Better Times Than These (55 page)

“Sir, I did not think anything. It was nighttime, and we was on a hill where many things could happen.”

“But you must have thought something,” Gore said.

“The Army does not pay me to think about things that happen in other platoons than mine,” Moon said defensively. “Sergeant Groutman was there. That was his responsibility.”

“Where was the First Sergeant all this time—Sergeant Dreyfuss?”

“He was asleep, sir. He had been up most of the night before.”

“Did you consider waking him up?”

“No, sir. Sergeant Dreyfuss did not like to be got up when he was sleeping.”

“If you had known that what you had witnessed was a rape, would you have taken measures to stop it?”

“Objection,” said Fox.

“Let him answer,” Maitland said.

“If I had known it for sure, sir, I believe I would have done something.”

“But you did not do anything—is that correct?”

“That is right, sir,” Moon said. Gore returned to his seat.

The last prosecution witness was Conway, one of the Bravo Company medics. Kahn remembered how his face had looked when he lifted it from Sharkey’s chest, back at The Fake. Fox established through questioning that he had gone to the Second Platoon positions in the morning after someone told him the two girls were in bad shape.

“Both of them were lying in the foxhole, and they didn’t seem like they could move much at all. The older one, she was just like a dishrag when you throw it against the wall,” Conway said.

“Did you examine them?” Fox asked.

“Yessir, sort of. There wasn’t much for me to do. They didn’t teach us about those kinds of problems—ah, female problems.”

“But you did examine them?”

“Yes, I did. The older girl was the worst. Her stomach was distended like a three-months-pregnant woman. I didn’t want to touch her, she was so sloppy.”

“What about the younger girl?”

“She was pretty bad off too. Her blouse was open, her breasts were exposed and her pants were torn at the crotch. There was a lot of blood on them.”

“Did you try to aid them?”

“Yessir, I was about to give the older one a shot of morphine because she seemed to be in a lot of pain, but then Lieutenant Brill came down and he said for the girls to get up and go with him and the interpreter.”

“Where did he take them?”

“Just down the path a little ways. There was a bare space where the bushes had all been beaten down.”

“And you followed them?”

“Everybody did, sir.”

Fox led Conway through a line of questions similar to those he had asked Spudhead, establishing that Brill had told the prisoner to shoot the girls. Twice Gore stood up and objected on grounds that what had happened to the girls at the hands of Lieutenant Brill was not material to the Army’s case against these defendants, but Maitland allowed Fox to proceed. Conway reached the point at which the prisoner was having trouble with the safety on the M-16.

“What were the girls doing all this time?” Fox asked.

“The older one, she was barely able to stand up and she was looking at the ground. The young girl was just standing there holding her blouse together where it was torn.”

“Did the prisoner shoot them?”

“Yessir, he did. He shot the older girl first.”

“What happened to the girl after she was shot?”

“Her head flew back and she fell to the ground.”

“Was she dead?”

“I do not know, sir. She twitched a little bit, but she did not move.”

“And did the prisoner then shoot the other girl?”

“Not right away. He looked over at Lieutenant Brill. The lieutenant had his pistol out, not pointing it at him, but he had it out and cocked.”

“But the prisoner eventually did shoot her?”

“He did, sir. He shot her twice, and I believe one of the shots missed but the other hit her in the chest and she went down hard.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went over to her. Everybody was just standing there, not saying anything. I think they were very shocked. I looked at her. It appeared her chest was rising and falling, and her eyes were like when you look up at the sun—she wanted to open them but the sun was too bright.”

“Did you try to assist her?”

“No, sir, I did not. I did not know what to do. I might have been able to help her, but Lieutenant Brill was the one who had gotten her shot, and so I guessed he wanted her dead. I have never been in a situation like that before, sir. It wouldn’t have done any good to try to help her.”

“What happened then?”

“The lieutenant took back the rifle from the prisoner and he looked at the girl himself. He was standing over her. Then he pointed the rifle at her and braced it on his hip and he fired it twice into her.”

