ROB REINER, A FEW GOOD MEN, AND MAGGIE GOODLANDER

     

ROB REINER, A FEW GOOD MEN, AND MAGGIE GOODLANDER

Marine lieutenants Bill Adams and Mike Moffett at Camp Fuji, Japan - 1984

The tragic murder of Hollywood star Rob Reiner and his wife Michele stunned and shocked the world. While 17,000 people were murdered in the U.S. in 2024, such violence really strikes home when one knows the victim—and most of us knew Reiner due to his 50-year career as an actor, writer, producer, and director.

Tributes to the late icon recollected his acting and especially his directing, which included wonderfully successful films like The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and especially A Few Good Men, about which I’m writing here.

A Few Good Men came out in 1992, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland and others. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including “Best Picture.” Its storyline involved a death coverup which occurred on the Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) American military base. A couple members of Gitmo’s Marine Security detachment were accused of murder after the hazing death of a fellow Leatherneck who was deemed a substandard performer.

Lieutenant (JG) Daniel Kaffee (Cruise) and Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway (Moore) were assigned to provide defense counsel to two young Marines accused of murder. Captain Jack Ross (Bacon) is the JAG (Judge Advocate General) prosecutor. Marine Colonel Nathan R. Jessep (Nicholson) was the overall commander at Guantanamo Bay. Marine Lieutenant Jonathan Kendrick (Sutherland) was the immediate officer in charge of the unit involved.

Based on an actual Guantanamo hazing incident that first inspired an Aaron Sorkin play, A Few Good Men was a perfect movie to rewatch as a way to honor and remember Reiner. So, I found it and watched it during a recent frosty December evening. The rewatch proved to be enormously compelling, beyond the Reiner connection. The movie was all about illegal military orders, a subject that has been and remains very newsworthy today, given the video put out by six Democratic congresspeople—including New Hampshire’s Maggie Goodlander—concerning the responsibility of military people to refuse “illegal” orders. Their video created a figurative firestorm which still burns.

But beyond all this, as I rewatched A Few Good Men, I realized that Lieutenant Kendrick (the Kiefer Sutherland character) was based on a real-life friend of mine—Bill Adams. The realization stunned me. Did Bill issue a fatal, illegal order?

Many years ago, Bill and I were fellow lieutenants in the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. We reconnected last year at Camp Pendleton, Calif. for the dedication of a memorial honoring 29 Marine comrades from 3/5 killed in a helicopter crash during a training mission in South Korea.

(That night training mission was a reprise of the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, also involving six CH-53 helicopters. The mission commander was one of the pilots from the ill-fated Iranian Desert One mission. The CH-53 behind mine hit a mountain top and memories of retrieving the bodies of our comrades will always stay with us. Hence the memorial dedication. But I digress.)

It was great to reconnect with Bill and other 3/5 survivors, including our Lima Company Commander, Captain Jay Paxton, who retired as a four-star general and assistant USMC commandant in 2016. As we all compared notes and got caught up on respective life journeys, I recalled that Billy was assigned to Guantanamo Bay after leaving 3/5—about the same time as the infamous hazing incident there.

Following my A Few Good Men rewatch, I googled the Gitmo hazing incident and found a 1992 New York Times story and was stunned to learn how much the movie coincided with the actual hazing incident. The real-life victim was a Private Alvarado (Private Santiago in the movie). The private was supposedly a substandard performer and a snitch who wanted to be reassigned. Rather than reassigning him, the Marines opted to apply illegal barracks justice (a Code Red) to Alvarado to teach him a lesson. He nearly died. (In the movie, Santiago does die.)

According to the Times story, Lieutenant Bill Adams got his squad leaders together and stated “I don’t want you to hurt him. I don’t want you to touch him. I don’t want you to throw him from any third story. But if he falls down the steps in the middle of the night, oh well.”

After midnight, a group of Marines subsequently barged in on Alvarado, bound and gagged him, and stuck a rolled-up stocking in his mouth, which asphyxiated him—just as in the movie. Alvarado ended up in a coma and was airlifted to emergency care. After several days in a coma, he recovered.

Bill and ten other Marines now had to contend with attempted murder charges. Seven of the men took less than honorable discharges. Three went to prison. Billy’s case was dismissed for missing the statutory requirement for a speedy trial by one day.

General Al Grey, soon to be USMC Commandant, flew to Cuba and met with officers and “ranted and raved” about Alvarado’s near death. Grey emphasized that Marines did not sanction blanket parties or barracks justice and that is what they were to tell investigators.

The truth is that Marines absolutely do look to junior non-commissioned officers to police each other as well as subordinates. That’s how leadership skills are developed, and unit discipline maintained. But sometimes barracks justice can go too far, as with Alvarado/Santiago.

Were illegal orders issued? I don’t know enough to judge. There are written orders and implied orders. Implied orders leave no paper trail.

The Lieutenant Kendrick (Kiefer Sutherland) in A Few Good Men, seems to be reprising Bill’s Gitmo platoon commander role. But Kendrick is a villainous fanatic and liar who bears no resemblance to Adams, who I know personally to be a stalwart officer and excellent Marine, caught up in a situation that escalated out of control.

The movie’s climax provides one of Hollywood’s most powerful scenes ever, where Kaffee (Cruise) puts Jessup (Nicholson) on the stand. Jessup famously tells Kaffee that “You can’t handle the truth!” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sLcfQKU_co&t=106

Kaffee goads Jessup into admitting that he issued an illegal “code red” order. The Marine colonel is subsequently arrested with the accused enlisted Marines acquitted of murder charges.

