Soldier of Fortune by Dinah Eng

Soldier of Fortune
Left for dead, Charles D. Holland survived
to become a football star, Green Beret,
Harvard lawyer, studio V.P., and JAG showrunner
Written by Dinah Eng
(From the September 2002 issue of "Written By")
Like most people on the West Coast, Holland was asleep on the morning of September 11. A friend in the military called and woke Holland, who is a former U.S. Army Military Intelligence Officer. He turned on the television just before the second plane hit the towers. Holland, who was writing for Soul Food: The Series at that time, then had a phone conversation with executive producer Felicia Henderson about the need to shut down production in the wake of the tragedy.
"The shock was off enough for me to realize that I knew people in the Pentagon who might have died, and that was a sinking feeling," says Holland. "My ex-wife is a reservist, and I was able to find out within the hour that she was not there during the time. But there were other people who did not make it. I lost someone I went to jump school with."
He wanted to fight. Somebody. Some place. "With 9/11, one thing that went through my mind is that I'm missing it all. I was trained to really defend my country, and I'm missing that."
Holland paces as he talks on the phone in his Sunset-Gower Studios lot office, juggling questions from writers, technical advisors, production assistants. Although he's the new showrunner of CBS' long-running drama JAG, a gold earring dangles from his left ear lobe. Shaped like a Samurai sword, it glints with defiance against any corporate style. But the former Harvard lawyer is also quick to laugh, blunt yet tactful, and clearly relishes being in command. Having left the Army as a First Lieutenant, he knows what it means to manage up and supervise down.
JAG had struggled until its initial cancellation by NBC in the 1995-96 season. After moving to CBS, the only military drama on air climbed from 68th in the Nielsen ratings to a 17th-place tie with Frasier last season, a rise that some media watchers attribute to patriotic fervor in the aftermath of September 11.
Holland joined JAG last October as a consulting producer, after two years on Showtime's Soul Food: The Series. His initial script assignment on the Navy drama was to write "Tribunal," an episode about a military trial of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist. Holland, who remains a member of the California Bar, says, "When I came on the show, Stephen Zito, the head writer at the time, thought I would be ideal to write the script. I couldn't wait to do it. The story was [JAG creator and executive producer] Don Bellisario's idea. The research staff gave me a huge notebook of information on tribunals, and I read the Manual for Court Martials and Geneva Convention, things I hadn't thought about for a while."
PREPARING THE DEFENSE
In the episode Adm. A.J. Chegwidden (played by John M. Jackson) and Cmdr. Sturgis Turner (Scott Lawrence) defend a suspected leader of the al Qaeda, while Cmdr. Harmon Rabb Jr. (David James Elliott) and Lt. Col. Sarah MacKenzie (Catherine Bell) prosecute the case.
To formulate the defense strategy, Holland called on a mentor he'd apprenticed for in Harvard Law School: famed attorney Alan Dershowitz. "Alan takes cases on appeal dealing with civil liberties," says Holland, who worked for Dershowitz for two years, "and we used to get hundreds of letters a week from prisoners, asking him to take their case. I asked him what his dream defense strategy for an al Qaeda prisoner would be. He said he'd work to get any confession [made under excessive duress] thrown out."
For example, while intelligence officials might use truth serum on a suspected terrorist in wartime to learn where nuclear weapons are hidden, it would violate the spirit of the Fifth Amendment to routinely use truth serum or torture to gain a confession from a suspected murderer. The Fifth Amendment deals with the rights of accused criminals, with due process of law, and states that no one may be forced to testify as a witness against himself.
In the "Tribunal" script, defense attorney Adm. Chegwidden argues that the confession of the suspected terrorist on trial should be excluded from consideration because "13 days of torture to obtain an involuntary confession shocks the conscience, violating both the spirit and the letter of the Fifth Amendment." Then prosecuting attorney Cmdr. Rabb responds, ". . . we are at war. The Fifth Amendment doesn't apply to our enemies. The very idea is ridiculous."
The judges on the tribunal rule that "the government is correct that the Fifth Amendment does not apply here," says Holland. "However, we're excluding Mister Atef's involuntary confession as lacking probative value to a reasonable person under the circumstances."
In addition to consulting Dershowitz, Holland sought advice on military law and the context of the case from one of the show's technical advisors, who used to be the assistant JAG (Judge Advocate General). "Then the Pentagon had a group of lawyers read through an early draft," remembers Holland. "We have a public affairs official there who always gets copies of our scripts. The military doesn't have veto power, but they will tell us if they think something is incorrect. The first two years of the show, they didn't want to cooperate with us, but then they had a sea change. A technical advisor may think something's embarrassing or incorrect, but we may keep it in the script anyway because it's good drama. It's helpful to have the Pentagon's input. There are so many technical things with the Navy and the law. At least when you have technical advice, you can make decisions from knowledge and not from ignorance."
