We Were Beautiful Once Read Online Free Page B

boy’s chest, palpating, peering deep into the body; running blood to the lab, scribbling on charts, searching for the pathogen destroying his son’s lungs.  Jamie survived.  This, he knew, was what drove him to undertake the quest for Roger, because he, like Jamie’s physician, was now linked to a son’s fate.
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    Five weeks later, Nick filed suit in Federal Court.  The government responded by assigning Bertram Harris, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, a seasoned lawyer that oozed oily success and a smug confidence in his ability to play the game, making him an ideal advocate for the army litigation machine.  When after nearly six months, Nick had obtained a court order obligating the Army to turn over its declassified files, Harris, playing for time, made high-sounding arguments that the records were scattered between Washington and Seoul, and it would take an army to reassemble them.  After several court hearings, Federal Judge Joe Lindquist observed that the Army was, after all, “an army” and told the government’s lead defense attorney that if they did not produce, “some Army record’s custodian is going to be hauled into my court to face contempt.”  But, the best evidence would be kept from Nick under the heading of “national security.”
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Witnesses to What?
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    THE YEAR 1982 WAS COMING TO A CLOSE, AND NICK was up against a fast approaching trial scheduled for the summer of ’83.  He had made little progress tracking down and talking to potential witnesses.  This was caused partly by government stonewalling, partly by a lack of funds and partly by lack of help.  Nick reached out to the local law school and found Kathy Rutherford and Mitch LeBeau willing to work for a stipend. They helped him painstakingly sift through a redacted CIA list of Camp 13 POWs that he had hoped might shed light on what happened to Roger.  Kathy, a stout woman with a Norman Rockwell face, had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday the week before Nick hired her.  She dressed thirty-something and behaved forty-something, with a speech pattern shaped by a blue-blooded Yankee upbringing.  Mitch, with hair banded in a short ponytail, proudly wore thick glasses that lended credence to a New York lefty, skeptic persona that forced Nick to justify his every out-of-the-mainstream machination.
    Nick took his first really deep breath in late January 1983 when, in one of a mere handful of files submitted by the army, he discovered Roger Girardin mentioned in an Army Intelligence memo about an operation called Little Switch in April 1953.  Entitled “ Missing in Action ”, it read: Several sources in Camp No. 13 report date Girardin last known alive: February 1953 .  
    Nick did not need witnesses to confirm what had happened in the fall of 1950, between October 26 and December 11, when the North Koreans and Chinese Communists had captured tens of thousands of Americans, but he did need someone who could talk about what had happened to the men, and Roger in particular, from when they were captured until the Armistice in mid-1953.  
    â€œI need one or more of those guys who saw Roger in the camp,” he said, “then we could possibly win a reclassification.  Go back over the Army intelligence reports from Panmunjom to see who else might have slipped through the crack.”  Though Mitch and Kathy were diligent, they were coming up with a big fat zero.  Nobody remembered Roger Girardin.
    Mitch burrowed through the short stacks of government released files, phone books and maps while Kathy pored over Art Girardin’s notes made during his needle-in-the-haystack searching at the Archives.  Meanwhile, Nick interviewed the POWs from Camp 13 his team had found.  The men who had been in Camp 13 all related the same inhumane conditions—bone-piercing cold or brain-searing heat, coupled with