Time for the leader of the Suicide Squad, the resourceful Rick Flag, who’ll be portrayed in Suicide Squad by Joel Kinnaman (in the group picture, he’s the guy in the center). Being a normal human (both in terms of superpowers and psyche), it’ll be quite a hard work for him to supervise a team of deranged metahumans and lunatics… it’ll be fun. Flag already appeared in Smallville along with the rest of the Squad: he was an ex-soldier named Richard Stafford, who was declared DIA and put in command of the Suicide Squad. He mostly operated against General Sam Lane and his Vigilante Registration Act, clashing with Clark Kent and his friends because of his violent methods. He ended up following the orders of Chloe Sullivan when she started blackmailing him and the rest of the Squad. Now, waiting to see who this new Flag will be, let’s see who he is originally in the comics.
Richard Rogers Flag was the son of Richard Montgomery Flag, a legendary World War II pilot and commander of the first Suicide Squad, and of his wife, Sharon Race. Known simply as Rick Flag Jr., the boy became an orphan when Sharon died in a car accident, sacrificing herself to save her son, while Rick Flag Sr. was killed saving a city from the War Wheel, a lethal Nazi super-tank. Rick was adopted by his godfather, Jeb Stewart, and old comrade in arms of Rick Flag Sr. and a military hero. Grown up hearing stories from World War II, Rick decided to enlist as soon as he came of age, and followed his father’s footsteps by becoming and incredibly skilled test pilot. Following his triumph in flight school, Rick applied to become an 
astronaut, and met Karin Grace, a doctor with space medicine expertise and a tragic past: the two formed a strong bond out of their tragedies, and eventually fell in love, becoming nearly inseparable. When Jeb Stewart decided to resurrect the Suicide Squad, he contacted both Flag and Karin for being a part of it, and they both accepted. Flag acted as the on-field leader, and along with him and Karin also astrophysicist Hugh Evans and nuclear physicist Jess Bright (both in love with Karin) entered the team. This time, the Suicide Squad, officially labelled Task Force X, was a publicly known spec ops team, without the secrecy of the predecessor, and Flag flew the scientists around the world in their Flying Lab to accomplish the several missions assigned to them by the U.S. Government. Rick and Karin kept their relationship secret not to anger the other two men of the group, and the four of them together embarked in missions of incredible risk and difficulty, facing ancient and mythological monsters, aliens, highly-intelligent dinosaurs, terrorists and sorcerers; the Suicide Squad always emerged victorious, thanks to the combined talents of the team. During a mission in Cambodia, however, the team was attacked by a Yeti, and Rick Flag was seriously wounded. Taking care of him, Karin revealed to Evans and Bright they were together, angering them to the point they decided to quit the team after the mission. Only Karin and Flag, however, came back from Cambodia, as Evans and Bright fell in a precipice with the Yeti while covering their teammates’ escape.
After losing half of his team, Rick Flag retired from the military, and he even broke up with Karin, feeling guilty for having saved his girlfriend at the expense of everybody else’s life (never visiting her during her recovery, he didn’t even learn that she was expecting a baby from him, something that she kept hidden). Flag briefly fought for the Immortal Man in his team, the Forgotten Heroes, against Vandal Savage, but he eventually left that squad as well. He decided to come back to action only when he learnt that Amanda Waller was reviving once again the Task Force X, this time as a secret black ops team composed of reforming supervillains. Feeling the team as some sort of personal legacy, Flag came back to the army, and asked to be assigned to Waller: it was plain from 
the very beginning that he didn’t like the woman’s agenda, but he nevertheless swore loyalty to her, and started helping her recruiting imprisoned villains who might have been interested to a pardon. The first villains recruited in the team were Ben “Bronze Tiger” Turner, Floyd “Deadshot” Lawton, Mark “Blockbuster” Desmond, George “Captain Boomerang” Harkness and June “Enchantress” Moone, all people that Waller and Flag selected because of their remarkable skills and abilities, and their (relative) reliability. The mission was (obviously) a potential suicidal one: the team was ordered to take down Brimstone, a firey monster created by the alien warlord Darkseid as a front runner for an invasion. Flag wasn’t rusty at all, and he led his team to victory, albeit Blockbuster died while fighting the monster and the Enchantress attempted to betray the team: back to the base, Waller wanted to keep the team members prisoners despite the promise she had made to them, but Rick Flag intervened, and kept his word by releasing the surviving members of the Suicide Squad. When Boomerang was captured by Glorious Godfrey (another agent of Darkseid’s) and threatened to expose the Squad on television, the Task Force X was formed again, this time to murder Boomerang before the could talk: Flag, angry at Waller, prevented Deadshot from killing Boomerang, and had the Enchantress solve the problem non-lethally (even if he personally knocked Harkness out with a punch). No matter what their past or choices were: Flag would have always been loyal to his men, and he would have guided and protected them, even from people like Amanda Waller.
Rick Flag is, essentially, a man of honor, a soldier born who follows the footsteps of his legendary father and who tries his best to keep the name up. Flag is extremely selfless, always ready to sacrifice himself for his teammates or for the cause they’re fighting for, but this virtuous behavior often becomes some sort of self-destructive tendency that ruined also his private life. As the on-field leader of the Suicide Squad, he’s an extremely charismatic commander, able to gain the respect of some of the most fearful and dangerous psychopaths in the world; he’s also one of the best living pilots, and an extremely well-trained armed and unarmed combatant, able to fight to a standstill even martial artists like Batman; he’s also a fine strategist and a keen investigator, able to accomplish nearly any kind of mission, from assaults to intelligence. Rick Flag is extremely loyal to his country, but he’s even more loyal to his men: he will obey any order, even the ones he doesn’t agree upon, except for the ones going against his own team.
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