“Yes. But Major Slater was simply trying to save the—”
“And you knew,” the prosecutor went on, twirling his eyeglasses in one hand, “that the purpose of the mission was to airlift a civilian, not a member of the armed forces, to a medical facility?”
“All due respect, sir, but it was a kid,” Groves said. “What would you have done? She’d been bitten by a viper and she’d have—”
“I repeat,” the prosecutor interrupted again, “you knew it was not U.S. Army personnel?”
“I did.”
“And yet you remained a party to the deception?”
“On my orders!” Slater barked, lifting himself out of his chair. He was afraid that Groves was not going to muster enough of a defense. “The sergeant only did what I told him to do as his commanding officer. What I ordered him to do.”
Predictably, Slater was ordered to sit down and shut up, in pretty much those words, or he would be removed from his own trial. After he sat back down, Lieutenant Bonham rose from his chair and conducted his own interrogation of the witness, advancing more or less the same argument, but in a legally reasoned, and more dispassionate, manner. Slater had given him explicit instructions to see to it that Groves was exonerated on all charges.
When the sergeant had been dismissed from the witness stand, he slunk by Slater’s chair and muttered, “Sorry, Frank,” as he passed.
“No reason to be,” Slater said.
The general in charge of the tribunal demanded again that there be no communication between the witnesses, and after shuffling his stack of papers, asked the lawyers to proceed to the summation.
The prosecutor, who looked confident that he had a winning hand, went through the litany of charges and all the articles of the military code that Slater had managed to break—even Slater was surprised that he’d managed to commit so many infractions in such a short space of time—before sitting down again with his hands folded over his abdomen like a guy waiting for the soufflé to be served.
Lieutenant Bonham stood up with a lot less confidence and proceeded to make his own arguments in defense of Major Slater. A lot of it was legal jargon, but Slater also had to sit still for a long recapitulation of his own military and medical accomplishments.
“May it be entered into the record that Major Slater enlisted in the United States Army thirteen years ago, with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, a specialty in tropical and infectious diseases, and an advanced degree in statistics and epidemiology from the Georgetown University Program in Public Health. Those credentials have served him—and this country—exceptionally well in some of the most dangerous and hotly disputed scenes of engagement, ranging from Somalia to Sarajevo. He has earned three special commendations, a Purple Heart, and attained the rank of major, which he holds at the time of this hearing. He is also a victim of an especially chronic strain of malaria, to which he was exposed in the line of duty but which he has never allowed to interfere with the assignments given him by the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, here in Washington, D.C., where he is based. This disease, I would argue, should be considered a mitigating factor for any possible misconduct. Among its symptoms are fevers, hallucinatory episodes, and insomnia—which in and of themselves can contribute to acts of an irrational and impulsive nature. Acts which Major Slater, if he had been wholly in control of his behavior, would never have countenanced, much less committed.”
Slater had to hand it to the kid. It was a very persuasive and well-put summation … even if he hated the part about the malaria. It wasn’t the malaria that made him throw that punch or call in the chopper. Right now, sitting comfortably in the courtroom, his illness at bay and his thoughts as clear as the blue November sky outside, he would have done exactly the same things all over again. And it wasn’t just the little Afghan girl that had done it—she was just the proverbial straw that had broken the camel’s back. This explosion had been building for years. He had seen too much horror, he had witnessed too many deaths, too many barbarities. He had flown to too many desolate corners of the earth, armed with too little to offer in the way of aid or relief. Under a mosquito net in Darfur, by the light of a bright moon, he had finally gotten around to reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and he had quickly understood why that volunteer from Oxfam had so urgently pressed the book on him. Maybe, without his noticing it, he had been turning into the mysterious character, Kurtz, a man who saw so much of the cruelty that man can inflict that it had finally driven him mad.