“Yes.”
“How did you reply?”
“That Vietnam was hard, and that what I experienced there affected me for a while.” Glancing toward Rose, he added softly, “The loss of my closest friend, Jack Gallagher, is with me still. But I told Meg that I was able to come out the other end, more or less intact. So I thought Brian could, too.”
“Did Meg reply to that?”
“Yes.” A rasp entered McCarran’s voice. “She said that was the illusion that Brian clung to, because of me. But that we were different men, and that it was time to set him free.”
When Terry looked toward the members of the court, the fissure within this family was graven on their faces. Even Flynn stared at the table, his eyes hooded. Terry did not attempt to glance at Meg or Brian, or even Rose. “After Meg came to you,” Terry asked, “did you try to talk with Brian?”
“Yes. It did not go well.”
“Could you describe that conversation?”
McCarran’s erect posture seemed more telling now, his last defense against the misery and failure he was forced to recite in public. “I told him that I felt sympathy and that I’d suffered from combat more than I’d let on. But that the only cure was to push forward, keeping up appearances until appearance again became reality. And that if Brian let himself fall to pieces he might never be able to pick them up again.”
“How did he react?”
McCarran shook his head, a gesture of dismay that seemed directed at himself. “Brian became very quiet. Then he said, ‘Listening to you, I realize that your father and grandfather were the luckiest McCarrans. Dead men feel nothing, and they keep up appearances just fine.’ ”
Even Terry felt a chill. “Did you discuss post-traumatic stress disorder?”
“Not with respect to Brian himself. But one of his men, a sergeant, was so shattered by a specific combat experience and a divorce that Brian sent him to the VA hospital for immediate psychiatric evaluation. Apparently, they put him on a six-month waiting list. Shortly thereafter, the man hanged himself in his former wife’s garage.
“Brian was filled with rage. Maybe he should have brought the sergeant to me, he said—I could have slapped him across the face, as George Patton supposedly did to a shell-shocked soldier. It was irrational, of course. But beneath his anger, I saw that Brian also blamed himself.” Though his voice lowered, McCarran’s gaze at Terry was unflinching. “A good officer, Brian said, looks after his men. Now I realize that he was telling me that a good father does, as well.”
At once Terry understood the psychic space McCarran had chosen to occupy—at whatever cost to himself, he had a mission to fulfill: the salvation of his son. “Do you regret your advice to Brian?” Terry asked.
“Yes. My son was very troubled and deeply changed. Telling him to suck it up—in essence—isolated him still further. As a father, I left him on his own.” McCarran glanced at Brian, his eyes holding a silent apology. “After Vietnam, no one talked about how we felt. All I learned was to seal it off. So I sealed off my son from the help he needed, and from his own father.”
He stopped abruptly, as though whatever more he could confess was not suited to this moment. “Thank you, General,” Terry said respectfully. “I have nothing more.”
Returning to the defense table, Terry saw Brian’s thousand-yard stare, as though he were gazing through the wall at something in his past. The general and his son could have been in different rooms.
FLYNN STOOD SLOWLY. TERRY was quite certain that he knew better than to attack General Anthony McCarran, the chastened father. Instead he would ask his questions, and later request that Hollis strike the testimony of both McCarrans, arguing that Terry could not connect the change in Brian to the facts of D’Abruzzo’s death. Pending his meeting with Johnny Whalen, Terry still liked Flynn’s chances.
Flynn stopped a good fifteen feet away, according respect through distance. In a tone of polite reluctance, he asked, “Prior to Captain D’Abruzzo’s death, sir, did Brian tell you he was involved with the captain’s wife?”
For what seemed a long time, McCarran did not answer. “No,” he said softly.
“Did you have any indication that they were romantically involved?”
“None.”
“Have you discussed that subject with anyone after your son killed Kate D’Abruzzo’s husband?”
McCarran stared at Flynn with wintry eyes. Quietly, he answered, “If you don’t mind, Major Flynn, that’s personal to me. I consider it a family matter—for the D’Abruzzos, the Gallaghers, and the McCarrans. Joe D’Abruzzo is dead; now the families must heal. There’s no good to be found in scraping our wounds any further.”
