the agency necessary for everyone to be a part of the narrative and its vision, and promulgated with the enthusiasm and leadership that facilitates hope.
Maybe I should stop this newsletter here. But the problems in our society broadly require that we engage. I imagine this engagement will elicit some responses that might be challenging, and nevertheless, think it is worth the conversation.