Ordinary Heroes Read Free Page A

the panic I'd caused him than the danger I'd posed to myself.
    Now the chance to learn what had troubled my father became a quest. As a reporter, I was fabled for my relentlessness, the Panting Dog School of Journalism, as I described it, in which I pursued my subjects until they dropped. I obtained a copy of Dad's 201, his Army personnel file, from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and with that fired off several letters to the Defense Department and the National Archives. By July, the chief clerk for the Army Judiciary in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed that she had located the recor d o f my father's court-martial. Only after I had paid to have it copied did she write back stating that the documents had now been embargoed as classified, not by the Army, but by, of all agencies, the CIA.
    The claim that my father did anything sixty years ago that deserved to be regarded as a national security matter today was clearly preposterous. I unleashed a barrage of red-hot faxes, phone calls, letters, and e-mails to various Washington offices that attracted all the interest of spam. Eventually, my Congressman, Stan Sennett, an old friend, worked out an arrangement in which the government agreed to let me see a few documents from the court-martial, while the CIA reconsidered the file's secret status.
    So in August 2003, I traveled to the Washington National Records Center, in Suitland, Maryland. The structure looks a little like an aircraft carrier in dry dock, a low redbrick block the size of forty football fields. The public areas within are confined to a single corridor whose decor is pure government, the equivalent of sensible shoes: brick walls, ceilings of acoustic tile, and an abundance of fluorescent light. There I was allowed to read--but not to copy--about ten pages that had been withdrawn from the Record of Proceedings compiled in 1945 by the trial judge advocate, the court-martial prosecutor. The sheets had faded to manila and had the texture o f w allpaper, but they still glimmered before me like treasure. Finally, I was going to know.
    I had told myself I was ready for anything, and what was actually written could hardly have been more matter-of-fact, set out in the deliberately neutral language of the law, further straitjacketed by military terminology. But reading, I felt like I'd been dropped on my head. Four counts had been brought against Dad, the specifications for each charge pointing to the same incident. In October 1944, my father, acting Assistant Staff Judge Advocate of the Third Army, had been directed to investigate allegations by General Roland Teedle of the 18th Armored Division concerning the possible court-martial of Major Robert Martin. Martin was attached to the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, which had been founded during World War II (accounting, I figured, for why the Agency had stuck its nose in now). Dad was ordered to arrest Major Martin in November 1944. Instead, in April 1945, near Hechingen, Germany, my father had taken custody of Martin, where, according to the specifications, Dad "deliberately allowed Martin to flee, at great prejudice to the security and well-being of the United States." Nor was that just rhetoric. The most serious charge, willful disobedience of a superior officer, was punishable by execution.
    A weeklong trial ensued in June 1945. At the start, the count that could have led to a firing squad had been dismissed, but the three charges remaining carried a potential sentence of thirty years. As to them, I found another discolored form labeled JUDGMENT.
    The court was opened and the president announced that the accused was guilty of all specifications and charges of Charges II, III, and IV; further that upon secret written ballot, two-thirds of the members present concurring, accused is sentenced to five years' confinement in the United States Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth at hard labor, and