I was born to survive calamitous events.
At least, that’s what my mother always claimed.
Whenever she recalled the great earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco in 1906, she would tell everyone how I was only a few months old at the time and was snoozing on a Murphy bed when the quake hit. Instead of its usual reluctance to spring upright and tuck itself into the wall, with the first tremor the bed snapped itself back and held me securely against the strongest interior support while the exterior of the house crumbled away.
After the quake, when my parents finally managed to reach the bed and pull it down, there I was, looking somewhat startled, but otherwise happy and content. By another stroke of luck, I had even been turned right side up.
Such recollections were far from my mind in late November 1944, however, when as usual I rose with the sun. The war in Europe was going well. Our Allied forces were moving steadily forward on a broad front across Europe. The Canadians had secured the Beveland Peninsula and the entrance to the vital port of Antwerp; the British Second Army was mopping up the Geilenkirchen salient after heavy fighting; and the American Third Army, under General Patton, was about to penetrate the Maginot Line. In Italy, the British and the Americans were driving steadily north along the Mediterranean coast, while on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, the Canadians, Poles and British were advancing on the city of Ravenna. Meanwhile, the Russians were moving toward Budapest after having driven the Germans out of Romania. In the Pacific, the American Navy was celebrating its victory in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in which it had sunk the last of Japan’s aircraft carriers.
I cannot recall the exact date, but that morning in Washington, D.C., the sun was bright. The city’s foliage was at its best: a rich green-gold, yellow and burnished bronze, electrifying in its beauty. I looked longingly at the golf clubs standing in the corner of my bedroom, especially at the new putter with which I had been practicing with great success, and I thought of a number of schemes I might employ to escape from my office at the Pentagon and hit the golf course.
I could almost hear my ball drop into the cup of the eighteenth hole, and I could feel the crisp dollar bills that I would win when I remembered that I was supposed to meet that morning with Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke, the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 (Army Intelligence). My heart sank. I didn’t realize it, but I was about to be dropped into some truly calamitous events.
As a Major in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, I had recently served as the Assistant Recorder to the Army Pearl Harbor Board’s investigation, during the period July 24 to October 19, 1944, into the greatest military defeat in American history. Some unusual things had occurred during this investigation, and after the Board submitted its final reports, it became apparent that information had been withheld from the investigating officers. I also suspected that the Board had been given tainted testimony. I didn’t know exactly what information had been withheld, nor did I know the extent of the questionable testimony given to the Board. But I had been asked to investigate.
My mission this day on behalf of the Army’s Judge Advocate General was to gain access to and review the Japanese radio messages the Americans had intercepted and which had been given to the Army Board as evidence. I was a relative newcomer to this code breaking, and I needed the messages to supplement a study that Col. William Hughes and I were writing on the findings and recommendations of the Army Pearl Harbor Board for a report that the Judge Advocate General would submit to the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson. Although I sat on the Army Board as a Recorder, I had never seen the intercepts and I needed to know what they said. In turn, Stimson would make his report to Congress and the nation about what had gone wrong at Pearl Harbor.
The man who held the key to the decrypted messages I needed to review was General Clarke. I suspected that he had been involved in whatever hanky-panky had taken place with the Army Board, and I knew he was going to be a hard nut to crack. His office was famous for never giving out any information, even the time of day.
In those days, only a tiny number of people knew about our having broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor. Nor did the public know that General Clarke, as Commander of the Army’s Communications Intelligence Operations, had been the courier between the Army’s Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, and the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, in the election of 1944. Somehow, I am not sure how exactly, Dewey had learned that the United States had broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor. His campaign strategy was obvious: to charge that the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been aware of the Japanese intentions to attack Pearl Harbor but had done nothing to prevent it. In turn, this brought America into the war against the Axis powers, which Roosevelt had wanted and the Republicans had been trying to prevent. Needless to say, if Dewey followed this strategy, he would probably win the election.
However, General Marshall feared that a presidential campaign revealing the greatest secret of the war, that we had broken the enemy’s codes (those of both Japan and Germany), would endanger the Allied war effort, to say nothing of starting a bitter political struggle between Republicans and Democrats. It might needlessly cost thousands upon thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives, plus prolong the war, if not make our goal of unconditional surrender by the Axis impossible.
