We Were Beautiful Once (28 page)

“Jack, that's my favorite song.” She watched for his reaction. Jack showed none. She made small talk: why her hips had broadened, why she'd let her hair grow over her shoulders, what she wanted out of life. Jack was skinnier than she'd remembered, thin faced, quieter. His hair glistened black and she thought him especially handsome, but he'd lost that Montgomery Cliff innocence the girls once teased him about, retaining, she thought, the actor's shyness.

After that first date they saw each other regularly.  Easter came in early April that year and after mass, the couple went behind the church to take pictures of Will in his three-piece suit, brown fedora, scarf blowing in a light breeze under a full sun. Anna, with one hand, held the top of her blue wide-brimmed hat that had rested on the bun of her hair, and with the other hand motioned to Jack to stand next to the boy. Flicking aside her bangs, she focused the Brownie on a man and boy each missing part of themselves, snapping pictures that showed a child, chest out, a man his arm around the boy's narrow shoulders. The couple sat on the bench near the rose garden while Will ran after pigeons pecking left over rice from a wedding. She snuggled close to Jack, her big-brim folding against his head. “You know, when Will was born his father wouldn't come forward.” She paused. “It was Trent.”

“I figured,” he said coldly.

“Jack, I never told him.”

“Somebody must've...  but it's none of my business.”

“I knew he would've never accepted he was the father. I moved on.”

Jack grabbed the knot in his tie. “Anna, let's not talk about it.”

She removed her hat, unfastened her bun, letting her hair fall over her shoulders. He rested his hand on her thigh and kissed her cheek.

“A guy kisses a girl, but it doesn't mean anything,” she said.

Jack pulled out a cigarette, lit it, throwing the spent matchbook in front of them.

“Anna, give me your hand.” Jack squeezed it tight. He blinked rapidly as he looked ahead.

***

“Mr. Prado, did you understand the question?”

“My first assignment at Hamilton was to assist the Plant Manager. I was assigned to production control, the department that schedules operations along the manufacturing line. The job entailed planning and distribution of materials and methods at different points and times.”

“Mr. Prado, when you say Hamilton Helicopters, does it have any relation to Trent Hamilton, the man you enlisted with?”

“Yes, his family owned the company. He got me the job.”

***

If the entire story were relevant, which to the court it hardly was, Jack had a good job which abruptly ended in 1972 for reasons he did not have to account for in court.  And he did not have to account for the details of the life he led after work—some might say the authentic one.  When Anna and Jack had married in '55, they moved into a cold-water flat across the street from the South End River.  Every six hours, low tide exposed its tar stained banks and blanketed the air with the smell of bunker fuel and dead fish.  For Jack, having recently spent three-plus years in a POW camp, it was home sweet home.  For Anna, it was a starting place, and if Jack could make his way with a little help from Trent, she would get to where she felt she was always headed: Fairview.  For now, on the other side of the river was the Hamilton Helicopters' flight line and at any given hour—even deep into the night—they could hear the chop, chop, chop of the whirling blades, discomforting sounds if one focused on them. In decades to come, that same sound would haunt the memory of the men who left their youth in a Vietnamese rice paddy.  One such ship would one day crash and in a significant way would lead to Jack's quitting Hamilton Helicopters and all it represented.

By now Nick had raised in Jack all those memories from when he had returned in '54, and he worried that Nick might delve into the cloud of suspicion under which he returned.  Even though the charge of commie sympathizer was never an issue between Trent and him, he couldn't immediately work at HH until his discharge status was upgraded.  So Trent's family pulled out the stops for the eventual security clearance that followed, for reasons which Jack could only speculate: past friendship, moral debts unpaid, for obligations assumed, for secrets kept.

