When I approached the conference room, through the glass panel in the door I saw Layton Merriwell waiting. He was impeccable but abstracted, a man very much alone at that moment, as he looked off with his legs crossed, one glossy Oxford jiggling idly beneath the knife-edge crease in his trousers. As I entered, he came to his feet and offered his hand. He was a bit smaller and slighter than he looked on TV, with sharp features and trim gray hair, still long enough to comb over. For a person of his age—sixty-eight, according to the net—his cheeks were unusually rosy, probably a remnant of drinking. His hands, pale and perhaps even manicured, seemed unexpectedly refined for a soldier.
Still standing, we talked a little bit about Roger. General Merriwell told me they had served in the same places several times, and we exchanged a couple of light remarks about Roger’s intense nature. Merriwell made me laugh out loud by briefly imitating the way Roger screwed up his whole face when he was bearing down on things. Then the general gestured to a chair. We sat on the same side of the long conference table.
“So what can I tell you, Mr. Ten Boom?” He smiled a bit, understanding the ambiguity of his remark.
“Many things, I’m sure, General, but first we need to get through some preliminaries.”
“You’re going to tell me that I have the right to have a lawyer present?”
“I was and you do.”
“As you would expect, Mr. Ten Boom, my attorneys have already told me not to talk to you.” Merriwell by now had plenty of experience with lawyers, since the revelation of his affair had led to both a congressional investigation and a brief grand jury probe that went nowhere because the alleged victim insisted she had never taken any of his threats seriously. I already recognized that his preconditions—that he would meet only alone, off the record and without notes—reflected a lawyer’s advice, since those in effect inoculated him from any subsequent use of his words against him.
“We both know that I don’t face much practical peril here, Mr. Ten Boom. If the ICC ever tried to charge me, our government would do whatever was required to save me.”
“Ah yes.” I smiled. “The Hague Invasion Act.”
General Merriwell smiled, too, but without parting his lips. We were facing each other in two adjoining high-back executive chairs upholstered with uncommonly rich blue leather. There were eighteen of them surrounding the beech table, its pinkish undertone revealed in the late April light entering through the large windows. The paneling was also beech, and the room was double height, three baubled chandeliers suspended over the table. At the far end, the blue flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with its yellow wedge and white stars, as well as the Stars and Stripes, stood on staffs on either side of the obsidian face of a large-screen TV that presumably served for occasional diplomatic teleconferences, as well as viewing satellite broadcasts of the soccer leagues back home.
“You know, Mr. Ten Boom, I don’t want to start out on the wrong foot, but what you are doing here is exactly what the armed forces feared about the International Criminal Court. The other countries negotiating the ICC treaty refused to exempt peacekeeping troops, like the ones we had in the Balkans, from prosecution.”
Given his NATO role at the time, Merriwell obviously was speaking with firsthand knowledge.
“General, how can you give anyone immunity for committing crimes against humanity? The British and the French and the Germans all had peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, and they joined the ICC.”
“The British and the French and the Germans are not the same targets our country is, Mr. Ten Boom. And those governments agreed in Dayton that our troops could only be prosecuted by us under American law. Apparently the ICC doesn’t regard itself as bound by that stipulation.”
“The Court never signed that agreement, General. But you’re raising a very good point.” The compliment caught him off guard and he raised a faint eyebrow. “Do you know,” I asked, “if the Army has done any investigation of this alleged massacre?”
Merriwell lingered before answering.
“Not while I was in the service. Since then, I wouldn’t know. But no one would share the results with you anyway, Mr. Ten Boom.”
“That’s not really why I’m asking. The way the ICC works, the Court is authorized to investigate crimes only when the nations involved can’t or won’t do that. As you just pointed out, the US Army always retains the power to prosecute its soldiers. So a thorough inquiry by the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and a public report of the findings would have prevented the ICC from going anywhere near this case. I don’t understand why that hasn’t happened.”
“Mr. Ten Boom, the US military is not about to let any international body tell them to investigate our troops when there’s no basis to do so. Or to reveal its findings when there is. It’s hard enough to persuade the American people to allow our military to intervene overseas, without having to tell parents that their sons and daughters will be subject to the moralizing whims of a court thousands of miles from home with procedures nothing like our own.”
“It’s the same justice everywhere, General. Sealing four hundred men, women, and children in a coal mine without any provocation is a crime in any land, and I doubt you truly view the prosecution of an atrocity like that as ‘moralizing.’”
Despite the jousting, our tone was pleasant, even amused, with occasional quick smiles that were only a little bit short of winking. We both knew the arguments. It was probably not a surprise that a military man and a trial lawyer each relished this kind of back-and-forth as a way to get acquainted. But my last challenge to Merriwell brought a more somber look.
“I certainly do not, Mr. Ten Boom. I was newly commissioned during the revelations of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and they’ve always stayed with me. War is hell. And hellish things happen. Although there is an industry of those who don’t like to mention it, soldiers in combat are desperately scared and fighting for their lives, and that does not always bring out the best in human beings. But there is no excuse for murdering four hundred unarmed human beings. If that were what happened. But it is not.”
The general lowered his chin just a bit to deliver a flinty look. The persistent intensity of his gray eyes, which I’d noticed since starting, was redoubled. We were now down to business.
“And on what basis, General, do you feel such confidence?”
“In the last week, I’ve spoken to every senior officer I had in Bosnia at the time. To a person, they told me there was not a scintilla of truth to this charge.”
“I’m sure if you were I, General, you’d say you would rather speak to those officers yourself.”
“If I were you, Mr. Ten Boom, I’d think I was doing very well having a word with the top commander, especially when US law prohibits it.”
I was silent, basically conceding the point. Nevertheless, he’d reinforced my long-running curiosity about why he was here.
“Let me be obnoxious and lawyerly, General. Are you saying that you know nothing about a massacre in Barupra, based either on anything you witnessed or were told?”
“That’s exactly what I am saying. This is a fabrication.”
“And what part is made up—that a massacre occurred or that American forces had anything to do with it?”
“Certainly the latter. But if I understand the allegations, a truck convoy and a couple dozen troops moved through an area under our control, then blew up a coal mine and annihilated four hundred people in the process. Unless I was a complete failure as a commander, that could not have happened without an American soldier noticing something and reporting it up the chain.”
Whatever it is that people believe about one another within the first instants of meeting can prove unwarranted—just ask anyone who’s been on a second date—but I liked General Merriwell, mostly because he radiated discipline in the face of the truth. His bearing said that he was neither self-deceived nor willing to lie about what he knew.
“General, it’s beyond dispute that the entire population of that village disappeared overnight in April 2004.”
“This wouldn’t be the first time that Gypsies have acted like Gypsies, Mr. Ten Boom, and moved on.”