"It's all right, honey, it's all right. I just had a bit of an accident and I'm in the hospital now. I'm being flown to Washington tomorrow, to Walter Reed Hospital. Maybe you could drive up. I want to see you and my son. God, you sound good!", I told her.
"Carl, what happened? What's going on? I don't understand! I heard you were in jail!"
"It's all a misunderstanding, Marilyn. I'm not in jail. I've just got a problem with one of my knees. I'll be fine. I'll explain it all when I see you. Can you come up?"
"Yes! How ... yes!"
"I'll get somebody to come over and help."
"I just don't understand what's happening, Carl! Somebody came over from the battery with all your personal stuff and told me you were being court martialed! What's going on?"
I smiled to myself. "It was just a misunderstanding. It's going to be all right, Marilyn. We'll have a long, long talk."
It was the day before Thanksgiving. I really had something to be thankful for this year.
Chapter 60: Starting Over
After our brief call, the phone was removed from my room. I guess Colonel Featherstone wasn't a very trusting sort, or maybe he was just a careful sort. It wasn't important to me. I had come to terms with what was happening.
I wasn't going to hide my money anymore, either. I asked him to arrange a nice suite at a nearby hotel, a good one, like a Hilton or a Ritz, not some damn Super-8. He suggested the Hilton in Silver Spring, which was only a few miles away, across the line in Maryland, and less than a ten minute drive. I agreed to that. He would have somebody from the local JAG office in Fort Bragg call her tomorrow and give her directions, or meet with her on Friday before she drove up. Then somebody from the JAG office in DC would meet her and get her to Walter Reed on Saturday.
After that I said thank you and farewell to the colonel. He told me that he'd follow my case, but that he needed to fly to Fort Rucker in Alabama to sort out some other assholes. I got the impression that was his main job, solving problems that nobody wanted to go to trial or to be in public with.
I knew Marilyn. She would be lucky to get the car packed and on the road by noon. The family joke was to always tell her you had to leave half an hour before she really had to leave, that way she would be on time. It was about a six hour drive from Fayetteville to Washington, unless she got lost and detoured through San Francisco. Hopefully she would notice the Mississippi River before she crossed it.
That meant she would spend the night at the Hilton and see me in two days. That was probably fine by my schedule. That had me spending two more nights here, getting checked and prepped for the transfer, and then being flown in an old C-123 Provider to Andrews in Washington, to be transferred to Walter Reed. I probably wouldn't get there before she did. I just hoped I would have a chance to see her before they started working on me at Walter Reed.
In two days time I was deemed healthy enough to travel. Whatever was wrong with my kidneys seemed okay, but they left the drain in my side. I lost a few more of the tubes in me, but they kept a couple of IVs in place, as well as the catheter. It was a wonderful flight. The Provider was even noisier and rougher than a Herc, and my not quite cute and bubbly flight attendant had a five o'clock shadow.
I was greeted at Walter Reed with a full physical. It was apparent that only Walter Reed's eminent physicians could possibly diagnose me correctly. After all, the Navy ran the hospital at Guantanamo Bay, and it was well known that they still used leeches. (Surprisingly, I heard the same comment from the staff in Gitmo about Army hospitals.) This continued the next morning, until about lunch time, and nobody would tell me if Marilyn or my son were there yet.
They were. I was wheeled in my bed back to my private room around lunchtime. The private room was at Colonel Featherstone's request, because I had told him that Classified or not, I was going to tell my wife what had happened. I wasn't going to tell her what I had done with the four prisoners. Marilyn would never understand or accept that.
I had been giving those killings a lot of thought over the last few days. By some standards I had murdered those men, but not by all standards. According to both the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I was prohibited from killing civilians under any circumstances, unless they were attacking me or my troops. Then again, if I had obeyed the Geneva Convention, I was to turn myself and my men over to civilian authorities and be interned or paroled and released. That was ludicrous.
During war time operations, I was actually justified in some cases in killing people in furtherance of my mission. Again, that didn't apply. If I had been there legitimately on a drug related mission, I could turn my prisoners over to civilian authority for disposal, again, not a realistic alternative.
Or I could just put a bullet in each brain and decide the world was better off without four narcos in it.
Once, when I was working on my MBA, I had taken a class in Personnel Management and Human Relations, taught by a guy who was a vice-president at ATT and chain smoked in class worse than Featherstone. One day, totally out of the blue, he asked for a show of hands. 'How many of you believe in capital punishment?' About half of us, including myself, put our hands up. He nodded and then told us, 'You're the people who will be able to fire people.' He then went on to explain how firing people was very similar to killing them, in terms of self esteem and the consequences, but that managers had to be able to do it.
I often wondered if that was why I always liked line jobs over staff. My father didn't believe in capital punishment (strange in a hard core Republican, at least to me) and hated line positions, where that sort of thing happens. I never had any problems with firing people; it's just part of the job, nothing personal, just do it.
It seemed as if I was the same when it came to actually killing people. I didn't have to like it; I just had to do it. So far I hadn't lost any sleep over it.
Curiously, my mother had no problems with capital punishment, either. She had a cold streak at times. I remember once when she sat on a death penalty jury, and voted to give the guy the needle. He sat on death row for eight years before the Innocence Project got his DNA tested and proved he was innocent, and got him released. As far as Mom was concerned, he was a scumbag anyway, so they should have fried him regardless. She didn't bat an eye when she told me that. Mom wouldn't have minded my killing four narcos, that's for sure!
I saw Marilyn with a baby stroller in the hallway as they wheeled me into my room. I turned to call to her but the orderly was moving too fast. It didn't matter; Marilyn had seen me, too. About thirty seconds later she came barreling into my room with that stroller, followed by a nurse. The nurse was smiling, and she didn't interfere.
Marilyn's face was lit up, but she was also crying, and she damn near threw herself on top of me. "Oh God, oh God, you're home, you're home!" Thankfully she was on my right side, since all the tubes and lines running into me were on my left side. I just smiled and rubbed her back. "You're alive! You're alive!"
I stopped her with a big kiss, and then pushed her upright. "I have missed you so much, but I think we need to let the nurse get in here."
The nurse, named Hawthorne according to her name tag, simply checked my temperature and blood pressure, and then told us what the visiting hours were, and then she bent down over the baby stroller and cooed. "Well, aren't you just darling! And so well behaved, too!"
Marilyn smiled at me, and then bent down to the stroller. "Would you like to meet your son?", she asked me.