“Go on,” O’Connor said calmly, hoping none of the jurors had focused on the word “chucks.”
Feeling as though he had to explain himself more clearly, Anderson began again. “We’s all standing there and hears these honky motherfuckers callin’ us niggers, and other names like it.”
The defendant’s voice rose angrily as he spoke, recounting the day.
O’Connor quickly interrupted his client.
“You regarded these whites as bigots?” the lawyer asked, glancing at the jury to see if he could assess the damage made by the slur.
“Yes, sir!” Anderson said loudly, his voice still sparking with an angry tone. His chest heaved as he told how the white Marines had approached his small group of friends, taunting and jeering at them. Sweat dripped from the defendant’s face, and his shaved head sparkled with wetness.
“I was real mad at hearin’ what they’s sayin’. I wasn’t scared of no honky motherfucker neither. I’s scared of what might happen. But I weren’t scared of any white trash crackers like those boys was!” Anderson strained in an increasing pitch. His voice wavered from the surge of anger that pulsed within him as he recalled the moment.
O’Connor looked at his client and took his chained hand. “We understand. Take a minute and get your breath.”
Anderson swallowed the remaining two gulps left in his glass. It felt like a wad of cotton going down his throat.
“Can I have some more water, sir?” he asked, holding up the empty container.
Terry O’Connor took the pitcher of water from the defense table and filled the glass.
“Here. Continue once you’ve cleared your voice,” the lawyer said, putting the nearly empty pitcher back.
“My peas. They all nervous and soundin’ scared,” Anderson continued, sweat dripping from his forehead. “They talk about gettin’ away from there. My hometown boy, Wendell Carter, he try to make me cower away. These boys my bloods, but they didn’t want no truck with no trashy redneck chucks.
“So I tole ’em. I says, you ain’t nothin’ but nigger slaves. That’s all you ever be! You talk freedom, fightin’ oppression, but you won’t make a stand against no white-bread white trash.
“Then I walks down toward them loud-talkin’ honky motherfuckers and I waits. I’m proud. I don’t run.”
O’Connor saw Anderson’s anger again boiling hot, and cut the story short.
“That’s when you killed Private Rein? When he approached you?” the lawyer said, blocking eye contact from his client with the jury.
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said, nodding.
“Were you frightened? You felt the white Marines may hurt you or your friends?” O’Connor added, nodding back.
“If you mean, I scared? Yes, sir, I scared all right,” Anderson nodded. “They a whole mess of them, and only one of me. I scared, but I ain’t backin’ off. No, sir. I stand and I fight. I don’t tuck tail an’ run like some whipped dog. I stand like a proud black man!”
“Were you in control when you killed the man who taunted you?” O’Connor asked while silently praying that Anderson would say no.
“Sir?” Anderson blinked.
“In control of yourself?” O’Connor repeated. “Were you in control of your emotions?”
“Hell, no!” Anderson snapped at his lawyer. “I mean, no, sir. I felt real mad right then. I guess I lost control. I couldn’t think. Everthing kinda blur, crazy-like—”
Hearing the words he wanted the jury to appreciate and remember, O’Connor quickly cut off Anderson in midsentence. “Thank you, Private Anderson. I think that we have the picture clearly now.”
Charlie Heyster stood, smiling after Terry O’Connor sat down. He had waited the entire trial for this moment. Like a matador in the bull ring, his verbal sword lay hidden, sparkling sharp behind his red cape, ready to drive home through the animal’s hump, straight into his heart.
Calmly, the prosecutor walked to the lectern atop the table in the center of the court and spoke across the room at Anderson. Keeping his eyes on his notes that lay in front of him, the major-select asked, “Do you like white people?”
“Some,” Anderson answered.
“But not all?” Heyster responded, looking directly at the defendant.
“No, sir,” Anderson answered, hoping that he had spoken correctly. “I don’t know that many. I don’t know, sir.”
“Why do you call them ‘crackers,’ ‘chucks,’ and ‘honkies’?” Heyster said, frowning so the jury could see him.
“That’s street talk, sir,” Anderson replied. “You know. Slang.”
“Slang, like ‘nigger’?” Heyster countered.
“No, sir!” Anderson snapped, his voice just short of a shout. “It’s different. Lots different.”
