Ordinary Heroes (2005) Read online

  Once when I was a boy, he saw me nearly run over as a car screamed around the corner, barely missing me where I was larking with friends on my bike. Dad snatched me up by one arm from the pavement and carried me that way until he could throw me down on our lawn. Even so young, I understood he was angrier about the panic I'd caused him than the danger I'd posed to myself.

  Now the chance to learn what had troubled my father became a quest. As a reporter, I was fabled for my relentlessness, the Panting Dog School of Journalism, as I described it, in which I pursued my subjects until they dropped. I obtained a copy of Dad's 201, his Army personnel file, from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and with that fired off several letters to the Defense Department and the National Archives. By July, the chief clerk for the Army Judiciary in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed that she had located the record of my father's court-martial. Only after I had paid to have it copied did she write back stating that the documents had now been embargoed as classified, not by the Army, but by, of all agencies, the CIA.

  The claim that my father did anything sixty years ago that deserved to be regarded as a national security matter today was clearly preposterous. I unleashed a barrage of red-hot faxes, phone calls, letters, and e-mails to various Washington offices that attracted all the interest of spam. Eventually, my Congressman, Stan Sennett, an old friend, worked out an arrangement in which the government agreed to let me see a few documents from the court-martial, while the CIA reconsidered the file's secret status.

  So in August 2003, I traveled to the Washington National Records Center, in Suitland, Maryland. The structure looks a little like an aircraft carrier in dry dock, a low redbrick block the size of forty football fields. The public areas within are confined to a single corridor whose decor is pure government, the equivalent of sensible shoes: brick walls, ceilings of acoustic tile, and an abundance of fluorescent light. There I was allowed to read--but not to copy--about ten pages that had been withdrawn from the Record of Proceedings compiled in 1945 by the trial judge advocate, the court-martial prosecutor. The sheets had faded to manila and had the texture of wallpaper, but they still glimmered before me like treasure. Finally, I was going to know.

  I had told myself I was ready for anything, and what was actually written could hardly have been more matter-of-fact, set out in the deliberately neutral language of the law, further straitjacketed by military terminology. But reading, I felt like I'd been dropped on my head. Four counts had been brought against Dad, the specifications for each charge pointing to the same incident. In October 1944, my father, acting Assistant Staff Judge Advocate of the Third Army, had been directed to investigate allegations by General Roland Teedle of the 18th Armored Division concerning the possible court-martial of Major Robert Martin. Martin was attached to the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, which had been founded during World War II (accounting, I figured, for why the Agency had stuck its nose in now). Dad was ordered to arrest Major Martin in November 1944. Instead, in April 1945, near Hechingen, Germany, my father had taken custody of Martin, where, according to the specifications, Dad "deliberately allowed Martin to flee, at great prejudice to the security and well-being of the United States." Nor was that just rhetoric. The most serious charge, willful disobedience of a superior officer, was punishable by execution.

  A weeklong trial ensued in June 1945. At the start, the count that could have led to a firing squad had been dismissed, but the three charges remaining carried a potential sentence of thirty years. As to them, I found another discolored form labeled JUDGMENT.

  The court was opened and the president announced that the accused was guilty of all specifications and charges of Charges II, III, and IV; further that upon secret written ballot, two-thirds of the members present concurring, accused is sentenced to five years' confinement in the United States Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth at hard labor, and to be dishonorably discharged from the U. S. Army forthwith, notice of his discharge to be posted at the place of his abode.

  I read this sheet several times, hoping to make it mean something else. My heart and hands were ice. My father was a felon.

  Dad's conviction was quickly affirmed by the Board of Review for the European Theater--the Army equivalent of an appellate court--leaving General Teedle free to carry out the sentence. Instead, in late July 1945, the General revoked the charges he himself had brought. He simply checked off a box on a form without a word of explanation.

