News From the Red Desert (45 page)

“
M
aster Sergeant Anakopoulus! You will stand at attention when staff enter your cell, is that understood?”

He nodded. He stood beside his bare cot and put his heels together. His scrotum jiggled with the movement and the sadistic twenty-five-year-old second lieutenant barking at him stood on his toes to lean into Anakopoulus's face, or chin, anyway. “So you wish to have sexual relations with me, Master Sergeant!”

“No sir.”

“We both saw what you just did, didn't we?”

“No sir.”

“Don't you ‘no sir' me!”

He had been in Quantico, naked, standing beside his bed for twenty-two hours a day on suicide watch since the day after he surrendered himself. Even for the two hours he was allowed to lie down, all the lights left blazing, two men sat on the other side of the bars, watching. Mostly, he was not allowed to see his lawyer. Once, when he was allowed, his lawyer told him that this treatment amounted to torture and she would be filing a complaint with the court and with the UN.

Anakopoulus had begged her not to. “That might get you a little more attention and media interviews, but it will not help me in the least. It will only anger them.”

“Listen to me,” she replied, stung, “the constitution applies here, to everyone. They can't do this.”

“They can do anything, absolutely anything they want to me. I am a traitor. I am responsible for thousands of deaths because of that leak.”

“No, you're not. You are not.”

“You seem to know my circumstances better than I do. How is that possible?”

“Master Sergeant, they've messed with you. They've made you agree with them.”

“I did what I did.”

His lawyer sat back at that. For the first time in her adult life, she had no words.

Deirdre's new offices were more opulent than she would have wanted anyone she worked with in the Suck to know. She had her own show and staff and personal assistants. Some days it was as if the air currents just picked her up and pushed her through her life. When Anakopoulus's ex-girlfriend had left a message that she wanted to meet, Deirdre had leapt at it. She had been planning to do an entire show on Anakopoulus's actions during the shooting, with Jeremy present and maybe an on-air awarding of a medal, when the press release about him being the InformationIsFree leaker came out. She had been floored. Fortunately, she had not spoken much to anyone at work about her plan to do a show honouring the man. The leak story had just about gone away, buried under the shooting story and the various bombings and acid splashings of the day. And then there was Iraq, which was worse and worse every day, worse even than Afghanistan. Apparently he had been discovered by the MPs at Walter Reed. She wondered how.

After two days of insomnia, she felt compelled to tell the world what she knew of Anakopoulus. The
Times
had published her op-ed. He had been unavailable to speak to their fact checkers, but given the nature of the piece and the prominence of its author, it had been cleared.

That day she got an email from the ex-girlfriend, wanting to talk to her about him. This intrigued her. The woman said she would fly to New York the next day. They agreed to meet at her office.

When Susie walked in Deirdre greeted her from her chair. Getting up was still painful for her. She apologized and Susie waved it off and sat down across from Deirdre.

“Thank you for writing the article.”

“It wasn't a very popular thing to do, around here,” Deirdre replied.

“Even though you didn't actually come out and say you thought he was innocent? Or even possibly innocent?”

“Ms Alvarez…”

“Please, Susie.”

“Susie. I don't know whether he leaked something or not. The MPs certainly think he did, for some reason. We'll see what he admitted to at his trial. In the meantime, I just wanted the world to know what he did for me.”

“He was high on pain killers, he had had just a session of rehab therapy. Don't they give painkillers for that? He could have admitted to anything.”

“I know.”

“What can we do for him?”

“We can ask hard questions about his treatment in Quantico. We can make sure the trial is well covered and fair.”

“Fair!”

“If you don't mind my asking, he's your ex. Why are you involved?”

“Because he still matters to me. And my son. And he served his country…”

“Does he know you're talking to me about his situation?”

“No. I visit him, when they permit him visitors—he still has me listed as his next of kin, but he won't talk to me or let me talk to him. So far, we've just sat there.”

“That must be painful, to see him in these circumstances.”

“It is important to me that someone helps him. If he hadn't gone so far away for so long, we would still be together.”

“Complicated situation for all of you.”

“No it isn't, Ms O'Malley. It's very simple. Every one of us should be outraged. Especially those of us who owe their lives to him.”

