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  Battlemind

  A Military Legal Thriller

  Michael Waddington

  Copyright © 2020 Michael Waddington

  Printed in the United States of America. First printing, 2020.

  Battlemind.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, at the address below.

  Michael Waddington

  4581 Weston Road, Suite 384,

  Weston, FL 33331

  [email protected]

  Battlemind/ Michael Waddington -- 1st ed.

  ISBN-13: 978-1712187845

  Dedication

  To Mom and Dad, for teaching me to

  fight for justice in the face of adversity.

  BATTLEMIND - A soldier’s inner strength to face fear and adversity with courage, self-confidence, and mental toughness.

  United States Army Definition (2005)

  DISCLAIMER

  This story is fictional. None of the characters are real people. The soldiers, lawyers, judges, investigators, family members, and everyone else in this book are fictional, including Sergeant Jefferson and his family. None of the characters or events depict the author’s past clients, cases, or experiences. The story in this book is a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or businesses, companies, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  The woods outside my childhood home were as treacherous as an Asian rain forest to my brother and me. After school and during summers, we crawled elbow over elbow on our bellies along our jungle floor. We pressed tight against the trees, holding our breath as we stalked the enemy. We knew every frame and line of Rambo as completely as we knew the trees and streams around our house. We never fought over who would be Rambo; we both were.

  One thing that made it possible for me, Max O'Donnell, a scrawny little kid, to see myself as this insane, badass, ex-Army soldier, was the knife my dad gave me for Christmas when I was 10. My older brother, Ricky, got a knife that Christmas too. His was a Ka-Bar, an official U.S. Marine Corps fighting knife, with a thick blade and a leather handle. Mine was flimsier, but it was a replica of Rambo's. It had a nine-inch curved steel blade with top edge serrations so sharp, they could cut through barbed wire.

  When I, like Rambo, escaped the prisoner of war camp and crept through the forest, I got my bearings from my knife's compass. I started fires with matches from its secret watertight chamber. I loved that Rambo started off alone, with no chance of surviving, and took on a hundred Russian soldiers with nothing but his brains, his brawn, and his knife.

  We weren't the first members of our family to stalk these woods. Our great-great-great-great-grandfather, John O'Donnell, fought in the Revolutionary War battles of Trenton, Long Island, and Brandywine as part of the First Pennsylvania Rifle Regiment. After the war, the government was too broke to pay the soldiers, so they gave them each 360 acres of Pennsylvania's western frontier. O'Donnell was among the veterans who made their way up the Beaver River in 1794 to claim this bounty.

  By the time my brother and I defended these woods, time and generational financial troubles had whittled the family territory down to two acres, and the frontier had shifted to the playground at St. Francis Catholic School. On that postage stamp of asphalt, it was the Italians versus everybody else.

  The downfall of American manufacturing in the 1980s hit Westfield hard. The steel and tin mills on the banks of the rivers running through the town moved to Pittsburgh and then overseas. The city quickly fell to ruin, as the industry collapsed. In my fourth-grade year, there were 40 kids in the class. The next year - the Rambo knife year - there were 15.

  Around town, we saw fathers who had gone from working the factory lines and then the picket lines, to cleaning the grounds of the county jail in their inmate jumpsuits. When you can't feed your family, you do what you have to do until you get caught. Many of the nice kids "went south" (as my dad would say) and became thugs.

  In Westfield, when I was growing up, you didn't have to go looking for a fight, a fight would always come looking for you. Some guys are born fighters. Others, like me, had to learn the hard way. Mornings at St. Francis School were brutal. The basketball stars, all Italian kids, lined up around the outside lunch tables with their slutty girlfriends draped over their shoulders. They stood loose and relaxed as if they were standing in their own backyards, wearing shiny tracksuits with gold crucifixes plumped up on their budding chest hair. They'd taunt all the other kids from the moment they entered the yard.

  Often, one of them would step in front of a kid and say, "Wachyou lookin' at?" Or worse, "You gotta problem wit' me?"

  By the end of my seventh-grade year at St. Francis, these morons, and my dad's orders to "never back down," had combined to make me miserable. My older brother wasn't around to help defend me anymore, so I attended morning mass to avoid having to brawl it out in the schoolyard. Church felt depressing. Nothing made any sense, and I began to have doubts about God.

  The nuns, the Catholic teachers, and everybody else knew that the supposed coolest kids in school were terrorizing the weaker ones. The priests would tell us to turn the other cheek, to forgive. For me, that wasn't an option. That asked for more trouble. I knelt in church every morning, chanting and bowing so that I wouldn't have to fight every day.

  Hunkering down in the church wasn't enough, though. One afternoon after gym class, I saw Donnie Fiorello push a buddy of mine into a wall.

  "Hey, cut it out," I said.

  "So, you think you're tough?" Donnie thrust out his chest.

  I didn't reply.

  Donnie and I stood face to face. A middle school standoff. His overly made-up, under-clad girlfriend giggled. I'll never forget the sound of her high pitched "he-he-he-he," as she stood there with her poufy hair, chubby face, and gapped teeth.

