by Brian Haig
He squared his shoulders. “My name is Will Smothers. I’m their commanding officer.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“I’m the commander of the First Battalion of the Tenth Special Forces Group. The A-team commanded by Captain Terry Sanchez was assigned to my battalion.”
“Command? Elaborate on that word for me, please. What is your understanding of it?”
His brow became furrowed for a moment or two.“I guess . . . well, it means they work for me. That I’m responsible for them.”
“That’s a good definition. How long have you been in command?”
“Nearly two years.”
“How long was Captain Sanchez one of your team leaders?” “Maybe half a year.”
“So you’ve only known him half a year?”
“No. He was on my staff before that. He worked in the operations office.”
“Was he in the unit when you arrived?”
“Yes. I think he got here about six months before me.”
“So you’ve known him two years?”
“Yes, two years. That’s about right.”
All of this was just a warm-up. Always start an interrogation by asking for simple, noncontroversial facts, to get the subject into the mode of answering quickly, almost automatically. Now it was time to dig for a few opinions.
“Would you say you know him well?”
“I suppose.”
“Who made the decision to place him in the team leader position?” “Me. It had to be approved by the group commander, but I recommended him.”
“The group commander would be ...?”
“Brigadier General Murphy.”
“Is Sanchez a good officer?”
“Uh...yes. A, uh, well, a very good officer,” he said, suddenly appearing eminently thoughtful. “In fact, outstanding in every way.”
“What ways?”
“Well...uh...he’s very competent. He leads by example.” I gave him a ridiculing smirk. “He leads by example? That’s pretty thin gruel.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“You tell me.Was he a strong leader? Did he compel his men to follow him or try to convince them? Was he smart? Did he have backbone?”
“All the above.”
This was getting a bit much, so I switched back to facts. “How old is he?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly. About thirty. Maybe a few years past thirty.”
“How many years does he have in?”
“Ten, I think. Maybe eleven, maybe twelve. He’s a senior captain. He should be up for major this year.”
“He needed the team leader job to get promoted, right?”
“He’s an outstanding officer. I’ve never looked at his record, but I’m sure it reflects that.”
“But the Special Forces branch ordinarily requires an officer to be a team leader before he makes major, right? Promotion boards want to see if he can hack it in a demanding field job, right?”
“Usually, yes. It’s not a requirement.”
“Were you ever a team leader?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know any Special Forces battalion commanders who weren’t?”
“No.”
By this time Smothers had caught on to where I was going and was therefore picking and parsing his words very carefully. As he had admitted himself, he was responsible for Sanchez’s A-team and everything they did. Of course, a battalion commander with a lot of teams under his command can’t be everywhere at once. What he can do is pick competent, reliable subordinate officers. In fact, the Army fully expects him to. If the team led by Terry Sanchez slaughtered thirty-five men in cold blood, then, de facto, Terry Sanchez was not up to the job he’d been given. That meant Will Smothers had made a mistake. That’s why he was suddenly so frugal with the truth.
He’d worked closely with Sanchez for two years, yet could not tell me his precise age, could not describe his command style, could not describe his strengths and weaknesses. He knew the answers; he just wasn’t going to tell me.
“So, tell me,” I said, changing tack, “exactly what were Sanchez’s orders when he was sent into Kosovo?”
“Well, he and his team had spent two months training a ninety-five-man Kosovar guerrilla unit. Since the Kosovars were still very green, Sanchez’s team was ordered to accompany them back in and continue their training.”
“Isn’t that an odd mission?”
“No, it’s a very common mission for Special Forces. Training indigent forces is exactly what we’re organized and trained to do.”
“I’m not talking about the training part, Colonel. I’m talking about the part where Sanchez’s team followed them back into Kosovo.”
“I wouldn’t call it unusual, no.”
“Really? What exactly were his instructions?”
“To continue training the Kosovars.”
“Was he supposed to become involved in the fighting?” “Absolutely not. Everybody here knows the rules, Major.” Morrow said, “Tell me about that.”
“There’s no ground war.”
Then she said,“But we’re bombing the Serbs in Kosovo. Hell, we’re bombing the Serbs in Serbia. How do you keep it straight?”
“Special Forces aren’t idiots,Captain.We may not be law school grads, but we understand what’s happening here.”
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“The mission. What you’re here doing.”
“What’s to like or dislike? It’s a job.”
I asked, “Were Sanchez and his people allowed to assist the Kosovars in planning their operations?”
“Yes and no.”
“That answer doesn’t count, Colonel. Yes or no.”
“We’re not combatants. So no, Sanchez and his people were not supposed to help them plan their operations. But if, for example, the Kosovar commander asked for advice, they could offer it.”
“Pretty sketchy line, that one.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
Morrow leaned back and hammered at her point again.“Were Sanchez’s people supposed to accompany them into combat operations?”