  But it was not a clerical error. The court-martial panel was reconvened by the General's order the next week and issued a one-line finding taking back everything they had done only a month and a half earlier. My father, who had been under house arrest since April, was freed.

  The blanks in this tale left me wild with curiosity, feeling like Samson chained blind inside the temple. The Army, the CIA, no one was going to keep me from answering a basic question of heritage: Was I the son of a convict who'd betrayed his country and slipped away on some technicality, or, perhaps, the child of a man who'd endured a primitive injustice which he'd left entombed in the past?

  I filled out innumerable government forms and crossed the continent several times as I pieced things together, visiting dozens of document storage sites and military libraries. The most productive trips of all were to Connecticut, where I ultimately acquired the records of Barrington Leach, the lawyer who'd defended my father unsuccessfully at Dad's trial before General Teedle revoked the charges.

  Almost as soon as my travels started, I became determined to set down my father's tale. Dad was the only member of the Judge Advocate General's Department court-martialed during World War II, and that was but a small part of what made his experiences distinctive. I toiled happily in the dark corridors of libraries and archives and wrote through half the night. This was going to make not only a book, but my book, and a great book, a book which, like the corniest dens ex machina, would elevate my life from the current valley to a peak higher than any I'd achieved before. And then, like the cross-examiners in the criminal courtrooms I had covered for so many years, I made the cardinal mistake, asked one question too many and discovered the single fact, the only conceivable detail, that could scoop me of my father's story.

  He had written it himself.

  Chapter 2.

  DAVID: REGARDING THE CHARGES AGAINST ME CONFIDENTIAL

  ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATION

  TO: Lieutenant Colonel Barrington Leach, Deputy Associate Judge Advocate, Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, U. S. Army (ETOUSA)

  FROM: Captain David Dubin

  RE: The Charges Against Me

  DATE: May 5, 1945

  I have decided to follow your suggestion to set down the major details I recall regarding my investigation of Major Robert Martin of OSS and the ensuing events which will shortly bring me before this court-martial. Since I have no desire to discuss this with another soul, including you as my lawyer, I find writing a more palatable alternative, even while I admit that my present inclination is not to show you a word of this. I know my silence frustrates you, making you think I lack a full appreciation for my circumstances, but rest assured that the prospect of a firing squad has caught my attention. Yet as a member of the JAG Department who has both prosecuted and defended hundreds of general courts-martial in the year or so I have been overseas, I am fully convinced that I have nothing to say for myself. General Teedle charges that last month in Hechingen I willfully suffered Major Martin to escape from my lawful custody. And that is true. I did. I let Martin go. I intend to plead guilty because I am guilty. The reasons I freed Martin are irrelevant in the eyes of the law and, candidly, my own business. Let me assure you, however, that telling the whole story would not improve my situation one whit.

  I may as well start by expanding on some of the information I routinely request of my own clients. I am a Midwesterner, born in 1915 in the city of DuSable in Kindle County. Both my parents were immigrants, each hail
ing from small towns in western Russia. Neither was educated beyond grade school. My father has worked since age fourteen as a cobbler, and owns a small shop a block from the three-flat where they raised my older sister, my younger brother, and me.

  I was a good student in high school, and also won the Kindle County championship in the hundred-yard backstroke. This combination led me to receive a full scholarship to Easton College. Easton is only about twenty miles from my parents' apartment, but a world apart, the longtime training ground of the genteel elite of the Tri-Cities. As a man whose parents' greatest dream was for their children to become `real Americans,' I embraced Easton in every aspect, right down to the raccoon coat, ukulele, and briar pipe. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and then entered Easton's esteemed law school. Afterward, I was lucky enough to find work in the legal department of Moreland Insurance. My parents pointed out that I appeared to be the first Jew Moreland had hired outside the mail room, but I'd always endeavored not to look at things that way.

