A Few Good Dems Told the Truth and Trump Couldn't Handle It

Former Rep. Conor Lamb argues that Democrats were right to remind troops to refuse unlawful orders, and Trump’s furious calls for their execution only prove their point.

Guest article by Conor Lamb

In the last couple of days, there has been a heated debate online about Democratic members of Congress reminding our troops that they should refuse unlawful orders. In response to the video, Trump called for the Democrats to be put on trial, locked up, and even hanged.

In other words, Trump lost his cool even faster than Colonel Nathan R. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) did in the 1992 classic movie, A Few Good Men.

A Few Good Men (directed by Rob Reiner and based on a play by Aaron Sorkin) is often thought of as a courtroom drama, which it is. It made me want to become a judge advocate. However, at the end of the day, the film is as much about Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson (below) as it is about Nicholson’s character or any of the lawyers (like Tom Cruise).

A rational question you might ask, in response to the Democratic members of Congress reminding troops to disobey unlawful orders, is how would Lance Corporal Dawson know if an order he received was lawful or unlawful? Isn’t that asking too much?

It wasn’t too much for the jury in the movie, which convicted Dawson for “conduct unbecoming,” even though the jury knew he was following an order. That’s why his example is so useful. Dawson and another Marine were put on trial for giving a weaker Marine a “Code Red,” a form of hazing that accidentally resulted in his death. We suspect that Colonel Jessep ordered them to do it, which is later proven at the trial in the famous “You can’t handle the truth” scene. But the two Marines are convicted anyway, because it was an unlawful order. They shouldn’t have obeyed it.

When Dawson salutes Tom Cruise at the end, it shows that he understands he was wrong. “We were supposed to fight for people who couldn’t fight for themselves,” he says. In that moment, he demonstrates the meaning of honor, as it is properly understood even by junior Marines.

In other words, it was not at all unreasonable for the jurors to have expected Dawson to know that it was unlawful for him to haze another Marine, not because he should have consulted a law book, but because he should have checked his moral compass. In the Marines particularly, the concept of the moral compass is taught during basic training, and referred to constantly. We were taught with real-life examples that there are basic issues of life and death about which they need to maintain moral clarity. Not conducting Code Reds would have been one at Guantanamo Bay in the early nineties, at least according to the film. When I was going through officer training, we talked a lot about My Lai, because Marines had been involved in the Haditha case not long before that.

Honor is essential if we are going to continue to have an apolitical military. America has succeeded because our military swears allegiance to the Constitution, not to an individual president or their personal agenda. That is exactly what Democratic members of Congress were trying to reaffirm for the troops. The fact that Trump wants them to die is what we lawyers might call “hard evidence” of his disrespect for the Constitution, and his desire for the military to serve him, not the interests of the nation.

This is exactly why someone besides him needs to be talking to our servicemembers about these killings at sea. Especially because senior commanders who know that President Trump, or any U.S. President, unilaterally ordering strikes on boats in the Caribbean is wrong are being pushed aside.

You may have read that Admiral Holsey, who was overseeing the Venezuelan boat strikes, suddenly stepped down recently. He had been in uniform for 37 years, and had two years left in that command. Clearly, he saw something was wrong. Then today we learned that the top lawyer in the same combatant command believed the boat strikes were unlawful before they ever began, and even considered them to be “extrajudicial killings,” but his views were sidelined.

Since Admiral Holsey isn’t there anymore, and we don’t know the status of the JAG officer(s), these Democratic members of Congress were filling an important gap. Pete Hegseth seems to only want to talk about shaving and fitness, and it would not surprise me in the slightest if some day, people like him try to pin blame for things they ordered on the junior-most troops involved, like Jessep tried to do in A Few Good Men. Hopefully this time, the Lance Corporal Dawsons of the world will get the message from someone else before it’s too late.

Conor Lamb is a former U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania (PA-17), federal prosecutor, and Marine officer. He is currently a lawyer at Kline & Specter and an avid town hall participant.