We Were Beautiful Once (7 page)

Nick, standing behind a blonde oak lectern threw down a cache of notes and pushed his fingers through his longish, brown hair.

“Mr. Girardin, may I call you Art?”

Art ran his tongue over his lips. “Yes, sir.”

“Art, this case is about your brother, Roger Girardin, a soldier who fought during the Korean War, correct?”

The witness put his hand to his mouth and turned in the direction of Lindquist, “Yes, sir.”

“Tell us about your brother.”

Art remembered the last time he had spoken to Roger: it was his eighteenth birthday and he had called from boot camp. The boys were four years apart, but they were always close.  Art was in the kitchen, standing anxiously by until his mother handed him the phone.  The subject of the brook behind the house overflowing came up, and Roger recalled spending summers as a kid on Lake Memphremagog, Vermont, where they had caught pollywogs.  These were parts of the conversation Art would spare the court.  Instead, Art gave the court a brief history of Roger's boyhood, where he went to school and where he worked before being drafted.  He testified to the letters his family had received before he shipped out to Japan and the last letter sometime in mid-September 1950, with the address,
APO, Pusan, Republic of Korea
.

Walking in Art's direction, Nick said, “Art, I asked you to bring the correspondence your parents received from the Army.”

“Yes, sir.”  Art reached down to pick up a folder.

“Let me have them, please.”

Art removed the two letters his parents received from the Army, wrinkled and marred, a white shock of hair falling to the floor. Art resisted the urge to pick it up.

“These were the notices my parents got that Roger wasn't coming back.  I promised my Dad...  I wouldn't stop looking.”

Art testified to the unexpected finding of a Congressional Resolution in the U.S. Archives, where Roger's name appeared along with hundreds of men that were unaccounted for, but had been listed as POWs, and how Congress never again considered the subject of Korean KIAs, MIAs, POWs.  He told how he'd contacted the men mentioned in U.S. Army Intelligence reports from Panmunjom, North Korea, in 1953 and those named in reports the International Red Cross recorded after visiting POW camps.

When Nick completed his examination, Harris stood up to say he had no questions.  The judge looked in Art's direction, “Sir, you're free to go.”

Art lifted himself from the witness stand feeling worn.  For six years he had shoveled the past into banker's boxes labeled A through Z, had spoken to scores of people from veterans to senators, lawyers to archivists, privates to generals, and it had all come down to two short hours, a hundred plus spectators, a cabal of government lawyers and a judge who, from what Art could sense, was skeptical of a man dragging in skeletons and relics from halfway around the world.

The clock on the wall ticked past 11:50. Lindquist looked at the crowd, “Let's take a five minute recess.”

The marshal cried out, “All rise.”

***

At the precise moment when both hands on the clock pointed to twelve, Lindquist, for the second time, addressed the occupants, “Ladies and gentlemen, air conditioning still not working.  I've asked the marshal t'open the rear doors.  Counsel, you ready?”

“Yes, your Honor,” Nick said rising from his chair.  “Your Honor, if you recall six weeks ago, you handed down your ruling that, with considerable redactions for national security reasons, the Broadbent report was to be turned over to us by the government.  The report, dated April 24, 1953, summarized the interrogations of several individuals who in one way or another mentioned the name Roger Girardin.  Only after receiving the report did we speak by telephone to David Bradshaw and Harry Sheer, two men we plan to call as witnesses, and until two weeks ago were not included in our witness list.  We ask the court to grant us leave to proceed with these witnesses.”

“Proceed, Counsel, I am aware of the late production of the document.”

“Your Honor, I call Mr. Harry Sheer to the stand.”  

From the box unoccupied by a jury, Ed Armstead, the newscaster from CBS, watched a man in the second row of benches make his way to the aisle.  While the man shuffled along, Armstead whispered to the fellow next to him, “About six feet two.” The man, a CBS sketch artist who earned his living capturing faces, drew the outline of a countenance creased and drawn.  He started to draw, a thin face, aquiline nose, fair hair parted to one side, and as he immersed himself in his work, he felt that his subject had spent considerable time in the unforgiving outdoors.

