I’m referring to the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men.
As a witness in a murder trial of his subordinates, he (eventually) admits that he ordered them to rough up the victim, which eventually led to his death. Beyond initially denying his involvement and thus trying to frame the murder as disobedience by his subordinates, it’s implied that Jessup also covered up the events by getting flight logs and/or call logs falsified.
I’ve always interpreted the movie as presenting him as an entertaining, badass bad guy. But maybe my perception was wrong, and given current events, it may start to matter.
So, are there people in the military who’d consider him to be a good person and leader? How about in society in general?
I had the impression that he was intended to show the side of the military that’s duty-focused to the point where the ends start justifying the means, and rule-of-law goes out the window. I mean, Jessup did what he thought was ultimately the right thing, even if it was unreasonably harsh to Santiago, because he thought he had a bigger issue to prepare for.
I’d say that it’s entirely relevant in today’s climate- the idea that some ideological concepts may override the rule of law and (possibly) the chain of command is a big question at the moment.
I don’t doubt that there are people out there who do believe that the ends do justify the means, and they would more than likely think Jessup was in the right, and that the whole thing was a farce, because Santiago was not doing what a Marine should have, and was getting in the way of Jessup and the other Marines doing their job.
Col. Jessup was a terrible leader. Not only did he convey tacit approval for a brutal ‘correction’ of Pvt. Santiago (the “Code Red” order) for poor performance and the nominal violation of chain of command by making a request around Jessup to be reassigned, it is strongly implied that Jessup is doing this to maintain his reputation and get his flag, rather than for the needs of the men and maintaining morale. He dresses all of this up in an arch speech about “honor, code, loyalty” and living in “world that has walls…that have to be guarded by men with guns”, but in reality, he just didn’t want the mark on his record that transferring the unacceptable Santiago (an inconsequential action) away from GITMO.
He’s convinced himself and his men that his orders are ordained from on high while essentially failing to maintain actual discipline. He actually has no self control because the judge overseeing the trial actually told him that he didn’t have to answer that question (and he wasn’t on trial) but he couldn’t help himself from rendering an absurd justification, much less throwing his enlisted men under the bus for following his order or falsifying records to cover up the crime. He’s basically two steps away from General Ripper in. Dr. Strangelove, and it wouldn’t surprise me that in his secret backstory he’s wearing women’s lingerie under that Corps uniform.
Now, let’s talk about the war crimes committed in Courage Under Fire…
Probably the same people who saw Wall Street and took away Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” as the essential moral lesson of the film.
4. Tell the truth about what you see and do. There is an army depending on us for correct information. You can lie all you please when you tell other folks about the Rangers, but don’t never lie to a Ranger or officer.
— Standing Orders, Rogers Rangers
We get the whole speech about standing on wall, defending freedom, deep down needing him in places you don’t talk about parties etc. etc. from which a naive viewer might conclude that the work Jessup and the marines are doing on his base is a) dangerous and b) safeguarding the freedom of US citizens from c) a genuine threat.
Bwahahahaha!
This is pre-War on Terror Guantanamo. The threat posed by the Cuban forces to teh base is negligible. The threat posed by Cuba to the cocktail sipping US citizen supposedly being safeguarded by Jessup’s actions is non-existent. If the base were in Cold War West Germany then maybe he’d have a point. But the biggest danger facing his men on guard duty is sunstroke. If the US had in a fit of unaccustomed generosity packed its bags and left Guantanamo the net effect on US national security would have been nil.
Jessup is ridiculous - an outdated pompous blowhard lacking a moral core and at best deluding himself about his job.
There are those that believe national security trumps all. So they would approve of what Jessup did along with approving of the Japanese-American internment during WW2 and current government spying on private citizens.
For the last 10ish years I have been on a one-person crusade to banish the word in all its uses. There is now no innocent untainted use of the word, not even for the idea of a suit of cards.
Imagine it’s 1938 and “hitler” has been a perfectly cromulent word in English meaning e.g. “nice”. You and most Americans would probably find a different word to use when you meant “nice”.
IMO that is where we are now and that is what we should do. Find a different word or words for every meaning of that word.
From now on, I’m going to champion the use of the term “hitler” to describe something I find pleasant, as in “Did you catch the sunrise this morning? It was so ‘hitler’.”
