Ordinary Heroes Read Free Page B

to be dishonorably discharged from the U . S . Army forthwith, notice of his discharge to be posted at the place of his abode.
    I read this sheet several times, hoping to make it mean something else. My heart and hands were ice. My father was a felon.
    Dad's conviction was quickly affirmed by the Board of Review for the European Theater--the Army equivalent of an appellate court--leaving General Teedle free to carry out the sentence. Instead, in late July 1945, the General revoked the charges he himself had brought. He simply checked off a box on a form without a word of explanation.
    But it was not a clerical error. The court-martial panel was reconvened by the General's order the next week and issued a one-line finding taking back everything they had done only a month and a half earlier. My father, who had been under house arrest since April, was freed.
    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 throug h h alf 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.

    Chapter 2.
    DAVID: REGARDING THE CHARGES AGAINST ME CONFIDENTIAL
    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 an d t he 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,