I was greeted at Walter Reed with a full physical. It was apparent that only Walter Reed’s eminent physicians could possibly diagnose me correctly. After all, the Navy ran the hospital at Guantanamo Bay, and it was well known that they still used leeches. (Surprisingly, I heard the same comment from the staff in Gitmo about Army hospitals.) This continued the next morning, until about lunch time, and nobody would tell me if Marilyn or my son were there yet.
They were. I was wheeled in my bed back to my private room around lunchtime. The private room was at Colonel Featherstone’s request, because I had told him that Classified or not, I was going to tell my wife what had happened. I wasn’t going to tell her what I had done with the four prisoners. Marilyn would never understand or accept that.
I had been giving those killings a lot of thought over the last few days. By some standards I had murdered those men, but not by all standards. According to both the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I was prohibited from killing civilians under any circumstances, unless they were attacking me or my troops. Then again, if I had obeyed the Geneva Convention, I was to turn myself and my men over to civilian authorities and be interned or paroled and released. That was ludicrous.
During war time operations, I was actually justified in some cases in killing people in furtherance of my mission. Again, that didn’t apply. If I had been there legitimately on a drug related mission, I could turn my prisoners over to civilian authority for disposal, again, not a realistic alternative.
Or I could just put a bullet in each brain and decide the world was better off without four narcos in it.
Once, when I was working on my MBA, I had taken a class in Personnel Management and Human Relations, taught by a guy who was a vice-president at ATT and chain smoked in class worse than Featherstone. One day, totally out of the blue, he asked for a show of hands. ‘How many of you believe in capital punishment?’ About half of us, including myself, put our hands up. He nodded and then told us, ‘You’re the people who will be able to fire people.’ He then went on to explain how firing people was very similar to killing them, in terms of self esteem and the consequences, but that managers had to be able to do it.
I often wondered if that was why I always liked line jobs over staff. My father didn’t believe in capital punishment (strange in a hard core Republican, at least to me) and hated line positions, where that sort of thing happens. I never had any problems with firing people; it’s just part of the job, nothing personal, just do it.
It seemed as if I was the same when it came to actually killing people. I didn’t have to like it; I just had to do it. So far I hadn’t lost any sleep over it.
Curiously, my mother had no problems with capital punishment, either. She had a cold streak at times. I remember once when she sat on a death penalty jury, and voted to give the guy the needle. He sat on death row for eight years before the Innocence Project got his DNA tested and proved he was innocent, and got him released. As far as Mom was concerned, he was a scumbag anyway, so they should have fried him regardless. She didn’t bat an eye when she told me that. Mom wouldn’t have minded my killing four narcos, that’s for sure!
I saw Marilyn with a baby stroller in the hallway as they wheeled me into my room. I turned to call to her but the orderly was moving too fast. It didn’t matter; Marilyn had seen me, too. About thirty seconds later she came barreling into my room with that stroller, followed by a nurse. The nurse was smiling, and she didn’t interfere.
Marilyn’s face was lit up, but she was also crying, and she damn near threw herself on top of me. “Oh God, oh God, you’re home, you’re home!” Thankfully she was on my right side, since all the tubes and lines running into me were on my left side. I just smiled and rubbed her back. “You’re alive! You’re alive!”
I stopped her with a big kiss, and then pushed her upright. “I have missed you so much, but I think we need to let the nurse get in here.”
The nurse, named Hawthorne according to her name tag, simply checked my temperature and blood pressure, and then told us what the visiting hours were, and then she bent down over the baby stroller and cooed. “Well, aren’t you just darling! And so well behaved, too!”
Marilyn smiled at me, and then bent down to the stroller. “Would you like to meet your son?” she asked me.
Nurse Hawthorne gasped and said, “Is this the first chance you’ve had to see your baby?!” She raised my bed up so that I was sitting upright, as Marilyn extricated Charlie from his contraption.
“Charles Robert Buckman, this is your father!” Marilyn held our son up to me. He was in blue baby clothes, and had a summer weight blanket around him, and she placed him in my hands.
If I had been expecting Charlie to look like Parker, it wasn’t even close. Parker had taken after me and my mother; Charlie was more like Marilyn’s family, the men’s side, which tended to blond and stocky.
I sat my son in my lap and supported his back. He was about two months old now, and was able to hold himself upright, with some help. He didn’t make much noise, but he was looking at me and making the funniest expressions on his face, and then he gave me a big grin. Marilyn was ecstatic! “He knows he’s with his Daddy!”
“He’s probably got gas!” I replied.
That set the nurse to laughing and she took her leave. Marilyn scolded me, but I just sniffed the air, and told her I thought I was closer to the truth. I held my right thumb up in front of him and he latched onto it. He was still too young to do much more than that, but he seemed pretty normal to me. Certainly I didn’t see any signs of Williams Syndrome! You can tell in the facial structure long before any of the other symptoms show.
I counted aloud his fingers. “All ten! What about his toes?” I asked Marilyn.
“All ten there, too.” answered my wife.
I grinned at my son. “All ten piggies? I’ll check them later!” I glanced back at Marilyn. “What about, well, you know.”
“What?”
“Well, can he count to 21?”
It took her a second, but then she rolled her eyes and groaned. “Men! You all think that’s so important! Yes, he can count to 21!”
I turned back to Charlie. “I’ll take Mommy’s word for it. I’m not going to look. Daddy doesn’t do diapers!”
“Daddy’s a wimp!” Marilyn took him back and sniffed his diaper. “Here, you get to find out now.” She handed him back to me and then dug a diaper from the diaper bag on the back of the stroller. She found a flat spot at the end of the bed and expertly changed him. She had been changing her brothers and sisters since she was big enough to pick up a baby. Before she was done, though, she held him up for me to see. “See? Twenty-one!”
“Looks like he can get to 22 and 23 as well,” I commented.
“Men!” After changing him, it was feeding time. Marilyn gave him back to me, and then dug out a blanket from the bag and draped it over her shoulder and her chest. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and took Charlie back, and slid him under the blanket. She was breast feeding him!
“Well, I guess that beats a bottle,” I said. We had discussed this during Lamaze classes.
“He’s a little piglet is what he is!” Marilyn grimaced for a moment as he latched on fiercely. “Watch it buster!”
“Well, he’s a Buckman, that’s for sure!” Marilyn smiled at that. “God, you look so good. I have missed you so much!”
“I’ve missed you, too. You look terrible, though! You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
I shrugged. “It’s that delicious hospital food,” I told her. “It really cuts down on going back for seconds.”
“It’s more than that, and you know it.”