Jean Havoc Quotes

Mustang answers Havoc's request for release by imagining a later reunion at the top. Hawkeye recognizes the same refusal to abandon someone that she credits with helping her when she had given up on living. Her testimony makes the generous reading substantial: leaving a place open can keep a relationship from being reduced to present usefulness. Havoc's opening request still matters. He asks to get on with his life, not to be assigned a more hopeful version of Mustang's timetable. The reply grants separation while describing it as an opportunity to catch up. That can be an invitation, but it also risks treating the other person's departure as temporary before he has agreed. Havoc calls Mustang a fool; Hawkeye says the country needs that kind of fool. Neither assessment should erase the person asking to leave. Support is most defensible here if the promised place remains available without becoming another obligation Havoc must fulfill.

Havoc grabs Roy's leg with a nosebleed after hearing the proposed requirement that female officers wear miniskirts. The pledge of permanent allegiance comes with its own absurdly specific price. It is much less impressive than its duration. Earlier in the 2003 series, Havoc tells Edward that Roy's followers know reasons for supporting him beyond his appetite for promotion. Asked what those reasons are, he postpones the explanation. This episode supplies a comic answer no serious defense of Roy could use: personal gratification dressed up as loyalty. The joke does not establish that the policy is enacted or that Havoc has no better reasons for following him. It does puncture the authority of the sweeping promise. A declaration can last forever in its wording and still be shallow in its occasion. The body clinging to Roy's leg makes that shallowness harder to hide behind the language of devotion.