We Were Beautiful Once (21 page)

Harris listened, then responded, “Yes, they won't see that. If it comes up, I'll get the judge to redact, on national security grounds, the part about the CIA  and references to the Girardin film.” He put his hand to his head, squeezing to alleviate a pounding headache.

“Correct, we've decided that it's not in our interest to bring in Montoya from New Mexico.  He's too vague, and he doesn't help our theory.” Harris got up from the chair and took a step to his right. “Yes, I appreciate that I'm not to mention CIA and Girardin in the same sentence.” The man could be heard still coming through the receiver. “Well, sir, we'll do our best. I think there's only a small chance that things will turn out different than we've predicted.” Two minutes passed while Harris shifted back and forth—one foot then the other. His face reddened.

“Thank you, sir. I'll stay in touch if anything develops.”

 

Harris walked over to Jaeger before the session resumed. “Tom, nice to finally meet you. I'm sorry, I didn't know you were blind. If I had, I could've had someone drive you up from Pennsy.”

“Nothing to be sorry about, Mr. Harris.  I've been like this for a few years. Hard getting used to at first, but you know something?  Once you can't see, you soon realize everybody's got a blind spot.”

 “How'd it happen?” Harris asked with concern.

“Well, after Vietnam, you know.  It came out about Agent Orange leading to permanent blindness.”

“Ole Nick there, he was a VA lawyer handling Agent Orange cases.”

“For vets?”

“For Uncle Sam. Was pretty good at it, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never lost the VA one case for the government. Were you given a medical discharge?”

“No, the blindness happened about two years after I retired in the late seventies. VA denied the benefits. Back then I'd been workin' as a part-time guard at Lewisburg Federal Correction. I have a small farm that me and the wife grow corn on and one day in the field the green stalks turned brown for a few minutes, then everything turned black. Last thing I saw, corn stalks. Now, I ain't able to do much. I mean, I can dig a hole or get eggs, feed chickens, you know, the things that are like the back of my hand.”

After a few seconds passed, Harris remarked, “Well, I can't tell you how much we appreciate you coming all this way to set the record straight.”

 

 

 

WHEN COURT WENT INTO RECESS, Lindquist returned to his chambers. It had an oversized desk, a small library of books and several ornately framed pictures of judges that had once occupied the room. He picked up the phone and called his dentist. “That's right, soon as you can. Can I get some pain meds at the drug store? Good, then yes, this afternoon...  that works. What time? ...  Fine, see you then.” He pushed on the intercom and asked Alice, his secretary, to find him an ice pack.

“My father would have sent me for some pain killers,” he mumbled. He sat back and closed his eyes.

Unlike the vast majority of men and women who have opinions on war, Joseph Lindquist formed his while living through one. When he returned from Europe in '46 he went to college and studied history in a vain attempt to intellectualize what he had experienced. He never found an answer that completely satisfied him.

Lindquist and his friend Tom Aspinwall, a judge appointed under Nixon, had many a discussion about politics. Lately, when the men had nothing better to talk about, they would  discuss what the government's response should be in matters of its overseas interests.

The day before the trial started, the men walked to
The Rex
, a men's club where judges could drink outside of public scrutiny after work. They sat in overstuffed leather chairs, in a room with dark oak paneling and gilt framed oil paintings, mostly of men at sea—a reminder of where many patrons would rather be. Aspinwall brought a glass of merlot to his lips and took a sip before holding the glass aloft and twirling it so the wine coated the inside.

“Well, Joe should we retaliate for the Lebanon Embassy bombing?”

“Not a good idea, Tom.”

“Don't you think we go in and take them out?” Aspinwall asked to provoke his friend.

Lindquist stretched his legs.  “Tom, you'd risk starting another war.”

Aspinwall ran his hand through his thinning white hair and straightened himself to better face Lindquist. “Sure, but we can't let them make us look like fools in the eyes of the world.”

“Well, that's a new one, ‘fools in the eyes of the world.' Countries go to war to conquer territories for riches, to defend nations, to bring civilization to heathens, to convert infidels, but now we have ‘fools in the eyes of the world.'”