Flynn could have pushed the subject. Terry watched him consider that and then decide—contrary to what Terry might have done—to finish there. At whatever cost to himself, General Anthony McCarran had prevailed once again. This time he might even have helped his son.
AS TERRY AND MEG had planned, the McCarrans left the court together, a tableau of family with Rose at Tony’s side, and Meg between her father and Brian. The two men did not speak, or even look at each other. Terry did not envy them the hours that lay ahead.
He went back to his apartment and poured himself a drink, reflecting as he waited for a report on Johnny Whalen’s arrival.
Perhaps it was the McCarran way, the military way. Perhaps Terry’s wish that McCarran’s effort might bring him closer to his son reflected his own sense of loss, the father whom nothing could bring back. But this evoked for Terry the fault lines in the lives of the McCarrans that preexisted Brian’s war: the way Mary McCarran’s suicide had distanced Meg from Rose and, perhaps sadder, Tony from Rose. Just as Meg and Brian’s mother had intended.
An affair between Tony’s son and Rose’s daughter did not seem driven by this history. Yet it seemed to have had a similar effect, distancing the general from his children, and Meg from Kate. The two who still hewed to each other, as always, were Brian and his sister.
six
TERRY AND MEG SPENT THE ENTIRE WEEKEND CLOSETED WITH Sergeant Johnny Whalen and their expert psychiatrist, Dr. Blake Carson.
The work was intense. Gathered around a conference table at the headquarters of the regional defense counsel, Terry and Meg questioned Whalen about his service as Brian’s platoon sergeant in minute detail, taking notes in order to prepare a motion for Judge Hollis. At times Meg and Carson shuttled between Whalen’s and Brian McCarran’s quarters, checking details and hammering away at Brian to discuss the war. By Sunday evening, Meg in particular looked exhausted by the work and, even more so, the effort to repress her anguish at what she was learning. “Can you connect this to the shooting?” she asked Blake Carson.
Carson, too, looked exhausted. “It’s complicated. To me, the psychological parallels seem compelling. But the circumstances aren’t the same.”
“We have to try,” Terry said. “It explains too much about Brian.”
By the end of the weekend, they had filed their motion with the judge.
On Monday afternoon, they came before the judge. From his expression, he had read the motion papers carefully, as well as Flynn’s response that Brian’s year of combat was irrelevant to the case. “I want to hear from this man Whalen,” he told Flynn flatly. “Also McCarran’s company chaplain. You can move to strike their testimony at the end of Captain Terry’s case.”
Flynn asked for a recess until Tuesday, in order to prepare. That night Meg stayed with Brian again. Not only was she filled with pity, Terry knew, but she feared what the memories jarred loose by Johnny Whalen might drive her brother to do.
SERGEANT JOHNNY WHALEN WAS Boston Irish, with a teamster’s frame and the blunt speech of a blue-collar kid who had seen too much to pull his punches. Except for his eyes, he was the portrait of a tough enlisted man—squat and thick; curly black hair on top; sidewalls of black bristles and pink, sunburned skin; a cleft chin; a square, wide face; and a guarded way of looking around the courtroom as though
wary of unfamiliar surroundings or, perhaps, ridicule. But when he focused on Brian, an expression of dogged loyalty stole into his dark brown eyes, transforming his face entirely. He nodded at Brian, a gesture of respect that his lieutenant answered with the briefest of smiles. Then Whalen turned to Terry, ready to do his job.
Terry walked forward, aware of the almost suffocating attention of the members and the onlookers who today jammed the courtroom to overflowing: media, curiosity seekers, and family—the D’Abruzzos, Rose Gallagher, and, for the first time, General Anthony McCarran. Meg was as still as a caught breath.
Terry’s first questions were low-key, designed to elicit background information while increasing Whalen’s comfort with speaking about hard things in such a public way. Then he moved to the core of his testimony.
“Prior to your deployment in Afghanistan, did you serve in Iraq with Lieutenant Brian McCarran?”
“Yes, sir. Beginning in January 2004, I was platoon sergeant of the third platoon of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment. Lieutenant McCarran was our platoon leader.”
