Forty-Eight X Page 5

  Two hundred men scattered out of the remaining trucks, taking cover behind buildings and concrete dividers on either side of the road.

  “We’re taking mortars,” his sergeant major yelled. “And… AKs at ten and five o’clock. We have multiple, shit… multiple casualties.”

  The decisions to make war and if so, how to make war were ultimately made by elegantly suited and beribboned uniformed men sitting in antiseptic offices in Washington. They were men with power, men with money, men who fancied themselves as “honorable” and their actions as “noble,” but who were sometimes blinded by their zealotry and patriotism. Time passed. Billions were spent. Thousands died. Tens of thousands were maimed. And though the original war had come to an end, new ones were ready to be fought. And the decision makers would always need soldiers.

  One such soldier was Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence (Link) McGraw, who came to sit in a ten-foot prison cell, staring at its stark walls for over a year. A fourth-generation South Carolinian, McGraw was a graduate of the Citadel, the West Point of the South, and a career soldier like his father and his father’s father. He supposed that his twelve-year-old son would have chosen to become a soldier as well if he hadn’t died a year earlier in a boating accident. McGraw had been on a tour of duty in Iraq. He mourned his only son but didn’t return to attend the funeral. The boy was dead, and he had a responsibility to his living “brothers.” Ina way, his son’s passing might have been a strange blessing. How hurtful it would have been for his son to discover the misfortune that had befallen his father, to hear others besmirch his most valuable possession, his honor. In just a few months, the Fates had brought him as low as any man could go. He had suffered the loss of his only son. His wife suffered that grief alone and didn’t understand his explanations about “duty.” What she understood was that she had married a callous, heartless bastard whose only use for an embrace was to choke the life out of an enemy. She buried her son and filed for divorce. And now, Link McGraw sat alone in a military brig—a place he had no doubt he would remain until his brown hair grew gray, his rippled belly became a paunch, his keen mind became Jell-O, or he simply became dust.

  McGraw’s home now was in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, headquarters for the U.S. army’s Combined Arms Center (CAC). CAC’s mission was to prepare the army’s leaders for war—with today’s war being the “global war on terrorism.” Leavenworth, however, was better known to most as the place where the army held its prisoners, those soldiers who had committed grievous crimes in the eyes of the military—thieves, murderers, rapists. Interestingly, there were no cowards held in Leavenworth. The military could not advertise that there were cowards in its ranks. Combat fatigue, shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, call it what you may, but there were no cowards. Such “illnesses” were crimes worthy of discharge, not prison. The men held here were, by and large, adept at killing, just sometimes the wrong people.

  In his fifteen years in the army, Link McGraw had seen bullets fly in Somalia, in Bosnia, in the first Gulf War, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. He had risen rapidly to the rank of lieutenant colonel in command of a battalion. He led mostly brave men, and he led by example. While the army advertised that it taught leadership, there was no classroom that could teach judgment under fire, decisiveness, or courage. That was something that came either with hard-fought experience or naturally. Link McGraw felt it was in his genes. He had been a colonel and had felt confident that someday he would make general. But now he had no rank. He was just prisoner #697042K.

  Ironically, his father, a retired army colonel, never wanted his son to become a military man. He felt that the sense of honor the U.S. military had maintained for centuries had been betrayed in Vietnam. His father took up ministering, that other family tradition, after his military service. That role, too, probably tempered his taste for the military life and prompted his decision to keep his son out of it. So, after a conservative upbringing and education at a seminary high school in Charleston, Link’s father unexpectedly sent his only son to the godless north to college, as opposed to where Link had wanted to go, the military academies of the Citadel or West Point. For two years McGraw attended the most liberal of educational palaces in America, NYU, where no rational student or professor would ever even think of becoming a soldier. Link did well there. He was orderly and disciplined, lessons learned from a military family. While the dorm rooms of his peers were covered with posters of rock stars and athletes, his wall was draped with an American flag. He was a misfit. At the end of his sophomore year, he protested a protest.

  The furor of that day was called “Irangate.” A civil war was raging in Nicaragua. Guerillas were trying to overthrow the Sandinistas, the Communist regime that had just come to power. The Reagan administration opposed the Communists and supported the rebels, the Contras. Congress, however, decided it didn’t want to get involved in a Central American war and passed a law, the Boland Amendment, making it a crime to aid the Contras.

  “While Communist governments can support Communist rebel groups around the world,” McGraw lectured his peers, “we’re forbidden by our own laws to support pro-American dissent. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the United States had more woes. Americans were being held hostage in Lebanon by Islamic terrorists. Colonel Oliver North, who had links to the CIA, conjured up a scheme to solve both problems. The Israelis would supply American-made missiles to Iran. In exchange, Iran would mediate the release of American hostages held in Lebanon, and money from the sale of arms would be laundered and funneled to the Contras. The people who were involved in this intricate plan to bypass Congress—Reagan, George Bush, the Ayatollah, the Israeli prime minister, and of course Oliver North—all lied about it. The president and vice-president claimed ignorance. Only Oliver North was found guilty of lying to Congress. Link McGraw, however, respected North and what he had tried to achieve. In the midst of all the acrimony against Irangate on NYU’s campus, he ardently defended the man. It didn’t matter that he’d lied to Congress. McGraw made it a point to quote one statement North made to Congress that he felt was absolutely true. And with that truth, nothing else mattered to him at all.

