The Night Crew (4 page)

Chapter Four

In character with the rest of the post, the building was a neat-as-a-pin, red brick, faux colonial-style affair, with close-cropped shrubbery and a precisely handpainted sign announcing its purpose. Compared with MP stations at larger military bases, this building was small and definitely looked sleepy.

But, as the residents on this post were either senior officers or handpicked soldiers from the Old Guard, a big sheriff was neither needed, wanted, nor, probably, all that good an idea. I mean, generals don’t really like their kids getting busted for dope, or their wives getting pulled over for speeding tickets.

We entered and moved straight to the good-looking staff sergeant behind a desk who glanced up and asked in a polite but firm tone, “How can I help you?”

I identified myself, flashed my military ID, and introduced Katherine. He appeared to be expecting us and, glancing at his watch, informed us, “The prisoner is waiting in an interrogation room. Follow me, sir.”

He led us down a narrow stairwell to the lower level and stopped beside the second door on the left. There was no guard posted, so Lydia Eddelston was apparently not regarded as a danger to herself or to others, nor was she considered a flight risk, which I guess I understood.

Given all the publicity surrounding this case, Lydia Eddelston couldn’t walk two steps off this post without some kid pointing at her and saying, “Look, Mommy, there’s the lady who led that man around by his ding-dong.”

I thanked the sergeant and inquired, “Is this room cleared of listening and observation devices?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long do we have?”

“One hour.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. We don’t wish to be disturbed.” I turned to Katherine, who nodded, and I pushed open the door. We entered a small, rectangular room, about eight by fifteen, furnished in the functional, minimalist manner the army prefers, with only a long wooden table and ten wooden chairs.

Private First Class Lydia Eddelston was seated, wearing a desert battle dress uniform, sans handcuffs, at the long wooden conference table. Her nose was stuffed inside a
People
magazine with Tom Cruise doing his I-get-paid-twenty-five-million-bucks-for-being-a-movie-stud smile on the cover—at the sound of the door being opened, she looked up, first at Katherine, whom she smiled at, then at me: the smile faded.

We moved to the table and sat across from her. By way of introduction, Katherine stated, “Lydia, you remember I told you that a military lawyer had to be involved as cocounsel?”

“I guess.”

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Sean Drummond. We were classmates at law school and worked another case together.”

Lydia stared at me, and it did not seem to compute that I was dressed in civilian attire.

I extended my hand. As a senior officer I did not need to do this, but enlisted clients tend to become stiff or timid around senior officers and informal gestures can go a long way toward breaking the ice.

Lydia Eddelston, however, was either too young, or was from a socioeconomic background where handshakes were not a common form of greeting. She stared at my hand for a few beats, then, almost hesitantly, we shook.

I said, “Despite my rank, Private Eddelston, I work for you.” I continued with my standard spiel about lawyer-client relations, lawyer confidentiality, and so forth and so on, and ended, as I usually do, by asking, “Do you have any opening questions you’d like to ask me?”

She thought about this too briefly. “No, sir. Don’t guess I do.”

“After we’ve become better acquainted, maybe you will. In the meantime, I’m new to this case, and I have a few questions.” Like, what in the hell were you thinking when you idiots took pictures? But I didn’t say this, of course.

She looked at Katherine, who nodded, which I regarded as a revealing gesture, then nodded at me.

I started off, “Where are you from?”

“Justin, West Virginia.”

“Age?”

“Twenty, sir.”

“How long have you been in the National Guard?”

“’Bout two years. Ever since high school. Signed up under delayed entry six months ’fore graduation.”

“Like it?”

“Sure . . . well enuff.” She paused for a moment, then had a reasonable second thought. “Least-wise, ’fore all this happened.”

I did not want to talk about that yet, and asked, “Why did you join?”

“Thought it would be fun. Maybe pick up a few skills fer afterward.”

“Maybe earn a little college money?”

“No, sir . . . didn’t really care nuthin’ ’bout that.”

“I see.” I thought about that revelation, then continued, “Justin? I’ve never heard of it. Small town?”

