The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “Oh, come on, Sherman,” she said, trying out this new Pulowski-freedom by using her superior officer’s first name. “Even if they clear me on this—which would be a total crock, but possible, I admit—there’s no way I’m getting my platoon back.”

  For the first time, Hartz’s glance flickered back at her and, in his reflection in the windshield, she saw him give a covert grin. “I don’t think your hand is as bad as all that.”

  “We’re playing poker now?”

  “My advice to you,” Hartz said, “is that you listen when the colonel talks to you and if he makes you an offer, you take it. He won’t offer again.”

  * * *

  She was feeling fairly cocky the next day as a guard escorted her out back of headquarters to the latticed gazebo that had been constructed as a congratulatory present for Colonel Seacourt’s assumption of command. If there was one thing she’d learned from Pulowski, it was the power you could gain by not caring. By stepping away. She also figured the colonel—who was waiting for her in the gazebo’s dappled shade—had more to care about than she did. He was about five foot nine, wore a Swatch, a lieutenant colonel’s brass star, and a gold wedding band, and to go along with his extremely normal stature he had an extremely normal, clean-shaven face with a proportionate nose that maintained a permanent pink sunburn but never tanned. He pulled out a metal office chair and patted its back, inviting Fowler to be seated, as if she were somebody’s wife at a battalion party. False confidence was how she read that. Nerves. She stayed in place. “This is Major Henry Harmon,” he said, introducing a lanky, dark-haired major on the opposite side of a folding table, a manila folder in his hand. “Henry and I were lieutenants together back in Saudi,” Seacourt said. “How long ago was that?”

  “Forward Operating Base Bastogne,” said the major. His voice carried a faint southern melody that set her teeth on edge. “In the good ol’ days of 1991.”

  “Hard to imagine what we were like back then,” Colonel Seacourt said. He’d attended West Point and had a graduate degree in political science from Florida State, but in presentation he emphasized his midwestern roots, his lack of adornment, his faith. Having abandoned his attempt at chivalry, he’d circled back around to his seat. “A young lieutenant, first time in combat, terrified of making a mistake—and then sick to death when, as is inevitably going to happen, things don’t go according to plan. These are … well, they’re the mental habits of a responsible officer, wouldn’t you say, Henry?”

  “If they weren’t, we’d have to court-martial half the generals in the Army,” Major Harmon said. “Not to mention pissant majors like me.”

  “Does that apply to lieutenants, sir?” Fowler said.

  The two friends exchanged glances again, a very brief communication in which, if Fowler had to interpret it, the colonel asked, How much should I tell her? And the major had raised his eyebrows to say, Whatever you think is right.

  Maybe Pulowski was wrong. She felt something at least mildly human there.

  “I brought Henry in to investigate your report, because I think the major is capable of lending a friendly ear,” Seacourt said. “How do I know this? Because, back in Saudi, I was once involved in an incident that was as ugly as yours. I felt as bad about it as I possibly could—worse, actually. And I believed that the only honest thing that I could do as an officer and a man … or woman, in your case”—the transition here was abrupt and professional, no hint of embarrassment—“would be to write a report like this one you’ve written, in which I basically forced the Army to court-martial me.”

  “If I could ask, sir,” Fowler said. “How’d the major help with that?”

  “He convinced me that self-destruction is not necessarily an honorable choice,” Seacourt said. “Particularly when it isn’t warranted by the facts.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t take responsibility for the Iraqi, sir?”

  She asked this question by design, to shock—borrowing one of Pulowski’s techniques. To her surprise, Seacourt reacted to this in stride. “Not at all. Did I say that, Henry? No, obviously, your testimony has to be the truth as you see it. It’s only that Henry here—because he’s an old friend—has alerted me to certain discrepancies that are indicative, to him, of an officer who is—how did you put it, Henry?”

  “In extremis,” the major said, shrugging and yawning, as if he were discussing a subject as innocuous as a baseball game. “Possibly experiencing battle fatigue.”

  “I’m not sick, sir,” Fowler said.

