Command, I legally own all the operational forces of the U.S. Army—other branches, too, but this is really an Army matter. The soldier involved is a Company First Sergeant (E-8) named Sam Driscoll. He’s a special ops soldier, part of the 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning. I pulled his personnel package. He’s a very serious soldier, combat record is excellent, a poster-boy soldier and a hell of a good Ranger.”
“Okay.” Ryan thought about that addition. He’d been to Fort Benning and had gotten the standard VIP tour of the base. The Rangers, all spit and polish for that day, had impressed him as supremely fit kids for whom killing was at the top of their job description. Special operations types, the American counterpart to the British SAS regiment. “What’s the problem?”
“Sir, a while back we got an intel blip that the Emir might be in one particular cave, and so we detailed a special operation to go in and try and bag him. It turned out he wasn’t there. The problem, sir, is that Driscoll killed nine bad guys, and some people are upset about how he did that.”
Ryan was two bites into his sandwich. “And?”
“And it came to the President’s attention, and he directed DOJ to prosecute him for—that is, to investigate this incident for—a possible murder investigation, since it may or may not have violated an executive order for battlefield conduct. Driscoll took down nine people, some of them asleep.”
“Murder? Awake or asleep, they were enemy combatants, right?”
“Yes, sir. Driscoll had an adverse tactical situation, and in his judgment as the senior NCO on the scene, he had to eliminate them before continuing the mission. And so he did. But the guys at Justice—all political appointees, if that matters—seem to think he should have arrested them instead of killing them.”
“Where does Kealty come into this?” Jack asked, sipping some of his Coke.
“He read the report, and he was upset by it. So he brought it to the AG’s attention, and then the AG sent one of his people down to me to commence the investigation.” Diggs set his sandwich down. “Sir, this is hard for me. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the President is my commander in chief, but goddamn it, this is one of my soldiers, a good soldier, doing a tough job. I have a duty to be loyal to the President, but—”
“But you have a responsibility to be loyal to your sergeants,” Ryan finished the statement.
“Yes, sir. Driscoll might not be much in the great scheme of things, but he’s a fine soldier.”
Ryan thought this one over. Driscoll was only a soldier to Kealty, a low form of life. Had he been a union bus driver it might be different, but the U.S. Army didn’t have unions yet. For Diggs it was a question of justice, and a question of morale, which would suffer throughout the armed forces if this soldier went to prison, or even to a general court-martial over this incident.
“Where’s the law on this?” Jack asked.
“Sir, it’s a bit of a muddle. The President did send out orders, but they were not terribly clear, and anyway, such orders do not generally apply to special operations. His mission was to locate and capture this Emir guy if they found him—or kill him if that’s how it worked out. Soldiers are not policemen. They’re not trained for it, and they’re crummy at it when they try. From where I sit, Driscoll didn’t do anything wrong at all. Under the rules of war, you don’t have to warn an enemy before you kill him. It’s his job to look out for his own safety, and if he screws up, well, that’s his tough luck. Shooting a guy in the back is perfectly all right on a battlefield. That’s how soldiers are trained. In this case, four bad guys were asleep in the racks, and Sergeant Driscoll saw to it that they didn’t wake up. End of story.”
“Is this going to go any further?”
“The Assistant AG seemed to be pretty worked up about it. I tried to explain the facts of life to him, but he just tried to explain the facts of life back to me. Sir, I’ve been a soldier for thirty-four years. I ain’t never heard anything like this.” He paused. “The President sent us there. Just like into Iraq, but he’s running this like—like Vietnam was once, I suppose. We’ve lost a lot of people, good people,