  She tittered, "Kick his ass, baby."

  Donnie slapped me, and I snapped. I grasped his hair and slammed his face into the gym's metal door. He dropped to his knees, dazed.

  "Donnie!" she cried.

  I walked away feeling like a big man, but as Rambo says in First Blood, "Nothing is over."

  At three o'clock, the school bell rang, and Donnie's gang of friends approached me. "We're gonna take this outside," one said.

  "You're dead meat," another threatened.

  When I walked into the street in front of the school, I found out I was fighting four guys, and none of my friends dared accompany me. We walked to an alley behind the church. There I stood with my back to a chain-link fence, my stance wide, arms tight at my sides, fists clenched. I scrambled into the fight, and my untied sneaker lace caught on one of the chain links. I fell to the ground. Then, all four of them started kicking me in the face and ribs. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth.

  "You guys stop! Stop it right now!" A mother. Salvation. "You guys have a game tonight," she said. "You don't want to hurt your shooting hand. Let's go! Do not argue with me, Joey Pavano. Let's go." I knew this woman, a leader in the Catholic Youth Group, and I was one of her students. She pointed at my battered face as she walked away and said, "You boys can deal with this later, but not on church property."

  I'm not going to describe every fight I got into, just the ones where I learned something. I learned something then. I learned that when you're heading into trouble
, make sure your shit is tied down before you get into it and never count on backup. That applies to everything in life. I also learned that not every bully is standing on a corner, smoking a cigarette. They must have someone in power supporting them, or they can't survive.

  That night, during family dinner, Dad noticed my black eye. "Who won?" he asked.

  I didn't answer. I scurried to my room, while Dad ranted about me being "a goddamn weakling." The next day I signed up at a local boxing gym. Run by the Fraternal Order of Police, it had become an after-school refuge for people like me. Kids trying to deal with life's problems, whether it be poverty, abuse, or bullies, by using their fists.

  Sergeant John Mullarkey, a retired Pittsburgh cop, ran the gym. He and Dad grew up together, but I did not want Dad involved. So, I asked the sergeant to keep my boxing a secret, and he agreed. Mullarkey had a gentle way of motivating me. Though he was anything but soft. I had to give 100 percent, or he would say, "O'Donnell, I can tell ya' don't want to be here. Go home, quit wasting my time." These words hit me harder than any name-calling ever would.

  Mullarkey had me working the heavy bag until my knees buckled. I moved on to the speed bag, combos, and footwork. Every day, I owed him 200 pushups and 50 pull-ups before I could head home. In a few months, my strength, speed, and skill had increased, and I could hold my own when sparring with the other kids.

  Redemption came on my thirteenth birthday. Dad and I went to see my brother Ricky's baseball game. I proudly wore my vintage Roberto Clemente Pittsburgh Pirates jacket. Mom was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Her loyalties had a rock-solid order of priority: God, family, and Clemente. The jacket, sporting a block "21" on the sleeve, had been one of the last gifts she gave me before she succumbed to breast cancer.

  Halfway through the game, my dad was sitting in the stands waiting for my brother's team to finish. I was goofing around on a hill next to the field, playing tag. I saw Chris Tomassi too late. Classic bully. In my grade, but two years older and twice my weight - he was the perfect combination of stupid and mean.

  "Nice jacket, you fuckin' spic," he said, and he took my jacket. I tried to snatch it back. He whipped it at me, and the zipper clawed my face. I started bleeding. I ran to my dad, like a whimpering puppy. My dad doesn't talk much. Our conversations are short, no bullshit. He asked me what was going on. I stood there about to cry with him looking up at the hill, and then back at me. Meanwhile, Tomassi had stolen some kid's bike. He was riding around wearing my jacket, terrorizing other middle school children.

  "What's going on?" Dad asked.

  I lied: "Nothin'."

  "Maximillian O'Donnell, where's the jacket your mother gave you?"

  I shrugged.

  "Get it back. It's your jacket."

  "But... uh... I... how... not sure." My stammers were not making a lot of sense.

  "Dad?" I asked. "How?"

  "Battlemind," he said, tapping his forehead with his right index finger. That was it. One word. "Pay attention. Your brother's up." Dad didn't take his eyes off the game. He just repeated, "Battlemind."

  Hot with rage at my dad, at the kid, at myself, I went charging back up the hill. My mind went blank as I started punching that big kid in the face. I don't remember the blows that landed, only the ones that missed. Suddenly he was crying. I walked to the car, with my jacket wadded up in my bloodied, throbbing fist. I felt bad about it, but I also felt good. I had my jacket back. My dad didn't say anything. He'd left it all to me, even the victory. That kid never bothered me again. With that, I'd joined the fight.

  It was more than that, for my brother and me, raised in this carved up, strip-mined, backwater on a diet of Hollywood heroism. We were not Rambo, and this was no Asian jungle. We were just a bunch of dumb kids slugging it out. There had to be something else, a place big enough for our ambitions. That place, we decided, was the Army.

