Homecoming Continued

After my return from Vietnam, I was sent to Ft. Lewis Washington.  As a newly arrived lieutenant, I was assigned an extra duty as special court-martial defense counsel. This involved a military court proceeding which also included a judge, a prosecutor and three jury members- all of us were officers with no legal training.  Out of the blue, I had been pulled into the Army legal system.  This assignment sparked my interest in a legal career.

My first case was in early 1969 and was to defend an 18-year-old soldier accused of going absent without official leave or AWOL.   He had been drafted into the Army in June 1968, along with 50,000 others.  The demand for soldier replacements in the Vietnam War was skyrocketing and that included my defendant.  The draft medical qualifications were meager at the time.  What I was to learn shortly was that the Army system and bureaucracy had treated him with gross injustice.  

He told me he went AWOL when his company commander assigned him permanent daily barracks latrine duty because he refused to work or drill in the sun.  He claimed to have a severe allergy to the sun but his personnel file included no medical record of such an allergy.  He described an inherited condition of getting a severe and painful red rash and blisters on any skin exposed to the sun.  I believed him and felt the absurdity and injustice of drafting an 18-year-old with an allergy to the sun and sending him to Vietnam.  The prosecution, on the other hand, was seeking the 6-6-1 penalty- 6 months forfeiture of pay, 6 months confinement, and rank reduction to enlisted level 1.

My sense of injustice and determination kept growing as various levels of the army command structure showed indifference to my defendant’s sun allergy claim.  After much stonewalling by the Army, I finally obtained from an Army fort in Seattle his medical records that had been filed incorrectly and separately from his personnel file records.  The medical records documented that he had suffered severe and painful sun allergy blisters in his first week in Vietnam, was shipped to Japan for treatment, and then unbelievably reassigned to Ft. Lewis for general duty.

I learned of the military appellate court case books at Ft. Lewis and spent several days reading them and writing a legal defense argument.  At the trial I introduced the medical records into evidence, along with evidence of his mistreatment by everyone in the Army that dealt with him- he never should have been drafted.  The three-officer jury voted 3-0 for a 6-6-1 sentence.  I immediately argued vigorously that I would appeal the injustice through the Army legal and command system.  I was called aside by the senior officer and judge and told not to act but to wait until the next day.  The next morning the senior officer called me into his office and told me the special court-martial convening colonel had been briefed on the case and agreed with me about the Army mistreatment of my defendant.  The colonel had talked to my defendant’s parents and said he was granting my defendant an immediate general discharge from the Army, with no penalties or record.  Because of this experience, I applied for law school and spent 35 years practicing law.