“Forgive me, Sir John. A figure of speech. I meant to say that the U.S. Marines have a reputation for aggressiveness. Surely this is true?”
“Marines are light infantry troops who specialize in amphibious assault. We were pretty well trained, but when you get down to it we weren’t all that different from any other kind of soldier. It’s just a matter of specialization in a particularly tough field,” Ryan answered, hoping to throw him a little off balance. Marines were supposed to be arrogant, but that was mostly movie stuff. If you’re really good, they’d taught him at Quantico, you don’t have to be arrogant. Just letting people know you’re a Marine was usually enough.
“Assault troops?”
“Yes, sir. That’s basically correct.”
“So, you commanded assault troops, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Try not to be too modest, Sir John. What sort of man is selected to lead such troops. Aggressive? Decisive? Bold? Certainly he would have more of these qualities than the average foot soldier?”
“As a matter of fact, sir, in my edition of The Marine Officer’s Guide, the foremost of the qualities that the Corps looks for in an officer is integrity.” Ryan smiled again. Atkinson hadn’t don6 his homework on that score. “I commanded a platoon, sure, but as my captain explained to me when I came aboard, my principal job was to carry out the orders he gave me, and to lean on my gunny — my platoon sergeant — for his practical experience. The job I was in was supposed to be as much a learning experience as a command slot. I mean, in business it’s called an entry-level position. You don’t start shaking the world your first day on the job in any business.”
Atkinson frowned a bit. This was not going as he’d expected.
“Ah, then, Sir John, a leftenant of American Marines is really a leader of Boy Scouts. Surely you don’t mean that?” he asked, a sarcastic edge on his voice.
“No, sir. Excuse me, I did not mean to give that impression, but we’re not a bunch of hyperaggressive barbarians either. My job was to carry out orders, to be as aggressive as the situation called for, and to exercise some amount of judgment, like any officer. But I was only there three months, and I was still learning how to be an officer when I was injured. Marines follow orders. Officers give orders, of course, but a second lieutenant is the lowest form of officer. You take more than you give. I guess you’ve never been in the service,” Ryan tagged on the barb at the end.
“So, what sort of training did they give you?” Atkinson demanded, either angry or feigning it.
Richards looked up to Ryan, a warning broadcast from his eyes. He’d emphasized several times that Jack shouldn’t cross swords with Red Charlie.
“Really, basic leadership skills. They taught us how to lead men in the field,” Ryan replied. “How to react to a given tactical situation. How to employ the platoon’s weapons, and to a lesser extent, the weapons in a rifle company. How to call in outside support from artillery and air assets –”
“To react?”
“Yes, sir, that is part of it.” Ryan kept his answers as long as he thought he could get away with, careful to keep his voice even, friendly, and informative. “I’ve never been in anything like a combat situation — unless you count this thing we’re talking about, of course — but our instructors were very clear about telling us that you don’t have time to think very much when bullets are flying. You have to know what to do, and you have to do it fast — or you get your own people killed.”
“Excellent, Sir John. You were trained to react quickly and decisively to tactical stimuli, correct?”
“Yes, sir.” Ryan thought he saw the ambush coming.
“So, in the unfortunate incident before this court, when the initial explosion took place, you have testified that you were looking in the wrong direction?”
“I was looking away from the explosion, yes, sir.”
“How soon afterwards did you turn to see what was happening?”
“Well, sir, as I said earlier, the first thing I did was to get my wife and daughter down under cover. Then I looked up. How long did that take?” Ryan cocked his head. “At least one second, sir, maybe as many as three. Sorry, but as I said earlier, it’s hard to recall that sort of thing — you don’t have a stopwatch on yourself, I mean.”
“So, when you finally did look up, you had not seen what had immediately transpired?”
“Correct, sir.” Okay, Charlie, ask the next question.
“You did not, therefore, see my client fire his pistol, nor throw a hand grenade?”
Cute, Ryan thought, surprised that he’d try this ploy. Well, he has to try something, doesn’t he? “No, sir. When I first saw him, he was running around the corner of the car, from the direction of the other man, the one who was killed — the one with the rifle. A moment later he was at the right-rear corner of the Rolls, facing away from me, with the pistol in his right hand, pointed forward and down, as if –”
“Assumption on your part,” Atkinson interrupted. “As if what? It could have been any one of several things. But what things? How could you tell what he was doing there? You did not see him get out of the car, which later drove off. For all you know he might have been another pedestrian racing to the rescue, just as you did, mightn’t he?”
Jack was supposed to be surprised by this.
“Assumption, sir? No, I’d call it a judgment. For him to have been racing to the rescue as you suggest, he would have had to come from across the street. I doubt that anyone could have reacted anywhere near fast enough to do that at all, not to mention the fact that there was a guy there with a machine gun to make you think twice about it. Also, the direction I saw him running from was directly away from the guy with the AK-47. If he was running to the rescue, why away from him? If he had a gun, why not shoot him? At the time I never considered this possibility, and it seems pretty unlikely now, sir.”
“Again, a conclusion. Sir John,” Atkinson said as though to a backward child.
“Sir, you asked me a question, and I tried to answer it, with the reasons to back up my answer.”
“And you expect us to believe that all this flashed through your mind in a brief span of seconds?” Atkinson turned back to the jury.
“Yes, sir, it did,” Ryan said with conviction. “That’s all I can say — it did.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve been told that my client has never been arrested, or accused of any crime?”
“I guess that makes him a first offender.”
“It’s for the jury to decide that,” the lawyer snapped back. “You did not see him fire a single shot, did you?”
“No, sir, but his automatic had an eight-shot clip, and there were only three rounds in it. When I fired my third shot, it was empty.”
“So what? For all you know someone else could have fired that gun. You did not see him fire, did you?”
“No, sir.”
“So it might have been dropped by someone in the car. My client might have picked it up and, I repeat, been doing the same thing you were doing — this could all be true, but you have no way of knowing this, do you?”
“I cannot testify about things I didn’t see, sir. However, I did see the street, the traffic, and the other pedestrians. If your client did what you say, where did he come from?”
“Precisely — you don’t know, do you?” Atkinson said sharply.
“When I saw your client, sir, he was coming from the direction of the stopped car.” Jack gestured to the model on the evidence table. “For him to have come off the sidewalk, then gotten the gun, and then appeared where I saw him — there’s just no way unless he’s an Olympic-class sprinter.”
“Well, we’ll never know, will we — you fixed that. You reacted precipitously, didn’t you? You reacted as you were trained to by the U.S. Marines, never stopping to assess the situation. You raced into the fray quite recklessly, attacked my client and knocked him unconscious, then tried to kill him.”
“No, sir, I did not try to kill your client. I’ve already –”
“Then why did you shoot an unconscious, helpless man?”
“My Lord,” prosecutor Richards said, standing up, “we have already asked that question.”
“The witness may answer on further reflection,” Justice Wheeler intoned No one would say that this trial was unfair.
“Sir, I did not know he was unconscious, and I didn’t know how long it would be before he got up. So, I shot to disable him. I just didn’t want him to get back up for a while.”