“ ‘Nigger’ is bad, but ‘cracker’ is all right,” Heyster said. “Cracker isn’t meant to be insulting? Is that it, Private?”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said, and wiped his sweaty forehead on his shoulder as he spoke. “ ‘Cracker’ don’t mean nothing.”
“Are you a bigot, Private Anderson?” the prosecutor asked, looking at a sheet of paper on the lectern and then nailing eye contact with the defendant.
“No, sir!” Anderson snapped back. “Black people can’t be no bigots. Only whites is bigots.”
“I wasn’t aware that bigotry was exclusively for white people,” Heyster said, and smiled at the jury.
“Tell us about how you killed Private Rein,” Heyster then said, still smiling and now leaning over the lectern and looking at the defendant. “It seems that you had that story going along so well, and then the defense counsel quickly finished it for you. Tell us?”
“I told it, sir,” Anderson said in a pleading voice.
“What about the details after you stood out by yourself?” Heyster asked, remaining behind the center table to keep his intimidation factor for the witness strong. “What about the details of when Private Rein approached you? Did he run at you, brandishing a weapon, or did he merely walk toward you, casually? Tell us, Private Anderson.”
Charlie Heyster walked back to his chair and sat behind the prosecution’s table, leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head, and waited for the man in the hot seat to finally respond to his question.
“What do you want to know?” Anderson asked, confused.
Captain Heyster leaped to his feet, slammed his fist on the table, and shouted, “I want to know how you killed Private Rein! I want you to tell the jury the same thing that you said in your statement following your apprehension! Do you understand now, mister?”
Celestine Anderson felt his rage surge past its limits and explode toward this white Marine captain who shouted from behind the table. In a booming voice the private first class bellowed at the prosecutor, “Yes, sir!”
Quietly, Charlie Heyster sat back down and waved his hand at the defendant in a motion to continue.
“I’m standin’ there and this chuck walks up and says real loud, ‘Hey! Hey! Any you niggers gots a light?’ ” Anderson roared, his chest heaving as he shouted at the prosecutor. “So I says to him, and I’m smilin’ like I don’t give a shit, ‘Sho! I gots a light.’
“So I reaches down in my pocket with my left hand and I pulls out my Zippo. Then, as I gives the beast a light, I reaches around with my right hand, pulls out my hand ax, and I splits the motherfucker’s skull!”
Anderson shouted his testimony in a tear-filled cry, spittle and sweat flying from his lips with every syllable.
Charlie Heyster stood, walked to the lectern, crossed his arms, and bowed his head.
“ ‘I gives the beast a light.’ Private Rein, the beast. Right. Where were your friends, Private Anderson?” the prosecutor asked, walking slowly toward the jury.
“Behind me,” the defendant sobbed. “Just watchin’. Behind me.”
Charlie Heyster then looked at the jury, shook his head, walked back to the prosecutor’s table, sat, and asked no more questions.
Terry O’Connor stood, his face drained of its color. The bristle of rust-colored hair on top of his head sparkled with perspiration. He looked at the judge and asked, “May I redirect, Your Honor?”
Charlie Heyster nodded his approval, and Colonel Swanson shook his head yes.
O’Connor cleared his throat and in a low voice asked, “Private Anderson, why did you have that hatchet?”
“Sir,” Anderson said, still shaken, “we bush Marines all carries them to cut through the close jungle out there.”
Walking toward the witness stand, O’Connor calmly asked his last question of his client. “When you killed Private Rein, when did you last sleep?”
Anderson cleared his voice and in cool composure said, “Not all night. I stood listening post, and I patrolled all day before that, too. I ain’t had no chance to sleep since two days before. When I killed that white boy, I had wore myself right down to my boots, dog tired.”
“Thank you, Private Anderson. That is all,” O’Connor said and returned to his seat.
After another brief recess, Terry O’Connor began his closing statement to the jury. He sought their sympathy toward the black Marine’s difficult struggle throughout his life. He told how Anderson was a victim, too, because of his growing up without a father, living on welfare, suffering from racial bias all his life.