“No. Absolutely no. A secure base camp was established, and Sanchez’s team was required to remain at that camp.”
“Say Sanchez and his people were attacked by a Serb unit. Were they authorized to shoot back?”
“Yes. Self-defense is authorized. If they were detected, they were supposed to extricate. If that required them to fight their way out, that was acceptable.”
“Who wrote these rules?” I asked.
“I don’t know who wrote them. Some staff officer somewhere, I guess. But I believe they were approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff themselves.”
“Why do you believe that?”
“Because they usually are.”
“Usually?”
“The rules of engagement used in Mogadishu and Haiti and Bosnia were all approved by the Chiefs. I think it’s a logical assumption these were, too.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Thank you?”
“Right. You can go now.”
He regarded me for a moment with a kind of slack-jawed look, like what the hell happened to the hard part. I just stared back. The hard part would come. Just not yet.
As Smothers walked out, Delbert walked back in.
“Enjoy your lunch?” I asked.
“Uh,yeah,sure.”He rubbernecked around and watched Smothers’s retreating back. “What was that about?”
“Colonel Smothers was kind enough to stop by for a little interrogatory. It was a very interesting session.”
“Why didn’t you wait for me?”
“Because you decided to run off and eat.”
“But I had no idea this was scheduled.”
“Imelda knew. That’s why she was kind enough to fetch us some food.”
“Why didn’t she say anything?”
“I don’
t think I heard you ask her.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t think I heard you ask me, either.”
I could see this was getting very frustrating for poor Delbert, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit I was enjoying his discomfort. He might be the best prosecutor in the Army, but he was still a prig.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said reassuringly.“It’s all on tape. Listen to it tonight after we close shop.”
I then turned to Morrow. “Any thoughts?”
“He’s an impressive officer.”
“Special Forces battalion commanders usually are.”
“He’s worried.”
“Was he telling the truth, though?”
“Was he being truthful? Maybe. Was he being open? No.” “About what?”
“About what he thinks of Sanchez. About what he thinks about the orders he’s operating under. About what he thinks about anything.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because you told him yesterday that he might be a suspect. It might’ve been better if you’d held off on that. You antagonized him.”
Even Delbert, who’d missed the interrogatory, was vigorously nodding that he agreed with her on this issue.
I grinned and didn’t say anything. If they didn’t comprehend the way my brilliant legal mind worked, then I wasn’t about to enlighten them. Besides, as I said earlier, these two were hungry thoroughbreds, and if they thought, even for a fraction of a second, that they could get a nose ahead of you, you’d spend the rest of the race staring at their fannies. That was a halfway pretty good proposition, but I didn’t relish the thought of ogling Mr. Delbert’s little tightass one bit.
The door suddenly crashed open and Imelda bustled back in with three legal clerks in tow, all carrying heavy boxes overflowing with documents.
“What’s all that crap?” I asked.
“All the operations orders and the duty communications log, and the personnel files of the accused.”
“I don’t remember asking for that.”
“And what are you gonna do without it? You’re not going to get any further on this case unless you go over all this.”
“And who signed the requisitions?”
“Don’t be gettin’ stupid on me, Major. I know your signature by now.”
This caused more dropped jaws from Delbert and Morrow, because forging an officer’s signature is a fairly serious military offense. It gets glacially serious when classified papers such as operations orders and operational duty logs are being requisitioned.
I turned to Delbert and Morrow. “By the way, make sure Imelda has good, legible copies of both your signatures before the end of business. By tomorrow, mark my words, she’ll be able to fool your own mothers.”
Imelda smacked her lips a few times and mumbled some unintelligible curse, which is kind of her way of expressing gratitude. Then she marched back out, shooing her three assistants ahead of her.
We each took a box, then spent the next eight hours trading files back and forth, reading furiously, saying little, and making our first real acquaintance with the nine American soldiers who were accused of mass murder and exactly what they’d been ordered to do across the border in a land called Kosovo.
Chapter 6
I had two phone calls that night. The first came from a general in the Pentagon and went something like this:
“Drummond, that you?”
I squeezed and pinched myself. “It’s me, Drummond.” “General Clapper here.”
“Morning, sir.”
“It’s not morning here. It’s eight o’clock in the evening.” “That right? So that’s why it’s two o’clock in the morning here.”
A mighty chuckle. “How’s it going?”
“How’s what going?”
“The investigation, Drummond. Don’t play dumbass.”
“Sorry, it’s this two o’clock in the morning thing. Try me again at eight, when my mind works like a Cray computer.”
“Am I hearing the sounds of whimpering?”
“Yes. Go away and leave me alone.”
Another chuckle, which was easy for him because it was early evening where he was, and he still had a sense of humor.“Okay, give it to me.”
“Well, we went to the morgue at Belgrade yesterday and spent some time with about thirty-five corpses. The pathologist is still doing his report, but the preliminary isn’t good. All the perforations in the bodies appear to have been made by American weapons.”