So Clarke had carried a special message from Marshall to Dewey, in which Marshall asked Dewey not to discuss the issue of breaking the Japanese codes during the campaign. A true patriot, Dewey acquiesced to the Chief of Staff’s request. It cost him the election. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office that November 1944. (The nation had no idea how ill Roosevelt was at the time.)
I knew that Clarke had an explosive temper. Although quite a decent person, he laced his language with frequent bursts of profanity. He was tall, with a great shock of black hair that sometimes streamed like rivulets over his ears and forehead. From experience in dealing with him, I expected that if I was going to get the documents I needed, I’d have to slug it out, toe to toe.
I was pleasantly surprised when I entered Clarke’s office and he said, “Clausen, how the hell are you? Take a seat.”
I sat, and then reminded him about our earlier phone conversation, that Colonel Hughes and I were reviewing the Army Pearl Harbor Board’s findings and that I needed to check the decrypts.
“Ordinarily, I’d tell you to go to hell,” Clarke replied with cheerful good humor that amazed me. “If the Japs ever learned we’d broken their Purple codes, it could cost us the damn war. But I’ll level with you. Before you came, I checked with a higher authority. I was told to give you whatever you wanted and to cooperate fully. I don’t understand why. I think it’s dead wrong.”
“Well, maybe it’ll keep me from going off half-cocked like the Army Pearl Harbor Board seems to have done,” I said. “We don’t need another fiasco.”
“You’re damned right about that,” said Clarke. He ordered a portable desk set up alongside his own and handed me one file folder after another filled with decrypts of Japanese messages. It took several hours to go through the lot and be briefed on their meaning, but I finally got all the messages that the Army Board had seen. Clarke had true copies made while I waited. He then bound them together in a special folder. As he handed them over, he said, “Clausen, guard these documents as though they are vials of nitroglycerin. If you lose a single one, may God have mercy on your soul.”
I put the file folder in my special briefcase, locked it, put it under my arm and hurried to my office.
Mine wasn’t an ordinary office. The outer door was made of steel and had a big combination lock for a doorknob. It looked like a bank vault. No one could enter without the permission of Colonel Hughes or myself, and access was so tightly restricted that only we had the combination for the door. Inside, there were no desks with drawers, only flat-topped tables plus row upon row of armored file cabinets, each with its special combination lock, containing all the records of the Army Pearl Harbor Board and related papers.
It was nearing noon, and I found it difficult to work the combination of the outer door with my briefcase under my arm. Suddenly, I heard my telephone inside start to ring, so I put the case down, spun the dial frantically and got to the phone before the calling party hung up. I immediately recognized the voice as that of the secretary for Gen. Myron Cramer, the Judge Advocate General.
“Major Clausen?”
“Hi, Bernice.”
“Major, I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. The General wants you to join him in a meeting with Secretary of War Stimson at two P.M. today.”
“Please tell the General I’ll be there. What’s up?”
“The Secretary of War is worried about how the public will react to the report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board. He has asked General Cramer to brief him and make recommendations.”
“Okay. I think I can help, and thanks for the tip. I bet you thought I’d snuck off to play golf this morning. Actually, I was with General Clarke.”
“I know,” Bernice said.
The way she said “I know” made me nervous. Something was up.
Although it was getting on toward lunchtime, this wasn’t a day to go to the cafeteria for coffee. I made a cup of tea and sat at my table eating the sandwich I’d brought from home, trying to figure out what was going on.
The memoranda about potential errors in the Army Board’s two reports I had prepared with Colonel Hughes had obviously struck home with someone. But with whom? And why?
The problems with the Board’s report (in reality there were two reports, one Secret and one Top Secret, the latter dealing with the issue of the breaking of the Japanese codes) were myriad. The Board members had reached mistaken assumptions about when the Japanese had actually set sail on their way to attack. They preferred to believe that the Japanese had dispatched their attacking force toward Pearl Harbor as a result of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s proposals of November 26, when in fact the Japanese fleet had gone to sea before that date. (The report said that Hull had to bear some responsibility for Pearl Harbor because his message to Tokyo of November 26 “was used by the Japanese as a signal to begin war by the attack on Pearl Harbor.”) There also were errors about spying in Hawaii, and claims that the Japanese had their submarines inside Pearl Harbor before the attack. The Board found that the Army commander on the spot, Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short, had failed to alert his command adequately for war. But then the Board had gone on to fault the War Department for not ordering Short to prepare “an adequate alert,” and for not keeping Short properly informed about the ongoing diplomatic negotiations between Japan and America.
