The Impact of "Taking Chance"

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Today is Memorial Day. Two years ago I took my daughter Chloe to a Memorial Day parade and tried to give her some idea of what it was about, but as she was just 2 1/2 years old I naturally had limited success. So last evening we sat down together and watched "Taking Chance." It's a 2008 HBO film based on the true story of Marine Lt Col Michael Strobel's experience escorting the remains of PFC Chance Phelps from Dover Air Force Base to his parents' home in rural Wyoming.  Here's the trailer:




I'd seen the film before, enough to know that it was perfectly suitable for a 4 1/2 year old to watch. It contains no violence and (with one brief exception) no profanity. Chloe asked a number of questions, and periodically we'd pause the DVD while I answered them. One of them had to do with the term "service"; as in "Thank you for your service." Chloe had previously encountered the term only in the context of food service, so I had to explain the larger meaning of "service," what it means "to serve," and so on. Particularly what it means to serve in the military and, by extension, to serve one's country.

Whenever I get a little choked up about something, Chloe interprets it as sadness, and has continued to do so despite my efforts to explain that such shows of emotion often do not signify sadness.  Several times during the film she turned to me and said, "Don't be sad."

The movie had an impact on someone made of sterner stuff than myself.  Early in the Obama administration, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates conducted a review of the Defense Department's policy of barring media access to the military mortuary facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  The media cried foul, with some charging that the policy was a politically-motivated effort to hide the human cost of war from the American public.  But the military services and a number of groups representing the families of fallen soldiers considered it almost sacrilegious to allow cameras to film the flag-draped coffins returning from overseas.  Gates ultimately decided to modify the policy so as to allow press coverage as long as a grieving family did not object.

In his memoirs, Gates wrote:

In the case of my decision on Dover, an HBO movie, Taking Chance, released in February [2009], had an important impact.  The story follows a Marine lieutenant colonel (played by Kevin Bacon) as he escorts the remains of Marine Lance Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover to his hometown in Wyoming, ordinary Americans making gestures of respect all along the way.  After seeing the film, I was resolved that we should publicly honor as many of our fallen warriors as possible, beginning at Dover.  -- Duty:  Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York, 2014), 307. 

(For more information on the film, see the  "Taking Chance" web site on HBO.)