Deirdre handed her a box of tissues.

Their handlers brought them all to makeup an hour before the discussion was to begin. Charlie Rose was already in his chair being primped, and avuncular and cheerful as he waved at the generals and their spouses, and then Deirdre and Stewart Robinson. Mrs. Lattice and Mrs. Jackson embraced, affecting pleasure at the sight of one another. Mrs. Jackson paused for an instant before shaking Deirdre's hand, and Deirdre was not able to say what she knew or didn't know but was anyway uncomfortable enough that she let the woman's hand go the instant she could and retreated to talk to a producer in the corner.

Stewart Robinson approached her then—his hand touching the small of her back. Jeremy Jackson noticed and his wife noticed him noticing and the two of them looked away, in opposite directions.

“Deirdre,” Robinson whispered. “Such a pleasure to see you again. When I heard about the attack I was worried sick. When they released your name…”

“Stewart,” she replied, and turned to embrace him, catching Jeremy's eye over his shoulder for a nanosecond as she did. “How are you?” She stood back to survey him to spare herself the thermal injury of that look from across the room.

Deirdre had lost weight after being shot, and still wore a cast on her right arm. Jackson never varied his workout regimen or diet and had always seemed as much a university professor as a soldier. He wore the suit comfortably. But Lattice was the most obviously diminished. He looked absurd wearing anything but combats. He had been gutted by the response to Deirdre's piece. The title said it all, was the conclusion of innumerable internet commenters. With popular opinion against him, his supporters in the Pentagon had backed away, too, and within days, he hadn't a friend in the army. He reached out to men he had served and fought and bled with and for the first time ever no one would take his calls. He had hoped his “Don't apologize, don't explain, don't deny” approach would work in this instance, as it had so often. But this was just too big.

He was, if anything, the most innocent among them, and he had paid, was paying, the steepest price of all.

Mary Lattice hated Deirdre for different reasons than Sherry Jackson did, but she hated her with a deep ferocity that prevented her from looking away from the woman who had destroyed her husband. The essay about the Foscart massacre, and the headline, splashed across every newsstand, “Not in Front of the Embed,” had been like a bomb going off. The day after it appeared, Lattice had been summoned to the White House. When he got to Washington, he met with the president's chief of staff. The secretary of defense and the chair of the Joint Chiefs were left entirely out of the conversation. It didn't matter. The president needed to be seen to be doing this, and not through a committee or at a distance.

The president also needed to be seen responding to the green-on-blue massacre at KAF, which spelled the end of Jeremy Jackson's military career. Fred Shaw told him and Sherry Jackson that the timing had been perfect. No reasonable voter would view him as personally responsible for the shooting, and would see this as a political firing, for which they would hold the president and his party responsible. Nevertheless. Jeremy Jackson was out of uniform and living in his own house seven days a week for the first time in decades. His wife was conscious of his
diminished stature, and hers. A Super PAC had been started with a large initial contribution from Kellogg Brown and Root, and she met with Fred Shaw nearly daily. Jeremy himself was working on his book, though he had not given her anything to read yet.

“Deirdre O'Malley, I'd like to begin with you if I could. The coverage of the recent wars has been a departure from war reporting in previous conflicts. The practice of embedding is new, and some say, not coincidentally, the coverage of these wars and of the military has been much more sympathetic than was seen, for instance, in Vietnam. Has the military played the media in these wars?”

“Great question, Charlie. The war was necessary and remains necessary and however critical we must be, appropriately, of our own conduct, it is important to remember that the enemy is vastly worse. Our nation is at war with mass murderers. With men who throw acid in the faces of girls for the crime of attending school. So if you ask me, do I have opinions about the merit of our wars, the answer is, You bet I do. And I have opinions about the brave men and women taking the fight to those monsters.”

Charlie Rose replied, “But you are among a very small number of journalists that both embedded with the troops and wrote critically about the conduct of the war. Can you give us some insight into the difficulty of the embedded reporter's position?

“Well, I think my own record shows how overblown many of these concerns have become. Reporters are reporters. When we are in the field there is no confusion at all about our role there. We wear different-coloured body armour, our only weapons are our cameras and notepads, and what we are interested in is the story.