The Board had also been extremely critical of the actions of Chief of Staff Marshall. He was accused of failing to keep his immediate staff properly informed about developments, of failing to brief General Short adequately and of failing to send Short “important information” on December 6 and 7 that would have warned Short that an attack was coming. Lastly, the Board said that Marshall was responsible for not knowing that Short’s command was not prepared for war. In brief, the Army Board was saying that, like Short, Marshall should be relieved of command.
There were other criticisms, but the primary ones were aimed at the Secretary of State and the Chief of Staff. I didn’t know it at the time, but Marshall had been so devastated by the report that he had told Secretary Stimson he believed the report had destroyed his usefulness to the Army. This estimate wasn’t completely true, but as I will show later, the Army Board’s reports severely wounded Marshall’s reputation.
So, as I sat munching my sandwich, it seemed to me that two issues were most likely to come up for discussion that afternoon: (1) How should Secretary Stimson tell the public that the Army Board had found, erroneously I suspected, that the Secretary of State and Chief of Staff were largely responsible for Pearl Harbor? (2) How could he say that the findings of the Army Board were not really true? As I said earlier, I already knew that many so-called facts found in the Board’s report were false. But proving that the Board was wrong about Marshall and Hull was another matter. I could foresee a real legal challenge in the offing. My guess was that either the Army Board would have to be reconvened or yet another one would have to be appointed to review the findings of the first. This inquiry into Pearl Harbor was becoming a major scandal, if not a miscarriage of justice. The meeting with Secretary Stimson was going to be interesting.
Thus, I was in the Secretary’s waiting room well before the appointed hour. The Judge Advocate General arrived next. Cramer was a short, squat man, with a chin like a bulldog’s. He was a great paper pusher, a delegator who liked to claim that he ran the biggest law firm in the world. The claim was true. There were more lawyers in the Army than anywhere else in the country. But he could spare me the “law firm” bit. I don’t believe Cramer ever tried a major case in a civilian court.
Just before two P.M., we were joined by Harvey Bundy, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War. Tall, slim, with thick eyeglasses and a ready smile, Bundy had been a prominent Boston lawyer before joining forces with Stimson. Bundy’s genealogical roots ran deep in American history, and he was the best aide a Secretary of War could have asked for: smart, loyal, with trustworthy judgement.
When we entered Stimson’s office, I was struck yet again by his magnetic personality. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man with a heavy, imposing presence. He had a short mustache and a rather stern face that lit up with an attractive smile. I would have hated to have him angry at me, because he was tough as nails. He had served as Secretary of War under President Calvin Coolidge and as Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover. He was proudest of his title of Colonel, however, which he had earned in combat as an artilleryman in the First World War. He preferred the title Colonel to anything else. A prominent Republican, he had broken with the isolationists in his party in the spring of 1940, making a speech at Yale University that created banner headlines because he came out in support of President Roosevelt’s programs for a draft to build up the American military and aid to Great Britain in her fight against Germany. As a result, Roosevelt had appointed him Secretary of War in June 1940, and although Stimson was then in his seventies, he served as, we would call it today, Secretary of both the Army and the Army Air Force (there being no separate Air Force at that time) throughout World War II with extraordinary wisdom, strength and integrity.
To me, Stimson was a man of truly heroic stature, one of the greatest men of the war, head and shoulders above Marshall. That’s personal opinion, of course, or perhaps it’s just one civilian sticking up for another, but I believe that Stimson saw changes in the wind, and the way the world would be in the future, before Marshall did. I also believe, and the evidence to date seems to prove the point, that Stimson stiffened Roosevelt’s spine on a number of occasions, forcing Roosevelt to take immediate action rather than vacillate, as was his custom.
When the Pentagon was built, at first Stimson refused to move his office from the old War Department next to the White House, because he liked to have his windows open. The Pentagon was hermetically sealed because of its newfangled air-conditioning. Later, he relented and came to like it. As for me, I always propped my window in the Pentagon open with a coat hanger. No one could catch me doing this, since no one had the security clearance to enter the room and see what was going on.