“People have gone to war for reasons far less noble than that.”

Lindquist lifted his empty glass over his shoulder to get the bartender's attention. “Yes...  rape and pillage, I suppose. And, there're men who would go to war if they felt their honor were at stake.  I think we should sit this one out and see if the diplomats can't handle it.”

Aspinwald, a chubby man, leaned forward and, in a low serious tone, he opined, “You know, Joe, unless we deal with these dictators with an iron fist, we'll find ourselves in deeper trouble. Look at Hitler. We should have taken him down two, three years before we actually got into the war.”

“Blame it on Republicans.”

Aspinwall laughed. “Oh, let's not go down that road.”

“I don't know. We're always looking for reasons to go to war. There's something basic in our makeup, motivates us to wage war. Man's genes, maybe. Yes, what man does by way of organized killing of his own kind is something copied into his flesh.”

Lindquist was sipping from his glass when he saw Paul Morris, the judge who occupied the office next to his. “
Eh, Paul 'ow's it goin' der?” he said cheerfully, adding, “want a join us?”
 

“Hello, Joe. Sorry, can't. Meeting an old college friend.”

Aspinwall looked at the large painting behind Lindquist, the one with a man hooking a fish the size of a great white. “I think there's some truth to that if you want to look at it philosophically,” he said.  “We can no more stop war than stop making babies.”

Ever since his wife Mattie died five years earlier, Lindquist spent Sunday morning reading the
New York Times
and the
Bridgeport Post
with his cat Red. At some point he usually put down the newspapers and picked up an album full of photos of him and Mattie. Then he would turn on the TV to watch the Sunday political shows and, if nothing particularly interesting was on, he would read trial briefs for the cases in the weeks ahead.

The Sunday before the Girardin trial started, he read the briefs. After an hour, he put down the paperwork, walked over to the pull-down stairs to the attic and ventured into the place where old memories were archived. In the far corner of the attic his eye caught a twelve-by-twelve picture of Robby O'Halloran dressed in a khaki colored army jacket, the kind of picture the boys took right after boot camp—before they were put on liberty ships and sent to North Africa. He found an album of pictures his father took on his first hunting trip. It was 1937, up Vermont way near the Canadian border. His father had spotted the buck and was close enough to his son to whisper, “Aim slightly higher than the buck because he's going to leap into the clearing.” Bam! Four legs slowly buckled under the 500 pound frame of a beast that offered no resistance and did no harm. Now, it shadowed the memory that all dead innocents cast in the executioner's mind. In time, Lindquist became both the hunter and the hunted. It was during that cold winter of '44 in Belgium where he accrued a soldier's inventory of menacing memories, where he came to know death, not through the oblique angle of a hunter's sight, but as a man intent on killing other men.

Later that night, Lindquist picked up his pen, and in the habit formed from watching his father, he made a notation in his diary:

What justification do boys have for going to war? Maybe it's patriotism, or maybe it's because they are dead ended in life and war promises status, dignity. Regardless, in time their sacrifices or their ends are forgotten.

Federal Judge Joseph Lindquist would never forget what happened forty years ago, in another place, where men woke up every day with the full intention of killing one another. The final journal entry for that night read:

Can there ever be such a thing as the unimpassioned observer exercising objective reasoning in recounting war?  For in war, that thing called reason gives way to that thing called Nature, and more precisely the Nature of Man. Under the circumstances of my own experience, can I still judge things by that standard of judicial objectivity that my oath of office demands?

 

 

THE LANKY CLERK LIFTED HIS CRANE-LIKE NECK and, in his naturally high voice, shouted in the direction of the lawyers, “Are you ready to proceed?” Hearing joint confirmation, he motioned to the boxer-turned-marshal that the stage was set for the next round.

“Please rise.”

Having heard the marshal shout and the long familiar sound of people getting off their duffs to pay their respects, Lindquist, in black robes and trademark frown, eyebrows pinched at the furrow, turned the doorknob of the door directly behind the bench.

