Cynthia spoke up. “Rape should not be embarrassing to the victim.”
General Campbell replied, “But it is.”
Cynthia asked, “Did she indicate to you in any way that she was willing to lie them while you went and got Colonel and Mrs. Fowler?”
“No, but I thought it was the best thing.”
Cynthia inquired, “Wasn’t she frightened out of her mind that the rapist or rapists would return while you were gone?”
“No… well, yes, she did say to hurry back. Look, Ms. Sunhill, Mr. Brenner, if you’re suggesting that I did not take the best course of action, then you’re probably correct. Perhaps I should have tried harder to get her loose, perhaps I should have put my pistol in her hand so she could try to protect herself while I was gone, perhaps I should have fired the pistol to attract the attention of MPs, perhaps I should have just sat there with her until a vehicle came along. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this a thousand times? If you’re questioning my judgment, you have a valid point. But do not question my degree of concern.”
Cynthia replied, “General, I’m not questioning either. I’m questioning what actually went on out there.”
He started to reply, then decided to say nothing.
I said to him, “So you drove to the Fowlers, explained the situation, and they went back to assist Captain Campbell.”
“That’s correct. Mrs. Fowler had a robe and a knife to cut the ropes.”
“And you didn’t see your daughter’s clothes anywhere at the scene?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you think to cover her with your shirt?”
“No… I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”
This was the man who, as a lieutenant colonel, led a mechanized infantry battalion into the besieged city of Quang Tri and rescued an American rifle company who were trapped in the old French citadel. But he couldn’t figure out how to aid his daughter. Obviously, he had no intention of offering her aid and comfort. He was royally pissed-off.
I asked him, “Why didn’t you accompany the Fowlers, General?”
“I wasn’t needed, obviously. Only Mrs. Fowler was needed, but Colonel Fowler went along, of course, in case there was trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Well, in case the person who did that was still around.”
“But why would you leave your daughter alone, tied, naked, and exposed if you thought there might be any chance of that?”
“It didn’t occur to me until after I was back on the road. Until I was nearly at the Fowlers’ house. I should point out that the drive to the Fowlers took under ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir. But the round trip, including your waking them and them getting dressed and driving back, would take close to thirty minutes. After waking them and asking for their assistance, the natural response of any person—a father, a military commander—would be to race back to the scene and to secure the situation until the alerted cavalry arrived, to use a military analogy.”
“Are you questioning my judgment or my motives, Mr. Brenner?”
“Not your judgment, sir. Your judgment would have been excellent if your motives were pure. So I guess I’m questioning your motives.” Normally, you don’t question a general about anything. But this was different.
He nodded and said, “I suppose you both know more than you’re letting on. You’re very clever. I could see that from the beginning. So why don’t you tell me what my motives were?”
Cynthia responded to that and said, “You wanted to make her squirm a little.”
The fortifications had been breached, to continue the military metaphor, and Cynthia charged right through. She said, “In fact, General, you knew that your daughter was not the victim of some rapist, that she hadn’t been attacked while waiting out there for you. But, in fact, she and an accomplice called you, played her message, and got you out there for the sole purpose of you and Mrs. Campbell finding her in that position. That, sir, is the only logical explanation for that sequence of events, for you leaving her there alone, for you going to the Fowlers and telling them to take care of it, for you staying behind in their house and waiting for them to return with your daughter and with her humvee, and for you not reporting a word of this until this moment. You were very angry with her for what she did.”
General Campbell sat there, deep in thought, contemplating, perhaps, his options, his life, his mistake a few nights ago, his mistake ten years ago. Finally, he said, “My career is ended, and I’ve drafted a resignation that I will submit tomorrow after my daughter’s funeral. I suppose what I’m thinking about now is how much you have to know to find the murderer, how much I want to confess to you and to the world, and what good it would do anyone to further dishonor my daughter’s memory. This is all self-serving, I know, but I do have to consider my wife and my son, and also the Army.” He added, “I’m not a private citizen, and my conduct is a reflection on my profession, and my disgrace can only serve to lower the morale of the officer corps.”
I wanted to tell him that the morale of the senior officers at Fort Hadley was already low as they all waited for the ax to fall, and that, indeed, he wasn’t a private citizen and had no reasonable expectation to be treated like one, and that, yes, he sounded a little self-serving and that his daughter’s reputation was not the issue at hand, and to let me worry about how much I had to know to find the murderer, and, last but not least, his career was, indeed, over. But instead, I told him, “I understand why you did not notify the MPs that your daughter was staked out naked on the rifle range—indeed, General, it was a private matter up until that point, and I confess to you I would have done the same thing. I understand, too, why and how the Fowlers got involved. Again, I confess, I would probably have done the same thing. But when the Fowlers returned and told you that your daughter was dead, you had no right to involve them in a conspiracy to conceal the true nature of the crime, and no right to involve your wife in the conspiracy as well. And no right, sir, to make my job and Ms. Sunhill’s job more difficult by sending us up false trails.”
He nodded. “You’re absolutely correct. I take full responsibility.”
