Free Mission Compromised by Oliver North Page B

kitchen. “Why didn't Rachel come up with you?”
    â€œShe had crew training. I didn't have time to track her down.”
    Nancy glared long and hard at her older brother, who finally said, “Sis, this isn't the time to talk about it.”
    She continued to stare until the Marine shrugged and went upstairs to bed.
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    â€œP. J., I'm so sorry about Jim,” said Rachel as she came out of the kitchen to greet her husband when he arrived home from the airport.
    â€œYeah, so am I,” Newman replied, brusquely brushing by his wife who had reached up to embrace him.
    She reacted with anger at the rejection. “Why, P. J., why? You didn't give me a chance to go with you on Monday. I should have gone to your parents with you,” Rachel said as he walked upstairs to change into his uniform.
    â€œYou had crew training,” he replied without stopping.
    â€œCrew training! Sure I had crew training, but if you had simply paged me at Dulles, you know that I would have met you at National and flown up with you. I loved Jim, too, you know,” she said, following him into their bedroom.
    â€œLook, this is a family matter,” he stated with a flat tone of finality, not noticing the tears starting to well up in his wife's eyes.
    â€œA family matter! What are you saying? I'm a Newman, too, for heaven's sake. I'm your wife , Peter! Your sister introduced us! What could you have been thinking by shutting me out of your life at a time like that?” Rachel picked up a book from the dresser and threw it at her husband. It hit him squarely in the chest, but he merely caught it and tossed it onto the bed, acting as if it had never happened. In her rage, Rachel turned and left the room, crying. He heard the front door slam as he buttoned up his uniform shirt. He checked the alignment of his shirt, belt buckle, and trousers in the mirror and headed back down the stairs, out the door to his car, and set off for HQMC. He noticed as he backed out of the driveway that his wife's Chevy Blazer was gone.
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    The funeral service for Captain James Bedford Newman was held October 14 at the Old Fort Meyer Chapel—where John and Alice Newman had been married thirty-nine years before. It was a cool, clear day, and the church was filled with his parents' friends and comrades from wars and duty stations past. Jim's Delta Squadron commander was there, along with a heavy contingent of generals and colonels—some retired, others still on active duty—with whom father and son had served. The Secretary of the Army offered a eulogy and read Jim's citation for the Distinguished Service Cross. The blue-and-white medallion and a Purple Heart were affixed to the American flag that draped Jim's government-issue, gunmetal-gray coffin.
    The words of the presiding chaplain weren't much of a solace to Peter, although he noticed that his mother and sister somehow seemed buoyed when one of his brother's fellow Delta troopers described how Jim had “come to know the Lord” a few months before his gruesome death in Somalia. Newman vaguely wondered what the young man meant.
    As they always do on these solemn occasions, the Army's old guard provided a fitting send-off for one of their own: the pallbearers and honor guard in dress uniform; the horse-drawn caisson with the flag-covered casket aboard; the Army band, slowly leading the entourage through Arlington Cemetery's winding roads, flanked by row after ordered row of white stone grave markers. “So different in life, so much the same in death,” they seemed to say.
    When they arrived at Jim's gravesite, Peter and his father were seated beneath a white awning on either side of the grieving mother.Nancy and her husband, Dan, in their Navy dress uniforms, sat to her father's right. Peter in his Marine dress blues and Rachel in a black dress sat to his mother's left. After the chaplain read again from the Scriptures, they concluded with the Lord's