Chapter 59: Colonel Featherstone

When I woke again, everything seemed very bright. Not the bright at the end of the tunnel, just bright, like a bright room. By the time I got around to opening my eyes, I fell asleep again. It seemed like this went on a few more times before I managed to get my eyes open enough to see where I was. I could see a white ceiling of some sort, and I tried to move, but I couldn’t move. I could feel things, but I couldn’t move. I was able to turn my head, and rise slightly, and it looked like I was in a hospital room.

I must be alive, I thought to myself. If I had died, I didn’t think Heaven was a hospital room, although the odds were very long that I would be anywhere near Heaven. No, the reverse was far more likely, and while Hell might indeed be a hospital room, it didn’t seem likely. Maybe Limbo is a hospital room, but I was Lutheran, sort of, and we don’t believe in Limbo or Purgatory or any of the other Catholic waiting rooms to eternity.

I tried to move some more and managed to raise my head a little more. I was strapped to the bed. Well, at least my new prison cell was more comfortable than my last one. That wore me out a little, and I fell back asleep.

The next time I woke up was when a nurse was in the room. She must have been fiddling with something on me because my eyes came open and she noticed. She smiled brightly at that, and said, “Oh, good! You’re coming awake! How are you feeling?”

I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t even croak out an answer. She brought over a small cup of water and a straw. “Try this.” It was difficult to drink that way, but I got enough in me to make a response. “Would you like to be up some?”

This time I managed to croak out, “Yes.”

She went behind my head and cranked on the bed, and slowly my head raised. When I was at about a thirty-degree angle, she stopped, and we tried again with the water. I drained the cup. It tasted like ambrosia. “Thank you,” I whispered. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Thank you.” That sounded a little better, almost human.

“A little more?” she asked.

I sipped some more water and worked it around and over my lips. I could feel with my tongue that somebody, probably a nurse, had rubbed some Vaseline or something on my lips to keep them from cracking. I cleared my throat some more, and said, “Thank you. What happened? Where am I?” Now I sounded almost myself again.

The nurse looked at me nervously. “Do you know your name?”

“Huh? I’m Carl Buckman, Captain Carl Buckman, 1^st of the 319 ^th. Why? Where am I? What is this place?” She looked relieved. Maybe she thought I had amnesia. “What’s going on? Am I still in prison?” I looked around the room. My hands were Velcroed to the sidebars of the bed, which was why I couldn’t move them. Another reason I couldn’t move was that my right leg seemed to be wrapped in bandage and elevated like it was in traction. I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The nurse was still trying to answer the prison comment when I rattled my arms against the bedrails briefly. “Any chance you can unstrap me? I don’t think I’m going anywhere.”

That at least got another smile. Pretty girl. “We did that while you were asleep, to keep you from messing with the IVs and lines. If you promise to leave them alone, I’ll let you loose.”

“I give you my word as an officer and a gentleman, or at least as an officer. The gentleman part is questionable at best.” I smiled and waggled my eyebrows at her.

“I think I’m safe enough for the moment,” she replied, and unstrapped my hands.

I promptly used them to scratch myself, moving slowly because of the intravenous lines. “You have no idea how good that feels!” She laughed as I scratched my body and arms. I wasn’t in very much pain, although my torso seemed very tender, and I could feel bandages all over my left side. That stopped me. That was new.

“You never said where I was, or what’s happening,” I told her.

The smile disappeared. “You’ll need to talk to the doctor. I’ll let him know you’re awake. I’ll bring you dinner in a few minutes,” she told me, glancing at her wristwatch.

I just nodded. I wasn’t going to get any answers from her. I could see a frosted glass window with wire mesh embedded in it, and when she left, I heard a distinctive click as she latched the door. I must be in a prison hospital ward of some sort. It still beat my last accommodations. Maybe I could call a lawyer from here.

Dinner proved to be some broth and juice. I was promised that if I was good, at my next meal I might get some Jell-O as a dessert. Wow, talk about your incentives! I could barely contain my excitement.

About an hour or two later the nurse returned with a doctor. I wasn’t sure, since there wasn’t a clock in my cell, or whatever it was. Right after he said hello and introduced himself as Doctor Bancroft, I asked him, “Where am I? What’s happening?”

“We’ll get to that later,” he answered, dodging the question.

“Thanks, Colonel,” I said with a grimace. I knew I was still in a military prison, since he had eagles on his collars under his white coat.

He gave me an odd look at that, but started to examine me, while the nurse, who had first lieutenant’s bars on her collars, took notes and wrote things down. It was a standard examination (“Does this hurt? Does that hurt?”) after which I learned a little about what was going on, at least regarding my condition.