“How many men were in your platoon?”
Whalen scowled. “Should have been forty, broken into squads. But we started with thirty and went down from there.”
“By ‘went down,’ ” Terry asked, “what do you mean to say?”
“Some got killed. Some got wounded too bad to fight.”
“Can you describe the conditions in Sadr City?”
Whalen hunkered down, squinting, as though trying to put pictures into words. “It was the worst part of Baghdad,” he said. “The streets were crowded and dirty, filled with people and roadside stands. The big problem was not knowing which Iraqi was harmless and which wanted to blow your head off. We were pretty much surrounded by people who hated our guts.”
“Was there a reason for that?”
“Yeah. Muqtada al-Sadr ran the city. His people infiltrated the government and police forces and every group we had to deal with. He had something called the Sadr Bureau that controlled all that—even who got welfare.” Whalen glanced at the members. “Al-Sadr put it out that we should die. The same for any Iraqi who helped us or had anything to do with us at all. You’d go up to someone on the street, and they’d flinch like they’d seen a ghost, then start looking over their shoulder.
“Couldn’t blame them—second week in, we’re moving down an alley, and somebody throws our translator’s head off a roof. Ali’s just staring up at us from near a pile of dog shit, like maybe we could help him find his body. We all stare back. Then Lieutenant McCarran gets out of his Humvee, picks up Ali’s head, and wraps it in a blanket. He drove around the rest of the day with the head in the back of his Hummer.”
Randi Wertheimer turned to gaze at Brian. But Whalen resumed staring fixedly at Terry, as though to block out the image of a severed head. Quietly, Terry asked, “Were there other challenges dealing with Iraqi civilians?”
“Yeah,” Whalen answered in the same flat tone. “The way al-Sadr’s people used them. Early on, we were told that they’d use women and children to block a road and set up an ambush. If that happened, our orders were to drive right through them, even if it meant mowing down some kid or his mother.
“It made you paranoid. You never knew if a woman was pregnant or had a bomb. One poor guy at a checkpoint shot at a woman who had something concealed under the burka, and ended up killing a mother and her newborn kid. One way or the other, al-Sadr’s plan was that every dead Iraqi made them hate us more.”
“In Sadr City, what was Charlie Company’s assignment?”
“Just about every day we’d have a mission, usually patrolling the streets. The kids in our platoon pretty much lived in constant fear. Before this, none of them had even seen combat, and no one knew anything about these people. So the lieutenant took us through the rules for getting by. ‘Don’t show the soles of your feet. Don’t touch them with your left hand. Don’t refuse a cup of tea, but don’t accept another one. Don’t mention their women, don’t look at them, and never touch one. Don’t wear sunglasses when you talk to them. Don’t wear shoes in their houses.’ A lot of stuff about cultural sensitivity.” Whalen shrugged. “Problem was that we could make things worse but we couldn’t make anything better. We just kept getting killed.”
“How?” Terry asked bluntly.
“Mostly by IEDs—improvised explosive devices.” Whalen stared down, as though into his own past. “That’s what you remember, the thing you were most afraid of. Every turn down some street or alley was a game of Russian roulette. You never knew where they’d hidden the IEDs or which one had your name on it.”
“Can you describe how IEDs work?”
“The bad guys would make them from antitank mines, or pack an empty bomb casing with plastique, or wire together daisy chains of explosives by the side of the road.” Briefly, Whalen glanced at Brian. “They got real good at hiding them. They’d put them in a rotten log and float it in an open sewer. They’d gut a dog, stuff its carcass, and lay it in the road. Or they’d leave one in a broken-down car, or mold explosives into curbsides. They’d put IEDs in potholes or milk cartons or soda cans or behind anti-American posters which exploded when a soldier tore it down.” His voice softened. “Next thing you knew, you were picking up pieces of a dead friend. And if you didn’t, they’d stuff one of the pieces with an IED. IEDs were everywhere, every day.”
“How did al-Sadr’s people detonate them?”
