Playing Taps

Director Harold Becker’s coming-of-age military drama ”Taps” was released in 1981, when the Fall of Saigon and the end of our misadventure in Vietnam was still only six years in our past… a little more than one Presidential election cycle under the bridge and downstream. It was a time when our nation in general, and Hollywood in particular, was still dealing with the political and social ramifications of that National failure, one which was engineered by a different, but philosophically related, generation of “experts” than the one which currently bedevils us.

Unlike the post-WWII period where our twin victories in Europe and the Pacific generated an ocean of movies about Americans kicking Hitler and Tojo in the yarbles, the decade and a half post-Saigon would produce dozens of movies, and at least one TV show (M*A*S*H), which dealt with our failure in Vietnam in ways both direct and otherwise. The most obvious titles are “Platoon”, “Apocalypse Now”, “Born on the Fourth of July”, “Good Morning Vietnam”, and “Casualties of War”… but even “Top Gun”, as rah-rah a patriotic mom and apple pie film as Hollywood has ever made, included a pointed dig at the military’s Vietnam era failures.

View the TAPS trailer, here:

“Taps”, though, stands out from its peers. It’s a lesser-known film of the period but it’s interesting for all the ways in which it is different from those other films. Adapted from the 1979 Devery Freeman novel “Father Sky”, “Taps” is the story of 17-year-old Cadet Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton), a rising senior at Bunker Hill Military Academy. Having spent the bulk of his childhood at Bunker Hill, Moreland has been fully indoctrinated into the concepts of duty, honor and sacrifice in ways both good and bad, and is set to begin his final year having achieved the rank of “Cadet Major” second only to the school’s charismatic superintendent, General Bache, played as an aging George Patton by the man himself George C. Scott.

When Moreland learns, during a shocking Commencement Day speech given by Bache, that Bunker Hill will close at the end of the year, to be sold off and turned into condos, he is privately assured by Bache that the fight is not over… that this is nothing but another battle that Bache and his young not-quite-men will win together. But before that fight can begin, Bache makes a tragic mistake and takes himself off the chess board, leaving Moreland alone with an impossible mission and with no senior officer upon whom to lean. In the wake of Bache’s fatal error, the Trustees elect to close the school immediately, and Moreland and his cadets respond by siezing control of the school by force in hopes that they can negotiate for a different outcome.

I’ve seen “Taps” many times over the years, at many different phases of my life, and each time it has delivered a different emotional experience. The first time I saw the movie I was about the same age as Charlie Auden, the squared-away pre-teen plebe who is indirectly responsible for the movie’s final tragic sequence, and I remember getting caught up in many of the same inspirational messages about duty, honor and glory that so enthrall Major Moreland.

As a young man with a budding anti-authoritarian streak, I was thrilled by the sequence where Moreland attemps to deliver his demands to the Trustees and the police, only to have the local Sheriff attempt to arrest him… an attempt that ends when Moreland’s cadets appear on a catwalk, armed with fully-loaded M-16s. As the adults cower in shock, Moreland stands firm, shoulders back, chin up and calmly delivers his demands, perhaps his finest moment in what will become a doomed first command.

Back in those more innocent days, I wanted to see Moreland’s tragic arc as a missed opportunity… “the wrong execution of the right idea” as Moreland’s father will later tell him. But as I’ve gotten older and have witnessed the growing crisis of manhood we currently face in America, I’ve begun to see the movie in a very different way. General Bache is a fascinating figure, charismatic, full of love of country and stories about glory in battle as well as a deep devotion to his men. He is very good at spinning up young soldiers like Major Moreland, but either due to lack of time or lack of care, he seems to have never gotten around to teaching his young charges that in any engagement, the enemy gets a vote and that the loneliness of Command always arrives after things start to go wrong and men begin dying.

In other words, he never got around to teaching them wisdom.

In an essay on America’s crisis of masculinity I wrote:

The thing about masculinity is, it must be harnessed and channeled in the right direction. A good man will run through a wall to get the job done, but that same energy can be dangerous if it’s not first molded by wiser men who know what it means to be a Good Man. Boys must be taught how to be men, it doesn’t just happen. Good men are made, not born. You can’t just wind them up and let them go…

This is the crux of the problem in “Taps”… Moreland and his Cadets are good young men and they are ready to run through a wall for their General. But without wisdom, wthout thoughtful leadership, they are full of an undirected energy that is dangerous…. even more so because it is fueled by righteousness. At the midpoint of the film, trying to rally his dispirited troops, Moreland tells them “most kids are vandalizing their schools, we want to save ours.” This is true, but in the end, it’s also irrelevant. Righteousness alone does not give us the moral authority to launch wars without a plan to end them quickly and decisively, something Americans have had to learn at least twice over the last fifty years.

