The Good Lieutenant (15 page)

“All right,” she said when she got them separated. The wires had touched again, but she kept her bad arm up anyway. “All right? Gonna be okay?”

“I'm good,” Dykstra said, wiping dust away.

The pain from her shoulder was a furious force moving inside Fowler's head, like a wheel that kept spinning faster and faster. Beale was right. The position he was in now, beaten, humiliated, isolated from the rest of the platoon, was on her as much as anybody. “You? Are good?” she said to Dykstra, getting very close to his face. “Well, I'm not good. The detainee is my responsibility. That's on me. So if you and Jimenez want to fuck with somebody, fuck with me. Is that clear? As for you, Beale, no matter how much of a shithead you are, you still ought to be smart enough to know I wouldn't send you down for this. So … so—” She scanned their faces, trying to figure out what to say next, something to replace the silence that had overtaken her at Muthanna. “So we're all fucked, okay? Beale”—she grabbed the sergeant by his body armor and dragged him into the group—“is fucked because nobody likes him. Dykstra is fucked because he's forty pounds overweight. Jimenez is fucked with his hankie. Fredrickson and Arthur are more fucked than anybody. But I'll promise you one thing, okay? It's not going to feel any better if we start fucking each other, too. In fact, the only thing that might make it feel slightly better is actually doing our job
right
despite getting fucked. Okay?”

It was a bad speech, she could see that, but maybe its badness helped; she could see Jimenez cover a smile with his bandanna. “Are we clear?” she said.

“Yes, ma'am,” Jimenez said. “We all equal in the fuck.”

She crossed the field. The detainee was conscious, cuffed, and moaning a little bit. He had thick black unwashed hair and a long, delicate nose, and a mole high up on his cheekbone, like a beauty mark. “He have any papers?” Crawford handed her a heavily worn wallet. She opened it and thumbed through the cards in the plastic sheaths—an identity card. Other printed cards on stock paper. All in Arabic. In his jacket pocket, a folded piece of paper with a pencil drawing of a
U
in the center, nothing else there … “So this wouldn't give me any information on why you were out there during an attack on my men?”

The man averted his gaze. “This is stupid,” he said.

“Okay, that's progress,” Fowler said. Then, tucked inside an interior flap of the wallet, a plastic military ID card—Faisal Amar was the man's name—a worker number, and an interpreter pass signed by Bert Masterson of Delta Company.

“Jesus Christ, Beale,” she said. “Why not get lucky, for a change?”

*   *   *

Beale's and Pulowski's voices argued inside her head as she sat at her desk, staring numbly at the sworn statement form, on which she was supposed to describe what had happened during the attack on the RG, the commands she'd given, the order of events. What were the choices? It was one thing to tell her platoon that the detainee was her responsibility, it was another to write it down in a sworn statement whose facts could be checked. The right thing was to tell the truth. The other right thing was to accept responsibility. But when she tried to put the two together, the report seemed more doormat than brave:
As Dogpound Platoon leader, the injury of the detained Iraqi was my responsibility. I did not have zip cuffs with me and thus was unable to secure the detainee quickly enough in the immediate aftermath of the attack. If I had done this properly, Sergeant Beale would never have struck the Iraqi …
She stopped there, unable to close the sentence. Maybe the mistake was sitting around whining to herself about wrong and right at all. Whining never helped—it made as much sense as telling someone that you were so concerned about their safety that you couldn't be around them anymore. And then disappearing to fucking Tennessee.

And yet, if there was one thing that Pulowski
had
taught her, it was how to formulate a thesis and then back it up objectively. That, and facts were naïve.

She erased the last line and wrote,
I caused the injuries to the Iraqi's head and face.
And then she pulled out a second piece of paper and added this:

On April 9, 20–, two specialists from the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry's Delta Company were killed by a truck bomb at the intersection outside Muthanna
, she wrote.
At the subsequent battalion briefing, Lieutenant Colonel Seacourt said that two soldiers had died in the explosion, in large part because they had been occupying an un-reinforced checkpoint. And yet, I had been installing concrete T-walls
inside
Camp Tolerance for three months prior to the bombing at the Muthanna intersection. I had also frequently volunteered to use my platoon's equipment to haul a load of T-walls out to the entrance of Muthanna and build a reinforced checkpoint. Colonel Seacourt did not follow through on the idea. Instead, he insisted that the Muthanna intersection was “the one place in Iraq that I'd take my grandmother.”

