Support the Troops

Writes Seymour Hersh:

And so, I’m looking for Paul. And I’m doing the stories as a freelancer. And I’m looking for him. I’m somewhere in the West Coast. And I hear about him, and I find his phone. It was a lot harder then—find his house. We didn’t have Google. He’s a southern Indiana farm boy. I get down there the next day. I fly overnight to, I think it’s Indiana, Indianapolis, below Indianapolis, below Terre Haute, a place called New Goshen, down in the southern part of Indiana. A chicken farm, I pull in. It’s a chicken farm out of Norman Rockwell, one of those old paintings from The Saturday Evening Post. It’s poor, just chicken coops, no farm, no farmland, a bunch of shacks. That’s the home. To the mother that I talked to the night before, I said, “I’m coming.” She said, “I can’t tell you he’s going to talk to you.” I said, “I’m coming, and you decide.” She said, “Just come, but I can’t promise.” She’s comes out to meet me. She’s 50 maybe, weathered, no man around, looks 70. And I just say, “Is Paul in there? Is he around?” She said, “He’s in there.” I said, “Is it alright if I talk to him?” She said, “Okay,” and then she says—then she says, you know, she says, “I gave them [the government and the Army] a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.

(Thanks to Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy)

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1:07 pm on November 1, 2009