“Ask any Vietnam wife,” Colonel Eklund says. “Who knows her husband better? Her? Or the men who spent a year in the mud and the blood with him in Southeast Asia?”
Shad seems to honestly weigh the implications of this. He’s breaking a cardinal rule of jurisprudence, asking questions to which he does not know the answers. For a few moments I am confused, but then it hits me: Shad actually believes that Dad murdered Viola. And because he does, he believes that even in this story of heroism, he will find some hint of the moral decay that led to Viola’s murder five decades later.
“I listened closely to the nomination you made for the Medal of Honor. Let me ask you this, Colonel. Couldn’t it be said that on that night Private Cage—rather than going above and beyond the call of duty—performed his duties exactly as required?”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m suggesting that Private Cage performed the standard duties of an army medic, performed them well, and then, after your position was overrun, did whatever was required to save himself and the other survivors from certain death.”
“That’s what he did, all right.”
“Is that in itself remarkable?”
Colonel Eklund takes his time with this one. “It is. You might think that performing one’s duty under fire is standard procedure. But after serving in three wars, I can tell you it’s not. I’ve seen muscle-bound hero types cower in trenches, while skinny runts held together with spit and whipcord charged machine-gun nests, howling like the hounds of hell. What’s remarkable about the night the Chinese overran us is that Private Cage survived at all. He had more burp gun rounds sprayed at him than what you see in these silly shoot-’em-up movies they make nowadays. But somebody upstairs was looking out for him that night. As for duty . . . the men who served with Tom Cage knew that if they went down, he would do everything in his power to save them. They knew it, you hear me? And because of that, they fought hard. And when they fell, he kept his end of the bargain. He crawled out into a dark so full of Chinese soldiers you couldn’t move without one trying to bayonet you. You can’t ask more of a man than that. And you can’t teach it in boot camp. A man’s either raised up to do his duty or he’s not.”
“A stirring speech, Colonel. I have to admit, you’ve convinced me. Tom Cage acted heroically on the night of the twenty-fifth. But let me ask you this: Have you heard of cases where men who acted heroically in war committed crimes later in life?”
The colonel’s face clouds with unpleasant recollection. “Ah—”
“Objection,” says Quentin.
“On what grounds?” asks Judge Elder.
I can see from the colonel’s face that Shad struck vital tissue with his thrust. Dad’s going to take a hit here; Quentin senses it, too. Colonel Eklund remembers something, and he isn’t about to lie on the stand. But Quentin himself already argued that Eklund qualifies as an expert on military matters, and by Quentin’s own strategy, trying to suppress any part of the truth—even an unpleasant part—would be a mistake.
“Withdrawn,” Quentin says softly.
“Colonel?” Shad prompts, smelling blood.
“I knew a sergeant in Vietnam who killed his wife after he got out of the service. Killed his wife and then himself. He suffered from battle fatigue. Or PTSD, they call it now.”
“Is that the only such case you remember?”
Colonel Eklund hesitates, then says, “No. A guy I served with went to jail for robbing a bank in Illinois.”
“After he’d won an award for bravery?”
“The Bronze Star.”
“Any other cases?”
“I don’t think so. You hear things, you know. But those are the only instances in my personal experience.”
Shad nods as though he and the colonel share some difficult knowledge about life. “I personally know that one veteran of the Mogadishu raid dramatized in Black Hawk Down was convicted of child molestation. They left his character out of the movie because of that.”
“Move to strike,” says Quentin.
“So ordered,” says the judge. “You’ve made your point, Mr. Johnson, and the jury will disregard that last statement.”
Shad lifts one hand in acknowledgment. “War changes men, doesn’t it, Colonel?”
“Yes and no,” Colonel Eklund says after reflection. “Depends on how much action they see, and where they see it. Tempo is the thing. In the Pacific, you could endure a year’s worth of hell in five days of combat. Two days could break a man. In Vietnam, you had lighter contact, but it never let up. Two or three hundred days of exposure in the field, to land mines and trench foot and booby traps and sniper fire. It’s like a Chinese water torture.”
“Did you return to combat in Korea after receiving your wounds?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever serve with Private Cage again?”
“No.”
“So, you have no idea what kind of operational tempo he experienced in the months that he remained in the Korean theater?”
“That’s true.”
“Is your opinion of him based entirely on his actions on the night of November twenty-fifth, 1950?”
“And four months of operations leading up to that night,” Eklund clarifies. “We saw a fair amount of action prior to that.”
“But nothing comparable to that night?”
“Naktong was pretty hairy, but not like after the Chinese came in. That’s true.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Most enlightening.”
Colonel Eklund nods warily, not quite trusting Shad’s solicitous tone.
“And thank you for the information about Love Company—the ‘colored boys,’ as you called them. I thought the army had been desegregated by that time.”
The colonel shifts on his seat as though to get the blood flowing in order to stand. “On paper it had been. But there were still all-black units in the early months of the war. The army doesn’t like change.”
“Nor does society at large, Colonel. Thank you. No further questions.”
“Shad just earned his paycheck,” Rusty says in my ear.
Judge Elder looks at Quentin and raises his eyebrows. “Redirect?”
“Nothing further, Your Honor.”
“You’re free to go, Colonel,” Judge Elder says.
Colonel Eklund looks up at the judge and nods with obvious respect for the office. Then, with a last look around the courtroom, he rises, steps out of the witness box, and walks to the center aisle. As he passes the defense table, he stops and looks my father full in the face. Then he straightens up, raises a wrinkled right hand, and snaps out a salute that would make a West Point officer proud. This act, a superior officer initiating a salute to a man of lower rank, is a courtesy reserved for winners of the Medal of Honor.