When you order a man to do a dirty job, you trust him, since he is doing it for you.

Rating: 10/10 (25 September 2007)

This is a brilliant film portraying the trust that citizens need to give their soldiers. The duty of a soldier is hard and involves lots of training and preparation for something there is no real training and preparation for: war. Only the hardest and most determined men become good soldiers and the best of that elite become good officers.
Colonel Childers is a good officer and solid war veteran who knows what he needs to do to get his job, defending America, done and done well. He pulls of compromises and makes his decisions crisp and clear. However, when faced with the task of protecting an embassy and American soil in a hostile Middle Eastern country he is faced with a dilemma any soldier would face: should he order his men to fire into a hostile crowd in order to get them to stop? He decides through agonizing minutes after three of his men are down and he himself is wounded to give the order to fire. Shockingly, instead of being treated as hero who made a tough but necessary decision he is accused of murder on 83 counts.
There is an investigation into what happened, but evidence is slim as the embassy security cameras have been destroyed and the soldiers have trouble remembering what happened in the chaos. They were taking cover and only rose up to fire, anyway. One camera was left intact, but the tape to it has vanished as a part of a conspiracy by diplomats to write this off as the mistake of one unstable man. But Childers knows the truth and his friend and brother in arms Hogdes (who represents Childers on court) knows it too. Hodges has his doubts, but realizes that Childers is not a glory hound, he isn't eager to say that he willfully ordered his men to fire into a crowd that had women and children, but the important thing is that Childers did what he decided was best: protect America from hostility. It had to be done and was rightfully done so.
The courtroom scenes in the films last act are particularly shocking as nit picking diplomats and prosecutors pick apart little details and question the integrity of Colonel Childers, asking him to recall the minutest details. The point is that Childers's decision as a USMC Colonel was made from his heart and gut, not from a measly piece of paper called "the rules of engagement." That's what defending America is all about and it comes from the heart of every citizen and the gut of every soldier. It's about time people, mainly liberals, got that. Also the film isn't racist, it treats offenders of America equally. The Viet Cong get it for endangering and killing Americans in the beginning so the Muslims get it too. The point transcends race and is ever more relevant in today's political spectrum.