Goodlander and company’s video was an unnecessary partisan political stunt. But their video, along with Reiner’s movie, does focus attention on inevitable moral and ethical issues that confront leaders who must issue orders, sometimes in the heat of battle. And while American military justice—like all justice systems—is imperfect we should be proud that we have provisions for accountability in place that are historically absent in other military organizations, such as Putin’s Russian army, to name one.

If you’ve never seen A Few Good Men, you should check it out.

R.I.P. Rob Reiner.

                                                            Jack Nicholson (Wikipedia)

Rep. Maggie Goodlander: Seditious or just shameful?

 

Rep. Maggie Goodlander: Seditious or just shameful?

State. Rep Mike Moffett, Governor Kelly Ayotte, and Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander at 250th Marine Corps Birthday Ceremony at N.H. State House on Nov. 10, 2025

 

There are many angles from which to view the “Scandalous Saga of the Seditious Six,” the recent Video-Gate story of six Democrat congresspeople who went public to admonish serving military personnel that they don’t need to follow orders they deem illegal.

Such sagas have value in that they necessarily raise awareness about history, law, civics, precedents, military service doctrines, and motives.

As a Marine Corps veteran and the current Chair of the House Committee on State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs, I was unsurprisingly contacted by a reporter when the story broke. He sent me a link to the video and asked for a comment, which I provided as follows:

“A very disturbing video,” added State Rep. Michael Moffett (R-Loudon), a Marine veteran who served in the Middle East. “At Marine Corps Mess Nights, we always faithfully toasted our commander-in-chief, whether we liked them or not, be it Clinton, Bush, or Obama. This (attitude) is a huge threat to military discipline and the good order required. Very dangerous and disappointing to see partisanship introduced to our military culture in this way.”

The “Scandalous Saga of the Seditious Six” is of particular interest to Granite Staters in that one of the six is our CD2 Congressperson, Maggie Goodlander. Ironically, I had just spent some quality time with her on the Marine Corps Birthday, November 10^th. We Marines appreciated her getting up early that day to be at the State House flag-raising to offer comments. Later that day Beth and I shared a table with the Congresswoman and others at the Marine Corps Ball in Franklin, where she again offered very nice comments to the large crowd while I read Governor Ayotte’s proclamation. I later sent the Congresswoman a copy of my Afghanistan book.

It’s hard not to like Representative Goodlander. So, the “Scandalous Saga of the Seditious Six” was both a surprise and a disappointment.

The other five video participants were Senators Mark Kelly and Ellissa Slotkin as well as Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan. All are Democrats, which made their action appear to be nakedly partisan. Surely, they could have found at least one Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger type to provide a patina of bipartisanship to their stunt.

An early reaction was to wonder whose idea this was. Apparently, it emanated from Slotkin, who is not even a veteran. Indeed, only 26 Democrats in all of Congress are veterans.

(In 1971, 78 out of 100 U.S. Senators were veterans along with 313 out of 435 U.S. Representatives.)

Goodlander threw gasoline on the subsequent political fire by doubling down and providing a second video which attempted to rationalize and justify the first.

The initial video unfortunately didn’t point to any specific issue or incident, which would have been instructive. Speaking in broad, ambiguous terms was perhaps an attempt to “poke the bear” to get a reaction. If that was the intent, it succeeded, as President Trump responded that he saw the behavior as seditious, which could involve a death penalty. Dems happily replied by (inaccurately) claiming that the President called for the murder of the Seditious Six.

The President is familiar with this “bear poking” dynamic. He often utters provocative comments likely designed to cause apoplexy amongst his many political opponents who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome who take the bait and end up looking foolish with their hysterical responses. Then Trumpsters effectively shine lights on their unhinged behavior.

"Touché, mes amis!”

Yes, specific examples concerning relevant orders would have been helpful. Short of that, speculation subsequently centered on administration policies related to domestic National Guard deployments or international interdictions of suspected nautical Venezuelan drug runners.

Goodlander is standing on especially shaky ground here, as she’s married to Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Advisor. Recall that the Biden Administration ordered bombing missions in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen—without Congressional sanction. Those actions likely resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians and could certainly be construed by some as “illegal orders” worthy of being disobeyed, if we follow the logic from Video-Gate.

But the Seditious Six were silent on these bombings, thus confirming that Video-Gate was prompted by partisanship, not patriotism.

Stone, meet Glass House!

An example of an illegal order would be a senior telling a subordinate to kill an unarmed civilian detainee. But most military orders result from leaders seeking to accomplish missions assigned by elected officials. Members of any effective military unit do not have the luxury of discussing or debating the morality or probity of most missions or orders.

To be sure, that approach has been tried before—with disastrous consequences.

For example, during World War I, Russia’s Imperial Army was infiltrated by Bolsheviks and other disruptors who succeeded in implementing Order #1, which called for the election of soldier “committees” to review policies and orders. Discipline and morale collapsed. That army disintegrated. Communists took over the country and sued for a separate peace with Germany in 1918 and then established a Soviet Union which would inflict almost a century of horrors all over the world.

Truth.

So, if a result of the Dems’ Video-Gate is a new appreciation of important history, then that’s good. And if another result is an enhanced awareness of craven partisan political motives that undermine the good order and discipline in our military, then that is also good.

So, are the Scandalous Six actually seditious?

I want to think not.

Are they shameful?

Yes.