This may be my favorite scene from They Were Expendable, the John Ford movie about the hopeless defense of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines during the Pacific War. It's not often that an American movie explores the nobility of defeat, the dignity of a fighting retreat when there is no place to retreat to, but this film does so, and achieves its own dignity in doing so.
Exhausted American soldiers await another attack from Chinese forces, Korea, 1950. Note the grenades at the ready.
