Decoding Murder: A Few Good Men's Dilemma

When one shoots and kills an intruder in her home, is it considered murder or self defense? When a soldier shoots and kills a man, is he defending his country and following orders, or he is committing murder? These are questions raised by A Few Good Men, a 1992 film by Rob Riener. When Lance Corporal Harold Dawson and Pfc. Louden Downey are given orders to give Pfc. William Santiago a code red, they accidentally take it too far and kill him. They are then placed on trial for murder, but are they really guilty? Though many people would consider Dawson and Downey to be sadistic or even ruthless for what they did to Santiago, Zimbardo in “The Stanford Prison Experiment” and Milgram in “The Perils of Obedience” explain how they are simply ordinary

He found that when a person is labeled with some kind of social role, they begin to form themselves to it, however untrue it may be. In A Few Good Men, for example, Dawson and Downey refuse to plead guilty and take the plea bargain as Kaffee suggests, because they feel it 's against their code, “Unit, Core, God, Country,” to take the easy way out. Both Dawson and Downey knew that giving a Code Red to a peer is illegal and morally wrong, however they both wholeheartedly thought that what they were doing was their job, and that they did nothing wrong. Dawson explains his reasoning to Kaffee when he says “What do we do then, sir? We joined the corps 'cause we wanted to live our lives by a certain code. And we found it in the Corps. And now you 're asking us to sign a piece of paper that says we have no honor. You 're asking us to say we 're not marines. If a judge and jury decide that what we did was wrong, I 'll accept

But I believe I was right, sir. I believe I did my job. And I won 't dishonor myself, my unit, or the Corps, so that I can go home in six months.” (Kaffee, Dawson, and Downey in interrogation room). By saying this, he proves what Zimbardo found in his study: when placed in a social role, young educated men and women are radically transformed to fit that role. Though Dawson appears to have no remorse over what he 's done, we see that he knows what he did was wrong when he says “I never meant to hurt Willy” to Kaffee, Jo, and Sam after he 's been sentenced. Would Dawson and Downey have done what they did to Santiago if they were at home with family? If they had never joined the Marines? Zimbardo 's answer to this would be a definite no. To explain his reasoning, he says “To what extent do we allow ourselves to become imprisoned by docilely accepting the roles others assign us or, indeed, choose to remain prisoners because being passive and dependent frees us from the need to act and be responsible for our actions (117).” Through Zimbardo 's viewpoint, Dawson and Downey were nothing more than ordinary men who were placed in an extreme role and were radically changed to assume that role. Much like how the guards changed in The Stanford Prison Experiment, Dawson and Downey were changed through the pressures of the military, and took the responsibility of the Code Red too