Last night I finished re-watching the HBO series "Generation Kill," about a Marine Recon Battalion during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The series captures moments of incredible bravery by the Marines followed by long hours of boredom and a string of bad decisions by high command.
One of several comic characters in the drama is the battalion Sergeant's Major John Sixta. A short, broad-shouldered man with a raspy, nasal voice, he is obsessed with the "grooming standard." He combines the worst of every senior enlisted man in every branch of every military. This little son-of-a-bitch would make soldiers laugh who were veterans of either side of the fight at Gettysburg, at Leningrad or Stalingrad, at Austerlitz, at Waterloo, probably even at Vosges on either the Roman or German side. The cartoon Sergeant's Major is perfectly expressed in John Sixta.
On the other extreme of the senior sergeant in film is Colour Sergeant (Platoon Sergeant) Frank Bourne in the 1964 film "Zulu." Bourne trains his men, makes sure they are ready to fight, quietly encourages his best soldiers, pushes the slackers, and stands with stiff-upper-lip resolve in the face of an assault by a force outnumbering his unit by 100 to 1.
The best sergeant's major I have known personally is Christopher Kepner, the current Command Sergeant's Major of the National Guard.
The role of the Top Enlisted Soldier in the military has civilian parallels. A warehouse manager or shop manager keeps the workers motivated makes sure work procedures are followed to the letter, and is responsible for worker safety. But a manager has no input in corporate strategy. The Top Sergeant has responsibility, but not authority: they get the soldiers ready to fight, but do not decide where or when to fight. That's what officers do.
For me, the best civilian parallel is in the book (NOT the movie) "Remains of the Day" by the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro. The butler in that lovely book is the picture of the sergeant's major. He is in charge of maintaining the appearance, the morale, and the performance performance of the large staff of servants in a pre-World-War-II English ancestral mansion. He can terrorize the staff and yet, behind his well-groomed back, be the subject of ridicule. In one of a hundred big and small ironies in the story, the butler is completely devoted to the Lord of the house. But that venerated figure turns out to be the center of clandestine Nazi sympathy in England.
I heard Ishiguro speak in Phialdelphia in 2015, two decades after the book was published. When asked about the movie Ishiguro said he was just beginning his career as a novelist. He was flattered to have a movie made of his book. But the choice of the studio to play the butler was Anthony Hopkins. Ishiguro said Hopkins is brilliant, but he is not a comic figure, so the movie lost that dimension of the butler.
If you have a favorite portrayal of a Sergeant's Major or other top sergeant in film, let me know at ngussman@yahoo.com .
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