“Be seated,” Lindquist barked. He turned to Jaeger waiting in the witness chair. “Mr. Jaeger, you are still under oath. Mr. Harris, proceed. I hope we're finally getting to the end of the war.”

“Yes, sir, I'll be finishing up in a few minutes.”

“Now, Mr. Jaeger, can you recall where you were on or about the morning of November 27, 1950?”

“The regiment was near Kunu-ri, close to the Ch'ongch'on river. We were still well north of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, but now we were heading south again, as I said before.”

“Why would you remember a particular date like November 27, 1950?”

Jaeger paused, touched his chin and seemed to stare in the direction of the audience.

“Mr. Jaeger, did you hear the question, sir, the morning of November 27. Can you recall what happened next?”

“That morning I went scouting. I had heard two, three shots fired in the distance and decided to move in that direction to see what I could. I found a stray North Korean, or maybe it was a Chinese, and I shot him. I also found two GIs on the ground near one another, and one of our guys standing over one of them.”

“Can you please elaborate for the court, let's start to what led to the shooting?”

Jaeger hesitated. The word “shooting” reduced the politely hushed din. “Well, that night a wet snow had passed, leaving us soaked. The unit was headed south and scouts were dispatched north of the bivouac to figure out if the enemy was comin' from that direction. Wasn't my job, but 'cause the scouts were north, Lieutenant Billingsly ordered me to recon the area south to see if the enemy'd moved 'round the unit—you know, out-flanked us. Was half-mile south when I heard a noise like maybe a pheasant.  Caught movement out of the corner of my eye.”

Jaeger would not tell the court that when he stopped, his heart beat wildly. He was acutely conscious of condensation forming phlegm with every lungful of air, and he needed to cough. Through his breathy fog, he saw a soldier in the foreground. The man had moved slightly and sniffed the Siberian air. Jaeger crouched into a prone position and removed his leather gloves. The man turned in Jaeger's direction. A glint of an emerging, rose-colored sun reflected off his glassy pupil.

Jaeger set his carbine into the crease between his shoulder and pectoral. He released the safety, squeezed the cold metal grip, taking a slow deep breath. White air spilled off his lips and he froze a moment to steady his weapon, panning along the line defining life within the “V” of its bore sight. He pressed the curvature of the trigger, releasing a firing pin into the backside of a .30 caliber bullet. The rifle jerked upwards as the bullet crossed the vacancy separating the two warriors.

“Saw an enemy. Fired. Missed! Man looked left, spotted me. Fired again and hit 'em. His head jolted up...  jaw unhinged.” Jaeger was quiet, thinking he had said more than he should have.

“Mr. Jaeger, what happened next?”

Jaeger was quiet.

“Mr. Jaeger, besides the enemy you engaged, were you alone that morning?”

“I thought so, but I'd a couple of angels with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I thought I was firing at one, but he had back up. As I fired, his backup was ready to drop me. But a couple of guys from another company were apparently on scout patrol, too.”

“What exactly happened?”

“I heard the crack of another rifle. I looked right. I wondered if someone was shooting at me, but I saw a GI on a small knoll. I realized that he was firing at somebody stalking me.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, laid as close to the ground as I could. Heard more shots, but wasn't lifting my head. Let at least ten minutes pass. A pheasant flew into the woods, and I finally felt it was safe to move toward the GIs who'd helped me. But, as I got close I noticed one guy was kneeling next to another guy on the ground. Tryin' to stop bleeding.  His whole side was bloody, right through his jacket. Like I said to you the other day, he looked like he was gone.”

“Did you talk to the guy trying to stop the bleeding?”

“Yeah...  after a while. We was both pretty shook.”

“Do you remember the name of the man who you met that morning?”

“He asked my name. Told me his name was, and I'm guessing now, it's been a while, an O'Connel or O'Conner, can't remember exactly...  but it's the one you and me talked about.”

“And, did you learn about who the other guy was?”