“We expected that.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet you didn’t expect this. Somebody shot each corpse in the head.”
“All of them?”
“Well, a few didn’t have much left for heads, and one didn’t have any head at all, but from what we could tell, yeah, about all of them.”
“Why didn’t Milosevic and his people make hay of that in the press conferences?”
“You’ll really have to ask him, General. I do recommend, however, that you wait until it’s morning over here. From what I hear, he’s not as nice a guy as I am.”
“That’s a debatable point. Are you getting sufficient cooperation?”
“Sure. They love us around here.We got the best tents in the compound.”
“We got your request for Milosevic to postpone his state funeral and hold on to the bodies.”
“Good. The coroner’s sending one through his channels, too.” “Won’t make any difference. I took yours over to the State Department and got laughed out of the building.”
“Did you meet with these two guys, one real tall and skinny, and one real short and fat?”
“Sounds like them.”
“Likable couple, aren’t they? The Laurel and Hardy of international diplomacy.”
“They liked you a lot, too. They studied your request and the words ‘fat chance’ and ‘fathead’ got mentioned a few times.”
“A fella can’t ask for much more than that, can he?” “How damaging will it be if the request is denied?”
“It creates an opening for a good defense attorney to poke a few holes.”
“Well, nothing more to be done about that. Need anything else from me, Sean?”
“No, sir. But thanks for asking.”
He hung up, and I hung up, and it took a few minutes before I dozed off again. Major General Thomas Clapper was the closest thing to a friend I had in this case. He had taught me military law way back when he was a major and I was a brand-new lieutenant going through my basic officer’s training. If I wasn’t the worst student he ever had, the other guy must have been a stone-cold putz. One can only imagine his dismay when, four or five years later, I approached him to ask if he would sponsor my application to law school and the JAG Corps. I’ve never understood what went through his brain at that instant, but he said yes, and the rest is legal history.
Unlike my own lethargic career, Thomas Clapper was always on a fast track. He was now the two-star general who headed up the corps of Army lawyers. This is the largest law firm in the world, with offices spread around the globe, handling everything from criminal to contracts to real estate law. It is a corps of over a thousand military lawyers and judges and more than twice as many legal specialists of various varieties. It is a corner of the Army few people know exists, filled with grating personalities, oversize egos, and rawly ambitious lawyers. It takes an iron-fisted tyrant to keep all those egos in check, although Clapper was seen as a benevolent dictator, and thus was very beloved by the rank and file. Although not by me. Not at that moment. Clapper just happened to be the guy who threw my name into the hat to head this pre-court-martial investigation, and I knew he was calling to assuage his guilt. I wasn’t about to offer him any clemency. I wanted his guilt to be so massive it gave him walloping headaches.
The next call came about an hour and a half later, and the caller identified himself as Jeremy Berkowitz. Even at 3:30 A.M.,
I recognized the name. Berkowitz was a reporter for the Washingt
on Herald who had earned a handsome reputation by exposing lots of embarrassing military insights and scandals. That call went something like this:
“You’re Major Sean Drummond?”
“Says so on my nametag.”
“Heh, heh, that’s a good one. My name’s Jeremy Berkowitz. A common friend gave me your number.”
“Name that friend, would you? I’d like to choke him.”
This resulted in another nice chuckle, and it struck me that everyone in that time zone back in Washington was filled with good humor that day.
“Hey, you know the rules. A good reporter never discloses his sources.”
“What do you want?”
“I’ve been assigned by the Herald to cover the Kosovo massacre. I thought it would be a good idea for us to get to know each other.”
“I don’t.”
“You ever dealt with the working press before?”
“A few times.”
“Then you should know that it’s always a good idea to cooperate.”
“And in turn, you’ll cooperate with me, right?”
“Exactly. I’ll make sure your side of things gets printed, and I’ll make sure you’re well treated in our stories.”
Click! Oops, the phone accidentally fell into the cradle. Actually, it landed in the cradle because I don’t like being threatened, and if you read between the lines that was exactly what he was trying to convey. Of course, it was a dumb, petulant thing to do. On my part, that is. I should’ve soft-pedaled and let him down gently. But then I would have had to act like a tease, because I wasn’t about to leak any damned thing.
Not that I have anything against reporters. The military needs good watchdogs for it to remain the marginally healthy institution it is, and the press happens to fulfill that function. It doesn’t pay to antagonize or mistreat them, but like I said, I was tired and not thinking straight.
My mood had not improved when, at 6 A.M., I entered our wooden building, where Captains Delbert and Morrow were hovering over a couple of steaming cups of coffee and awaiting my arrival. Both looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I resented that.
“Morning,” I said, or barked or growled. Whatever.
“Ouch,” said Morrow.
And wouldn’t you know that at just that moment the phone rang again.