The Secretary greeted Cramer, Bundy and me most cordially, as was his practice. He seated General Cramer next to him at his desk, placing Bundy and me across from him.
Stimson began outlining the problem that he saw in making the report of the Army Board public as it was written. The nation was clamoring for blood, and the Republican members of Congress were calling for the courts-martial of the guilty parties. Marshall could be charged. Hull’s reputation could be destroyed. Preliminary leaks to the press about the contents of the Board’s findings that alleged treason within the White House were igniting even greater public anger. But overall, there was the issue that the Board’s criticisms appeared to be fatally flawed, because I suspected that the Board had heard perjured testimony, that crucial evidence had been withheld from it and that the general officers on it were unfairly prejudiced against Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.
Something had to be done, and done quickly, Stimson said. He then asked General Cramer, “What are your recommendations?”
Cramer hemmed and hawed. His comments were completely indecisive.
Stimson snorted and then fixed me with a steely eye. “Major Clausen, what do you think?”
My lunchtime preparation paid off.
“Mr. Secretary,” I said, “it would be highly dangerous to release falsehoods to the public. We are fighting a world war, and winning that war is of paramount importance. General Marshall, whom the Army Board has harshly criticized in its newly finished report, and who will be the focus of great public anger, is working in the next room fighting the war. If he is to be court-martialed, like any defendant in a court-martial proceeding, he would rightly insist that his court-martial be held in a public forum. This would mean that we’d have to reveal to our enemies that we have broken their codes. That would be suicidal to our war effort.”
“I agree,” Stimson said. “Specifically, then, what do you recommend?”
“If you want to discipline Marshall,” I said, “why not do what President Lincoln did when he gave an administrative reprimand to Secretary of War Cameron for gross dereliction of duty? Cameron’s picture is hanging on that wall, there, Mr. Secretary.
“However, you can’t do that,” I continued. “In my considered judgement, you do not have all the facts of the case before you. It appears that a number of witnesses gave misleading testimony to the Army Board about our supersecret code-cracking intelligence. We don’t know yet how misleading this testimony was, or why it was given the Board. Furthermore, only one week before the Board adjourned its hearings, because its authorized investigative time limit of ninety days was expiring, did the Board learn that the decrypts of the Japanese intentions were available to the Army and the Navy before the Japanese attack. The Board failed to investigate fully the issues raised by the availability of these decrypts.”
Stimson sat bolt upright in his chair. I had his attention.
“Continue, Major.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “the Army Board, one week before its term was to expire, learned that while the Navy had been holding its own Court of Inquiry in the building next door, the Navy had introduced an exhibit from the earlier Navy Hart Inquiry in the form of testimony by a Naval Captain of Intelligence named Safford. In his testimony, Safford had revealed the names of Army personnel who were active in our Army G-2, War Department Intelligence. Safford said that these men knew about Japan’s intentions before they attacked Pearl Harbor.
“That’s a heavy charge, Mr. Secretary. We immediately requested Safford’s testimony from the Navy Court for use by the Army Board. The Navy Court refused our request. We appealed the denial to the Under Secretary of the Navy Board. He upheld the denial. We then appealed to Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. He reversed the rulings of his Under Secretary and the Navy Court. And so we got Captain Safford’s testimony, and our first knowledge of the code cracking.
“With Safford’s testimony in hand,” I continued, “the Army Board demanded of Army G-2, War Department, all the messages and details of these decrypted dispatches. General Russell of the Board was given copies of these documents. He was made custodian of this special file, to which only he had the combination. As the Assistant Recorder of the Court, I was not allowed to see the decrypts at that time. The next witnesses called before the Army Board were General Marshall and Colonel Rufus Bratton. They told us the gist of what the Navy Court had refused to give us during our ninety days of hearings. What they had to say threw everything else we had taken testimony about into a cocked hat. The Army Board then went out of business because its statutory time limit expired. The Board’s two reports were written and submitted without the Board’s having properly completed its investigation. So the Board’s findings are biased and incorrect, because the Board was suckered. Most importantly, the Board’s findings, I believe, are way off the mark. To release them to the public as they stand would be a serious miscarriage of justice.”