In all respects, Jack and Anna's life hadn't been different from the lives of other young families in the urban east from the mid-fifties forward.  In '57 Mona was born.  By '58 the couple had saved enough to buy a small six-room colonial on the west side of town.  A '49 Chevy sedan got Jack back and forth to work.  During the day, Anna worked at a small variety store a block from home.  Anna and Mona spent time together at Girl Scouts.  During the summer Jack and Will would throw a baseball before supper.  Winters, the two of them hibernated in the cellar, working on a massive toy train village.  Jack watched his son's mind work through his hands, moving from boyhood into adolescence.  He watched him use the drill press to slowly bore its way through wood or sheets of steel on its way to making a soapbox racer. The days he and Jack spent in these places spoke volumes about the closeness between the man and the boy standing in peace on the solid ground called home.

***

Nick proceeded to take Jack through the preliminaries of when he enlisted, the units he was assigned to, where he fought in the fall of '50 and where he ended up at the beginning of '51.  

“Mr. Jaeger testified that you and another man saved his life on or about November 27, 1950. He testified that he'd been on a scouting mission and, in the course of trying to kill an enemy soldier, he did not realize he himself was a target. He testified that a man with a name sounding something like yours came to his rescue. Do you not recall such an event?”

“No, sir, never saved anybody's life scouting.”

 

Harris, muttered under his breath loud enough for Townsend to hear, “Goddamn it.” Lindquist raised his head and looked over at defense table. Harris avoided eye contact.

 

“Mr. Prado, do you recall November 24 or 25, 1950, for any reason?”

“Yes. Was with a rifle company, patrolling the north shore of the Ch'ongch'on River, maybe 50 miles south of the Yalu, near a little town called Unsan.  Maybe west of it, actually. Snowed all day. Shortly before dark—this is late fall, it gets dark early—and just before it got dark, the Chinese struck.”

“What happened next?”

“We were committed back to our battalion area... to hold the line.”

“And did you?”

“No, the battalion retreated, company by company leap-frogged three, two, one,” he replied, illustrating, by rotating one hand over the other. “The Chinese hit again. Ran us out of our positions, dawn next morning—mass confusion.”

“Did you continue to fight?”

“They'd surrounded us; we started regrouping around the first battalion area, three, four miles away.”  Jack's voice weakened, he swallowed hard, reached for the pitcher and observers like Anna heard the reverberating clink of the glass. Jack's hand trembled. He blinked rapidly and proceeded to mumble. “And Captain, Captain Klein, either Klein or Stein, Mine, Captain, Captain, Oh Captain...  Klein.”

“Excuse me?” Nick blinked. His key witness wasn't going to lose it now, was he?

“Sorry, Company Commander Klein shouted, ‘Men, we're surrounded...   use escape evasion, every man for himself.'”

The words, “every man for himself” bounced off the plaster walls. Nick waited a moment before asking the next question. He saw Jack recompose himself.

“Would you say that your unit became fragmented? During this... ”

Jack's eyes moved up and left and not letting Nick finish. Jack continued, “Dove into a ravine. Ravine.  Ravine, two guys...  hidin' in a bramble ravine.”

“How long'd you stay?”

“Maybe two or three hours, it seemed forever.  Below zero, snowing. We heard 'em coming.”

“You heard who coming?”

“Someone speakin' Oriental.”

“What did you do?”

“We weren't sure what to do. They could've been ROK.”

“What happened, next?”

“Bayonets, all directions.”

“Were any of you wounded?”

“Not really, I'd twisted my leg.” Jack pointed down. “No more Jack-be-nimble, you know.”

“Right.” Nick gave Jack a piercing look, but he seemed calm. “Could you walk?”

“Sure.”

“Where'd they take you?”

“You have to imagine it was total, mass confusion. They were picking us up all over. We're not talking a small city block, we're talking miles wide, squatting us down in the snow after they searched us, put us up in a little draw 'til dark.”

“Did you and the other men stay together?”

“For a while, but some of us split off into groups, about ten guys each.”  

“What happened next?”

“Air strikes, plus artillery.” Jack observed Nick begin to rub his hands together and shift uneasily in his chair. “But, too late. In fact, we killed our own.”

Jack took a gulp of air. Inwardly, Nick willed him to continue, just finish accounting for why he could not have rescued Jaeger.

