Earl Cole

Earl Cole is a soldier character created by Legendary Pictures who first appeared in the 2017 MonsterVerse film, Kong: Skull Island.

Personality
Because of the PTSD he gained during the Vietnam War, Cole started to see the world with a different perspective. This was shown when he calmly ate his food right after Kong destroyed all of the helicopters and scattered the survivors into different parts of the island, deeming the experience as an “unconventional encounter”.

Cole greatly cared for his fellow soldiers, and he particularly viewed Glenn Mills like a son. When the Skull Devil was chasing the survivors, Cole decided to stay behind and sacrifice himself to give his comrades time to escape.

History
When he was a child, Cole would listen to his mother telling the story of The Lion and the Mouse. However, instead of telling him that the lion befriended the mouse after the latter pulled the thorn out from the former’s paw, she said that the mouse used the thorn to kill the lion.

During the Vietnam War, Cole and his squadron were fighting soldiers who were conscripted into the NVA. The NVA soldiers surrendered when Cole and his men leveled the village that became their battlefield. Cole kept an AK-47 that belonged to a conscripted 50-year old farmer, eschewing the military standard-issue M16A1. Despite the victory, the experience haunted Cole ever since.