  “I’m not saying you are,” Colonel Seacourt said. He spoke with the same offhanded and ingratiating tone that he’d used when she’d first entered, but the words contained a bit more heat. “I’m saying you’re in a difficult situation. You’ve got a soldier who has done something wrong. You’re interested in protecting him. You feel responsible for him. But I am trying to tell you that, in certain situations, there are individuals that you can’t save. You’ve got to let them go, or you’ll go with them.”

  For the first time, Fowler felt her confidence waver. The one thing she hadn’t expected was for Seacourt to speak as if he was on her side.

  “Let me just fold in a couple of questions here,” said the major, like the host of a dinner party gently guiding the conversation back on track. He slid Fowler’s testimony across the table. “Before you allegedly injured the Iraqi, did Sergeant Beale follow basic tactics, techniques, and procedures established for detaining a civilian in the field?”

  “In my opinion, sir, Sergeant Beale acted with extreme bravery and courage in leading my men out of a fire zone, in an attempt to—”

  “Did you see him do all of this?”

  “As the report indicates, I saw movement in the tree line on the far side of the canal. So I remained at the RG in an attempt to identify the unfriendlies.”

  “Who shot at you.”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “So your testimony is that you identified their vehicle, moved your soldiers to safety, drew enemy fire, got an ID on the shooter’s vehicle, radioed this information in—all of this entirely clear-headed. All good things. And once your men were safe and you’d handled every single threat, you proceeded down the canal, found an Iraqi who’d been properly detained by your sergeant, and then you decided to ruin your career?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, you did hit the Iraqi, or yes, you did not?”

  Fowler sat back in her chair, feeling almost mesmerized. It was a good story. Had she really done all that? It was exactly the story she would’ve liked to tell about herself. Why couldn’t she just accept it and let it be?

  “So wait, I just want to be clear,” she said. “’Cause this means a lot to me, sir. Your concern, trying to keep me out of trouble. I only have to change the stuff I wrote about Beale and not the intersection?” She was surprised by the bitterness beneath these words—she would never have allowed herself to speak this way in front of her platoon. But here, with Seacourt, the bitterness felt good. “It really would be easier if I could just take this stuff about this being my fault out. And nail Beale for the whole thing.”

  Harmon leaned in. “What the colonel means”—he glanced over at Seacourt for affirmation, and the colonel, making a grand effort, managed to nod, though without making eye contact—“is that he’s willing to look the other way when it comes to your faults, especially in the realm of personal relationships. But if you force me to do a full investigation here, every line you’ve ever crossed, every mistake you’ve made—it all comes out. It’s bad news for everybody. Especially for people you care about.”

  Aggressively naïve, her ass. Too bad for them Pulowski had dumped her two weeks back. “So you do want me to change the part about the T-walls,” Fowler said.

  “I want you to write a report that’s accurate and fair.”

  This must have been the offer Hartz had talked about. Time to cut a deal. “Well, that’s not the same thing anymore, is it?” she said, turning to Seacourt,
holding his gaze steadily. “So if you want that, then I want something back.”

  “I’m going to grab a Coke,” Major Harmon said.

  “No, no, you can stay,” Fowler said. “We’re not doing anything criminal. Or if we are, we should do it as a team.” Harmon gave a wilted grin. Seacourt’s expression was distant, not exactly defeated, but something more equivocal, as if reluctantly impressed.

  “We can’t just ignore what Beale did,” Seacourt said. “The Iraqi’s injury is in the system now. If you’d wanted that, you shouldn’t have written a report in the first place.”

  “Then no investigation. Reprimand only. Beale stays in the field.”

  “No,” Seacourt said. “Court-martial. Honorable discharge.”

  She sat down in the chair that Seacourt had offered her. Crossed her legs.

  “Fine,” Seacourt said, tossing Beale’s file aside. “I’ll give him office hours. A week in detention. He drops rank, E-6 to E-5. But you’ll go on the record. You’ll rewrite your report, and you’ll be grateful to have walked away.”

  She turned back to the major. “If Sergeant Beale did hit that Iraqi, he would have been disobeying my order, my direct order. Intentionally.”