O’Connor closed his plea to the jury, saying, “Private First Class Anderson struck out against a lifetime of cruelty that manifested itself in the body of a bigoted white Marine one evening in front of the chow hall at Chu Lai. Yes, he killed Private Harold Rein, but after provocation, driven by physical exhaustion, and committed the slaying in a mindless blur. He had no premeditation but acted in blind passion. A fight, intentionally provoked by the victim. A lost temper that resulted in death.
“You have a choice to find my client not guilty of the charges, or you can find him guilty of manslaughter, the lesser offense. He is certainly not guilty of murder in any degree.”
Charlie Heyster spent less than ten minutes making his summation to the jury.
“Private Anderson has said he was guilty,” the prosecutor began, walking to the jury box and looking at the face of each man seated there. “He freely admits to killing Private Rein, yet he pleads not guilty. Not guilty! How incredulous!
“The defense wants you to believe that the brutal ax murder of Private Harold Rein was an act of passion. A sudden fit of rage in what he envisions a two-sided fight by an exhausted Marine who had been the victim of abuse all his life. An act that was unthought. A reaction to a provocation. A moment of insanity brought on by a life of neglect.
“I do not dispute that Private Anderson has had a life filled with the disgust of racial bias. So did his best friend, Wendell Carter, and he tried to stop the violence. But when Private Anderson spoke to us, did he once say he felt remorse for killing Harold Rein? Did he ever express anything but satisfaction in his own words? His descriptions of whites moments ago in his testimony says much about Private Anderson. ‘Chucks!’ ‘Crackers!’ ‘Honky motherfuckers’!
“These are not the words of the late Doctor Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, who the defense wishes us to associate with their client and his cohort. Would men of peace utter such profanity? Such verbal hatred? These are not the words of any equality-seeking crusader for righteousness that the defense would like you to believe is Private First Class Celestine Anderson.
“These words, uttered in your presence only moments ago by the defendant—“honky,” “cracker,” “chuck”—are as ugly as “coon,” “spade,” or “nigger.” I submit to you that these are not the words of a just man, but the words of a murdering bigot.
“Bigotry is just as wrong, black or white. In this case, the bigotry and hatred expressed by Private First Class Celestine Anderson claimed the life of a fellow Marine.
“Private Anderson killed for hatred of a race, not to right an injustice. Hatred, gentlemen. Hatred. Logically, such a crime demands that you find for the maximum charge and seek its penalty, ridding free society of this hatemonger.”
The jury deliberated less than an hour. They brought back a verdict of guilty of second-degree murder and recommended that Celestine Anderson receive reduction to the lowest rank and a dishonorable discharge, and that he serve the maximum penalty that the judge had provided them in their instructions, thirty-five years in prison. Judge Swanson sentenced him to reduction to private, a dishonorable discharge, and twenty years at hard labor.
That night Private Anderson returned to the III MAF brig on Freedom Hill, where he began his wait for the commanding general to review his case and approve the sentence, before he would finally transfer to the Naval Disciplinary Barracks at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The process would take several more months.
MOVIE STAR AND three other lance corporals from his barracks lay on a quartet of nylon-webbed chaise lounge chairs by the tennis court watching the law center’s front doors while sipping cold sodas from an ice chest, telling lies, and improving their suntans.
The final session of the Anderson trial had lasted far longer than any of them had considered possible, and they were about to give up and get dressed when people finally began pouring from the building. As soon as the crew of snuffies saw Charlie Heyster emerge with Philip Edward Bailey-Brown, lugging the files while the major-select strutted ahead of him, the four lance corporals made a mad dash for the wing’s legal office headquarters and piled on Movie Star’s desk, where they had a clear view through the doorway of the prosecutor’s office.
“Hello, boys!” Heyster chirped as he brushed past the four nonrates who pretended to pour over Movie Star’s new edition of
Penthouse
. “Half a buck to the first man to bring me a hot cup of Java!”
Lance Corporal Bobby Pounds, who sat at his desk in the administrative section and had the nickname “Happy,” jumped first, grabbed Heyster’s cup, and dashed into Major Dickinson’s office, where he had just dumped his spit cup full of Copenhagen snuff juice into the pot, and dashed a pinch of the fresh-ground tobacco into the brew, just for good measure. He wondered how much he and his low-ranking colleagues could doctor the officers’ coffee before someone finally got sick on the stuff. As of yet the watch-standers who formulated the morning brew only got compliments on its often zesty gourmet flavor.