Free Mission Compromised by Oliver North Page A

arrangements for interment.
    Then, just as the two uniformed officers stood to take their leave, Alice Newman entered the room and choked back a sob as she saw her sole surviving son. Peter rushed to her, and the tears came again as he embraced his mother, her head on his chest. The colonel and the chaplain stood, looking down at the carpeted floor as the son tried to console his mother.
    Alice Newman had opened the door to the two officers a half hour before Peter arrived. Even before the sad-eyed Colonel Robertson could utter a word, she knew why he and the chaplain were there. She had spent too many years as the wife of a career soldier to have any hope that this was anything but the worst news a mother could ever get—that one of her cherished children had preceded her in death.
    With a gasp, her hand flew to her breast where she had nursed her children, and she turned and shouted in a voice that sounded almost strangled, “John, come quick! Oh dear, John… hurry! Something terrible has happened!” And then, with the two officers still standing silently outside the door, the afternoon sun shining on their uniforms, she leaned against the door and began quietly sobbing.
    Brigadier General John Newman had rushed to the front door from his study off the living room. When he saw the two officers, he too knew in an instant the purpose of their visit, but other than putting a consoling arm around his wife, his demeanor hardly changed. “Gentlemen, please come in,” he said as he escorted them to chairs in the living room.
    Alice Newman had quietly endured the terrible, emotionally wrenching brief from the colonel and the chaplain for fifteen minutes, saying nothing as her husband, a comforting arm around her shoulders, asked questions about their son's death, for which these officers, as yet, had no answers. Then, convinced that a mistake had not been made, she had excused herself. “I must get another handkerchief,” she said, holding out the balled-up white cloth she'd been using to soak up her tears.
    Alice Newman had gone upstairs and sat on the bed she shared with her husband, cried some more, then gone to the bathroom, washed her face, applied some fresh lipstick, a touch of color to her cheeks, and had come back down to attend to the men in her living room as was expected of a general's wife.
    Now, in the arms of her oldest son, she was crying again. It broke Peter's heart to hear his mother cry. And again, just as had happened minutes before when holding his grieving father, Peter Newman realized that his mother, now sixty-three, would never be young again.
    His mother's greatest happiness had always been her children. Even when her “kids” were grown, she still craved the holidays—especially Thanksgiving and Christmas—times when they were all together, when parents and children, and now grandchildren, gathered with joy and laughter in her big country kitchen. They would all take turns chiding Jim about getting married before he got too old. Now he never would, and those family gatherings would never be the same. They would always be tinged with sadness from the searing loss of Alice Newman's second son.
    And in that instant, arms around his devastated mother, anger began to merge with the grief in Peter Newman's heart. A two-bit African gangster had stolen his only brother and his mother's happiness. It was then that a craving for vengeance began to smolder in his gut.
    For the Newman family, the next ten days were a haze of tears and grief. His sister Nancy paged him that Monday evening, shortly after the colonel and the chaplain had departed. On Tuesday, October 5, mother, father, and son drove to the Albany airport and met her when she arrived on a flight from Providence, Rhode Island. The Mailgram from the Secretary of the Army was waiting for them when they got back to the farm.
    Later that night, after their parents had gone to bed, Nancy confronted Peter in the