by Brian Haig
“Why’d you like him?”
“He was just a swell guy. Everybody liked him. At least, everybody respected him.”
Amazing, I thought — almost word for word how Ernie Walters had phrased it.
“Okay,” I said, “could you tell me why everybody liked, or at least respected him?”
“He was a good officer. Y’know, you work in a headquarters company like this, you see scads of officers. I mean, there’s probably two hundred on our roll. No offense or nothin’, but most of them are either jerks or wimps.”
“That bad, huh? And I always thought officers were the crème de la crème.”
“Huh?”
“You know, the pick of the litter,” I said, and she still looked perplexed. “The best of the crop,” I tried again, and her befuddled look only deepened.
Not only did she not read much, but her knowledge of French, hogs, and farming was sorely lacking.
“Yeah, whatever,” she finally mumbled, like, Why was I torturing her with these complex issues? “Anyway, Captain Whitehall was different. He was real smart, y’know.”
I couldn’t escape the thought that this woman considered anybody who could tie their own shoes stratospherically intelligent.
Then after a thoughtful pause, she said, “And fair. He was always real fair.”
“Now, you’re sure you’re not just saying that because you were his clerk?”
“No way. You wanta know the truth? Word’s been put out not to say anything nice about the captain.”
I pulled back and gave her a shocked look. “Really? No kidding? Who’d put out something like that?”
“Well, y’know, nobody ever announced it or anything. I mean, there’s nothing official. It’s what I hear, though. Y’know?”
Yes, I knew.
The Army, like most big organizations, has two channels of communications, and this clearly wasn’t one of those instances where the first sergeant could simply draw all the troops into a formation and scream, “The first one of you jerk-offs who mutters a single nice thing about Whitehall will be cleaning the shitters for the rest of your Army career!” A more subtle method was used. They simply whispered the same message into the right sergeant’s ear, and in seconds flat it was the talk of the latrine.
Anyway, I said, “But you thought he was a pretty good commander?”
“Hey, it isn’t just me saying so,” she insisted, pointing toward a tall trophy rack in the corner.
I looked over and there were some very old, badly corroded antiques neatly positioned on the two top shelves, and six gleaming, brand-spanking-new trophies near the bottom.
In peacetime, you can’t win any battles — there aren’t any — so the Army channels all that dormant martial energy into having units compete against one another for various distinctions. The competitions get pretty fierce and bloodthirsty, since they’re the only way the overambitious can outshine their peers and get noticed doing it.
I was staring at six months’ worth of trophies declaring Headquarters Company, Yongsan Garrison, to be the top unit in all of Korea.
Thomas Whitehall, it appeared, was a singularly energetic and competent officer. Of course, he’d told me he was the first time I’d met him. But you learn to discount that kind of stuff, because if there’s one thing most officers get pretty good at, it’s spit-shining their own asses.
I turned back to Specialist Fiori, who, while I wasn’t looking, had somehow gotten herself fully up on top of her desk and into this strangely contorted position where her hips were twisted sideways, and her shoulders were slung back, and her breasts bulged tightly against her battle dress. If she were wearing a bikini, it would’ve been a glorious sight. Even in camouflage battle dress it had its righteous qualities.
And that’s when I realized what a sly dog Tommy Whitehall really was. No wonder he’d planted her in his outer office. If she wasn’t a full-blown nymphomaniac, she sure pulled off a lavish impersonation. That slick devil. She was the replacement for that girl’s picture he’d kept on his desk back at West Point; his latest piece of camouflage.
I smiled at Specialist Fiori and thanked her for her honesty. She sucked in her lower lip, fluttered her eyelashes, and swiveled her shoulders in this sideways, provocative, swaying motion that made her uptoppers undulate like a couple of humongous sand dunes in a windstorm. She’d seen a few too many Marilyn Monroe movies, if you ask me.
“So, you’re a lawyer?” she asked, licking her lips.
“Yep, that’s right.”
“Does that mean you get paid more than other officers?”
