He nodded vigorously.
I bent forward and peered intently into his face. “Haven’t you noticed that he’s experienced a very severe weight loss?”
“Uh… no, I hadn’t noticed.”
“But surely you’ve noticed that he’s very depressed?”
“No, I, uh, I hadn’t noticed that, either.”
“Then listen closely. If he manages to kill himself or loses even one more ounce, I’ll see that you’re charged with gross negligence. Do I make myself clear?”
“Uh, yes, sir… or, er, yes, Major.”
“Get out of here,” I said.
He scurried quickly away and his overweight butt shook like Jell-O.
I’d just done the best I could for Terry Sanchez. I wasn’t sure it was going to help, though. When a man walks all over his own image of himself the way he had, something dies inside. Sanchez was rotting away from the center, because he had compromised nearly every principle he believed in.
Most of the fault for that lay on his own increasingly skinny shoulders. But some of that fault fell on Smothers and Murphy. Smothers, because he allowed his sense of personal loyalty to overrule his judgment and gave Sanchez a team. He never should’ve done that. It was one of those all-too-common instances of doing something for all the right reasons with all the wrong consequences. It was a disservice to the men, because Sanchez wasn’t up to leading them. It was a disservice to Sanchez for the very same reason. He was bound to fail.
Murphy’s blame came from another source altogether. He had allowed his group to continue its policy of treating the First Battalion like it was some kind of privileged private men’s club. An exclusive old-timers’ club. Since Persico and his sergeants all felt handpicked and had all been together for so many years, and those bonds had been calcified by so many shared experiences, any newcomer, even a newly appointed team leader, was likely to be treated like an unproven outsider. The sergeants and warrants in the First Battalion were all convinced they were something special. They had isolated and blocked out Terry Sanchez. When that sense of isolation was compounded by the pressures of a combat situation, it became too much for the human spirit to bear. Particularly when that spirit was a little frail and pappy in the first place. The result was the pitiful picture of Terry Sanchez we had just seen.
I would bet that if we went back and interviewed the men who had led that team before Sanchez, we’d hear echoes of the same tale. In fact, I’d bet we’d find the same thing in a lot of the teams in First Battalion. The old-timers’ club. There were probably a lot of accidents waiting to happen out there.
I looked over at Imelda and asked her to get Chief Persico.
Chapter 33
Persico had disregarded my advice. He did not return with a lawyer. He walked into the room alone, and I had to wonder about that. Surely he knew we were closing in on the truth. Surely he knew there was a fairly strong possibility we were going to take the whole damned proverbial book and stuff it down his throat.
I said, “Chief, please have a seat.”
He took the same chair and casually hiked his right leg over his left. You couldn’t help but notice the yawning contrast between this gray-haired, leathery, self-assured man and the simmering, leg-rubbing wreck that was left of Terry Sanchez. If I were a sergeant in that team, there’d be no question which one I’d want to follow, either.
I said, “Chief, I want to be frank with you. You are facing possible charges of multiple counts of murder, failure to obey orders, inciting mutiny, obstruction of justice, lying in an official investigation, and a long host of lesser charges. I advise you from the bottom of my heart to have counsel present for these proceedings. I am willing to suspend this hearing, if you wish to take the time.”
He sat perfectly still. “I don’t want counsel.”
“That’s your right. If at any point you change your mind, though, we will halt the proceeding so you can obtain one.”
He said, “Can we get on with it?”
“Of course.”
Before I could say anything else, he said, “Mind if I start with a few points?”
“If you’d like.”
He studied me carefully. “Major, I see you’re wearing a Combat Infantryman’s Badge and a combat patch on your right sleeve. You were in combat, right?”
“Right.”
“Where?”
“I was with the 82nd in Panama and the Gulf,” I answered, which was technically true, since the 82nd Airborne Division was in both places while I was there with the outfit.
“Were you in leadership positions? Were you in the field?”
“Yes,” I answered, which was also true because like Sanchez I was a team leader.
“You get shot at any?”
“A fair amount,” I admitted.
“Good wars, weren’t they?” he asked, breaking into a grim grin.
I said, “I suppose the politically correct answer would be to say that there’s no such thing as a good war, but as wars go, I guess they were pretty good. Short, lopsided, and we won.”
“Goddamn right,” he said, nodding and watching my face very intensely. “I was in the Gulf, too. Didn’t do Panama, though. Did Haiti, Mogadishu, Rwanda. Also spent a shitload of years in Bosnia, doing this and that. You missed all those, didn’t you?”
“By that time, I was in law school or the JAG Corps.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “Me, Perrite, Machusco, Caldwell, Butler, the Moore brothers, we done nearly all those together. The Moore brothers, poor bastards, they joined too late for the Gulf. Never gotta taste of what it feels like to get a sweet war under their belts. Only thing they’ve ever done is float through all these endless shitholes we’ve been doin’ ever since. They don’t even know what it’s like to win, you know?”
He paused for a moment and his gray eyes roved around the room, taking in each of our faces. He paused for a moment at Imelda’s face. She quietly nodded. He smiled at her, then nodded back in some kind of private acknowledgment.
Then the smile evaporated and he faced me again. “Can’t tell you how many refugee camps we’ve been through since the Gulf. You kinda lose count. I swear I’ve seen a hundred million miserable faces with those empty-looking eyes all those refugees got. Maimed kids, raped women, orphans, mothers who just lost their babies, men too ashamed to look at their families ’cause they let this happen. Christ, you get tired of it. They send you into these things, and you’re supposed to just… well, you know? I mean, they call these things humanitarian operations, but a real humanitarian would go in and knock the crap out of the bad guys, wouldn’t he? A real humanitarian wouldn’t stand around putting Band-Aids on ’em after they got hurt. A real humanitarian would keep ’em from getting hurt in the first place. Don’t ya think?”
“Chief,” I said as kindly as I could, “we’re not here to debate the righteousness of our national policies. We’re here to consider what happened in Kosovo between the fourteenth and eighteenth of June.”
His voice was cool, almost matter-of-fact. “You wanta know, then listen. ’Cause this is what happened. I mean, it’s a head game, isn’t it? You wanta know what happened, you gotta climb in and share some headspace with us. Anyway, you do enough of these things, you eventually reach a point. Maybe it was ’cause of Akhan. Any of the others tell you about Akhan?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Yeah, well, I doubt what they said did him justice. Christ, I can’t do him justice. I seen some fine men in my time, but I never saw one who could touch him. God, I would’ve followed that bastard myself. Didn’t know crap about fighting, you know. Really had no business at all being out there. The guy was a brilliant doctor. I mean, he was really gifted, you know. I heard some of the UN docs talking about him. They talked about him like he was just Jesus Christ, a guy who could do miracles. Only thing was, Akhan refused to stay back in some hospital tent tending the wounded when others were out fighting. He wanted to be one of those real humanitarians, you see?”