Chapter 7
The part I didn't expect was the part with my name on it.
Mullins got a defense counsel — a captain out of the trial defense service who called me two days after Nakamura's meeting and asked if I'd come in and "clarify a few things" about the timing of my pocket log. Not on the record. Just a conversation. Just to help them understand what they were dealing with.
I said yes. I shouldn't have, but I said yes, because I was twenty-three and my first sergeant told me it would look good and because I still thought I was the one in control of the version of the story being told.
It took eleven minutes to figure out I wasn't.
The captain was polite. She was so polite it felt like being handled. She asked me when I'd started the notebook. I told her. She asked me if I'd ever shared the notebook with anyone in my chain of command before the shove. I said no. She asked why not.
"Because I didn't know if anyone would believe me," I said.
"And when you finally showed it to Sergeant First Class Nakamura. That was after the shove?"
"Yes."
"Not before?"
"No."
"So for fourteen months you were documenting discrepancies and never reported them."
"I was on lane one. I document what comes through lane one."
"And you never took it up the chain."
"I didn't know what I was looking at."
"You didn't know you were looking at signatures on vehicles that never crossed your lane?"
That one sat in the air. I didn't have an answer that didn't sound like the answer they wanted.
"If the command determines that the shove was unrelated to the documentation," the captain said, "would you say your pocket log would have surfaced anyway?"
"I don't know."
"Would it?"
"I don't know."
She wrote something down. She closed her folder. She told me I'd done the right thing and that she appreciated my time, and she walked me out of the building into the parking lot, and I sat in my car for twenty minutes before I could turn the key.
The story they were building was smaller than the story I knew. In their version, Mullins was a guy with a bad morning. I was a junior soldier who'd hoarded a notebook for over a year. The shove was the shove. The rest was a coincidence that happened to line up behind it.
The rumor mill smelled it. By the end of that week I heard the phrase "obsessive junior soldier" twice from people who thought I couldn't hear. I heard that the defense was going to argue that I'd been building a case against Mullins for a year — not because I'd seen anything, but because I didn't like him. I heard I was the one who needed to be "looked at."
I lost three pounds that week. I didn't sleep.
The night before the Article 32, Nakamura called me at 21:40 and told me to meet him at Gate 3 at 05:45. He said two words.
"Bring everything."
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