Betrayal

Onofrio nodded. "That's right. We were supposed to be doing maintenance on heavy equipment transport vehicles, but when we got to Kuwait, they weren't there yet, so they farmed a bunch of us out as convoy units."

The questioning was getting far afield, but Washburn took his own advice and let it go. Better to hear the answer now than find out for the first time in front of a jury about some land mine in the witness's testimony.

"How did you feel about that?" Mills asked.

He smiled, either at her naïveté or at the question. "They didn't ask us. It wasn't like it was negotiable."

"No, I understand that. But the convoy work at the front, wasn't it more dangerous than the work you'd originally been scheduled to do?"

"Only by about a factor of ten. Maybe twenty."

"So? Much more dangerous, then?"

"Yes. Way more."

Mills paused, and kept casting. "Didn't you and the other men object to that?"

"Sure. But what were we going to do?"

"I don't know, Mr. Onofrio. What did you do?"

"Well, we complained about it to Lieutenant Scholler. We asked him to talk to the base commander and see if we could get transferred back to our regular unit."

"And did he do that?"

"He tried, but he couldn't get in to see him. Not in time, anyway." Then, trying to be helpful, Onofrio added, "He was going to see if Nolan could pull some strings with the brass, but again, that didn't happen in time."

"Mr. Scholler thought that Mr. Nolan might be able to pull some strings for him. Why was that? Were they friends?"

"I'd say so, yeah."

"Close friends?"

"Well, I don't know." He shrugged again, then unwittingly dropped his bomb. "Drinking buddies, anyway."

The words had barely registered as significant when Mills heard Washburn all but erupt behind her. "Objection! Irrelevant!"

But this was the purest bluff. No one in the courtroom thought the answer was even remotely irrelevant, and Tollson sealed that opinion in an instant. "Overruled."

Mills kept her mouth tight to avoid telegraphing her pleasure. "Thank you, Your Honor," she said. Then, back at the witness. "Mr. Onofrio, when you characterize the friendship between Mr. Nolan and Mr. Scholler as that of drinking buddies, do you mean that they literally drank together?"

Onofrio, picking up the panic in Washburn's tone, flashed a quick look over to the defense table. "Occasionally, I think, yes."

"Do you think they drank together, or did you see them drinking together?"

"Yes, they drank together."

"Mr. Onofrio, is there a rule in the military against drinking on duty, or in a war zone?"

"Yes."

"But Mr. Scholler broke this rule?

"I suppose so."

"You witnessed this yourself, personally?"

"Yes."

"How many times?"

"I don't know exactly. A few."

"More than five times?"

"Your Honor," Washburn said. "Badgering the witness."

"Overruled."

Mills nodded. "More than five times, Mr. Onofrio?"

"Maybe."

"More than ten?"

"I didn't count the times," Onofrio said. "I really couldn't say for sure."

"Once a day? Once a week? Once a month?"

"A few times a week."

"All right, then. Did Mr. Scholler drink to excess?"

"Objection," Washburn sang out. "Calls for a conclusion."

"Overruled," Tollson said. "A lay witness can give an opinion as to sobriety."

Mills slowed herself down. She was close to something very good here and didn't want to blow it. "Did Mr. Scholler ever appear drunk to you when he was on duty?"

"Objection. Conclusion."

"Sustained."

Mills tried again. "Did you, personally, ever see Mr. Scholler intoxicated after he'd been drinking with Mr. Nolan?"

Onofrio threw another worried glance over to Washburn and Evan. "Yes, ma'am."

"And by intoxicated, do you mean that you heard him speak with slurred speech or have trouble walking?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Mr. Onofrio. When was the last time you remember noticing these things-defendant's slurred speech or the uncertain walk?"

Onofrio looked down at his lap. "His last night over there."

"The night before this incident at Masbah, is that what you're saying?"

He blew out and slowly nodded. "That's what I'm saying."

"Mr. Onofrio, on the day the shooting started, when Mr. Scholler was leading the convoy that got ambushed, did he appear to be intoxicated?"

"No, ma'am," Onofrio answered strongly.

Mills paused, then came out with it. "But he certainly was hung over, wasn't he?"

Stephan Ray, the language and recreational therapist from Walter Reed, nodded enthusiastically at Washburn from the witness stand. "He is definitely one of the success stories. He worked very hard and was also very lucky. But his success doesn't take away from the seriousness of his injuries. There was a real question for at least a couple of months as to whether he'd live, and then a further question about how completely, if at all, he'd recover."

"What were the areas most affected?"

"Well, most obviously affected were speech and memory, although there were also some coordination issues early on that cleared up more or less on their own."

"So how did these memory problems manifest themselves?"

"Well, at first, just after the surgery, of course, he remained pretty much continually unconscious for three weeks-in fact, I believe they kept him in an induced coma until they were confident that he'd gotten sufficiently well to handle consciousness, although I'm not a hundred percent sure of that. I wasn't on his medical team. I'm not a doctor. But when I first encountered Evan, he had what I'd call severe memory and cognition issues. He didn't know where he was, he thought I worked for the CIA, he didn't know what had happened to him exactly. But mostly, he didn't have a vocabulary."

"No vocabulary at all?"

"At first, very little. But then over time, as the healing progressed, he recovered the use of most common words."

"Was this a natural event?"

"To some degree, yes. But a lot of it was a matter of training the brain again, or relearning what he'd once known. We used flash cards, just the way you would if you were learning a new language, and Evan made really remarkable progress, especially compared to many others of our patients who never recover their ability to talk or to reason."

Washburn nodded. "Even with all this progress, how long did Evan remain in therapy with you at Walter Reed?"

"Nearly six months."

"Six months. And during those six months, while he was progressing so well, did he also suffer from blackouts?"

"I'm not sure exactly what you mean by blackouts."

"Periods when he could not recall what he'd done or where he was. As you described when he'd first come out of surgery."

"Ah. Well, yes. They were not infrequent."

"Not infrequent. So they were common?"

"Yes, but that's always to be expected in a case of traumatic brain injury."

"And how long could a blackout period last?"

"Again, it would vary. I remember a time with Evan, this was after three or four months of therapy, when he woke up one morning convinced that he was in Baghdad. He didn't understand why there was snow outside when it was summer in Baghdad. I thought it was a serious enough setback to bring it to the attention of the doctors, but he woke up on the third morning and was fine."

"He didn't think he was in Baghdad anymore?"

"No. He knew he was in Walter Reed. He picked up just where he'd left off in terms of his recovery."

"But for those three days, he was different?"

"As far as he was concerned, he was in Baghdad."