The date was 24 November, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I had been in the hospital for four days now. The first three I had been sedated and unconscious while I healed up. I had gotten an intestinal infection from drinking polluted water, which was why I had the shivers and the runs in the cell, but it wasn’t clear whether I drank the polluted water on the hike back to civilization or in my basement cell. In fact, when I asked directly, Doctor Bancroft refused to discuss it. I was on an antibiotic regimen currently.

The bandages and tape on my left side were both to help my ribs heal (three were cracked, but not broken) and to cover the stitches in my side and back. They had opened me up to stitch up some lacerations in my left kidney, which had been discovered when I was pissing blood. A tube was still in place to drain off fluid. That was the extent of my internal injuries. Most of my torso was a rainbow of colors from the beating and bruising. I was now moving from the mundane black and blue into greens and yellows. The doctor didn’t comment on my beating, just on the effects of it. He seemed very impressed that I was able to stand up when I was found. Me, not so much; his clinical detachment was starting to piss me off.

The worst damage was to my right knee, which was why it was wrapped and immobilized. Again, the doctor refused to comment on whether the damage was the result of my bad landing, or my jailer kicking me. Either way, it was serious. He suspected major ligament damage and tearing, and surgery was necessary, at least after I was strong enough.

“Oh, good. That way I’ll be able to walk to my hanging,” I told him. He didn’t respond.

He also didn’t respond when I pressed him on where I was. After the examination he simply left, taking the nurse with him. He did tell me, however, that it was about 1600, and I was going to be eating soft foods for a while. Since I was conscious again, about half the tubes and IVs could be pulled, but I still had a catheter in, and solids wouldn’t be good until we could do something where I could walk again, as in walk to the bathroom. At the prospect of using a bedpan for Number Two, suddenly broth and Jell-O looked like good choices!

I slept fitfully that night. My rest was not helped by a nurse taking my temperature every four hours. Breakfast was at 0700. At least I could get the nurses to tell me what time it was when they made their rounds.

At 0800, my delicious repast of juice and yogurt consumed, the latch on my door clicked and my nurse came in. She took my temperature and blood pressure, and then took my tray away. However, as she was leaving, another voice sounded, one that seemed vaguely familiar, saying he was entering, and we were to be left alone. I turned around to see who was coming in.

It was the colonel who I had saluted in the cell in basement. He must have been the one who got me out of there. He came over to the side of the bed and said, “Good morning, Captain Buckman. My name is Featherstone. How are you feeling?”

I eyed this man warily. “I’m feeling better now than I was in that basement.”

He nodded and smiled. “Yes, I expect you are. That’s really why I’m here, to talk to you about that. I’m from the JAG Corps in Washington.”

Well, that explained a few things. Dorne must have been able to contact somebody after all, although whether that was good or not, I didn’t know yet. Featherstone had the distinctive patch of the Military District of Washington on his sleeve, a naked sword superimposed over the Washington Monument. The standing joke was that whenever they forgot where they were, they were to look at their sleeves so they could look for the monument and find their way home. The sword was to make a bunch of pencil-pushers feel brave.

“Okay. Where am I?”

“You’re at the base hospital at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba,” he replied calmly.

I wasn’t so calm. My most recent memories of Gitmo were from after 9-11, when it became a military prison for terrorists and anybody else the government could convince itself was a national security threat. Ultimately, it would house more American citizens than Arab terrorists. “GITMO! You sent me to Gitmo? Jesus, the Army wasn’t bad enough, you had to give me to the Navy?” Featherstone laughed loudly at this. At least one of us was enjoying himself.

“What the hell am I doing in Gitmo?” I asked. “Doesn’t Leavenworth have a prison ward in the hospital?”

“Oh, this isn’t the prison ward. It’s the NP ward, neuropsychiatric. That’s why it’s all locked up.”

Sweet Jesus! This just kept getting better and better! “The psych ward? You put me in the psych ward? It’s not enough to put me in prison, you have to label me as a Section 8, too? Why don’t you just shoot me with a silver bullet and drive a stake through my heart while you’re at it!” I looked away from him for a moment and contemplated my surroundings. I turned back and said, “You know, screw you! I want a lawyer. Get me a lawyer and get the fuck out of here. I don’t care who you are. I want a lawyer and I want one now.”

Surprisingly, Featherstone just stood there and smiled, and didn’t complain about my cursing a superior officer. “Captain, relax, you’re not under arrest, and you’re not in the NP ward.”

“Yeah? You just told me I was in the nut shack. If I’m not in jail, then get me a goddamned phone! I’m calling my wife!” Marilyn wouldn’t understand this, but she could call a lawyer for me.

He held his hands up in a placating gesture. “Relax, Captain Buckman. I simply had you stashed here while I sorted out this clusterfuck. As soon as we’re done talking, I’ll get you a telephone. Just relax and let’s talk first.”

