Crossroads

Hello and welcome to Currahee, the unofficial Band of Brothers podcast.

So welcome to episode five, Crossroads, where we're entering the halfway point of Band of Brothers.

So here's a quick recap of where Easy Company find themselves now.

We've seen them training at Tekoa and going through everything Sobol could throw at them.

leadership has gradually become... of the principal ways through which band of brothers explores almost everything else it's interested in because you know fear courage discipline and brotherhood are all affected by the quality of the person asking these men to put themselves in danger and the contrast established very early in the series is between sobel so we'll watch and winters twice yeah and you know sobel understands leadership primarily through authority, discipline and control and having that rank bestowed upon him.

Whereas Winters gradually earns authority because the men recognises that he shares their danger and accepts responsibility for the consequences of his decisions.

not only the responsibility but the weight hits him as well and that's evident in no episode more than Crossroads and so by the time we reach Crossroads the question is no longer whether winters is capable of leading these men uh because that's been comprehensively established the more interesting question now concerns what repeatedly carrying that responsibility is doing to him and that's why i think this episode represents an important transition for winters we have spent the first half of the series watching him become an exceptional combat leader.

But Crossroads begins asking whether exceptional leadership can ever be psychologically cost-free.