If ever you’ve served out of Quantico, Virginia, you’ll know there’s nothing worse than having to roll out of bed, deice your car and make a slippery, snowy drive down I-95 to get to work on time.
There’s nothing sweeter than getting the call that the base is closed. But what if that base closure comes from lower in the chain of the command than the commanding officer, say, from a lance corporal?
Someone must pay.
In 2019, after one such storm, a group of public affairs officers out of Quantico, Virginia, posted a base cancellation notice to the installation’s Facebook page.
“The new CO at the time, Col. William Bentley, was entering his first winter and wanted us to notify everyone that he was going to make the call on the status of the base by 8 p.m. the night prior to a weather event,” Maj. Ken Kunze, communication strategy and operations director for the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, told Marine Corps Times on Tuesday. “The previous CO sometimes waited until 4 a.m. which manifested in anger in the comments.”
But the decision to share the news of a cancellation on Facebook drew ire about chain of command, and where there’s ire on social media, memes are sure to follow.
In this case, the memes primarily were from the “Code Red” scene in the 1992 military legal drama, “A Few Good Men.”
So Kunze and company leaned into it and made a snow day spoof of the courtroom drama.
“Sgt. Caleb Dillard and Sgt. David Diggs were the main actors,” Kunze said. “They watched the movie scene the night before and wrote the rough script, then filmed in in one afternoon the next day in the Quantico courtroom.”
In the mock trial, tensions rise as the counsel questioning the asks a sergeant if he ordered the code red, and the defendant screams “You’re g*ddamn right I did.”
After a heavy Monday snowstorm in the Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia area left cars and trucks stuck overnight on I-95, the situation did indeed appear to be a code-red level disaster for more than a few good men.
Sarah Sicard is a Senior Editor with Military Times. She previously served as the Digitial Editor of Military Times and the Army Times Editor. Other work can be found at National Defense Magazine, Task & Purpose, and Defense News.
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