I define loyalty as the willingness of a person to sacrifice at their own personal expense in order to protect, uphold, defend and edify those persons, ideals and/or things which they cherish most. The amount of loyalty a person feels towards someone or something determines how much they are willing to sacrifice for them. As a soldier, we are called upon to sacrifice every aspect of our lives - the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual - in order to protect, uphold, defend and edify the U.S. constitution, the Army, our fellow soldiers and the nation and heritage (all those things about America that we have fought and died to achieve as a country; our structure of government, our laws and our freedoms, our prosperity) of our homeland. Our sacrifices demonstrate our loyalty and it is our loyalty that allows the America we know today to continue to grow and prosper as our ancestors hoped. It is worth noting that loyalty, as a rule, does not take into consideration the small, every-day irritants and disagreements that we encounter with the persons and things to which we are loyal; if it did, it would no longer require self-sacrifice but would instead be a matter of business exchange, or more appropriately, mercenary enterprise. This is why the Army definition of loyalty uses the phrase, "true faith"; to have faith means to believe even when the evidence and facts are in disagreement with the desired outcome of one's hopes and action(s). Loyalty means to believe that our personal sacrifices will be worthwhile in the end no matter how bleak the outcome may look in the present.…