  For two years, I tried small personal-injury lawsuits in the Municipal Court, but in September 1942, I enlisted. No one who cared about me approved. Both my parents and my sweetheart, Grace Morton, wanted me to wait out the draft, hoping against hope that I'd be missed, or at least limit my time in the path of danger. But I was no longer willing to put off doing my part.

  I had met Grace three years earlier, when I fit her for a pair of pumps in the shoe section of Morton's Department Store, where I'd earned pocket money throughout college and law school. In her round-collared sweaters and tiny pearls and pleated skirts, Grace was the image of the all-American girl. But what most attracted me was not her blonde bob or her demure manner so much as her high-mindedness. She is the best-intentioned soul I have ever met. Grace worked as a schoolteacher in the tough North End and waited several months before letting on that her family owned the department store where I'd first encountered her. When I decided to enter the service, I proposed, so that we could remain together, at least while I was posted Stateside. She instantly agreed, but our marriage plans set off a storm in both families that could be calmed only by postponing the wedding.

  After basic training at Fort Riley, I entered Officers Candidate School in the infantry at Fort Benning in Georgia. I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant on April 6, 1943. Two days later, I was transferred forthwith to the Judge Advocate General's Department. I had just turned twenty-eight, making me eligible for JAGD, and some thoughtful superior had put me in for reassignment. In essential Army style, no one asked what I preferred, and I probably don't know the answer to this day. Still ambivalent, I was sent to the stately quadrangle of the University of Michigan Law School to learn about the Articles of War. My graduation in the upper half of my class made my promotion to First Lieutenant automatic.

  When I entered the JAG Department, I had requested service in the Pacific, thinking I was more likely to get within the vicinity of active combat, but in August 1943, I was sent to Fort Barkley, Texas, for a period of apprenticeship, so-called applicatory training as the Assistant Judge Advocate at the camp. I spent most of my time explaining legal options to soldiers who'd received Dear Johns from their wives and, as an odd counterpoint, sorting out the many conflicting Dependency Benefit Claims the Army had received from the five women a soldier named Joe Hark had married at his five prior postings, each without benefit of any intervening divorce.

  In March 1944, I was at last reassigned overseas, but to the Central Base Station in London, rather than the Pacific. I was fortunate, however, to come under the command of Colonel Halley Maples. He was in his late fifties, and the picture of a lawyer, more than six feet tall, lean, with graying hair and a broad mustache. He seemed to hold a high opinion of me, probably because I, like him, was a graduate of Easton University Law School. Sometime in July, only a few weeks after D-Day, the Colonel was designated as the Staff Judge Advocate for the newly forming Third Army, and I was delighted when he asked me to serve as his acting assistant. I crossed the Channel on August i6, 1944, aboard the USS Holland, finally coming within the proximity of war.

  The staff judge advocates were part of Patton's rear-echelon headquarters, and we traveled in the General's wake as the Third Army flashed across Europe. It was an advantageous assignment. We did none of the fighting, but time and again entered the French villages and towns jubilantly celebrating their liberation after years of Nazi occupation. From atop the beds of half-ton trucks and armored troop carriers, the infantrymen tossed cigarettes and chocolates to the crowds while the French uncorked bottles of wine hidden from the Germans for years and lavished kisses on us, more, alas, from whiskery old men than willing girls.

  In the liberated towns, there was seldom any clear authority, while dozens of French political parties squabbled for power. Locals clustered about the police station and our military headquarters, seeking travel passes or trying to find the sons and fathers who'd been carried off by the Germans. The windows of stores purveying Nazi goods and propaganda were smashed with paving stones, while the cross of Lorraine, symbol of the French resistance, was painted over every swastika that could not be removed. Collaborators were routed out by mobs. In Brou, I saw a barmaid set upon by six or seven youths in resistance armbands who cut off all her hair as punishment for sleeping with Nazis. She endured her shearing with a pliancy that might not have been much different from the way she'd accepted her German suitors. She said nothing, merely wept and sat absolutely still, except for one arm that moved entirely on its own, bucking against her side like the wing of some domesticated fowl engaged in a futile attempt at flight.