  * * *

  The first email that Pulowski managed to send her in four weeks was an invitation to a meeting with his CO, Major McKutcheon, at the 16th Engineer Brigade in Camp Victory. Sorry I’ve been out of touch, he wrote. But I do think you’ll be interested in this. You’re an idiot, she told herself, deleting it. Then later, Well, in that case, showing up won’t change anything. And so in the end she went. Camp Victory was a forty-five-minute drive, clear across Camp Tolerance, through the stop-and-start madness of fuel and water convoys, and around so many orange-coned roadwork areas she felt as if she’d been teleported back to Kansas in summer when the potholes on I-70 got patched. A stone bridge marked the entrance, its carved balustrade arching over a cattailed canal that divided the fighting soldiers and the brass. She and Pulowski had driven over it the first week that they’d arrived in-country, gazing out like tourists at what Pulowski had termed McSheikh palaces strung gaudily along a vast lagoon. They’d asked a passing private to snap a picture of them outside the white walls of the Al-Faw Palace, which housed the entire brains of the Multi-National Force–Iraq. For Pulowski the background had been ironic—“Say WMD!” he’d prompted, as the private framed the shot—but the foreground had been something else, something personal, the two of them together, arm in arm, with nobody they knew watching. She’d had the same feeling at the party he’d organized for her at the Cracker Barrel outside Fort Riley, when she’d glanced down from the national broadcast of a K-State basketball game and caught him staring at her, concentrating. Not I agree (though she didn’t necessarily disagree) so much as I am with you, and she’d agreed to see him now because of that. The offices for the 16th Engineer Brigade were salmon-colored, the plain concrete walls roughed up with adobe-style spackle, in which the imprints of some lucky Iraqi contractor’s blades could still be seen. On the other side of the flimsy varnished door with its fake brass handle, she found Pulowski waiting on a bench. As she entered, she caught an unguarded glimpse of him, nervous and pale as a fifth-grader, a spiral notebook jogging compulsively on his knee. “You’re here!” he said, leaping up, his voice lifting in awkwardly high-pitched relief.

  “I’m only five minutes late,” she said, pointing to her watch. “Oh-nine-hundred, right? It’s not like I’m on vacation, Lieutenant.” Before his leave, she’d always liked calling Pulowski “Lieutenant” formally, out in public, as if they were barely acquainted, when of course they each knew every hair on the other’s body. This “Lieutenant,” though, was just the formal one, and saying it that way made her knees feel weak. “The traffic sucked,” she added, to soften things.

  “No shit,” he said. “McKutcheon was telling me that the guys who actually laid out this whole camp—and I shit you not—like two-thirds of them were from Kansas. No sidewalks anyplace. Can you believe that?”

  “No,” Fowler said.

  “McKutcheon’s got another meeting upstairs. So I was freaking out because this guy”—he nodded to a bulky sergeant at a metal desk—“wouldn’t let me call up to tell McKutcheon that I was here. So I didn’t want to leave in case you actually showed up, but then I started to worry that McKutcheon was gonna think I’d bailed—”

  “Yeah, well, I found you,” Fowler said. Pulowski’s chatter, its faint edge of panic, both irritated her and felt familiar in its irritation. An abrasion she had missed.

  They were standing there in the entryway of the 16th Engineer Brigade. Past the sergeant, there were rows of desks, maps pinned to the wall, glowing computer screens, and the little wooden stands that you could buy at the PX, where you could hang your body armor once you got to the office, as if it were Mr. Rogers’s sweater. This was the moment when, if she was going to stand on ceremony, she was going to need to do it. She could’ve asked him what the hell he was thinking even asking her here, what the hell he had been doing when she’d needed him during the past four weeks. On the other hand, that would’ve meant she had to be prepared to turn around and walk out that door permanently and accept never being irritated by a Pulowski story ever again.

  “You know I’m not real comfortable in places like this,” she said.

  “Well, thank fucking God for that,” Pulowski said. “Because if you were, I would have had to ask somebody else.”

