Ever read Wouk's
The Caine Mutiny? If so, you already know the answer to your question.
Enlisted men can be cowards and officers cannot be cowards. If an officer displays behavior which seems cowardly, there must be another reason because an officer cannot be a coward.
I'm sure more of us have seen the movie with Bogie rolling his ball bearings on the witness stand than have read the book. There's much much more to the book than Queeg's breakdown and the subsequent court martial, but the cultural blind spot I'm referring takes place at the trial.
Queeg is a marginal fellow who has become a marginal officer. In peacetime he would have eventually failed to go "up" and thus would have been sent "out". But it's not peacetime and he's an Annapolis grad, so he's given a command where he shouldn't be able to do much harm. He shouldn't be in command though, it's definitely beyond his abilities.
Queeg's also a coward. That, plus the pressures of command, wear on him so much that his psychiatric health becomes marginal too. He's not foaming at the mouth or talking to Jesus, it comes and goes. One shrink could look at him one day and commit him immediately while another shrink could look at him another day and see nothing worth an intervention, but there's definitely something going on and it's getting worse.
Of course Queeg's officers aren't helping matters either.
Anyway, the mutiny occurs and the fellow who gets fingered for it, the XO, is relatively blameless. He was sort of talked into it over a long period of time by another officer. The navy lawyer defending the XO, a pilot on medical leave after a crash who was a hotshot lawyer in civilian life, sizes all this up pretty quickly and, deciding that the wrong man is on trial, comes up with a strategy to get the XO off.
That strategy is what I wrote above:
An officer CANNOT be a coward. The defense lawyer hammers that home time and time again, pointing to Queeg's undeniably cowardly behavior and his other quirks to lead the court martial panel to conclude that the XO is innocent because Queeg is insane. Because an officer simply
cannot be a coward, Queeg acted cowardly because he was insane and, because Queeg was insane, the XO was correct in relieving Queeg of his duties.
The defense lawyer plays to the court martial officers' innate prejudices and fears. The officers not only cannot believe that an officer, especially an Annapolis grad, can be a coward but they don't want to believe that an officer, especially an Annapolis grad, can be a coward.
It's simple logic really.
An officer cannot be a coward.
Little Mac is an officer.
Little Mac cannot be a coward.
But an enlisted man can be shot.