“They’d use some sort of shortwave radio transmitter, like a garage door opener. Later on it was cell phones—they’d be far enough away that you couldn’t see them, but where they could see you. All the sudden you’d be staring at a dead soldier, and you knew the guy who killed him is sitting there with a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other, laughing and watching you dredge up the remains.”
The steady accretion of details had begun to permeate the courtroom, Terry sensed, conjuring the world in which Brian and his men had struggled to survive. “Was driving itself a hazard?” Terry asked.
“Like I said, you didn’t want to stop even for a second, because you never knew if that’d be the thing that killed you. So you’d bounce over medians, hop curbs, streak through intersections, speed through markets—anything to keep moving.” He twitched his shoulders. “It made the Iraqis mad, and you could see why. But there was just too much to worry about—not just IEDs but the drivers all around you. We even looked for pedestrians in clean clothes, because that could be a sign that they were ready to meet Allah. You were always on alert.”
As Colonel MacDonald studied Brian, Terry saw him make the connection between Whalen’s testimony and Brian’s twitchiness on the highway. “As part of your mission,” Terry asked, “did you also conduct house-to-house searches?”
“Yes, sir. We’d cordon off an area of Sadr City and go from one house to the next. Sometimes we’d knock at some family’s door, interrupt their dinner, and order them outside while we searched for weapons that weren’t there. The worst that happens then is that we’ve made a few more enemies. Other times the bad guys were waiting, and there’d be a firefight. Or maybe some Iraqi would pop out of an alley and shoot one of us in the head.” Whalen paused, then said slowly, “Our company commander had this slogan: ‘Be the hunter, not the hunted.’ At first it was a joke among the guys, seeing how we were like targets in al-Sadr’s video game. But too many of our guys got killed for the rest of us to keep laughing.”
Terry put his hands in his pockets. “Who was your company commander?”
Whalen kept his eyes on Terry. “Captain Joe D’Abruzzo.”
“Did he accompany you on patrols?”
“No, sir. Lieutenant McCarran would be in charge.”
“Okay. Say you were on patrol, Sergeant Whalen, going down a dangerous street. Some of you were in Humvees and some on foot, correct?”
“Yes, sir. Some men felt safer on foot than in Humvees. Less of a target.”
“Relati
ve to the rest of you, where would Lieutenant McCarran be?”
“Always in the lead vehicle.”
“Are you aware of the reason for this?”
“The lieutenant never said. But he started doing it the first week we were on patrol, right after what happened to Corporal Bronsky.”
Glancing at Brian, Terry saw that he had touched his eyes, head bent slightly forward. “Could you describe that incident, Sergeant Whalen?”
“Yes, sir.” Whalen paused, gathering himself. “The Humvees now are steel-plated, with either a machine gun and or a grenade launcher in a turret. But ours had the weaponry without the protection. So they were vulnerable to IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades.
“We figured that out pretty quick, going down a crowded street with Bronsky driving the lead vehicle, and the lieutenant’s Humvee right behind—he’s in the front seat, with me in back. It’s maybe noon, and this block we’ve turned down is almost empty. ‘Too quiet,’ the lieutenant says.
“In the lead vehicle, Bronsky speeds up. All that’s in the way is a green plastic bag stuffed with garbage. ‘Stop!’ I hear the lieutenant shout into his transmitter, and then the bomb goes off.” Whalen’s speech slowed. “The Humvee’s lying on its side. The lieutenant jumps out, telling me to cover him if anybody starts shooting. The other guy with Bronsky, Private Velez, is lying there with a broken leg. Bronsky’s on his stomach, bleeding all over but still alive. Then the lieutenant rolls him over, me right behind him.
“Bronsky’s eyes are covered with film—the contact lenses he’s wearing got melted by the heat of the explosives. You don’t have to be a doctor to know he’s blind.” Whalen shook his head. “Bronsky starts to scream. The lieutenant picks him up and we rush him to an aid station. He never said that much about what happened. But after that, Lieutenant McCarran always made sure he was the guy in the lead vehicle.” Whalen glanced at Brian again. “It was the lieutenant’s way of saying that he wasn’t telling anyone to take risks he wouldn’t take.”
In the Name of Honor Page 32