After reading "Tribunal," the only feedback Pentagon lawyers were specific about was the description of what an actual tribunal would look like, according to Holland. The military attorneys said the trial wouldn't be held like a normal court martial and would probably take place in Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. base on Cuba, or an aircraft carrier. Holland chose the aircraft carrier for the setting of his tribunal and spun a tale that wove both fact and fiction in ways that surprised many.
"The revised rules for military tribunals were published during the second day of shooting [March 21], and our guesses were right," says Holland. "What was spooky was the guy I made up as a terrorist then got caught. He had the same background and even looked like the guy we cast [Marc Casabani]." (Abu Zubaydah, thought to be al Qaeda's chief of operations, is the highest ranking terrorist in Osama bin Laden's network now known to be in U.S. custody. Zubaydah was captured March 28 in a Pakistani raid and continues to be interrogated by U.S. officials.)
When "Tribunal" aired April 30, Holland says the show was "deluged by the media, starting with the New York Times, which had a significant ax to grind," according to the showrunner. "There was some sensitivity that I was getting an inside track to serious things that journalists weren't. We didn't have any information that the media didn't have, but reporters always cut out the part of my interview that said, 'Then I made it up!'"
Along with the media critics, military contacts complained as well.
"I made the strongest argument [in the script] I could that the fighters in al Qaeda were freedom fighters and not terrorists, and the military thought I did too good a job [in the defense strategy dialogue]," Holland says, shrugging and smiling at the same time. "Part of being a lawyer is arguing things you don't believe in order to win a case. It's so important to have both sides told. My belief is that suspected terrorists would get a fair trial here. We have so many differences in this country, but we have great tolerance. We have checks and balances, and the system works."
After writing "Tribunal," Holland was asked to script the season finale, "Enemy Below," which continues the story of what happens after the terrorist in "Tribunal" is convicted and sentenced to death. In "Enemy Below" the convicted terrorist's brother is involved in an effort to attack a U.S. aircraft carrier.
SOUL SURVIVOR
Holland's experiences in the military changed his view of the world and of himself. Born in Chicago, Holland grew up in a tough housing project with his younger brother and mother, who worked as a legal secretary. He also has a half-sister from his mother's second marriage.
"I never knew my father," says Holland. "My mother worked three jobs because I liked books. I had three sets of encyclopedias, which was a lot for poor children. Back then law firms would hire people to work in shifts to type things and prepare cases, and my mother would work those extra shifts."
Holland, as book smart as he was street savvy, played football and ran track in high school. Although he never belonged to a gang, there was little separation between those who signed up for trouble and those who didn't. Everyone knew everyone, and one day, when Holland was 14, trouble found him.
"My best friend was doing something with the wrong girl, a gangbanger's girl," remembers Holland. "I defended my friend and humiliated the gangbanger, and when I wasn't ready, he came back with his gang. I was attacked and left for dead." All but two of Holland's ribs were broken, his nose was broken and he suffered stab wounds that, left untreated, could have resulted in his bleeding to death.
Holland's family, fearful that the gang would return to kill the injured boy, spirited him off to Danville, Illinois, to recuperate with his grandparents. He grimaces, saying the stay with his relatives is not a happy memory, but it was the catalyst that awakened the writer within. "While I was laid up, I had to stay still for long periods of time, and writing was an emotional outlet. It became a thing I did for myself. I'd always make up stories about other people and being in other places. Back home, the savagery of the attack had touched off a war, and the guys who did it were killed or left town. People thought I had died, so when I came back [from Danville], people thought I was cool. I got all this respect and deference, and all I'd done was survive."
He achieved far more than basic survival skills--Holland rebuilt his body into an athlete's, earning a football scholarship to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he encountered another setback: His dreams of turning pro turned to ash after suffering a severe shoulder injury during a game in his sophomore year. He lost the football scholarship and paid for his remaining undergraduate education by signing on with Army ROTC.
"ROTC seemed like a snap to me--I already knew how to fight," says Holland, laughing. "The silly, but conscious, reason I joined the military was to be a hero. I was assigned to military intelligence and got a chance to find out what a lot of guys wonder about: How would I do in combat? I found out what the real essence of being a hero in combat is. It's really just about showing up."
He abruptly stops talking, reins in his turbulent emotions, and explains: "You show up when there's a chance people may die. You show up and watch other people die."
Holland declines to share what he did as a military intelligence officer in the Seventh Special Forces Group but says, "I can tell you I was based in Fort Bragg. When I served, I went other places. It gave me an appreciation for other ways of life. I was in places where people feared a knock on the door, and you couldn't walk outside without fearing snipers.
"I never went to Afghanistan, but when the attacks happened, I sure wanted to. I oftentimes hope the things I do on this show contribute. Now, somebody else has to show up for me, and there's a degree of guilt about that."
