Mission Compromised (9 page)

 

 

Before boarding his flight at National Airport, Newman tried to call his sister in Newport, Rhode Island, to tell her the awful news about their brother. Nancy had followed her mother's footsteps into nursing—but in the Navy instead of the Army. Now Nancy was a lieutenant in the Navy and was running a ward at the Naval Hospital where her husband was a doctor. Newman secretly envied his sister for finding a mate who seemed to love her as much as she loved him, for being able to see each other every day, and for having two great kids. Trying hard not to let the sadness in his heart be heard in his voice, he left a message on Nancy's home phone, asking her to page him as soon as she got the message.

Exhausted from his desperate all-night vigil, Newman did what most professional soldiers do aboard ships, planes, or vehicles in which they are merely passengers: he was asleep before the wheels
were up on the U.S. Air commuter jet. He awoke with a start almost two hours later as they began their descent into Albany. Whether it was the brief nap or the effects of the adrenaline that had been coursing through him for the previous thirty-two hours, Newman felt strangely alert. It was the kind of thing he'd experienced in combat—an extra measure of awareness, a sharpening of focus. Colors were brighter; sounds he would normally have ignored in the background were pronounced.

When the cabin door opened, Newman grabbed his overnight bag out of the overhead compartment and made his way to the Hertz counter. He signed the paperwork and walked hastily outside into the crisp, early autumn air. Finding the numbered space for the car he'd rented, he threw his bag into the Pontiac and exited the airport toward N.Y. Route 9, heading south for Kinderhook and a meeting that filled him with dread.

It was almost 4:00 P.M. when he pulled into the driveway of the little farm he still thought of as home. The sun, almost down in the west, was hitting the two big maples that stood like sentinels at the entrance to the drive. The trees were just beginning to change from green to what would soon be riotous hues of red, orange, and yellow.
How many times did Jim and I rake those leaves together?
he thought to himself.

As Newman rounded the curve in the drive, he could see the old, white farmhouse surrounded by the white picket fence that he and Jim had been press-ganged into painting during a high-school summer vacation. There was the red barn where he and his brother had played in the loft, and from which they had been summoned to meals, arriving with hay hanging from their hair. Behind the house and barn was the little apple orchard where on long summer days the Newman
boys had played soldiers, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and capture the flag—always on the same side against other boys in the neighborhood.

Newman felt a deep sickening feeling in his gut as he remembered his brother, and he choked back the sob that caught in his throat.

And then he noticed the strange car in the driveway. It wasn't his dad's big Lincoln or his mother's red Jeep Cherokee. If they were home, their vehicles would be, in accord with “Newman Family Standard Operating Procedures,” parked in the garage.

Newman pulled up beside the dark-green Ford Crown Victoria. The plate on the back read,
U.S. Government GSA-3721.
But on the door in small block printing it said,
U.S. Army.
He felt at once sick and then a little ashamed. He felt guilty because he had a sense of relief that he didn't have to be the one to tell his parents that their son was dead.

Instead of going around to the front entrance, he let himself in the back door without knocking and walked into the “the boys' mud room” as his mother called it. Once inside, he walked quietly through the kitchen, dining room, and front hallway into the living room. His father was seated on the couch, leaning forward, elbows on knees, talking quietly to two men in Army dress green uniforms who were seated on straight-back chairs. His mother was nowhere to be seen, although Peter could detect the faint scent of the only perfume he could ever remember her wearing, Chanel No. 5. He recalled that when he and Jim were little boys, they would chip in every Mother's Day to buy her a bottle of it.

All three men looked up and rose as one when Peter entered the room. The younger Newman walked up to his father, and without a word, embraced the older man as both began to cry unashamedly.

Neither of the Newman boys had ever seen their dad cry. He was their hero. He had been wounded leading a platoon of the Eighty-second Airborne Division in France in World War II. During Harry Truman's “police action” in Korea, a Chinese communist bullet had punched a hole in his gut and a grenade had mangled his legs. While the doctors were trying to patch him back together in a hospital in Japan, a pretty Army nurse named Alice Atkinson was working to mend his shattered spirit.

By the time Major John C. Newman was well enough to go back to the States, he and the pretty nurse were in love. And even though she was almost nine years younger than the badly wounded soldier, she agreed to marry him. Alice Atkinson and John Newman were married in the chapel at Fort Meyer, Virginia, in April of 1955. His colleagues from the Army staff, in their dress uniforms, formed an arch of swords for the bride and groom to walk beneath as they exited the chapel under a hail of rice thrown by her fellow nurses.

The birthplaces of the Newman children reflected the nomadic odyssey of a typical American military family. Peter was born the following May in the Army hospital at Fort Drum, New York. Nancy, the only girl, arrived in 1957 in the Army hospital at Crailsheim, Germany. And Jim was born in 1960 in Italy while their dad was commanding the Airborne Brigade at Livorno.

When the Vietnam War began in earnest in 1965, the now Brigadier General John Newman volunteered to lead one of the first Army units to deploy from Fort Benning, Georgia. But when he went to get his predeparture physical, the doctors found that adhesions from his old stomach wounds were obstructing his intestines. Two bouts with the Army surgeons were followed by a quiet retirement ceremony and a family move to a small farm along the Hudson River,
north of Kinderhook, New York. The reluctantly retired brigadier general took an executive position with General Electric in Schenectady.