Stimson almost leapt from his chair. He walked swiftly to the window of his office overlooking the Potomac River and the Washington Monument, and then he wheeled on me.
“When I was the U.S. Attorney for New York,” he said with real anger, “I always had all the facts. On cross-examination, I’d throw a lying witness out the window.” He punched the air in the direction of the Potomac. “No witness ever lied to me and got away with it.”
I rose and moved next to Stimson. He was upset, so I spoke softly. “If I can talk to you, Mr. Secretary, lawyer to lawyer, I, too, was an Assistant U.S. Attorney, although I served in San Francisco, and I know exactly what you mean about witnesses who lie.”
Stimson took a deep breath, turned and pointed his index finger at my chest, saying, “Major, I want you to go back over the operations of the Army Board with a fine-toothed comb. Retake every bit of testimony that needs to be clarified as the result of our having broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor. You are to follow any unexplored leads you consider necessary. Leave no stone unturned. You will report to me regularly via Mr. Bundy. I will give you all the support my office can provide. Just let me know what you need.”
I was momentarily stunned by the enormousness of the assignment he was thrusting upon me. In effect, he was asking me to re-investigate Pearl Harbor and giving me the discretionary authority to correct the faulty proceedings of the Army Board.
After a few seconds, I replied, “I welcome the opportunity, Mr. Secretary, and I hope to fulfill my duties to your satisfaction.”
“Good luck, Major Clausen. And Godspeed.” Stimson shook my hand with a powerful grip.
Our meeting was over. As we left the room, I pondered what might have occurred earlier. Obviously, Secretary Stimson had held meetings in high places about which I knew nothing. Nor did I ever learn what had transpired so that my name was put forward for the job. Everyone in the War Department knew I was a civilian at heart. I didn’t give two hoots in hell for a military career. I had signed on for the duration of the war only. All I wanted after the fighting stopped was to return to my practice in San Francisco. The Army could have my body as long as the war lasted, but it could never have my heart. That belonged to the law.
Bundy, Cramer and I stood in the anteroom, chatting for a few moments, and then Bundy asked me to come into his office.
Folding himself into his chair, Bundy said, “I am delighted by the Secretary’s solution to this problem of the Army Board’s report.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “The Secretary certainly amazed me. I am deeply impressed and honored by the assignment. But it’s a rather large order. It’ll be difficult to do it properly.”
I had good reason to feel both honored and apprehensive. I was being given a task usually assigned to a three-star general with a fully supportive court of inquiry and all the staff trimmings. I understood that the reputations of many men would depend on how effectively I performed my mission. I also realized that if I was careless in handling the decrypts now in my possession, I could cause terrible damage to our war effort.
The most important question would be how to conduct my investigation. I told Bundy that I preferred to act as an independent prosecutor, rather than convene a full court of inquiry. Since speed was of the essence in backtracking through the records and questioning witnesses who needed to be checked, the fastest and most secure way to do the job would be to act like an FBI agent. And rather than go through the time-consuming process of calling witnesses back to Washington from combat zones around the world, it would be better, I thought, if I went to them. I could take their statements and type them up in affidavit form, review the affidavits with the witnesses, then ask the witnesses to affirm and swear to their testimony to me as an officer of the court.
“I think that’s a far better procedure than another high-falutin’ Board with stars on their shoulders, all of them worrying about their chances of promotion,” I said. “My mission appears to call for a careful, factual, judicial approach using extreme care to preserve the security of our code cracking.”
“Excellent,” said Bundy.
We agreed that there were other details I had to think my way through, so we decided to meet again in a couple of days.
That’s how my investigation into Pearl Harbor began.
At the time, I was not aware of what was being hotly debated by Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and President Roosevelt about the release of the findings of the Navy Court of Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board. I was too busy working like a galley slave.
It quickly became obvious, however, that high-stakes politics were taking place. The result was that Forrestal reported to the nation that the Navy Court “had found there were errors of judgement of certain officers in the naval service, both at Pearl Harbor and at Washington.” For his part, Secretary Stimson told the public, “So far as the Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department is concerned, I am of the opinion that his errors of judgement were of such a nature as to demand his relief from Command status.… In my judgement, on the evidence now recorded, it is sufficient action.”