I took a deep breath and informed him, “I must tell you, sir, that your actions are offenses that are punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
He nodded again, slowly. “Yes, I’m aware of that.” He looked at me, then at Cynthia. “I would ask one favor of you.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I would ask that you do everything you can to keep the Fowlers’ name out of this.”
I was prepared for that request, and I’d wrestled with the answer long before General Campbell asked. I looked at Cynthia, then at the general, and replied, “I can’t compound this crime with a crime of my own.” In fact, I’d already done that by striking a deal with Burt Yardley. But that was offpost stuff. This was not. I said, “The Fowlers found the body, General. They did not report it.”
“They did. To me.”
Cynthia said, “General, my position is somewhat different from Mr. Brenner’s, and though detectives are never to disagree in public, I think we can keep the Fowlers out of this. In fact, Colonel Fowler did report the crime to you, and you told him you would call Colonel Kent. But in your shock and grief, and Mrs. Campbell’s grief, the body was discovered before you could call the provost marshal. There are more details to work out, but I don’t think justice would be served any better by dragging the Fowlers into this.”
General Campbell looked at Cynthia for a long time, then nodded.
I was not happy, but I was relieved. Colonel Fowler, after all, was perhaps the only officer who’d shown some degree of honor and integrity throughout, including not screwing the general’s daughter. In truth, I did not possess that kind of willpower myself, and I was in awe of a man who did. Still, you don’t give something for nothing, and Cynthia understood that, because she said to the general, “But I would like you, sir, to tell us what actually happened out there, and why it
happened.”
General Campbell sat back in his chair and nodded. He said, “All right, then. The story actually begins ten years ago… ten years ago this month at West Point.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
General Campbell related to us what had happened at Camp Buckner, West Point’s field training area. In regard to the actual rape, he knew not much more than we did, or, probably, the authorities did. What he did know was that, when he saw his daughter at Keller Army Hospital, she was traumatized, hysterical, and humiliated by what had happened to her. He told us that Ann clung to him, cried, and begged him to take her home.
He offered the information that his daughter told him she was a virgin, and that the men who raped her made fun of this. She told him that the men had pulled off her clothes and staked her on the ground with tent pegs. One of the men had choked her with a rope while he was raping her, and told her he’d strangle her to death if she reported the assault.
Neither I nor Cynthia, I’m sure, expected the general to provide these small, intimate details. He knew that this incident was only related to the murder in a peripheral way, and there was no clue there regarding her murderer. Yet, he wanted to talk, and we let him talk.
I got the impression, though he didn’t address the issue directly, that his daughter expected him to see to it that justice was done, that there was no question that she’d been brutally raped, and that the men who’d done it were to be expelled from the military academy and prosecuted.
These, of course, were reasonable expectations for a young woman who’d been trying her damnedest to live up to Daddy’s expectations, who had put up with all the hardships that were part of life at West Point, and who had been criminally assaulted.
But there were some problems, it seemed. First, there was the question of Cadet Campbell being alone with five men in the woods at night. How did she get separated from the forty-person patrol? By accident? On purpose? Second, Cadet Campbell could not identify the men. They not only wore camouflage paint, but they had mosquito nets over their faces. It was so dark, she couldn’t even identify the uniforms and could not say for certain if the men were other cadets, West Point cadre, or soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division. In all, there were close to a thousand men and women on training exercises that night, and the chance of her identifying her five attackers was almost nil, according to what General Campbell had been told.
But this was not precisely true, as Cynthia and I knew. By process of elimination, you could begin to narrow the field. And as you got closer to the perpetrators, it was inevitable that one of them would crack to save himself from long jail time. And also you had semen tests, saliva tests, hair tests, fingerprints, and all the other magic of forensic science. In fact, gang rapes were easier to solve than solitary rapes, and I knew that, Cynthia certainly knew it, and I strongly suspected that General Campbell knew it.
The real problem was not identifying who did it; the problem was that the rapists were either cadets, cadre, or soldiers. The problem was not in the area of police science, but in the area of public relations.
Basically, it came down to the fact that five erect penises penetrated one vagina, and the entire United States Army Military Academy at West Point could be torn apart in the same act that had torn Ann Campbell’s hymen imperforatus. These were the times that we lived in; rape was not an act of sex—consensual sex is easily available. Rape was an act of violence, a breach of military order and discipline, an affront to the West Point code of honor, a definitive no vote against a co-ed academy, against women in the Army, against female officers, and against the notion that women could coexist with men in the dark woods of Camp Buckner, or the hostile environment of the battlefield.
The exclusive male domain of West Point had been infiltrated by people who squatted to piss in the woods, as that colonel at the O Club bar would put it. During the academic year, in the classroom, it wasn’t intolerable. But out in the woods, in the hot summer night, in the dark, men will revert to ancient modes of behavior.
The entire field training experience, as I remember too well, was a call to arms, a call to war, a call to bravery, and an intentional imitation of a primitive rite of passage for young men. There were no women in the woods when I took my training, and if there had been, I would have felt sorry for them and been frightened for them.