Now, holding his father this way—feeling the convulsions of the older man's chest against his, his dad's once-powerful shoulders shaking uncontrollably beneath his arms—it abruptly occurred to Peter Newman that his father was suddenly an old man. It had been only four months since they had last seen each other. His father and mother had stayed with Peter and Rachel for a night when they were in Washington for a reunion of the Eighty-second Airborne, the unit he'd fought with at Normandy. In the brief time since he saw him last, Brigadier General John C. Newman had seemingly aged dramatically and was now showing every one of his seventy-two years.

The two men stood like this for several moments, and then, despite their grief, began to collect themselves. Still holding the older man, Peter spoke over his father's shoulder. “I'm so sorry, Dad,” he said, the tears still streaming down his own face.

He could feel his father's whiskers against his cheek, his father's hair against his forehead. The hint of Old Spice mixed with the witch hazel his father always wore as an aftershave reminded the younger man once again of countless camping and hunting trips with “the three Newman boys” huddled against one another in the darkness.

“Thank you for coming, Peter. Your mother will be pleased. She's upstairs in the bathroom. She'll be back down in a few minutes,” the old man said, his voice constricted, barely controlled and hardly above a whisper. And then, after standing this way for a few more moments, the officer and gentleman in him reasserted control over the grieving father, and he broke the embrace with his son and said, just barely
composed, “Gentlemen, this is my son, Peter. He's a major in the Marines. Peter, this is Colonel Edward Robertson. We served together in the Airborne. He's now the chief Army inspector at the GE plant in Schenectady. Major Olson here is the chaplain for the Army Reserve district in Albany.”

The two men in uniform shook hands with the younger Newman, and they all sat back down, Peter taking a place on the couch beside his father. Colonel Robertson spoke first, following a script as old as warfare itself: “Major Newman, I am the casualty assistance officer for your brother. As you apparently already know, Captain Newman was killed in action last night by hostile fire in an engagement in Mogadishu, Somalia. The Secretary of the Army extends his sincere condolences…”

Peter sat numbly through the ritual: the intonations of sympathy, the declaration that details would be forthcoming, the chaplain's offer—politely refused—to pray with the family, and finally the promise to be in touch to make arrangements for interment.

Then, just as the two uniformed officers stood to take their leave, Alice Newman entered the room and choked back a sob as she saw her sole surviving son. Peter rushed to her, and the tears came again as he embraced his mother, her head on his chest. The colonel and the chaplain stood, looking down at the carpeted floor as the son tried to console his mother.

Alice Newman had opened the door to the two officers a half hour before Peter arrived. Even before the sad-eyed Colonel Robertson could utter a word, she knew why he and the chaplain were there. She had spent too many years as the wife of a career soldier to have any hope that this was anything but the worst news a mother could ever get—that one of her cherished children had preceded her in death.

With a gasp, her hand flew to her breast where she had nursed her children, and she turned and shouted in a voice that sounded almost strangled, “John, come quick! Oh dear, John… hurry! Something terrible has happened!” And then, with the two officers still standing silently outside the door, the afternoon sun shining on their uniforms, she leaned against the door and began quietly sobbing.

Brigadier General John Newman had rushed to the front door from his study off the living room. When he saw the two officers, he too knew in an instant the purpose of their visit, but other than putting a consoling arm around his wife, his demeanor hardly changed. “Gentlemen, please come in,” he said as he escorted them to chairs in the living room.

Alice Newman had quietly endured the terrible, emotionally wrenching brief from the colonel and the chaplain for fifteen minutes, saying nothing as her husband, a comforting arm around her shoulders, asked questions about their son's death, for which these officers, as yet, had no answers. Then, convinced that a mistake had not been made, she had excused herself. “I must get another handkerchief,” she said, holding out the balled-up white cloth she'd been using to soak up her tears.

Alice Newman had gone upstairs and sat on the bed she shared with her husband, cried some more, then gone to the bathroom, washed her face, applied some fresh lipstick, a touch of color to her cheeks, and had come back down to attend to the men in her living room as was expected of a general's wife.

Now, in the arms of her oldest son, she was crying again. It broke Peter's heart to hear his mother cry. And again, just as had happened minutes before when holding his grieving father, Peter Newman realized that his mother, now sixty-three, would never be young again.

His mother's greatest happiness had always been her children. Even when her “kids” were grown, she still craved the holidays—especially Thanksgiving and Christmas—times when they were all together, when parents and children, and now grandchildren, gathered with joy and laughter in her big country kitchen. They would all take turns chiding Jim about getting married before he got too old. Now he never would, and those family gatherings would never be the same. They would always be tinged with sadness from the searing loss of Alice Newman's second son.

And in that instant, arms around his devastated mother, anger began to merge with the grief in Peter Newman's heart. A two-bit African gangster had stolen his only brother and his mother's happiness. It was then that a craving for vengeance began to smolder in his gut.

For the Newman family, the next ten days were a haze of tears and grief. His sister Nancy paged him that Monday evening, shortly after the colonel and the chaplain had departed. On Tuesday, October 5, mother, father, and son drove to the Albany airport and met her when she arrived on a flight from Providence, Rhode Island. The Mailgram from the Secretary of the Army was waiting for them when they got back to the farm.

Later that night, after their parents had gone to bed, Nancy confronted Peter in the kitchen. “Why didn't Rachel come up with you?”

“She had crew training. I didn't have time to track her down.”

Nancy glared long and hard at her older brother, who finally said, “Sis, this isn't the time to talk about it.”

She continued to stare until the Marine shrugged and went upstairs to bed.