I made a suggestion a year or three ago that what we ought to do is simply find a different existing English word and agree to swap its meanings with the newly unmentionable word. So wherever you’d you the one word now you’d use the other.
Several posters liked the idea and suggested various words to use for the president and the card suit and other such meanings. “Shart” won the contest.
The entire notion of allowing Donald Trump to diminish even one word of a language he already routinely mangles is so distasteful and absurd notwithstanding of how difficult it would be to get your neologism inserted into general usage as a replacement makes your quest a quixotic one, and while I often admire the energy that people will put into hopeless and pointless exercises just to salve their own frustrations, I’m not going to participate in it any more than I would tilt at ‘dragons’ on the back of a much suffering donkey.
It would be much easier, and more appropriate, to rechristen the individual in question to Donald Drumpf so that he can have an appropriately alliterative villain name.
Oh, I quite agree my various suggestions are utterly in vain. And made mostly in deadpan jest.
in general I’m not big on name-calling, so I’d just like to reserve the term for the guy’s name and avoid using that as much as possible. And use it not at all for the other meanings. Simply to avoid calling the guy to mind unnecessarily.
With luck we can memory-hole this whole sordid experience in another century or so. But I doubt it.
I could conceivably see a scenario where Jessup tells Kendrick to give Santiago a code red but in reality it would most likely never rise to Jessup’s level. A full bird colonel? Give me a break. Likely not even to Kendrick’s level (the platoon commander). The squad leaders and/or NCOs and/or platoon sergeant would handle this on their own. In my day it was called a blanket party. In my years I never heard that term, code red. That specific term may or may not have ever existed but the concept was widely known and it can be an effective way to tell someone to get their shit together and quit being a shitbird. In my day we’d sometimes consider doing it to someone but it never got to the point where we did it, or even anyone that I knew who did it.
As to Jessup specifically, his famous and memorable monologue makes sense and is an accurate viewpoint for someone in his line of work, specifically at the edge of a serious conflict zone. Whether Gitmo is or was such a place, I’m not worried about that. It’s Hollywood. But one of the guards was ‘engaged’, which to me and what I remember from the movie means an opposing soldier sighted in on him with his weapon. Sure Jessup is a little exuberant, and so is Kendrick for that matter, but it makes sense to me.
Was Jessup a ‘good guy’? No, he was an asshole who covered up the tragic death of one of his Marines. Even if Santiago was a shitbird and screwup, he is still one of his Marines. Santiago was never going to be transferred away and the matter was going to be taken care of in-house, okay that’s fine, but once he accidentally died you don’t cover it up.
At the O-6 level, things start to get more political and their decisions can be affected by politics. But even at the battalion commander level, or even the company commander level, some of those leaders make political decisions to protect their career at the expense of one of the troops. That definitely happens.
Still in all it’s a great movie, well written with excellent plot lines and dialogues, and two excellent monologues very well delivered by Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. One of my favorite movies.
One bit of movie trivia. In the opening scene with the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon performing their manual of arms and maneuvers (which in the movie are done pretty well although there are some obvious errors to the trained eye), that was performed by some college drill team and not the actual Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon. Still, they did a decent job with it.
I was going to say something similar. During the 60s Gitmo was different. There were tanks stationed there. Admiral Bulkeley was the base commander. The Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs happened. There was genuine tension and possible danger.
30 years later when the movie came out none of that was true. The idea that some sort of rockstar colonel existed was always laughable. The fact that he was stationed there is even more laughable. As the Marine in charge of base security he only had a small role. He wouldn’t be in charge of the base. He would have to answer to the base commander, a Navy officer.
A little more than a decade later I was there for a year. It seemed even more ridiculous. I knew the guy who had Jessup’s job. He was a major. We were in the same weekly poker game. No one was really worried about the Cubans and they weren’t worried about us. The Marine unit sold t-shirts with the “I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4,000 Cubans trained to kill me” quote on the back. It was definitely done tongue in cheek. I lost that one somewhere along the way.
And there is no wall. It’s a chainlink fence with sporadic observation towers.
So to bring it back to the OP I’m sure there are some people in the military who don’t understand the character as written. Most understand he’s caricature written by someone with no experience with the military. Most probably agree with the sentiment that someone who hasn’t lived the life doesn’t know enough to give criticism to those that live it.