But the people in Washington and the Pentagon had heard and heeded the call to equality. It was a good call, a necessary call, a long-overdue call. And certainly attitudes and perceptions had changed since I was a young man training for Vietnam. But not everyone’s attitudes changed, and the move to equality proceeded at different paces in different sections of the national life. There are glitches in the system, little pockets of resistance, situational behavior, primitive stirrings in the loins. This is what happened on a night in August ten years before. The commandant of West Point did not announce that a hundred women in the woods with a thousand men did not get raped during recondo training. And he wasn’t about to announce that one did.
So the people in Washington, in the Pentagon, at the Academy, had reasoned with General Joseph Campbell. And, as he related it to Cynthia and me, it certainly sounded reasonable. Better to have one unreported and unvindicated rape than to rock the very foundations of West Point, to cause doubts about a co-ed academy, to cast suspicion on a thousand innocent men who did not gang-rape a woman that night. All the general had to do was to convince his daughter that she—as well as the Academy, the Army, the nation, and the cause of equality— would best be served if she just forgot about the whole thing.
Ann Campbell was given a drug to prevent pregnancy, she was tested and retested for sexually communicated diseases, her mother flew in from Germany and brought her a favorite childhood doll, her cuts and bruises healed, and everyone held their breath.
Daddy was convincing, Mommy was not as convinced. Ann trusted Daddy, and, at twenty years old, for all her world travel as a military brat, she was still Daddy’s girl and she wanted to please him, so she forgot she was raped. But later, she remembered, which was why we were all sitting in the general’s office that evening.
So that was the sad story, and the general’s voice cracked now and then, got husky, got quiet. I heard Cynthia sniffle a few times, too, and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t feel a lump in my throat.
The general stood but motioned us to remain seated. He said, “Excuse me a moment.” He disappeared through a door, and we could hear water running. As melodramatic as it sounds now, I almost expected to hear a gunshot.
Cynthia kept her eye on the door and said softly, “I understand why he did what he did, but as a woman, I’m outraged.”
“As a man, I’m outraged, too, Cynthia. Five men have a memory of a fun night, and here we are dealing with the mess. Five men, if they were all cadets, went on to graduate and become officers and gentlemen. They were classmates of hers and probably saw her every day. Indirectly, or perhaps directly, they were responsible for her death. Certainly they were responsible for her mental condition.”
Cynthia nodded. “And if they were soldiers, they went back to their post and bragged about how they all fucked this little West Point bitch cadet.”
“Right. And they got away with it.”
General Campbell returned and sat again. After a while, he said, “So you see, I got what I deserved, but Ann was the one who paid for my betrayal. Within months of the incident, she went from a warm, outgoing, and friendly girl to a distrustful, quiet, and withdrawn woman. She did well at the Point, graduated in the top of her class, and went on to postgraduate school. But things were never the same between us, and I should have thought of that consequence of my behavior.” He added, “I lost my daughter when she lost her faith in me.” He took a deep breath. “You know, it feels good to talk it out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know about her promiscuousness, and professionals have explained to me what that was all about. It wasn’t just that
she was trying to corrupt the people around me or to embarrass me. She was saying to me, ‘You thought nothing of my chastity, my decision to remain a virgin until I was ready, so what I’m giving to every man who wants it is nothing you care about. So don’t lecture me.’ ”
I nodded but could not and would not comment.
The general said, “So the years pass, and she arrives here. Not by accident, but by design. A person in the Pentagon, a person who was closely involved with the West Point decision, strongly suggested that I consider two options. One, that I leave the service so that Ann might decide to leave also or might decide that her misbehavior was no longer profitable.” He added, “They were quite honestly afraid to ask for her resignation, because she obviously had something on the Army, though she never had a name. My second option was to take this uncoveted command at Fort Hadley, where the Psy-Ops School has its subcommand. They said they would have Ann transferred here, which would be a natural career assignment for her, and I could solve the problem in close quarters. I chose the second option, though my resignation would not have been unusual after the success in the Gulf and my years of service.” He added, “However, she told me once that if I ever accepted a White House appointment, or ever accepted a political nomination, she would go public with this story. In effect, I was being held hostage in the Army by my daughter, and my only options were to stay or to retire into private life.”
So, I thought, that explained General Campbell’s coyness regarding political office or a presidential appointment. Like everything else about this case, this Army post, and the people here, what you saw, and what you heard, were not what was actually happening.
He looked around his office as though seeing it for the first time, or the last time. He said, “So I chose to come here to try to make amends, to try to rectify not only my mistake but the mistake of my superiors, many of whom are still in the service or in public life, and most of whose names you would know.” He paused and said, “I’m not blaming my superiors for putting pressure on me. It was wrong what they did, but the ultimate decision to cooperate in the cover-up was mine. I thought I was doing what I did for good and valid reasons—for Ann and for the Army—but in the final analysis, they were not good reasons, and I was selling out my daughter for myself.” He added, “Within a year of the incident, I had my second star.”