  We saw the military as a place where we could be as big as our courage, as big as Rambo. He lived by his own rules, made his own order. We didn't pick up the contradiction in the fact that what kept Rambo going was how much he wanted to go back and stab the bureaucrat who sent him there. Ricky and I both enlisted in the Army while in high school. I was later commissioned as an Army officer through the ROTC program.

  At 18-years old, the Army assigned me to a Reserve Military Police Unit in Pittsburgh. There, I thought I'd meet some real heroes: guys who'd fought in the first Iraq war and who could tell me what it was like to be a warrior.

  Imagine my surprise when it turned out that the unit was basically a drinking club. One weekend a month each soldier got a $100 check that they mostly spent on half-price booze at the Army liquor store, the Class 6. These were the soldiers our nation held in reserve, paid to be ready at any moment to save our country.

  Were we going to go on maneuvers? No, we didn't have enough gas for the vehicles. Well, how about if we shot off some rounds at the firing range? They didn't have any ammo to shoot, and their weapons were rusted. Our job was what they called "vehicle maintenance."

  One time, some soldiers and I were sitting in an Army vehicle listening to the Steelers game on the radio. During commercial breaks, I was reading a book called Rogue Warrior, by an ex-Navy Seal. Our commanding officer approached.

  "Put the book down, Private O'Donnell," my sergeant said as the officer neared.

  "Huh?" I was confused.

  "You're making us look bad."

  "What?"

  "If you're sitting in the vehicle, he'll think you're testing it, but if you're reading, he knows you're not."

  So, this was the military? These were the heroes? Where was the fight? Yes, I wanted the fight, but I still wanted something worth fighting for. What was that?

  Justice. I decided that I wanted to be a JAG.

  Getting into the Army Judge Advocate General Corps isn't easy. Candidates from the best law schools in the country compete for a handful of openings. From the moment I arrived at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, for the four-month JAG course, I was told again and again about the JAG Corps' proud tradition as America's oldest law firm, started by General George Washington, no less.

  I quickly learned the irony of looking for justice in the military. There is an old joke that "military intelligence" is an oxymoron. "Military justice" is another one. In the Army, a vigorous defense of your client is not considered a smart career move. I was frequently reminded that as Army lawyers, we were "all in this together." I was advised to "not rock the boat" or "burn any bridges."

  At my first trial, I saw the prosecution's shotgun approach to charging the defendant. Courts-martial charge sheets are typically three or four pages long, usually with the same conduct charged repeatedly in a variety of ways. The strategy was to overwhelm the defendant so that he had no choice but to plead guilty. In many cases, the soldiers were made to feel guilty even when they were not.

  As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on, more and more soldiers were accused of war crimes. Most of these men weren't killing machines that turned savage at the battle line. They were guys like me in many ways, who built a notion of American manhood from the scowls of their pissed off dads and the words of action movie heroes. They were men who had had the Greatest Generation shoved down their throats and were told they were too lazy and corn-fed to match that glory, men who saw 9/11 as their chance to prove themselves.

  The fight on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan was not so straightforward. Often, it wasn't clear who the bad guys were. In the War on Terror, your instincts, vague rules of engagement, and conflicting orders could easily betray you, and when the Army needs someone to blame for a mishap, it charges the enlisted man.

  As an Army lawyer, I had a memory of myself getting picked on in school. The truth was, that by this point, I liked to fight. I had been doing it for so long. It didn't feel right not to be defending something, even if afterward hardly any of those battles seemed worth it.

  Facing an opponent in the moments before the first pun
ch, my mind was sharp, a clarity I found nowhere else, except for the courtroom. At that moment, some part of me stretched back to John O'Donnell, making his way up the river knowing the woods were full of enemies, and the other boats might be too. That state of hyperawareness was also a state of calm, the absence of fear in a stillness where movement and thought were one. This is the state my dad called "Battlemind."

  Chapter 2

  Sangar Air Base, Afghanistan - August 2002

  Sangar Prison pounded the nose with a mixture of sweat, the ammonia of stale urine - and something else. At Sangar, you could always smell fear. Prisoners without clout and men without boundaries combined for a toxic cocktail of mistreatment.

  The "guests" of Sangar deserved to be there, most of them. They'd been stalked, captured, caged, and labeled "enemy combatants." They were men without freedom, men without rights, and men without hope.

  The political climate after the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, engendered a gunslinger approach: "shoot first and ask questions later," or "just beat the shit out of someone because the feel of knuckles on flesh unleashed your inner rage, and it felt good."

  Sangar Air Base lay shrouded in a perpetual smog of smoldering feces. Commandeered by the U.S. Military in December 2001, a single 10,499-foot runway bisected the massive compound. Military and contract personnel slept in tents, so it wouldn't look like a permanent occupation. Constructed in 1977, and used as a base of operations for the Soviet Union's ill-fated attempt to invade Afghanistan, Sangar was steeped in a history not even the clatter of construction or the whine of jet turbines could render irrelevant. A hodgepodge of Army Reservists served as guards at the secretive military detention facility located in the center of the complex.