Had either man known Harry Sheer, they would have known that he lived alone on a farm in South Dakota, where on a typical summer day a searing sun could hastily disappear behind thunderheads that would heartlessly dump tons of wheat-flattening hail, or where in winter, winds blew snow horizontally— plunging temperatures into dead zones where the molecules that energized life forces slowed, thickened, and crystallized.  And, along the latitudes and longitudes of this meteorological tempestuousness, his farm sat at the end of a rutted road, where every morning for the past thirty-odd years— save the years in Korea— Harry would put on a pot of coffee at four, milk his cows by five and by six head out to the fields. Yesterday, Harry had milked the cows and returned to the farmhouse and then did something he had never done before.  He'd dressed in his holiday suit, drove his '65 Ford pickup fifty miles over dirt roads to Valentine, Nebraska, and boarded a plane to Connecticut.

His scuffed cowboy boots now tapped against the oak floor, echoing off the twenty-foot walls enclosing the forum.  Armstead turned to the artist and muttered, “A rancher or a farmer.”

Sheer met the clerk at the witness stand.  

“Sir, please raise your right hand.”  Sheer turned away from the lanky clerk and raised a thick, calloused hand toward the flag behind the bench, where he gave his present address and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“Mr. Sheer, you're a veteran of the Korean War, are you not?”

Harry lifted his head, “Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Sheer, as I explained when we spoke by phone, we're trying to determine the last location of Private Roger Girardin, a soldier listed as MIA during the Korean War.  Did you know Private Girardin?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You learned that his brother Art was searching for the whereabouts of Private Roger Girardin, isn't that true?”

“Yes, I would say almost a year and a half, maybe even two years ago.”

“Let's say about two years ago.  Did he call you?”

“Yes, he'd called me.  Asked me straight out.”

“Alright.  Did he tell you where he got your name?”

“No, told me his name, that his brother was lost in the Korean War.  Asked if I knowed him.”

“Did he say right off, ‘Did you know Roger Girardin?'”

“When I heard him say he was Art Girardin, the name Roger popped into my head.  He hadn't mentioned the name ‘Roger.'  It was me saying ‘I think I knew a Roger,' or ‘I knew a Roger Girardin.'”

“You're absolutely sure of that?  That he didn't say, ‘Did you know Roger Girardin?'”

“No, he asked me if I knowed his brother.  I'm the one who came up with the name ‘Roger.'  Tell you the truth, didn't know how I remembered that.”

“Had you thought about it since you first talked with Art Girardin?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“Please tell us what you later thought about that made that response likely?”

“I figure I remembered because I'd gotten orders from the Company Commander that the soldier was to get down to regimental headquarters in the morning, ASAP.”

“Any idea why they wanted Roger?”

“Nope, no idea.”

“Well, did he go to the regiment at that time?”

“No, it didn't happen.”

“Why not?”

“We got nailed that night.”

“Would you tell us what happened?  Why didn't Girardin report to headquarters?”

As Sheer started to answer, the hundred odd spectators stopped shuffling and leaned forward.  Amy Dusseldorf adjusted her glasses and muscled her way free from the bodies on either side of her to sit on the edge of her seat.

“Well, was November '50, a few days after Thanksgiving.  I was a Second Louie in charge of a squad in Company C, 19th Regiment, 24th Division, on recon patrol outside of Usan along the Ch'ongch'on River.  We were retreating south, tryin' to see if the way in fron' of us was clear.  Orders were to follow the river southeasterly and destroy any enemy we encountered. But we were more interested in runnin' from the Chinese coming at us heavy from the north. Lots of us lacked seasonin'.  Heck, I only had a couple of months in; I wasn't lookin' for a fight.

“You see we moved through the ravines and through the woods stayin' clear of paddies.  During the day we hid in irrigation ditches.  So the night before Girardin was to find his way back to regiment, a message came down the line from our point man.  It must have been two in the morning.  Point man walked ahead of us so we didn't bump into the enemy, you know, by chance.  He'd spotted NKs or Chinese about 800 meters in fron' of us.  Maybe they were headed to eventually outflank us.  Didn't know.”