“Nope,” I told her, making my way steadily toward the door. She only had time to give me one more sizzling glance before I made it to the safety of the hallway.
I rushed straight back to the hotel to see if there were any messages. But the moment I walked into the lobby, I ran smack into the middle of a large gaggle of men. They were mostly in line, getting checked in. There were probably fifty in all; some wore black-and-white collars and some didn’t. By their noisy chatter, they sounded like a convention of southern rednecks. How very curious, I said to myself.
I artfully worked my way to the end of the line and stood behind a fleshy older gent, tall and rotund, who had nothing but some frizzy fuzz left on his big head. He looked like a big walking peach, nudging his bags forward with the tip of his foot as he inched up in line.
I bumped up against him and he spun around.
I winced and said, “Uh, gee, sorry. I hope that didn’t hurt.”
“Not at all, son,” he responded in a syrupy, deep southern drawl that made it sound like “not’all, sun.”
I grinned. “Well, welcome to Korea. This your first time here?”
“Actually, nope. I was here in ’52, as a private, during the war.”
“Place has sure changed, hasn’t it?” I asked.
This was always a surefire opener to use with old Korean War vets. The last time they laid eyes on Korea it was nothing but shell-pocked farming fields that reeked literally of shit, and countless tiny, drab villages composed of thatched huts, and miserable, squalling people who couldn’t rub two nickels together. Now it was cluttered with skyscrapers and shiny new cars and, believe me, more than a few billionaires.
“The Lord surely has wrought a miracle,” he pronounced.
“Indeed he has. Is this some kind of returning vets’ group?” I asked, nodding with my chin.
“Nope. We’re all preachers and deacons.”
“Aha!” I said to Preacher Peach. “I suppose, then, that you’re all here for some religious convention?”
“Not actually, no. We’re here ’bout this Whitehall thing. Y’know, that murderin’ ho-mo-sex-u-al,” Preacher Peach intoned, painfully stretching out every single vowel, like it was just so damned hard to force that particular noun through his lips.
“Uh-huh. I guess that makes sense.”
“We’ve been invited by the Army,” he said, obviously immensely proud of that.
“The Army? No kidding? What? They asked you to come over?”
“They sure did. See, we were in Washington, for the big march. You see that on TV over here?” he asked in such a tone that it sounded like, Hey, did you see me land on the moon?
“Uh, yeah, I did. Very impressive,” I assured him.
“Yep. Well, we’re the fellas who put all that together. Anyway, a group of us was asked to stop over at that Pentagon, and the Chief of the Staff of the Army, he asked us hisself if we wanted to come over. Even loaned us a plane. A real nice fella, you ask me.”
“Well, ain’t that really something,” I remarked, slyly slipping into my own version of a bacon-and-grits brogue. “Mind if I ask, what’s the Army expecting y’all to do over here?”
“Ah, well, there weren’t no conditions nor nothin’. We’re just here to represent the views of all good Christian ’Mericans,” he said. “We’re here to show the cross.”
“You got any plans for how to show t
he cross?” I asked as offhandedly as I could manage, under the circumstances.
“You’ll be seein’ us around.” He smiled and beamed, nudging his bag up another yard or so. Then he looked at the lawyer insignia on my collar, and his eyes moved down to my boots and back up again.
“Say, you’re a lawyer, ain’t you?”
“Yep,” I admitted. “Worst thing in the Army to be. Dregs of the profession of arms.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, like from his experience that surely was true. “So, you got any opinion how this Whitehall devil’s gonna fare in court?”
“Sure do,” I announced.
“And what’s that?” he asked. Immediately seven or eight more of his preacherly brethren turned around to hear what I might say.
This was what you might call a golden moment. I mean, no way it was going to be a good thing having a bunch of fired-up, overzealous preachers demonizing our client. The environment was already poisonous enough. Besides which, the only leverage we had over the Korean government was its fear that American public opinion might be on our side. We didn’t want anybody creating the impression that fear was unfounded.
I put on my most lawyerly expression and recklessly announced, “I think he’s gonna get off.”