Stimson went on to say that he was still investigating other aspects of Pearl Harbor, but he didn’t say why he was doing it, nor did he mention my name.
The statements by the Army and the Navy failed to satisfy a lot of people, most notably Sen. Homer Ferguson, a Republican from Michigan, about whom I will say a lot later. He was a staunch supporter of Admiral Kimmel, and a believer that the Roosevelt administration had forced the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor to achieve Roosevelt’s ambition to fight the Axis. (The Army Board report would have made him very happy.) Ferguson couldn’t figure out how we had lost all those battleships and sailors at Pearl Harbor without somebody’s having done something that was worthy of court-martial. Why hadn’t heads rolled, either in the military or in the administration? He believed there must be a cover-up going on to protect people in high places: Roosevelt, Hull and Marshall, for starters.
Ferguson was partially right. There was a cover-up going on. But it was to protect our greatest secret: Magic. Ferguson was too partisan to be entrusted with the secret of Magic, as Marshall had done in the case of Dewey. He’d never keep the secret. And so the game of “blame, blame, who’s to blame” had to be played out to the bitter end.
One of the greatest problems facing me was the question of how I was going to get people to tell me the truth. So, first I wrote a series of questions I would use as a cover, in that they dealt with every unanswered aspect of Pearl Harbor. Then I got the questions turned into an order for me to follow and had the order signed by Judge Advocate General Cramer. This covered one of my flanks.
The next thing was to get inside the Top Secret Purple group. This I proposed doing by carrying the decrypts of the most significant intercepted Japanese messages with me on my travels. Then, if a witness seemed to be evading my questions, I would simply haul out the necessary document and show it to him. He would comprehend that I was one of the Top Secret group, too, and that lying to me would be impossible. Bundy and Stimson thought this idea was “first rate.” That covered a second flank.
Another tool would be my extraordinary power as the personal representative of the Secretary of War. I wrote a letter for Stimson’s signature—which he signed with relish, I might add—that ordered all Army personnel to give me access to all records, documents and information within their knowledge, whether requested or not; to volunteer any information they might think I needed; and to answer fully whatever questions I might put to them.
I mean to say that this was some letter of authorization. It gave me tremendous leverage. It also made me feel quite humble, for such power must never, never be misused.
There was one possibility I had overlooked, however, and it was corrected one afternoon when I met with Bundy.
He called me into his office and without much preamble said, “Secretary Stimson is greatly concerned about the decrypts you’re going to carry with you on your mission. He wants to make sure they are secure at all times. So we’re going to use a method that involves strapping a special envelope to your chest. The envelope will hold the decrypts. Also a magnesium bomb. You’ll have a cord that detonates the bomb when you pull it. If you are about to be captured, assuming you can’t detonate the bomb at a distance, you will pull the cord and detonate the bomb closer. In any event, the bomb will burn the decrypts to a crisp.”
Having just been told, admittedly in a very urbane way, how I was supposed to kill myself to avoid capture, I found myself speaking with some consternation. “Can I really detonate the bomb at a distance?” I asked. “If not,” I suppose I will be crisped just like the decrypts as they waltz their way to heaven. I am not resisting your idea, I hope you understand. It’s just that I fear some silly pilot might make me parachute into a jungle.”
“I’m sorry, Henry,” said Bundy. “There’s no alternative. We have been ordered by Congress to conduct this investigation, and we will have guards for you at all the appropriate places. But if the enemy captured these decrypts, it would expose our greatest secret. So I must ask that you be prepared to take this extreme action.”
I paused for a moment to think it through.
“Okay, I understand all this, and I accept the order,” I said. “I will become a walking bomb. When do I get this apparatus?”
“I have it here,” Bundy said. My heart sank as he showed me the contrivance.
“Does it have a safety?”
“Yes. It’s built so you can keep it on safety. But when you’re in a war zone, the bomb must always be armed and the safety turned off.”
In the months that followed, I was very unhappy to entrust my life to an unthinking device that, if it malfunctioned, would incinerate me in a flash. Strapped over my solar plexus, the damned envelope was stiff and uncomfortable to wear. And whenever I met a friend in a war zone and he slapped me on the back in greeting, I winced inwardly, waiting for the worst to happen.