Aspiring screenwriters should note that the character structure of “Taps” is interesting, complex and effective. Many of our most popular pop culture entertainment franchises place their main character in a tryptich between two supporting characters who represent moral and/or intellectual opposites and who push and pull the hero in those opposing directions.

In “Star Wars”, Luke Skywalker exists on a character continuum between the blue blood Princess Leia, a tough, smart warrior willing to make any sacrifice for the cause, and Han Solo, the mercenary who is only out for himself. In “Star Trek”, Captain Kirk occupies a leadership space between Doctor McCoy, the emotional human and Spock, the Vulcan capable only of pure logic, and Kirk must lean on both men’s perspectives in order to effectively command The Enterprise (NOTE: there is a scene in “Taps” where Moreland’s cadets are relaxing in front of the TV watching an episode of the original “Star Trek” series, which is almost certainly not a an accident).

“Taps” utilizes this storytelling device not once, but twice.

As a military Commander, Major Moreland is pulled in opposite directions by his mentor General Bache on one hand, and on the other by his adversary on the other side of the wire Colonel Kerby, played by Ronnie Cox, one of the best character actors of his generation and a staple of the 80’s movie landscape.

If Bache is the inspirational figure, the Ivory Towered Academy Superintendent long separated from the grim realities of the battlefield, whose speeches focus mainly on the glory of dying for a cause, Kerby is the practical blue collar soldier, a man who understands the realities and challenges of command, because he lives them every day. Listening to the speech he delivers to Moreland at the Academy gate after one of Moreland’s cadets is gravely injured, you get a sense that for all of Bache’s inspirational theatrics, Morleand might have been better served by learning to soldier from Kerby.

“A soldier?! No, goddammit, I'm a soldier, with the career goal of all soldiers… I want to stay alive in situations where it ain't all that easy to do! But you, my friend, you're a death-lover. Oh, I know the species. Seventeen-years-old and some son of a bitch has put you in love with death. Somebody sold you on the idea that dying for a cause is oh, so romantic. Well, that's the worst kind of all the kinds of bullshit there is. Dying is only one thing… bad.”

Long after it is far too late, Moreland seems to finally understand this fundamental truth when he says of Bache, “There had to be something missing, y’know, in all that he taught us… or this wouldn’t have happened.”

As a young man, Moreland is also caught between two character extremes. On one side is his close friend and roommate Alex Dwyer (Sean Penn), the conscientious objector who describes himself as “half civilian, on my mother’s side.” Dwyer is a loyal friend but he is, to say the least, not at all sold on Bache’s ideas about duty, honor and sacrifice, and it’s easy to wonder how he wound up at Bunker Hill in the first place.

On the other extreme is David Shawn (Tom Cruise) the gung-ho, all-in, squared away scrapper who craves the action of combat. A never give-up, never-surrender type, Shawn is always quick to choose aggression as the solution to any problem. Having been spun up by Bache to fight a battle that never comes, Shawn ultimately commits a shocking act of violence which leads to the flm’s final tragic conclusion.

In the same way that Oliver Stone described the hero of his Vietnam war epic “Platoon” as “the child of two fathers”, Major Moreland is the sum of the best and worst parts of both Dwyer and Shawn.

And as long as we are on the subject of history, the war in Vietnam is not the only historical echo we see in the twists and turns of “Taps.” Near the end of the film, during his final confrontation with Kerby, Moreland says:

“I know what they want us to do… they want us to be good little boys now so we can fight some war for them in the future. Some war they’ll decide on. Well we’d rather fight our own war, right now.”

This is a shocking about-face from Moreland’s previously expressed fealty to duty, honor, orders and the chain of command and it reminds me of the anti-war sentiment that has begun to animate the new “America First” Right in the wake of our disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and a generation of Neocon foreign policy dominance. I have no doubt that the men and women who served in that war over the last twenty years, to say nothing of their familes, felt betrayed by that chaotic retreat in the same way that Moreland feels betrayed by the Bunker Hill trustees’ plan to turn his home into condominiums.

None of this is to suggest that the new Right’s sense of betrayal and its new commitment to ending “foreign wars” is misguided in the same way that Moreland’s quixotic “war” is… it is not… but it does remind me of that old saying that “while history never repeats, it does rhyme.”

Viewed in the context of America’s mistakes in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the end of “Taps” can be appreciated as a sort of catharsis… because unlike the wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in which none of the architects of those failures faced any real personal or career consequences, at the Battle of Bunker Hill Academy, both the soldiers at the tip of the spear who put their faith and loyalty in a lost cause as well as the commanders who put them there under mistaken pretenses are killed.

It’s not a happy ending, but it is perhaps, the right one.