His chin flew back and his big beefy jowls shivered like poked Jell-O. “Get off? Now, how could that boy get off? He was sleeping right next to the corpse. His own belt was wrapped around that child’s neck. And his devil’s fluids were inside.”
His explosion was so loud that nearly twenty of the preachers and deacons began gathering in a knot around us, collectively eavesdropping on every word. There were more than a few apprehensive faces. The last thing they wanted was to publicly vilify a man who might subsequently be found innocent. How could they ever return home and look their flocks in the eye?
“Look, there aren’t many lawyers over here, and y’all know how us lawyers love to talk, right? Rumors fly around pretty thick.”
“That right?” another preacher stepped forward to ask. This one was a few years younger than Preacher Peach, and leaner, and weathered in that tough, parched, dried-out way some southerners get. He had hard eyes, too. What my mother used to call brimstone eyes. He would be Preacher Prick, I decided.
I said, “Well, I hear things.”
Preacher Prick’s neck shot forward an inch or two. “So what you hearin’, son?”
“That maybe the police didn’t do such a thorough job. They might’ve jumped to conclusions a bit, if you get my meaning.”
“Nope,” he said. “Don’t get your meaning at all.”
“Well, I’m only going on rumors now, but the word is the Korean police rushed into that apartment and messed up the scene of the crime something terrible. Contaminated the evidence, shoved around the witnesses. Also, given who died and all — if you’ll excuse my language — they were getting their nuts squeezed something awful to name a suspect. Any suspect, even if meant cramming a square peg into a round hole.”
The lids on Preacher Prick’s tight eyes screwed down even tighter, until all there was were two thin black slits, and the part of his face beneath his nose started moving around, like he was chewing something hard with his lips.
“Don’t say?” he asked, craning his neck forward dubiously.
“Just what I hear,” I replied, glancing at my watch, as though I suddenly remembered I had some drastically important appointment.
He drew his shoulders together a bit, and in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, said, “Son, ’fore we all dedicated ourselves to this lofty task, we got briefed by some two-star general back in the Pentagon. He went over every last detail about this case. Accordin’ to him, now, that Whitehall boy’s guilty as hell. He says he ain’t got a rat’s chance of gettin’ off. Them’s his words.”
I suddenly tasted a rush of bile slithering up my throat. I swallowed it, though, and struggled to appear normal.
“Ah, well,” I said, “and would you happen to remember that general’s name? I mean, even generals sometimes get these things wrong. And he’d be back in Washington, wouldn’t he? And we’re out here, on the forward frontier of justice, aren’t we? Besides, he ain’t a lawyer, is he? So what’s he know?”
“I can’t recall the man’s name,” Preacher Prick frankly admitted, scratching his head a bit. Then he quickly said, “I mean, there was a whole room full of generals when he was talking. He was a lawyer, though, just like you. ’Ceptin’, he’s like the head lawyer, so I expect he knows what he’s talkin’ about.”
The smile disappeared from my face. Then, since I’d already made a horse’s ass of myself, I glanced down at my watch again and said, “Holy cow, look at the time! I gotta get going.”
Preacher Peach smiled benignly, while Preacher Prick stared at my nametag like it was a name he meant to remember, and maybe even check up on.
I rushed straight to the elevator and up to my room. I was so furious, I could barely see straight. I lifted up the phone and gave the operator the number in Washington. A few seconds passed before Clapper’s administrative assistant, a captain with the silly name of William Jones, answered.
Trying to contain my rage, I choked out, “Drummond here. Let me talk to the general. Put the bastard on right now!”
Somehow or another, Captain Jones detected I was miffed.
“Major Drummond,” he said, in the calmest, most reasonable voice imaginable, “perhaps I should offer you some advice. You really might want to cool down, and call back later.”
To which I replied, “Jones, put me through right away or I swear I’m gonna climb on the next flight out of here and come kill you.”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” he answered, quite wisely deciding that his definition of duty did not require him to get trapped in the middle of whatever was happening here.
A moment later, Clapper, all warm and bubbly, said, “Hello, Sean. What can I do for you?”
