Courage Under Fire

Courage Under Fire is a motion picture, released in 1996, starring Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan, Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon. It is one of the first films to depict the 1991 Gulf War.

This movie uses the same cinematic concept as the 1950 Japanese film, Rashōmon, wherein the truth of an event becomes difficult to verify due to the conflicting accounts of different witnesses. The major difference here is that in Rashomon the characters believe the stories they tell. In Courage Under Fire, several of the characters deliberately lie to protect themselves.


Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Serling (Denzel Washington) was involved in a friendly fire incident. He was a tank commander who, in the confusion of a nighttime ambush by Iraqi tanks, gave the order to fire on one of his own tanks, killing his friend. The details were covered up, but he was reassigned to a desk job.

Later, he is given the task of determining if Captain Karen Emma Walden (Meg Ryan) should be the first woman to receive (posthumously) the Medal of Honor for bravery in combat in the First Gulf War. A Medevac helicopter commander, she went to the rescue of another chopper that had been shot down and was under heavy fire from an Iraqi tank and infantrymen. The tank was knocked out by dropping an improvised bomb on it, but her helicopter was shot down in the process. Both crews remained under attack and were unable to join forces. The survivors were rescued the next day, but Walden was killed in action.