“And this killed her?”

“Yessir. The first round made her head jump. Then he fired a second round and her head looked just like a hole. It had exploded. It spread brain matter all over the ground in the area.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then everyone just sort of drifted away. I went back up to my positions. I guess everybody else did too.”

“I have no more questions,” Fox said acidly. Some of the court members were looking with open hostility at the table of the accused.

“Private Conway,” Gore said, walking to the witness chair, “when you examined these two women at first, you said they had been raped. What made you conclude that?”

“From the way they looked, sir; they were pretty badly worked over.”

“What do you mean worked over? Had they been beaten? Were there any indications that they had been injured aside from their sexual organs?”

“No, sir, not that I saw.”

“Did either of them state to you that she had been raped?”

“They did not say anything to me, sir. But even if they had I wouldn’t have understood it.”

“So you base your conclusion on the fact that their sexual organs were strained from too much sex—is that correct?”

“You would have had to have seen it to know what I mean, sir. I mean they really did a job on them, like I said . . .”

“But you only based your conclusion on your examination of their sexual condition—right?”

“That is right, sir.”

“I have nothing further,” Gore said.

Fox was already on his feet.

“Private Conway, you described earlier the condition of the girls’ clothing. Would you repeat that for the court.”

“It was very torn. The younger girl, her blouse was like it had been ripped. And the older one was torn in the crotch.”

“At the time, what did you make of that? Did it suggest to you that the girls might have been forcibly assaulted?”

“It did, sir.”

“Thank you, Private Conway. I have no further questions,” Fox said. He turned to Maitland. “The Army has concluded its presentation, sir.”

“Very well,” Maitland said. “Does the defense wish to call witnesses or introduce evidence?”

Gore rose halfway out of his chair. “No, sir,” he said calmly.

“Very well, then,” Maitland said. “It’s nearly lunchtime. We will resume at fourteen hundred hours for closing arguments.”

Kahn caught up with Gore in the hallway outside the courtroom. “Like what you heard in there?” the lawyer said.

Stung by the coldness in his voice, Kahn looked Gore hard in the eye. “You were the one who told me I should be here,” he said.

Gore smiled a creaky grin. “Right. Wanta get a cup of coffee?”

They walked through the packed-dirt streets to the coffee shop and ordered two cups, which they took out to a table beneath a banyan tree. The sun was hot and the air humid but not stifling, since it had rained sometime during the morning while they were in the courtroom.

“What do you think?” Kahn said.

“Hard to say. It’s better than I thought it would be.”

“God, I don’t see how.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Gore said with just a hint of bitter satisfaction. “It’s all appearances. What you see in a criminal trial—or any kind of trial, for that matter—most times it doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to what really happened.

“Take this guy Poats, for example.”

“Yeah, how did you know about that?” Kahn asked. “I never knew about it.”

“Groutman told me—I think—or maybe one of the others—doesn’t make any difference. Anyway, he and the rest of them banged some village whore. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it, right?—he’d never have gone to Brill to blow the whistle in this thing, if he had. In fact, there wasn’t anything wrong with it, I suppose, but you make it look like there was. See what I mean? Appearances—all appearances,” Gore said. “Their weak point is they don’t have any documentary evidence to show rape. To the court it sure looks like rape, but proving it’s another thing.”

“Well, everybody knows what went on—there must have been two dozen wit—”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” Gore said matter-of-factly. “Fox is a damned good lawyer. I know—we went through JAG school together. But he’s up Shit’s Creek in this one because the general screamed so much about getting it tried fast and wouldn’t let him let one of my guys off the hook on a lesser charge so he could testify against the others—at least, I guess that’s what happened, because Fox is too good a lawyer to go into court with the case he just put on. You can imagine what would have happened if one of my guys had gotten up there and started implicating the others. But it didn’t happen, so there you go—anyway, it looks bad enough now.”

