Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

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.

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 hailing 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.