  “I haven’t,” Oliver North had testified, “in the twenty-three years I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America, ever violated an order—not one.”

  “A soldier obeys orders,” McGraw argued to his classmates. “If any blame is to be dealt out, it ought to go to the politicians who gave those orders and who make illogical and fickle foreign policy.”

  McGraw’s peers shunned him for his views, and his professors spoke openly of him as “a bit Neanderthal.” But after his sophomore year, McGraw established the decisiveness and independence he would exhibit for the rest of his life. He became his own man, not the man his father wanted him to be. He applied for a transfer. In a matter of a few weeks, he went from the towers of Manhattan to the hallowed halls of the Citadel and altered his persona overnight from a ne’er-do-well to a respected and lauded leader. What a difference a little geography makes.

  His career was upward bound from the moment he swore allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and became an officer in the United States army at graduation. He knew how to carry out an order, how to accomplish a task, and more importantly, when to give credit to superiors for work he had done well. He rose more rapidly than even some West Point grads.

  Lawrence McGraw’s fall came three years after President George W. Bush had announced victory in Iraq. It was on the streets of Mosul in northern Iraq where he was confronted by his life-changing challenge. He was given a mission to encircle an enclave of about fifty homes suspected of harboring leftover loyalists of Saddam Hussein and sectarian religious terrorists. A “high-priority” target it was called. He knew security had been breached when his command of nearly twenty armored personnel carriers, two tanks, and 250 men was hit by two IEDs. He left a team to secure that area and handle the casua
lties and then moved on to carry out his primary mission. Then his troops began taking mortar and machine-gun fire from nearby rooftops.

  “Stand fast,” Colonel McGraw yelled into his radio. Then turning to a captain, “Lay fifty caliber into that house and bring up three platoons to take cover over there.”

  By rote, he quickly consolidated his command to a defensive position. The situation was improving as his troops began to lay down counterfire. Then suddenly, a dozen of his frontline men began to run. He ordered them to halt, to take cover, to return fire, to resume their positions. With those dozen men fleeing, another twenty seemed unsteady and began to retreat farther. With their backs to the enemy, more ran, and more became casualties. He again shouted orders for the leads of this retreat to take cover, but they just kept running. Then, fearless himself in the face of enemy fire, McGraw rose, stood alone in the middle of the street, a stationary target with bullets splashing at his feet, and he yelled again.

  “Halt! Take cover!”

  He thought they had to hear him, but fear is a deafening voice. His command was fast falling apart. McGraw carried a short-barreled M249 Para light machine gun. His finger suppressed the trigger for two seconds, and his life changed. In that time, he fired thirty rounds, the retreat halted, and two of his men lay dead by his own hand.

  There was a faint and brief defense as to whether his actions had prevented a rout by hardening his men to stand and fight and had actually saved more lives. But the families of the men killed would not have their sons called cowards. And the army, as well, was loath to label any of its soldiers as cowards. So, McGraw’s act was called fratricide. His leadership was described as inept. He was tried and convicted of murder, not heroism. Murder, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Section 918, Article 118, required a sentence of “confinement for life without eligibility for parole.”

  His defense attorneys performed the routine appeals, but McGraw had no hopes of clemency. Military courts, judge and jury, are appointed by the highest-ranking officer in the field. The military commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq had enough political woes on his plate. Officers permitted to go free after shooting enlisted men, regardless of the circumstances, would not play well in the media. After his court martial, McGraw’s conviction underwent an automatic appeal to an intermediate court of review. That court also served on orders of the commander. He was then entitled to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF), the equivalent of a federal circuit court of appeals. That court, set up by Congress, followed a more civilian rule of law. But if a military court couldn’t find mitigating circumstances for an officer to shoot his own troops, was it likely a civilian court would?

  While other men might have gone mad in a cell so small, with concrete walls decorated with nothing but moisture and the autographs of former residents, McGraw found solace there. He was allowed only two books at a time in his cell. No photographs. No pornography. When dusk came and with it “lights out,” he closed his eyes and felt the cracks in the cement walls as if they were letters and words and poetry. Reading those cracks in the concrete walls, he believed the words came from a higher spirit than himself. Of course, he wondered, too, if this mental poetry was preserving his sanity or actually a sign of insanity.

  McGraw did not cling to any false hopes for freedom. His only hope was to remain sane—for as long as possible. Then one day, he was told he would be receiving a special visitor, a superior officer, not another JAG attorney. He knew something unusual was happening when he was handed a dress uniform to put on instead of his usual orange prison coveralls. The uniform had no insignia of rank, no name on the breast, and was bare of the emblems of his achievements—his gold parachute jumper wings, his collection of marksmanship awards, and a bevy of campaign ribbons he had once proudly worn. Nevertheless, he eyed the uniform with hope and was pleased. It was a soldier’s uniform, not a prisoner’s.