“Guess so. Only had, like forty kids in my graduatin’ class.”

I smiled.

Like a lot of residents from small, irrelevant bumps in the middle of nowhere, Lydia knew how to milk this angle and quickly elaborated, “Only got like, I don’t know, maybe two stoplights. Got a 7-Eleven, though.”

Actually, a surprising number of the army’s recruits come from these anonymous pockets in the middle of Rural Nowhere, USA. For the most part, they make great soldiers—dedicated, hardy, industrious, not cynical like their big city counterparts, imbued, instead, with the kind of red-meat patriotism that equals unquestioning obedience. I would put a gun to my head if I lived in such a place, and I suspected that Lydia’s motives for enlisting in the Guard were a little more dark and complicated than she was admitting to me, if not to herself. After she tried out a few more quaint anecdotal details about Justin, I asked, “And did you have a full-time civilian job?”

“Sure did. At the post office.”

This was an almost irresistible set-up for a crack about postal employees, but I asked, with an admirably straight face, “Doing what?”

“Letter sorter. Good benefits. Didn’t pay much, though.”

And so on. Most of this stuff could be gleaned from her personnel jacket or a standard background check, of course. But with new clients it’s important to build trust and rapport, to get to know each other before you get into the ickier stuff, such as, What in the hell was on your mind when you peed on that man’s face?

Anyway, as we went on, my initial impressions regarding Lydia Eddelston were largely reinforced, though she was slightly cuter in person than in the photo of her emptying her bladder. Also I thought she had packed on a few pounds since those pictures, which could be accounted for by the fact that she was in confinement with nothing better to do than eat.

Her accent was thick, country-style, and grammar and diction were definitely not her friends. Though she possessed a high school diploma, she was not well educated and, occasionally she stared at me for inappropriately long periods before responding. I couldn’t tell if she was dense, confused, the victim of some weird processing disorder, or all of the above.

As brazen and uninhibited as her poses and expressions appeared in the photos, in person, she came across as shy, remote, and while not depressed, clearly she was emotionally fragile. Also, she kept glancing at Katherine: fleeting, needy glances. Presumably she came from blue-collar, or possibly, no-collar stock. Regarding family, she informed me that she was raised a strict Southern Baptist, one brother, also in the National Guard, both parents still living and still married, and hopefully they weren’t first cousins or, God forbid, brother and sister.

Simple. That one adjective jumped out as I listened patiently to her responses to the perfunctory questions I occasionally had to reframe, because she became easily confused. Simple answers. Simple outlooks. Mentally simple. Indeed, I was tempted to ask her for her proof of age, because, in both her mannerisms and her coyness, she seemed to me almost childlike.

The more I listened to her, the more difficult I found it to believe this intellectually austere woman was the provocateur of so much attention, trouble, and harm. If I ever met anyone predestined for a life that would arouse little interest or attention, Lydia Eddelston was the personification of it.

For some reason, I recalled Homer’s aphorism about Helen of Troy—she, of the face that launched a thousand ships, and a war—and certainly here we had a paradox or an irony, for the somewhat plain face across the table from me threatened to sink a thousand careers, not to mention capsizing an entire war.

The mystery was not whether she did it or not. She definitely did. The mystery was this: How and why had such a seemingly unremarkable young lady from bucolic small-town America become the iconic figure of a war that seemed to be going off the rails?

Strange. No other word could explain it—strange girl, strange behavior. Strange case.

For a moment I closed my eyes and listened to her speech; the image that formed, inevitably, was of Lydia on a small backcountry farm, wearing slack blue coveralls, hauling milk pails or slopping pig shit, whatever it is farm hands do these days. I reopened my eyes and was instantly transported back to the photographs showing Lydia doing things that were surely the buzz of her Baptist congregation back in Justin, West Virginia. I couldn’t imagine what her preacher thought, or for that matter, her parents, of their little girl engaged in such vulgar activities. I could guess, though, that they were angry—angry that the army had turned their little girl into a monster, angry that the army had gotten her into this mess, and angriest of all that the army was now trying to put their little girl in the slammer for life.

