Colonel Cathcart

Colonel Cathcart commands the airbase and dreams only of becoming a general. He measures every decision by how it will look in Saturday Evening Post photographs, and keeps raising the number of missions his men must fly to impress his superiors, oblivious or indifferent to the toll it takes on the men doing the flying.

Chandler plays vanity as a kind of anxious performance rather than swagger, a man perpetually rehearsing his own greatness while terrified someone will notice he's a fraud. The writing makes him absurd and dangerous in equal measure, and Chandler never lets you forget that his insecurity is what actually gets people killed.