Head down, Nick silently read from a letter Sheer had sent him detailing the events. A few coughs came from the crowd.  The clock ticked loudly, filling in the auditory gap. He laid the letter on the lectern.  The big hand swept past 12:45.

“Did you plan to engage?”

“The short answer's yes.  We were pretty banged up since the day after Thanksgiving.  Already winter.  Low teens.  Guys had the runs.  You forget what stink means.”

“What happened?”

“Master Sergeant Horowitz, the top non-commissioned officer in the company; fought in France and Belgium.  We called him Arrow— you know, putting his first name Aaron and his last name together.  Told us we had to figure where we'd set an ambush.”

“And, then what?”

“He got a squad together and told'em to go out half-mile and find out what direction they're heading.  How many.”

At that moment, Harris interjected. “Your Honor, may we have a five minute break? I need to attend to something.”

“Mr. Harris, if you plan on interrupting, we'll never get through this case.  But very well, let's break for lunch.”

As Harris bolted from the courtroom, Nick walked back to counsel's table where Mitch had returned after preparing a subpoena for Jack O'Conner, aka Prado.  Nick vented in Mitch's direction.  “Let's hope Harris doesn't end up directing this show.”

“What happened?” Mitch asked.

“Too much to get into right now. Did you get the subpoena drafted?”

“Here it is.”

“Get the clerk to sign it and tell Sophie to find a process server to serve Prado, or O'Conner or whatever the hell his name is today.”

***

The ex-pugilist marshal stood in the front of the bench and hollered, “All rise, court is back in session.”

Harry Sheer recalled the night that he had replayed over and over during his three years in a POW camp, every move he made, the faces of the lost, the mistakes, and the remorse that followed that night the men huddled on their haunches, hands under armpits, waiting for the squad that was reconnoitering the enemy's position to return.  He spoke of how he had checked his green fluorescent watch, but not that he had wiped off the ice that clung to his honey colored mustache with his leather glove.  He said there was a clear moon and light smoke wafting in from the forest fires, but not how badly he had tried to ignore the shakes that had taken over his legs, or that the saliva on his tongue had thickened and made it hard to swallow.  He told them how Arrow's long, frost-bitten face seemed fixated on the few stars that twinkled through a clearing in the trees, but not that his hearing became sharper as his hands and feet grew colder.

Nick walked to the podium waving his pad.  “Mr. Sheer, you'd dispatched a squad to determine what path the enemy was on.  Did the squad get the information you needed to mount an attack?”

“Girardin and Velez returned and told us thirty or forty NKs were traveling west, diagonal towards us.  Figured we might catch 'em if we headed on an opposite diagonal.  Told my radioman to send out our terminal position to HQ, start Medivac.  Wanted it timed so that shortly after we opened fire, the copters would be in earshot.”

Harry began to shake as he replayed the plan that he had concocted based on a faulty report that there was just
one
enemy unit converging.  Working on a farm had taught him how nature took over in situations where fear takes hold.  Lots of things were outside his control that night, like the stiff, frozen grass that resisted movement; the night shadows that magnified and camouflaged his band of grunts beneath rising smoke and a moonless sky.  As the troops advanced, the line tightened, compensating for the insecurity the men felt.  Jones remained nearly fifty meters in front, backed by Richey Pittmen— the second oldest vet in the squad.  The lieutenant's position was fifteen yards out front.  Arrow took center stage to keep the line ruler-straight.  The column advanced as one and what happened to one happened to all, but every man would remain alone in his own skin, the place where he packed his fears, his weaknesses, obsessed in the mantra “safety off, ready, lock and load.”

Boots fought against taut grass, the narrow path and dark spaces.  The men moved elegantly, intent, a relentless prowl to meet— one hundred meters to the right— a serpentine line of figures as fearless and as fearful, each pursuer slithering and slicing through the same murky smoke, rising into the same dark sky.  Multiple military columns traveling without knowing the precise flash of contact, the vertex, the point where life and death would join.  They closed ranks to meet the convergence, seconds away.  God had no stake in this — He informed men on all sides to freeze.  One bolted from the line like a pulling lineman.  Others, spooked, scattered like darkened roman candles launched in random directions.