  * * *

  They climbed three flights of concrete stairs and pushed out through a red-painted fire-exit door onto a flat, industrial rooftop. There were five or six white shipping containers on the rooftop, shaded by blue tarps, their sides marked with the red logo PODS. Major McKutcheon waved to them from the doorway of the third, bareheaded, with a sunburned, thinning scalp, each follicle strangely stout, so that his skull appeared to be sprouting mechanical pencil leads. He grabbed Fowler’s hand with his stubby, baby-soft fingers (Pulowski was a few steps back, out in the heat) and said, “My God, Lieutenant, I am so appreciative of you being able to come here, in the middle of—well, I mean, look at us—you have my—I am so sorry about—”

  “Sorry for what, sir?” Fowler asked, before he could mention anything about Pulowski. It was the last thing she needed, the idea that their separation had been broadcast out over the network, so remarkable as to find its way here.

  “Yeah, sorry for what?” This voice, to her dismay, belonged to Beale. They’d steered clear of each other ever since, in Beale’s view, Fowler had sold him out to Seacourt and gotten him demoted. Or saved his ass, in hers. But there he was on a rolling chair beside a wooden shelf that ringed the inside of the pod, staring up at a television bolted to the ceiling. “That’s one thing we don’t do around here is apologize.”

  Turning, she gave Pulowski the stink-eye. He reacted like a Broadway singer, eyes bugged, hands flapping as if he’d thought that inviting Beale would be a good thing. Which, four weeks ago, would’ve been the case.

  “Why would I apologize?” McKutcheon said. “I have no idea. Maybe I just figure we’ll screw something up here eventually.”

  “Like Frenchy here?” Beale asked, staring at the TV. On it, Lance Armstrong pedaled through a mountain meadow in France, his shadow racing out in front of him.

  “He’s an American,” McKutcheon said.

  “Really?” Beale said, squinting. “Well, there’s your answer. I’d damn sure apologize if I got caught riding around France in a yellow shirt.”

  “I don’t think he intends to get caught,” the major continued smoothly. “Speaking of which, I understand you’ve been having some trouble with the colonel.”

  “Who told you that?” Fowler asked warily.

  “My understanding,” Beale said, “is that the lieutenant and the colonel have a hell of a good relationship when it comes to covering each other’s ass.”

  “Did I say that this has anything to do with covering the colonel’s ass?” asked McKutc
heon, who was either entirely oblivious to the tension or experienced enough to ignore it. He picked up a stack of xeroxes and waved them in the air. “As the chief information officer for the First Battalion, Twenty-seventh Infantry, I would neither confirm nor deny such a thing.”

  The A’am al-Bina’a newsletter, which McKutcheon handed out, was a battalion publication, printed in Arabic and English, publicizing the improvements that Colonel Seacourt had brought to their AO. Fowler was relieved for the break. They were on the verge of what felt to her like almost total anarchy. The three of them—Beale, herself, and Pulowski—all at odds, all resentful, all bitter. The only person who knew why they all felt that way was her. As for the newsletter, it described exactly the kind of reconstruction work that Colonel Seacourt had promised the battalion would do when Fowler’s platoon had been training at Fort Riley: COALITION REBUILDS SALMAN PAK ELEMENTARY, WATER PLANT REPAIRS PLANNED FOR MUSAYYIB, BAGHDAD IS BEAUTIFUL PROGRAM A SUCCESS. Beale laughed, a stringy, surprisingly cynical yip. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Who writes this? Captain Kangaroo?”

  “The question is, is this better than what you’ve been doing?” Pulowski asked. He’d hunched into the crate by now, leaning in the doorway, lanky and poorly shaved.

  This was dangerous territory around Pulowski, the closest they’d come to the subject they’d argued about before he left. “Look, I’m for rebuilding some kid’s school,” she said. “I just don’t see what that has to do with me and Beale.”

  “The main problem with the Salman Pak school,” McKutcheon said, “is that it has since been blown to smithereens.”

  “All right, then, what about the Musayyib Water Treatment Plant?”

  “Also blown up,” Pulowski said. Then in the scalloped profile of his face, lit by the slate blue of the Mac screen, she saw a twinge of uncertainty, as if he’d answered too quickly. “Wasn’t it?” he said to McKutcheon.

  “Read that one, Lieutenant,” McKutcheon said to her, dropping his earlier politeness. There was a bit of the geek tyrant in his demand, generous to sycophants, but vain as Napoleon with his equals or better, Fowler would’ve bet. Women especially.