Hostility and outrage were exuded by Captain Fox when he addressed the court with his final argument.

“The defense will apparently try to persuade you that a rape never happened.” He gestured toward the table of the accused. “The
defense,”
he said, barely disguising contempt, “would like you to believe that those two little girls—who were murdered in cold blood according to the testimony of several witnesses—gave themselves willingly to the abuse of these men, and others so far unidentified. But you have all heard the account of the witnesses this morning. That their clothing was torn and bloody. That they were hardly able to stand. That they moaned and whimpered while being assaulted. I ask you gentlemen to recall the testimony of the company medic who examined these girls shortly before they died. Can you honestly believe that these two girls, sixteen and fourteen years old, actually volunteered for and agreed to acts which left them in that horrible condition?”

Fox made much of the “rumor” that had circulated that the girls were to be raped to avenge Sergeant Trunk and leaned heavily on Spudhead’s testimony that some of the accused had joked about the rapes afterward.

“Two elements must be present to convict in a crime of this nature,” Fox said. “Motive and opportunity. There can be no doubt that the opportunity was there, and as for the motive . . .”

Fox hammered a few more points home and then sprang his conclusion.

“There is no more plain or eloquent statement to put the crimes of these men into perspective,” Fox said, “than these words by the late General Douglas MacArthur regarding the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Butcher of Bataan.”

He stepped back and read loudly to the court:

“ ‘Rarely has so cruel and wanton a record been spread to public gaze. Revolting as this may be in itself, it pales before the sinister and far-reaching implication thereby attached to the profession of arms. The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence of reason for his being. When he violates that sacred trust he not only profanes the entire cult but threatens the fabric of international society.

“ ‘The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable. They are based on the noblest of human traits—sacrifice. These men,’ ”
Fox said, and as he said it, pointed a finger directly at the table of the accused,
“ ‘have failed this irrevocable standard; they failed their duty to their country, to their enemy, to mankind; have failed utterly to their soldier faith.

“ ‘The transgressions resulting therefrom are a blot upon the military profession, a stain upon civilization and constitute a memory of shame and dishonor that can never be forgotten.’ ”

Fox’s face was flushed when he sat down, and to emphasize his own personal sense of outrage he did not look at the court but stared angrily above them at the American flag hanging on the wall. Groutman and the others stared at their table sullenly.

“Captain?” Maitland said.

Gore rose up slowly, his glasses lower than usual on his nose. In his hand was a copy of the United States
Manual for Courts-Martial,
and he began his closing argument by reading a passage from it:

“ ‘It is true that rape is a most detestable crime . . . but it must be remembered that it is an accusation easy to be made, hard to be proved but harder to be defended by the party accused, though innocent . . .’ ”

Laying the book aside, Gore said, “That, gentlemen, is the kernel of what you must decide in this case—not whether these soldiers sitting here committed rape, but whether rape was actually committed at all.

“The witnesses you have heard have been inconsistent about whether what they saw was rape. Only two of them have actually stated that they saw any of the accused having sexual relations with the alleged victims. The rest are implicated only through conversation. Ask yourselves—is it not common for men to boast of sexual exploits even though they did not actually perform them?”

Gore recounted the testimony of Sergeant Moon, “a senior noncommissioned officer with an honorable record who was at the scene—not once, but twice—and stated emphatically that he did not conclude that what he saw was rape.” The defense lawyer also chipped away at the testimony of Spudhead and Poats, who had initially labeled the activity rape, then waffled under cross-examination. He painted a picture of the accused as all-American boys, nineteen and twenty years old, some of whom had been wounded and received decorations. Finally he attacked the prosecutor’s “rumor”-motive theory as wholly inadequate evidence.

“Men must not be sent to prison on hearsay!” Gore proclaimed righteously. “The defense does not discount that such a rumor might have been spread in the encampment; but if these accused talked of foul deeds, they spoke as men who had seen so much killing and human suffering that it made little difference to them to discuss it in conversation.