She filed the report by slipping it into the wire basket that had been nailed to the trailer wall beside Hartz's office, openly in view of her desk. Its disappearance that afternoon was followed by a period of silence that her imagination feverishly tried to make permanent, imagining that her comments on the T-walls might not even be noticed. They had no business being in the report anyway, since the intersection bombing happened four weeks in the past. That evening Captain Hartz informed her—emphasizing that this was only a “bureaucratic requirement”—that she was now officially “relieved of duty” pending an investigation into her conduct. In addition, she was under orders to avoid contact with her platoon, and so, for the next two days, she lived primarily in the fifty yards between her trailer and the head. It was awful. Pulowski's absence, his lack of emails, and her own stubborn refusal to ask for a response had been bad enough when she was at work. Now Crawford silently delivered her meals in Styrofoam boxes from the DFAC, their tops dusty from his quarter-mile walk along the ravines and footbridges that stood in for sidewalks along their battalion's main street. She no longer attended morning briefings at the battalion headquarters, but she was cc'd on the email that Colonel Seacourt sent to every member of Echo Company, assuring them that “every soldier in the division” was currently engaged in looking for bombers at the intersection, and that he would know more when the official investigation of the incident was complete. Finally, on the morning of her third day of isolation, Captain Hartz knocked on her trailer and invited her for a ride in his Humvee.

“You understand that they're going to come after you, don't you?” Hartz said as they left the parking area, Hartz and his driver in front, Fowler in back.

She glanced up. Hartz was a fireplug of a man, five foot four, a solid 175. Despite his florid sunburned face and rocklike gut, his small tapered hands were curiously delicate, uniformly clean: the kind of guy you might imagine coaching women's basketball at Junction City High, decent, fair, soft-spoken, and, as Pulowski had phrased it, “aggressively naïve.” “What difference does it make?” she asked. “Fredrickson and Arthur are gone anyway.”

“No, no, no. We are
finding
whoever did this. You've got to believe that, if there's any chance of it coming true at all. Now take my hand and we'll say it together.”

“I don't pray,” Fowler said. She'd respected, and even courted, Hartz's advice back at Fort Riley, his nostrums about teams and taking it one day at a time being a comfortable kind of truth. Familiar. Not exactly groundbreaking. But spoken in good faith. Today it all seemed aggressively naïve.

“Look, I'm just saying—what's wrong with a positive thought?”

“Positive thought? What positives are there? You saw my statement. It's the truth. I screwed up. I should've had the zip cuffs on me. I should've checked the detainee's ID immediately. I should've been more skeptical of the intel. If I'm going to get my ass in a sling for fucking up an Iraqi, the least I can do—”

“Zip,” Captain Hartz said, holding a finger to his lips.

“—is do something to improve the situation,” Fowler said.

“I said stop.” Hartz lunged over the backseat to grab her shoulder, but the shoulder strap of his seat belt caught the bridge of his nose, giving him the appearance of a man mysteriously caught and held motionless by a finish-line tape. “You've got to stop overthinking,” he said as he finally, in anger, unclipped the seat belt and threw it to the side. “The way you're acting, this worrying about stuff, this questioning everything—let me ask you this, do you like it?”

“I don't have questions,” Fowler said. “I have bad facts.”

“If
I
was in a situation where I had my own and
other people's
careers at stake, I might start asking some questions,” Hartz said.

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Like, ‘Should I piss and moan about where colonels put their T-walls? Which I
can't
control. Or—'”

“Now we're getting somewhere.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Well, jeez, I don't know, sir. I thought we were talking about what happened to that Iraqi out by the RG. I thought we were talking about me.”

“The second thing I'd do is ask myself, ‘How do I help my team?' All of us, every single soldier on this entire base, practically, is sick to death about what happened at the intersection. We're
all
trying to fix it, and I think you need to consider whether this report of yours is contributing to that. Have you done that?” Fowler shook her head. Mostly she felt a strange, rising excitement at the thought of having sunk so low that she didn't have to care about these kinds of things.

“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?”