“I didn’t come all this way to watch some clerk talk to a computer!”

I turned and saw a gorilla-size silhouette darken Jacowicz’s doorway.

Judge March bulled past the orderly and planted his feet in the middle of Jacowicz’s office. The old boy wore a black suit with the sleeve pinned and a bow tie. I looked closer. The button-size fabric rosette in his lapel was pale blue with white stars. It was the first one I’d ever seen. The old boy was a Medal of Honor winner.

Jacowicz cocked his head. “Who the hell are you?” Then he stretched his neck forward toward Judge March’s lapel and the Medal of Honor rosette. The only reward America’s highest decoration actually brings you is that everybody up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff owes you a salute.

Jacowicz straightened and snapped off a sharp one.

The judge returned it. “My name is March. Formerly Colonel March, Captain.”

His Honor a full bird? Damn!

“Sir, what are you doing here?” Jacowicz asked.

“I’m here for Trainee Wander’s graduation from Basic. With no goddam planes flying it took me thirty-six hours on a train.”

Jacowicz and I looked at him like he’d grown fur.

“Jason sent me an invitation.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jacowicz.

“Trainee Wander was once what you might call a customer of mine. I traded my rank for a judgeship years ago. But when I called for more information about the ceremony I heard about Jason’s problems and about this upcoming hearing.”

Ord. He had to have talked to Ord.

Jacowicz thrust out his jaw. “It’s not upcoming. It’s over.”

“You know better, Captain. Whether the proceeding stays closed is entirely within your discretion.”

Jacowicz stared at Judge March. “Why would I want to reopen the matter?”

“I’d like to speak on behalf of Trainee Wander.”

“As a former field-grade officer, and a judge, you know he’s not entitled to counsel.”

“He’s entitled to fair treatment! As an officer who served with your father, I know that!”

Jacowicz stiffened. “You’re Dickie March?”

Judge March nodded. He reached his one hand across Jacowicz’s desk and touched a framed picture angled toward us. A gray-haired man in fatigues who looked like Jacowicz smiled, a foot on the bumper of an old-fashioned Hummvee. “He was one hell of a soldier.”

Jacowicz blinked. “Thank you, Colonel. Judge.”

Jacowicz straightened the picture and cleared his throat. “What did you want to say?”

“Trainee Wander came to the Infantry as a result of events I set in motion. I thought it would be good for him. And he for it. I still do.”

“He committed a grave offense.”

“I understand Trainee Wander took a very normal dose of nonprescription, perfectly legal medication on a single occasion.”

“And the regs are crystal-clear on the consequences of such behavior. Especially in light of aggravating circumstances. A trainee died. In combat it could have been far worse.” Jacowicz shook his head.

“In combat we understood that even good soldiers make mistakes. And good soldiers are hard to find.”

Jacowicz pressed his lips together.

“You know what your father and I did during the Siege of Kabul? When there was nothing to do all day but duck when enemy artillery came in?”

Jacowicz squinted while he nodded politely. So did I. The old fart was rambling.

“We sat around on cots and swapped stories. And we smoked a little grass.”

My jaw dropped. Not because I couldn’t understand him. “Grass” was old slang for marijuana. It was illegal back then.

Jacowicz seemed to know it, too, because he shook his head, slowly. “I find that incredible.”

“I find it incredible that you think your father would have told you everything he did in his off-duty hours. And that you think it made him a worse soldier. Do you think the army would have been well served to get rid of us if we’d gotten caught?”

Jacowicz pushed back from his desk, spun his chair, and looked out the window with his back to us.

Judge March looked at me and tapped a finger under his chin.

I nodded and raised mine.

in the distance Here engines whined then died as a transport landed.

Jacowicz spoke without turning to us. “Come back in fifteen minutes.”

Judge March and I stood in the company street. “Your Honor, thank you. Thank you so much! For coming. For eveiything.”

Judge March turned to me and flicked his eyes to inspect my shoeshine. “You wear the uniform well. How have you been, Jason?”

“Not so great like you heard.” It all seemed incredible. That Qrd had taken my part. That the judge had come here. That he’d been a decorated, field-grade officer.

Judge March pointed at the mess hall, with its vacant horizontal ladders and that scrawny sapling shivering bare in the breeze. “You think an old soldier could scrounge a cup of coffee in there?”

Three minutes later Judge March and I hunched over coffee cups at an empty mess-hall table while the kitchen grunts clattered around in back burning evening chow.

He sipped. “You ever do any drugs besides that Prozac stuff?”

“Never. Swear to God, Your Honor.”

He nodded. “If I ever hear different, I’ll pin your ears back.”

I wrinkled my brow. When the judge was young, body piercings were wick. But his tone now seemed punitive.

“Sir, why did you do this for me?”

He shrugged. “If you got discharged, you would have been back on my docket. I hate a messy docket.”

“Oh.”

He stared into his coffee, then looked up and grinned. “No. I just thought you were a kid with potential who needed a push in the right direction. I still do.”

Just about now mat was the nicest thing anybody ever said to me. I shook my head. “Sir, that is such a coincidence that you served with the captain’s father. And that you and he, you know, smoked up.”

The judge poured from the glass sugar shaker into his coffee with his remaining hand. He set down the shaker, picked up a spoon, and stirred. “Son, there’s a saying among the criminal defendants who come before me. They think I don’t know it.”

“Sir?”

“If the truth won’t set you free, lie your ass off.”

He sipped coffee, shrugged, and watched my jaw drop. The mendacious old son of a bitch.

We sat and drank coffee for minutes.

The mess-hall door opened and Jacowicz’s orderly poked his head in. “Wander! Captain’s ready for you.”

I squeezed my cup tighter.

“Move your ass, man!” The orderly pulled his head back and let the door slam. I must’ve jumped a foot.

When we got back, Jacowicz shooed the judge out.

The captain rocked in his chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “About that marijuana business. My father told me all about Colonel March. Dickie March was a good soldier but a rule-bender. They drank together but neither of them ever touched a joint.”

My blood chilled. Jacowicz had caught my defender in a lie that slandered Jacowicz’s dead father.

“Wander, do you know how Judge March won his Medal of Honor?”

I shook my head.

“During the Second Afghan War, my dad and Dickie March were the only survivors when a surface-to-air rocket knocked down a helicopter. My dad broke both legs. Major March’s arm was crushed and pinned by wreckage. The wreck caught fire. Dickie March used an entrenching tool and hacked off the tissue threads that attached his own arm so he could drag my dad out before the wreck exploded. Then he evaded enemy patrols for three days, carrying my dad on his back, until they were rescued.”

Jacowicz rocked back in his chair and fingered another frame, a holo of a pretty woman holding a baby. “I’d sacrifice anything for my wife and my son. But parents and children rarely actually have to make those sacrifices. Soldiers do. In combat, what we fight for isn’t God or country or even the people we love back home. We fight for the GI next to us. They’re more family to us than anyone else we’ll ever know.”