  Though he sat in that Fort Leavenworth prison box day after day, he still thought himself an infantryman, a soldier still prepared to do his duty, to die for his country. McGraw knew that wars were fought and won by infantrymen—not naval or air power, not by someone lobbing artillery over a hill or dropping bombs from miles high—but by men on the ground. And he preferred it that way.

  “It’s you, the individual infantryman,” he had preached to his men, building their esprit de corps, “that has turned the tide in every war America fought—from Revolutionary War colonial farmer soldiers at Yorktown, to citizen soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, to volunteer soldiers in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

  McGraw dressed, set his jacket aside, and then lay in bed, waiting. He wondered if he should stay sitting on his bed when the officers entered. Did he owe them any honor, any allegiance? After all, he was, in fact, forbidden to salute. When he heard footsteps, he sat up. He slipped on the uniform jacket and eyed something he had never taken much notice of before—the buttons. The buttons on United States Army uniforms bear an eagle holding arrows and an olive branch. McGraw remembered his lessons as a cadet. The eagle faces to the right because, according to the rules of ancient heraldry, right was the side of honor. Honor… he was about to get it back.

  So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man, when Duty whispers low, “Thou must,” the youth replies, “lean.”

  —Emerson

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  There were 250,000 officers in the United States military services. Lieutenant General Maximillian Shell could have chosen any of them for the special duty he had in mind. He narrowed his search to a dozen men and finally, despite the consternation of several of his associates, he chose a soldier in custody at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence McGraw, a man being held for the crime of murder.

  As General Shell reviewed McGraw’s record and studied his photograph, he felt he was choosing the right man—someone who had nothing to lose, but everything to gain; someone who had an allegiance to God, country, and honor that fit the fairy tale. McGraw was also a Southern boy. And that counted, too. But still Shell had a speck of doubt. That doubt would dissolve when he cast his gaze upon the man and sensed his aura. The general placed great faith on things unseen, and he had a knack for assessing character. As a member of a select hierarchy of the army’s general staff, Shell also felt some collective guilt about McGraw’s situation. The man was clearly a decisive leader, and sometimes decisions in war get men killed. In another war, at another time, McGraw’s actions would have drawn no punishment, and perhaps even quiet praise. To lead the troops that Shell planned to put under his command, McGraw would indeed have to be an unusual and decisive leader, someone exactly willing to put a bullet into his own men, if that’s what it took to get the job done.

  McGraw was escorted by armed military police to an area out of the main prison compound. He was shackled, chains dangling from his wrists and ankles. Hobbling down several corridors, his metal chains clanged and echoed in the halls like effects in a horror film. He finally arrived at a conference room where two colonels awaited him.

  “Take them off,” one colonel ordered.

  The escorts removed McGraw’s shackles. The other colonel pointed for him to sit in a chair at the side of a long wood laminate table. Several moisture-beaded pitchers of ice water were set on the table. The walls were mostly bare, lined only with the standard issue photographs of the chain of command—the president, secretary of defense, secretary of the army, and chief of staff of the army. The colonels stared at him with curiosity and a bit of derision. They said nothing but wondered what their general wanted with a murderer.

  When three-star Lieutenant General Mack Shell entered the room, the colonels popped to attention. And right along with them, perhaps with even more pomp, Link McGraw stood to attention as well. The general was exactly what he expected—spit and polish with a chest full of medals.

  “At ease, gentlemen,” General Shell ordered with a Southern accent as th
ick as the humidity of Fort Benning, Georgia, where he once commanded the 82nd Airborne Division. And, as he took his own seat, he looked to McGraw, who remained standing. “Be seated, Colonel.”

  With barely a nod, he dismissed the two other officers from the room. McGraw watched them leave like puppy dogs. A lieutenant general rated two colonels as gofers. McGraw knew General Shell by reputation. He was well respected by soldiers and politicians alike. His peers, and his men—when he was not within earshot—respectfully referred to him as Mack.

  The general let his head fall to his chest, sighed heavily, closed his eyes, and set his arms out and palms up. Shell knew he was embarking on a task that would change the way of warfare and the role of warriors forever, and it weighed heavily upon him. McGraw felt a little uneasy. The general seemed to be praying—or meditating.

  McGraw eyed the folder the general had in front of him. It had McGraw’s name on it. However, what was most interesting about the folder was that it had red-and-white striped tape on its edges. Those markings indicated that the file was top secret. What about a convicted murderer could anyone consider top secret? Then, slowly General Shell lowered his arms, lifted his head, and turned to McGraw.

  “Colonel, my name is Maximillian Shell.”

  He stared at McGraw. It was a bit unsettling, as if he was trying to look into his soul. Then he got to the point.

  “Any excuses, son, for your actions?”

  “No, sir,” McGraw replied unhesitantly. “I stand by my account as before.”

  “This was not your first combat action.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What was different, then?”

  “It’s always different, sir. I’ve smelled blood and fire many times, and each time the smell is different.”