I nodded warily, and he relaxed some. “Good. Now, just hold on a second, this is going to take some time.” He went back to the door and opened it, making me figure that he was leaving me and locking me back in jail. Instead, he simply opened it and yelled out to a nurse for a stool. She brought it back and he thanked her, and then he carried it over by my bed. I was still sitting upright from breakfast, and now he could look me in the eye.

Featherstone reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels and a lighter. He searched around and scrounged up a plastic cup, which he poured some water into. Then he lit up a cigarette, right there in the hospital! I mean, yeah, it wasn’t like later years, when the health Nazis would have arrested him, but still! “You mind?” he asked, seeing the look on my face. “That was a rhetorical question. I’m a colonel, you’re a captain. I don’t care if you mind. Want one?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay, let’s talk. Lieutenant Dorne contacted somebody in JAG HQ. He’s pretty green, but he called somebody who called somebody else, and it landed way up at the top of the food chain. I’ve been assigned to sort it all out. That’s why it took a couple of days for us to find you, captain.”

“You were sent down by the Pentagon?” I asked.

“Not precisely. The Army JAG office is in Arlington, but not in the Pentagon itself. Nearby, though. That doesn’t matter, though. Just be glad Dorne was able to call home. He was under orders not to, but he knew enough to know those were illegal orders. I flew down on a C-11. That’s what I had you flown out on, too.”

What the fuck was a C-11? “What’s a C-11?” I asked.

“Military version of a Gulfstream II. Sweet little bird! They have a newer and bigger version called the Gulfstream III now, a C-20. Sort of like a Learjet. That’s not important. I had them load you and a doctor on it and had it fly you here, to Gitmo. That got you out of Hawkins’ reach and under the care of the Navy and the Marines,” Featherstone said. He dropped his cigarette butt in the cup of water and pulled another from the pack. He was a chain smoker.

“Huh.” That explained the funny looks when I called the doctor ‘Colonel’. He was actually a Navy Captain. I looked at the colonel. “So, this was all Hawkins’ idea? He’s the one on my ass?”

Colonel Featherstone gave me a pained look. “Captain, how can you say such a thing! Brigadier General Hawkins knew nothing about your problems! Why he was shocked, shocked that there was gambling going on there!”

I rolled my eyes at the reference to Casablanca. Outstanding movie, although Marilyn never appreciated it all that much. Featherstone had just told me that Hawkins was in it up to his eyeballs.

Featherstone went on to explain, “The general was very disappointed in your improper radio procedures, but certainly didn’t consider that much of an offense. Instead, he ordered the Provost Marshal, Major Carmichael, to investigate. It was Carmichael who decided you had violated every precept of good military order and needed to be punished, not the general.”

“Uh, huh,” I muttered.

“Yes. Major Carmichael explained, however, that he never knew what was happening in the basement. He had told Staff Sergeant Walsley that he wanted you to confess, but not that you were to be harmed. He just wanted him to talk to you and convince you of the error of your ways.”

“Shit flows downhill, huh, Colonel?”

“You seem to have a succinct grasp of the situation, Captain Buckman,” agreed Colonel Featherstone.

“Crap!”

“Needless to say, once I began investigating, General Hawkins allowed me to clear up all the confusion. I was able to interview all the men who dropped with you, your commanding officer, your regular troops, even the helo crew that pulled you out. That’s where I’ve been for the last few days, after I put you on the plane here. Chasing down everything. That’s why I couldn’t let you talk to anybody until I got things settled down.”

“Is that your job? Pentagon fixer?”

Featherstone gave me a ghostly smile. “Why? You need any tickets taken care of, Captain?”

I snorted at that. Featherstone was the Army JAG Corps hammer, sent out to fix problems. Every outfit has one. He’d never make general, but nobody, not even generals, wanted to piss him off. “So, what happened to my men?” I asked.

“Which ones? Battery B or Company C?”

That made me start for a second. I had almost forgotten about Battery B, my regular outfit! “Both.”

“Lieutenant Fletcher took the battery back to Bragg a few days ago. They left their 105s behind as a gift to the Honduran Army. They’ll be getting new ones back at home.”

I nodded at that. I had heard that was under consideration. Now they would have new toys to play with, even if they were the same model as before. “And Company C?”

“They’ve gone home, too. Private Smith is probably medicalled out, but you saved his leg and his life. The doctors said another day and he’d have lost the leg for sure. The other guys just got some sprains and strains mostly.”

“Good. They’re damn fine troops, all of them,” I replied.

“They thought quite highly of you, too. By the time I talked to them, Company C was considering an assault on the headquarters building, and Battery B was going to provide artillery support. That idiot second john they had wasn’t very popular, that’s for sure. What’s your take on him?” asked Featherstone.