All Parents Want Their Children To Exceed Them, Even At Getting In Trouble, Right?

There was one other thing about the The Wild Geese. Seeing the movie reminded me Kohta Hirano used that same group of mercenaries in his Hellsing series. They were hired after all of the Hellsing Organization's actual soldiers were killed.

What I thought was interesting was that in Hellsing, the leader of the Wild Geese is a Frenchman named Pip Vernedead. Well, depending on who translates it, I guess, since Wikipedia says his last name is actually "Bernadette", but my copies had Vernedead, so that's what I'm sticking with. In the movie, Janders (Richard Harris) played the tactical genius for the Geese, and he was a bit of an idealist, so he naturally died. Point of fact, he begged Faulkner (Richard Burton) to kill him so the army wouldn't be able to torture him, which Burton did*.

Janders left behind a young son, who he had earlier asked Faulkner to look after. Or the boy's meant to look after Faulkner, who described himself as an out of work drunk, when he isn't killing people for money. Faulkner does take on this responsibility.

Vernedead was a Frenchman, albeit one whose name is "Pip", and whose father died as a mercenary, and the boy in the movie's mother was French. I assume, Janders tells Faulkner she moved back to Paris and rarely sees her son. There was a scene in the manga where a young Vernedead comes home crying from school, because the kids are teasing him about his father being some scummy hired killer, and his aged grandpa confirms this as truth, says it's been true of the family for generations, and it'll likely be true of Pip as well.

It amuses me to think the "grandpa" was Faulkner's character (who the years had not been kind to, but according to me dad, the years and liquor weren't kind to Burton himself), and that Harris' son grew up to help the British fight off an invasion by Nazi vampires.

* There was a point earlier where Burton's character killed one of his men who was badly wounded and would have to be left behind. It actually reminded me of the sequence at the end of the battle that killed most of Hellsing's forces, as Integra has to kill all of her subordinates who were turned into ghouls. The leader's responsibility, I suppose.