Although he no longer wears the uniform, an unabashed love of country is clear.
"The military has become a subculture in this country that people don't know much about," says Holland. "What's good is that the military is not as isolated. At least there's respect now. When I hear the national anthem, I don't think I hear it the way other people do. When I go to ball games, I always stand at attention when it's played. A lot of my friends used to tease me about that. Not anymore."
He pauses once again, almost overcome with emotion, then takes a breath and continues: "Let patriotism be a fad, if that's what it takes to let people be patriotic. You can be a liberal or progressive or a conservative and also be a patriot. It's not inconsistent with ideological beliefs. Today, anybody can have a flag on their car without feeling odd about it."
But while he maintains strong friendships and good memories from those years, he also left military life a bit disillusioned. "At the time [he left the military], I didn't think there was enough accountability for covert operations. Now, technology allows real-time oversight. You can micromanage operations by satellite. But back then, you could make decisions, and what happened was what you said happened. I learned the world was far more complicated than I had thought it was. Many times, I really wanted to be a super hero. Yet I felt like I was on the bad guys' side when I looked at the regimes we were supporting. You'd see some people living like kings, while other people lived in squalor."
So Holland decided to get a masters in public administration, thinking he'd pursue a government career to create social change. Along the way he also decided to become a lawyer. At age 22, he was accepted into Harvard Law School. While studying, he served a year and a half on active duty and later eight years as a Military Police Officer in the Massachusetts National Guard and Army Reserve.
"I learned that I didn't know anything," says Holland of his Harvard years. "It occurred to me I'd have to be willing to give up my life just to move the pile a centimeter in government. When you're in the projects as a kid, and it's 20 below, you watch TV and see [California scenes with] sunshine and beautiful women. It was a fantasy to live and work in L.A., so after law school I came here. I'm unconventional, so I was drawn to the entertainment business."
HARVARD WARRIOR
After landing a job as a studio lawyer at Twentieth Century Fox, Holland rose rapidly through the ranks. When the urge to try screenwriting hit, he couldn't convince anyone that he could write and practice law at the same time. So he gave up his position as vice president of business affairs at Fox and started writing feature scripts. After three unproduced screenplays for three different studios, he turned to television.
"My first credit was for an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger," says Holland. "My first staff job was on New York Undercover, which was the beginning of a very good run." He quickly knocks on the wood of his office desk. The run has included writing and producing such series as Murder One, Profiler, Vengeance Unlimited, and The Strip.
Holland's legal expertise was also tapped by the WGAw for last year's contract negotiations. Holland, vice president of the Guild, served as cochair (with then Secretary-Treasurer Michael Mahern) of the negotiating committee. "I had a legal background for talking with the Guild lawyers, and I had a context for what the other side was saying from my days at Fox. Writers are exceedingly opinionated, and it taxed one's leadership skills to come up with unanimous decisions and pull people together who don't always agree. But we were able to act with a great deal of discipline, and I had some small part in that."
Victoria Riskin, WGAw Guild president, calls Holland "a remarkable combination of street kid, Green Beret, and Harvard Law School graduate, which means whenever he tackles any problem, it's done with fearlessness, modified with his analytical, legal expertise." Riskin, who has worked with Holland on Guild matters for two years, adds, "He doesn't suffer fools gladly. Yet when he smiles, there's this warm, boyish look that's such a delight. It cracks the seriousness of the moment."
His achievements should make it obvious why Holland, a co-executive producer, filled the showrunner's slot on JAG when Stephen Zito resigned. However, some refer to his skin color as a reason, causing the Harvard Warrior to rise in his own defense.
"I've pushed hard for diversity in this business, but I wasn't hired because of that," says Holland, passionately. "Don [Bellisario] is a conservative, and people tend to equate conservativism with bigotry, and that's not true either. There are two main reasons I was hired. We both have a military background. Don's an ex-Marine. He understands what I'm saying, and I get what he's saying. On paper I'm the most qualified person. I've been a number two for four years. I'm a former military person and a lawyer. It doesn't have anything to do with being African-American, and that's the way it should be. To me, this is what it means to be working to get people the opportunity to do things like this, regardless of race or religion. We have to get to the point where it's not that odd [to have a showrunner of color].
"I've always counseled lower-ranking minorities that there's a perception people have of what people in certain positions are supposed to look like, and rarely is it a minority person," Holland continues. "I tell them, 'You have to create an image for yourself of that competent person.' I remember [Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall visiting us in law school and talking about how he'd earned his place in legal circles but was always reminded when he tried to get a taxi that he was a black guy. I certainly want to do what I can to move diversity forward in Hollywood."
Conflicts are never easy to resolve, but if Holland has anything to say about it, solutions will be found. And Holland's changes won't just be on paper.