“Do you understand your rights, Specialist Collard?”

It’s amazing what you remember when you are barely listening to what someone says, like your significant other rambling on about their day until you get to the part about dinner. Yes, I understood my rights, and somehow I picked out something that I probably wasn’t meant to notice. With all the legal mumbo-jumbo being thrown at me, something told me that my previous admission of guilt wasn’t on the record and was inadmissible. With about two years as an expert barracks lawyer under me, I surmised that they would now do everything they could, they being my company commander and whoever’s lead he was following, to get my admission of guilt on the record. My platoon leader, ever the actual leader I needed in this situation, had effectively put the kibosh on that when he told me to keep my mouth shut.

Excellent.

“Yes sir, I think I do,” I said.

“Great. Now Specialist Collard, you will need to fill out this written statement, including in it that you sent photos to USAWTFM of the Battalion motorpool area and the date and time those photos were taken.”

If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now; my company commander was no ally of mine in this situation. I was right, what he was telling me to do was make a second admission of guilt, this time via an official written statement now that the 15-6 had been initiated.

“Sir, before I do anything, I am going to talk to TDS about this matter.”

What I had said was well within my rights, and was the smartest thing I could have done in this situation. If not for my platoon leader watching over my ass, this could have ended right then and there, along with whatever hope I had of a career in the military. I had effectively told my CO that this wouldn’t be an easy issue to resolve, and might be a bit of a headache for him.

The CO dismissed me but told my PL to remain before telling me to close his office door on the way out. I went back to my barracks room to shower and get breakfast, unsure of what to do next. Part of me was panicking, I didn’t want to get into trouble for something so stupid. Maybe I could get USAWTFM to take the photos down? They were soldiers, after all. They would probably be more than willing to prevent the professional lynching of one of their own. The response I got surprised me.

“So they’re upset that their Battalion XO acted unprofessionally and now they want to punish you for that? Don’t admit to anything, go down to TDS and talk to Captain Redacted, he is known to us. Do it before noon, he has a full afternoon.”

Apparently, they had seen this before.

I went down to TDS and talked to the Captain I was referred to. After spilling everything to him, he just laughed.

“They don’t have anything on you, and what you did will more than likely effect your XO more than you. Just be smart, keep your mouth shut and this will all blow over. If they try to push an Article 15 in front of you, pull a Dick Winters.”

“Uh, sir I am familiar with the man, but what the fuck is a Dick Winters?”

“Request a court martial. They won’t want to dedicate the time and resources to such a silly issue and besides, the evidence necessary to actually punish you would be more than whatever it is that they have. They can hit you with a Article 92, but I think that is unlikely. Just keep your head down man.”

I knew at this time that the command teams all the way up to I Corps was tracking this situation, but I didn’t know that my brigade commander was pretty heated about this whole situation. What he had to do was pretty straight forward but also surprising. Not only were they investigating who sent the photos to USAWTFM, they also had to investigate the situation that had been photographed. That meant looking into what the Battalion XO was doing along with the smooth-brains NCOs that accompanied him, and I’m just guessing that he wasn’t thrilled at this distraction. My immediate chain of command implied that someone was going to go to bat for me, but I didn’t know who.

Someone in the know implied that they were gunning for either a discharge or reduction in rank before transferring me out of the brigade to another unit on post. I started making plans for both eventualities, including trying to get myself setup in a battalion that one of my old leaders was in. If they had discharged me, I would have been properly fucked and that likely would have hurt any chance I had at a successful career outside the military. There wasn’t much I could do but hope it didn’t go that far.

Every time I went to the battalion HQ I felt like a pariah. I was put on a few shit details, which was to be expected, but I did my best to follow the advice I had been given and keep my head down and my mouth shut. Despite what TDS had said, I was scared to death that the powers that be would come up with some way of delivering the green weenie to the depth of my metaphorical asshole. This was and probably still is the norm in many parts of the military, leaders want “cancerous” soldiers out of their units. Just like lower enlisted calling their chain of command “toxic”, leadership often throws around the adjective “cancerous” to describe soldiers that they think are detrimental to the unit, but in some case are only detrimental to their toxic command. To say that these descriptors are overused would be an understatement.

After several weeks, I was standing in a gaggle fuck of a formation when my near mystical First Sergeant, with his hands in his pockets and his patrol cap kicked back on his head, walked up to me. I was truly in awe of this dude every time I saw him, he had a soft spoken nature around mid to senior officers and NCOs but spoke like a true grunt around the E5’s and below. He was the quintessential infantryman, who jumped over to the conventional force after a career running around with 2nd Rangers all over Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Have you heard anything about that 15-6 from battalion, Collard?”

“Negative 1SG, I havent heard shit for a couple weeks.”

He just smirked and walked away.

What I didn’t know was I could rest easy now.

That was the last time anyone talked to me in an official capacity about the investigation.

The epilogue will be released whenever I get around to it– MC