“What can you do for me?” I screamed. “Jesus Christ! I just ran into a lynching party made up of cornpone preachers. They claimed the Chief of Staff of the Army invited them over here.”
“Now, settle down, Sean. It’s not like you make it sound.”
“No?” I replied. “Okay, listen closely to this, because I mean it exactly like it sounds. I am formally advising you that I’m considering filing an immediate motion to have this case dismissed. You’d better have a damned good excuse for this.”
He didn’t skip a beat. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought it might be a good idea if the Army tried to reach out to the southern religious community. While our position with regard to Whitehall is completely neutral, we can’t afford to antagonize the religious right.”
“You’re shittin’ me!”
“Did you know some forty percent of Army recruits come from the South? That’s almost half the Army’s enlisted strength. Hell, forty-five percent of the officer corps are southerners. I’m from Tennessee myself. And we nearly all fit into one profile. We’re nearly all dyed-in-the-wool, corn-fed, red-white-and-blue Baptists and Methodists. Do you have any idea what’ll happen to our recruiting statistics if these preachers take to the lecterns and start speaking out against military service? They very easily could, too. They’ll get up and start talking against the immoral and godless policy of gays serving in the ranks, and before you know it, you’ll swear service in the Army is the same thing as leasing a condo in Sodom and Gomorrah. You know us southern boys, Sean. When our mamas and our preachers talk, we sit up and listen. Christ, there won’t be any Army left to join. Believe me, they’ve got us by the short hairs.”
“How about you briefing them on the particulars of this case? Is that true?”
“It was perfectly aboveboard. They insisted on being briefed before they all climbed on an airplane to spend the next two weeks away from their churches. All I did was assure them the trial would go off as scheduled. I hardly told them anything.”
“Is that right?”
“I simply
went over a few things they could as easily have read in the newspapers. I disclosed nothing confidential. I said nothing that isn’t public knowledge.”
“Gee, General, now I’m thoroughly baffled. See, those preachers swore you said Whitehall’s guilty as hell, that he hasn’t got a rat’s chance of getting off. Your words exactly, according to them.”
Now here’s where you have to understand that there’s this list of cosmically dumb things you can do in the Army, and right near the top is catching a two-star general in a full-blown, bald-faced lie. You can suspect a general is lying, you can even know a general is lying, but to actually acknowledge that fact, to his face, falls under the heading of more than stupid: It’s like putting a gun to your own head.
Then again, there are exceptions to every rule — like when you can file a motion to get this case dismissed, and get the general a front-cover picture on TIME magazine that will ruin his career, his life, and his reputation. In instances like that you can say you balled his wife last night and odds are all he’ll do is grin and ask how it was.
And Clapper was no dummy. He knew that, too.
Sounding very legalistic, he said, “As I recall, I was answering a question, off the record. And to the best of my recollection, I caveated that response by clarifying this was only a personal reflection, not my professional opinion.”
When you hear those golden words, “as I recall,” and “to the best of my recollection,” and all the rest of that specious gobbledygook, especially from the lips of a trained lawyer, you know you’ve got a guilty scoundrel by the balls.
I said, “Know what really pisses me off about this?”
“No, Sean, what really pisses you off?” Clapper asked, struggling to sound affable.
“I know the guy probably did it, but I still can’t stomach it being done this way. He deserves every chance of squirming out of it everybody else gets.”
“And he’ll get that, Sean. He’ll have a fair trial in front of an impartial board. You can voir dire anybody off that board you don’t like.”
I hung up on him. I was suddenly sick of listening to him. He and the rest of the Army were stacking the deck against Whitehall, who might even deserve it, only it was wrong, and unethical. I was tired of hearing soldiers tell me they’d been told not to say anything nice about Whitehall; and the State Department trying to trade him like a piece of rotten meat; and learning the Army had handpicked its most viciously successful prosecutor and a military judge who thought he worked for the prosecuting attorney. And now I was tired of preachers telling me the Army had actually flown them over here to publicly pillory my client.