  Patton was concerned that the chaotic atmosphere would affect our troops and looked to Colonel Maples and his staff to reinforce discipline. I and my counterpart, Anthony Eisley, a squat young captain from Dayton who had practiced law in his father's firm for several years, were assigned to try the large number of general courts-martial which were arising for fairly serious offenses--murder, rape, assault, major thefts, and insubordination--many of these crimes committed against French civilians. In other commands, these cases, especially the defense of the accused, were handled by line officers as an auxiliary duty, but Colonel Maples wanted lawyers trained in the Articles of Wai dealing with matters that could end in stiff prison sentences or, even, hanging.

  The principal impediment in carrying out our assignment was that we had barely set up court when we were on the move again, as Patton's Army rampaged at an unprecedented pace across France.

  Columns raced through territory even before navigators could post the maps at headquarters. We tried men for their lives in squad tents, with the testimony often inaudible as bombers buzzed overhead and howitzers thundered.

  I felt grateful to be at the forefront of history, or at least close to it, and appreciated Colonel Maples as a commander. In the Army officers corps, being built on the double, it was not uncommon, even in the upper ranks, to find commanders who had never so much as fired a rifle in combat, but Maples was not merely a distinguished lawyer who'd risen to the pinnacle of a famous St. Louis firm, but also a veteran of the Great War, which had taken him through many of these towns.

  In early September, headquarters moved again to Marson, from La Chaume, bringing us across the Marne. The Colonel asked me to drive with him in search of the field where he had survived the most intense battle he'd fought in. It was a pasture now, but Maples recognized a long stone fence that separated this ground from the neighbor's. He had been a twenty-five-year-old second lieutenant dug into one of the slit trenches that ran across this green land, no more than one hundred yards from the Germans.

  There had been more fighting here again lately. In the adjoining woods, artillery rounds had brought down many of the trees, and tank tracks had ripped into the earth. The dead personnel and spent materiel had been cleared away, but there were still several animals, cows and military horses, bloated and reeking and swarming with flies. Yet it was the battles of a quarter century ago which appeared to hold the Colo
nel. As we walked along the devastated field, he recalled a friend who had popped out to relieve himself and been shot through the head.

  "Died like that, with his drawers around his knees, and fell back into the latrine. It was terrible. It was all terrible," he said and looked at me.

  Beyond the fence on the neighbor's side, in a narrow culvert, we found a dead German soldier facedown in the water. One hand was on the bank, now withered with a bare leathery husk over what would soon be a skeleton. He was the first dead man I'd seen on a battlefield, and the Colonel studied the corpse for quite some time while I contended with my thumping heart.

  "Thank God," he said then.

  "Sir?"

  "I thank the Lord, David, I shall be too old to come to this place again in war."

  Back in the jeep, I asked, "Do you think we might have to fight another World War soon, sir?" Eisley, my courtroom colleague, believed that war with the Soviets was all but inevitable and might begin even before we'd mustered out. The Colonel greeted the idea with exceptional gravity.

  "It must not happen, Dubin," he said, as if imparting the most consequential order. "It must not."

  By the end of September, Patton's sprint across Europe had come to a virtual stop. Our armored divisions had outraced their supply lines, and the dusty tanks and half-tracks sat immobile awaiting fuel, while the weather turned from bright to gloomy, soon giving way to the wettest fall on record. The front stretched on a static line about ten miles south of the Vosges Mountains. In the interval, infantry replaced the armor and dug themselves into foxholes which, in an echo of the Great War, were only a couple hundred yards from those of the enemy. The Krauts reportedly hurled nighttime taunts. "Babe Ruth is Schwarz-black. Black niggers is at home fucking with your wife." We had plenty of German speakers in our ranks, kids from New York and Cincinnati and Milwaukee, who shouted out their own observations about the puniness of Hitler's balls, hidden under his dress.