Jack continued, “Nobody had no idea where we were. That's how it happened. Started to get dark, pulled us out of different draws, marched us in circles all night. Few took off their boots, toes froze, lost 'em, had to wrap their feet in rags from long-johns. Next morning they'd put us in another ravine, kept us there till dark.”

“Sir, are you telling us that it was impossible that on November 27, 1950, you were on a scouting mission, as Mr. Jaeger claims?”

“I am saying that I was already a POW.”

Lindquist saw Foster lean over and whisper something to Harris, who kept his eye on Jack and shook his head in agreement.

Nick, irritated by the mumbling from the defense table, looked over, then put his hands in his pocket, and walked out from behind the podium. “Did you eventually reach an encampment?”

“We stayed goin' 'round in circles, round and round like a merry-go—”  

“How long,” Nick intercepted.

“—Uh, couple of days and then started north.”

“Where'd you sleep?”

“Marched us every night and put us in Korean rooms or whatever was available at night —I mean in the daytime. We was marched to the Pukchin-Tarigol Valley collection site. Then marched 'til we got to Sinuiju, near the Manchurian border.”

“What happened when you got near the border?”

Nick returned to the podium and turned several pages in his trial notebook.

“They put us in a bean camp, soybeans and bran. Lot of men already there.”

“How long?”

“About a week.  Then marched us along the Yalu.”

“Destination?”

“Pyoktong, a camp on the south bank of the Yalu. Stopped marching early January '51, at what later came known as Camp No. 13.”

“Did you go to any other camps while a prisoner?”

“No, sir, stayed until February '53 when... ”

“You're, of course, referring to the end of the war, right?”

“Well, sir, beyond that.”

Jack waited for Nick to ask why he did not return with the other soldiers.

“And during this time, did you meet a soldier named Roger Girardin?”

Jack rapidly blinked several times in succession. “Never!” And, of course, with that answer Jack once again knew that he needed those sanctimonious voices to speak to him about sanity, secrets and sins of omission.

Nick saw Jack's eyes blinking fast and thought there might be something Jack was holding back. Perhaps, Nick thought, he hadn't asked the right question.

“And, Mr. Prado, I take it from your answer...  let me phrase it differently, did you
ever
meet a soldier named Roger Girardin?”

Jack listened carefully and heard the word “soldier” in the question. “Can you please repeat that?”

“Did you ever meet a soldier named Roger Girardin?”

Jack listened, his head cocked, and heard the word “meet” in the question. He had known Roger before he was a soldier, met him as a civilian, not as a soldier, at least not a meeting that could be ever discovered. He swayed back and forth.  

“Mr. Prado, an answer please?” Nick asked after not getting an immediate response.

“No, sir.”

Jack looked down at his notepad, not sure whether to press Jack on what seemed an emphatic “no.” He decided to go in a different direction.

“Mr. Prado, you and Trent Hamilton were in ROTC. You both went into officer's training school together?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you see much of him there at the training school?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see him in Camp 13?”

Nick noticed that he looked at someone in the crowd and hesitated. “Not that I can remember.”

“When you returned home, did you see much of him?”

“Except occasionally at work, our paths didn't cross...  you know, worked in the same place, but he was upper management.”

“Thank you, Mr. Prado, I have no further questions at this time. Counsel, your witness.”

Harris rose, “Mr. O'Conner or is it Prado?” he asked with a smirk.

Jack ran his hand through his hair. “Told Mr. Castalano, I prefer Prado.”

“Well, before you arrived today a Mr. Jaeger testified that you and Private Girardin saved his life on or about November 27, 1950. He testified that he'd been on a scouting mission and in the course of trying to kill an enemy soldier he didn't realize he was himself a target. He testified that you and Private Girardin came to his rescue. Do you not recall that event?”

“No, sir, I can't say that I never saw a Private Girardin then.”

Nick rose from his chair. “Your Honor, Counsel is mistaken and mischaracterizes Mr. Jaeger's testimony. He did not testify that this man sitting before us was the Connell or O'Conner he referred to.”