When court resumes, Shad stuns me by calling Walt Garrity as his next witness. It takes a few seconds for me to realize the brilliance of this move, but I do, just in time to explain it to my mother.
“Shad expects Quentin to call Walt to refute Major Powers’s account of what happened in the ambulance, so he’s doing it himself. This way he can guide the questioning. See? Judge Elder just gave Shad permission to treat Walt as a hostile witness. That means Shad can lead Walt where Shad wants him to go. Plus, Shad can make it painfully clear that Walt’s on Dad’s side. The irony is, Quentin had no intention of calling Walt.”
“But Quentin can cross-examine him, right?”
“Quentin could have cross-examined Major Powers, too.”
Mom closes her eyes and braces herself for whatever is coming.
“Captain Garrity,” Shad begins, “you heard the testimony of Major Powers about what happened in that ambulance on the night of November thirtieth, 1950.”
The weathered old Ranger looks as though he is bursting to tell his version of what happened that night. “I did.”
“And does your recollection of that night differ in any significant way from the account Major Powers related?”
“As to the sequence of events, no. The character of events was a bit different than he portrayed.”
“How so?”
“The major’s story reminded me of our old reports in the Texas Rangers.”
“Back before computers?”
“Back when we rode horses.”
Several spectators laugh, but Walt wasn’t trying to be funny.
“A typical report might read: ‘Pursued robbery suspect south-southeast for three days. Cornered him near Terlingua. Shot suspect next day after altercation with associates. Returned to El Paso.’ It hits the high spots, but it don’t exactly cover the subtleties of the thing.”
“Well, that’s why I’ve called you up here.”
“Is it?” Walt looks skeptical.
“Yes, sir. Please feel free to add anything you believe Major Powers should have included.”
“Well, first off, the major wasn’t in a position to make the same judgments Tom and I were about those men. Powers had no medical training, beyond survival school for pilots. Even if he’d had training, he had limited mobility, and he suffered a concussion when the ambulance went over the cliff.”
I can see the jury warming to Walt’s delivery, but Shad seems willing to pay the price to get what he wants from Dad’s old friend.
“Second, the major said Tom had only minor wounds himself. In fact, Private Cage had sustained serious shrapnel wounds from fragmentation grenades on the night of November twenty-fifth, when the Chinese first attacked our position.”
Shad looks a little disconcerted by this correction of the record. “Go on, Captain.”
“Well, we started with eight wounded soldiers in that ambulance—it was an old Dodge WC54, World War Two vintage—which meant we were double loaded, plus me driving and Tom in the back. Most of those boys was wounded so bad they wouldn’t have made it to a surgeon even if the ambulance hadn’t gone off the road. The accident only caused additional casualties and shock, like the major said. Two GIs were killed by machine-gun fire during the ambush, and two more died during the roll down the cliff. One might have reached the hospital in decent shape if we hadn’t been ambushed, but he sustained a skull fracture during the crash. He was in and out briefly, then fell unconscious. But here’s my point: as bad as those two conscious boys were hurt—mortally wounded, both of them—they fully understood the situation. No help was coming.”
“How did they come to understand it? Through what you and Private Cage told them?”
“Lord, no. The whole damned division was bugging out, and they knew it. All discipline had broken down; the army was in full retreat. I don’t like saying it, but wounded were being abandoned all over the place. We could hardly get tanks down that road, much less stop and mount a rescue operation. Nobody was going to take time to winch an ambulance back up onto a road that was nothing but a kill zone. And those boys knew that. We all did. Even Powers.”
“Let’s get back to the wounded men,” Shad suggests.
“Let’s,” Walt says icily. “So . . . I was trapped in the driver’s seat, but I could hear fine, better than I wanted to. One boy was crying for his mother; another was screaming in pain. He quieted down when Tom gave him some morphine. That’s when Tom came forward and freed me. He did that by breaking my shoulder, by the way. Broke it with an entrenching tool.”
A soft gasp sounds in the courtroom.
“Weren’t no other way,” Walt said. “There wasn’t no Jaws of Life down in that godforsaken gorge. Tom told me what he’d have to do to get me out, and I said ‘Get on with it, then.’ I’d have let him cut my arm off to keep from being captured by those Chicom bastards.”
Shad probably figured he had an idea what was coming, but the jury members are hanging on Walt’s brusquely delivered words in a way they did not when Powers spoke.
“After Tom freed me, we climbed in the back and tried to figure a way to get those boys back up to the road. We saw right quick we couldn’t manage it, so Tom decided to climb the cliff to see if he could get help. We’d heard screaming up there earlier, but that had stopped. Tom’s climb took a while, and the wounded didn’t get any better during the wait. I did what I could to treat them, but they bled more and went deeper into shock. The one who was in and out went into a coma and stayed there. I had to shoot myself with morphine just to stand the pain from my shoulder. We was a pitiful bunch, I tell you. We tried to laugh about it, but it was twenty below zero. Hard to see the funny side when you’re that cold.
“Anyway, our column had taken off hell-for-leather when the ambush started. Some of our boys got knocked off the tanks when the gunners rotated their turrets to fire back at the Chinese, and some got crushed flat by the treads. Piss-poor planning, I’ll tell you. By the time Tom got up to the road, there was nobody there but dead GIs and Chinese waiting to ambush the next column. That’s when he got grazed by another bullet. And that’s another thing the major left out. If you don’t believe me, get him to strip down and take a look at his scars.”
Shad forces a respectful smile. “We’ll take your word for it, Captain.”
Walt looks hard at Shad, then continues, his eyes on the faces in the jury box. “After Tom got back, he asked me to come outside the ambulance to hear his report, but the boys heard it anyway, like Powers said. The next column to come down the road was going to catch the same hell we had. Tom and I were hurt too bad to move the wounded, who couldn’t ethically be moved anyway—so there we were. Rock and a hard place, literally.”
“Why couldn’t you stay where you were and wait for relief?”
Walt looks at Shad like he’s an idiot. “Did you not hear me say it was twenty below zero? We had two boys bleeding out and one in a coma. There was no heat and no hope of help. Plasma was frozen solid in the aid stations, and we had none in the ambulance. The only thing we had enough of was morphine.”
“Go on.”