Anyway, we continued the questioning in this perfunctory vein for about another twenty minutes. At one point, I asked about her MOS—her military occupational specialty—her military experience and training. To my surprise she informed me she was a 71 bravo—a personnel clerk—rather than a military policewoman or military intelligence specialist as I had assumed she would be. So what was a paper jockey, a fair-weather pogue in military parlance, doing in a military prison cellblock in a war zone? And why was a personnel clerk involved in prisoner interrogation?

But the extent of her military training entailed a three-month stint on active duty at Fort McClellan at the start of her enlistment, where she was taught the fundamentals of the military personnel system and a few rudimentary clerking duties, typing, correspondence, and so forth. Afterward, as per the standard National Guard contractual obligation, twice each month she reported to her local armory for her required weekend drills. Depending on the Guard unit in question, that may have entailed two fast and furious days of meaningful training or an extended weekend beer bash.

Her call-up for deployment to Iraq came at the last minute. After only one frantic week of country orientation and refresher training in basic combat skills, she found herself on a troop plane bound for war.

I should mention here that National Guard people are, in the truest and noblest sense of the term, America’s citizen-soldiers. They are patriotic citizens with full-time civilian jobs, families, community responsibilities—a full and demanding life outside military service—the modern-day equivalent of revolutionary-era minutemen who, at the first bang of the claxon, rush off to the ensuing environmental apocalypse or the sound of the guns, whatever the situation dictates.

But Lydia’s brief odyssey from peace to war stretched even that metaphor a bit; one Monday she was cramming letters into coded boxes in gentle, desultory Justin, trying to survive the ennui of small-time life; the next, she was holding her ass, dodging mortar rounds in Iraq.

Katherine sat patiently throughout this dialogue, still and sphinx-like. I was sure she had asked Lydia many of these same questions, and I was equally sure that my military background opened a few lines of inquiry that might have escaped Katherine’s scope of prurience.

Sometimes it’s the small things that break a case. You never know unless you ask.

I eventually did ask Private Eddelston, “Do you mind if we shift into a few preliminary questions about what happened at Al Basari?”

She smiled. “Guess that’s what we’re here to do, right?”

Good guess. She was now leaning back in her seat, hands clasped behind her neck, comfortable with herself and, if not totally comfortable with me, she at least seemed to have fit me into some nonthreatening frame of reference. Actually, I did not want her
that
relaxed, but neither did I want to intimidate her, so, to put her in the right mood, I reminded her, “We’re here because you’re facing a general court martial, which is the highest level of military justice with the most serious consequences. And you have been charged with a number of offenses, ranging from conspiracy to commit murder, to abusing prisoners.”

Her hands came down and a frown popped onto her face.

I added, “These are serious charges, Lydia. Have you been advised of the possible punishments if you’re convicted?”

She bit her lower lip. “Yes, sir. That other lawyer, Captain Howser, he tole me.”

“Life in prison. Is that what he said?”

“’Ceptin’ I’m innocent.”

The photographs screamed otherwise, but maybe she had a plausible explanation that would easily clear everything up; maybe the girl in the photos was her evil twin. “What was your assignment at the prison?” I asked her.

“Clerk. Worked at the Personnel Administration Center for the 215th MP battalion.”

“I see.” I thought about this, then stated, “Obviously, though, you were occasionally placed on guard duty inside the prison.”

“Oh . . . no, sir.”

“Never?”

“Nope . . . never.”

“But those photographs, they were taken
inside
the cellblock. Correct?”

“That’s right, sir. My boyfriend . . . well, he had a job there. Danny Elton. MP.”

“Then you worked inside the prison as well? Maybe as part of the administrative staff?”

“No, sir.”

“Well . . . where did you work?”

“Around the prison was this big FOB—a forward operating base, it’s called. An infantry unit, a battalion of MPs, some military intelligence folks, a buncha civilian contractors . . . we wuz all livin’ there. Sorta stuffed together, real tight, in this huge tent city.”