Army officers and those interested in military history don’t need me to recommend them Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. The HBO series based on the book is widely used in professional development platforms, leadership seminars, and military pop culture references. (Woe be it for any new officer to be labeled as a “Captain Sobel.”) I still have my copy of the book on my bookshelf. I read it during the Summer of 2001 at Camp Buckner and the pages reflect time spent being handled by the dirty hands during cadet military training. The cover carries a badge proclaiming “Soon to be an HBO Miniseries Event.” However, after nearly twenty years since it was first published it may be overlooked and its impact forgotten. 

The book was first published in June 2001. I purchased it on the way to Camp Buckner, the United States Military Academy training ground for rising sophomores and home of “the best summer of your life.”  In primitive metal bays, with only a creaky bunk bed and ancient wall locker I kept this book alongside my other personal effects and my olive drab-colored web gear. I would spend my days learning a little more about military leadership and small unit tactics, and I would retreat to my bunk to read another chapter of Easy Company’s trials before my next duty. The books lessons became part and parcel of my education that summer.

At the time of the television series release, in September 2001, there had been few movies available to the military community that depicted the daily life of army leadership during wartime. The Rambo films, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, and the previous decades’ films set during the Vietnam War featured fantastical stories of soldierly outliers or focused on the enlisted soldiers in a unit. The Band of Brothers series was especially useful for young cadets at West Point because it followed the training, maturing, and experiences of the officers of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Lieutenants Dick Winters, Ronald Speirs, Lewis Dixon, Buck Compton, along with many of their noncommissioned officers, became heroes to a generation of cadets and officers at the onset of the War on Terror. 

There are two reasons that Band of Brothers is especially meaningful to me. Firstly, I initially read Band of Brothers because of my own family history with World War II-era paratroopers. Sergeant Michael Zapf, my grandfather, jumped into Normandy France with F Company, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. He served in the same company through the Ardennes and Operation Varsity – the invasion of Germany. Having “E Co. 506th PIR, 101st Airborne” on the cover of Band of Brothers, only a few clicks of the dial off of Grandpa Zapf’s unit, made me feel like I was reading his story, getting to know the man that he was before he became a father, grandfather, and my personal hero. Since Band of Brothers, the D-Day paratroopers have been glorified, mythologized, and honored very publicly in the military circles and across wider American society, but at that time the recognition and realistic dramatization was new – and it seemed tailor-made for my own interests.

Secondly, watching Band of Brothers was a communal experience for me. When it first aired as a television series I was a cadet at West Point myself. At the time we did not have HBO streaming on our ancient computers or televisions that allowed us to watch anything other than Yankees baseball games. One of my friends had their mother tape each episode onto a VHS (yes, a VHS) and mailed it each week from Ohio to New York. For ten consecutive weeks we would gather in a basement common room, called a Day Room, and spend an evening with friends watching each episode. The theme music emanated from the mighty speakers of the old tube television and the cinder block walls echoed the sounds of battle in primitive surround-sound. Afterwards we naturally reflected upon what we saw, spending a few minutes to discuss what had transferred well from the book and what was missing – for we all had read the book already – before returning to our cadet lives. 

In addition to the atmosphere of the room, the mood at West Point had been dramatically altered by the attacks of September 11th, 2001. West Point is only 55 miles from where the World Trade Center towers stood and each of us in that room were on Academy grounds when the attacks occurred. The United States had also recently invaded Afghanistan and the attention of the student body instantly intensified on the realities of leading soldiers in combat. The leadership lessons of Easy Company during World War II seemed more useful than that of West Point’s faculty – who at most deployed in support of NATO and UN peacekeeping missions during the 1990s. We paid very close attention to Band of Brothers as we assembled in that Day Room.

The book remains a vital companion piece to the television series. The limits of hour-long episodes, selected dialogue, and film editing leave plenty of material to learn from in the book. While the wars of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and nation building do not resemble the fight to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny, the moral lessons, professional bearing, attitude, and ethos of those written about by Stephen Ambrose are valuable for any leader.