Free Mission Compromised by Oliver North

Atkinson and John Newman were married in the chapel at Fort Meyer, Virginia, in April of 1955. His colleagues from the Army staff, in their dress uniforms, formed an arch of swords for the bride and groom to walk beneath as they exited the chapel under a hail of rice thrown by her fellow nurses.
    The birthplaces of the Newman children reflected the nomadic odyssey of a typical American military family. Peter was born the following May in the Army hospital at Fort Drum, New York. Nancy, the only girl, arrived in 1957 in the Army hospital at Crailsheim, Germany. And Jim was born in 1960 in Italy while their dad was commanding the Airborne Brigade at Livorno.
    When the Vietnam War began in earnest in 1965, the now Brigadier General John Newman volunteered to lead one of the first Army units to deploy from Fort Benning, Georgia. But when he went to get his predeparture physical, the doctors found that adhesions from his old stomach wounds were obstructing his intestines. Two bouts with the Army surgeons were followed by a quiet retirement ceremony and a family move to a small farm along the Hudson River,north of Kinderhook, New York. The reluctantly retired brigadier general took an executive position with General Electric in Schenectady.
    Now, holding his father this way—feeling the convulsions of the older man's chest against his, his dad's once-powerful shoulders shaking uncontrollably beneath his arms—it abruptly occurred to Peter Newman that his father was suddenly an old man. It had been only four months since they had last seen each other. His father and mother had stayed with Peter and Rachel for a night when they were in Washington for a reunion of the Eighty-second Airborne, the unit he'd fought with at Normandy. In the brief time since he saw him last, Brigadier General John C. Newman had seemingly aged dramatically and was now showing every one of his seventy-two years.
    The two men stood like this for several moments, and then, despite their grief, began to collect themselves. Still holding the older man, Peter spoke over his father's shoulder. “I'm so sorry, Dad,” he said, the tears still streaming down his own face.
    He could feel his father's whiskers against his cheek, his father's hair against his forehead. The hint of Old Spice mixed with the witch hazel his father always wore as an aftershave reminded the younger man once again of countless camping and hunting trips with “the three Newman boys” huddled against one another in the darkness.
    â€œThank you for coming, Peter. Your mother will be pleased. She's upstairs in the bathroom. She'll be back down in a few minutes,” the old man said, his voice constricted, barely controlled and hardly above a whisper. And then, after standing this way for a few more moments, the officer and gentleman in him reasserted control over the grieving father, and he broke the embrace with his son and said, just barelycomposed, “Gentlemen, this is my son, Peter. He's a major in the Marines. Peter, this is Colonel Edward Robertson. We served together in the Airborne. He's now the chief Army inspector at the GE plant in Schenectady. Major Olson here is the chaplain for the Army Reserve district in Albany.”
    The two men in uniform shook hands with the younger Newman, and they all sat back down, Peter taking a place on the couch beside his father. Colonel Robertson spoke first, following a script as old as warfare itself: “Major Newman, I am the casualty assistance officer for your brother. As you apparently already know, Captain Newman was killed in action last night by hostile fire in an engagement in Mogadishu, Somalia. The Secretary of the Army extends his sincere condolences…”
    Peter sat numbly through the ritual: the intonations of sympathy, the declaration that details would be forthcoming, the chaplain's offer—politely refused—to pray with the family, and finally the promise to be in touch to make