The Night Crew by Brian Haig

freely. Other physical considerations aside, male prisoners are horny and easily excited. Also, male prisoners regard it as an unwelcome intrusion of their privacy.” I paused, then observed, “I imagine Arab males are even more sensitive to these issues.”
    “Well . . . I wouldn’t know nuthin’ ’bout that.”
    Maybe she didn’t, but the army officials running the prison certainly knew. “I’m saying that I’m a little surprised that you and two other female soldiers were ever present in that cellblock.” She was giving me another of those long, empty stares, and I added, “From the news reports, Lydia, your visits often occurred late at night.”
    The disconnected stare continued. She didn’t even blink. Hello, anybody home? I was tempted to shake her head to see if anything rattled or if it was an empty vessel. “If you’re wondering, that was a question.”
    “Oh . . . then . . . yes, sir. They always did. Like I tole you, we wuz invited.”
    “Look, I just—” This was becoming very annoying. I drew a long breath, then retreated into an amiable smile. “Yes, so you did tell me.” After a moment, I changed tact. “And were the other women invited as well?”
    “Sure wuz. Andrea and June had friends in the same unit as Danny.”
    “Did your senior officers know you were there?”
    “Cain’t really speak for Andrea and June.”
    “Of course.”
    “My sergeant knew, though. Dang sure, she knew.” After a moment, she added, “Often as not, I slept at the cellblock.”
    “You slept there?”
    “Yup. See, one of them cells got turned into a lounge fer the guards. Had bunks, coupla fans, a hotplate fer cookin’. Much better’n the tents outside. Didn’t have to worry about no mortars neither.”
    Katherine quickly asked, “Were you ever subjected to mortar fire during your time in Iraq?”
    “A few times . . . I guess I heard some goin’ off.”
    “Near you?”
    “Nope. I mean, sometimes I heard these big thumps and blasts. Like, a ways off . . . y’know, in the distance. But since I wuz sleepin’ in the prison most nights, I wuz pretty safe from that.”
    I now knew where Katherine was going with this. She leaned closer and asked, “Did they ever explode near you?”
    “Nope.”
    “Were you ever subjected to direct enemy fire? Not necessarily at the prison . . . maybe a convoy you traveled with? A bomb going off in the road? At any point during your tour in Iraq, did you experience violence?”
    She shook her head. “Since all them Iraqi prisoners wuz mixed into our FOB, them insurgents didn’t really mess with us too bad.”
    What Katherine was probing for was the chance that Lydia Eddelston had experienced combat, which might have induced battleshock or some other form of post-combat syndrome that scrambled her ability to tell right from wrong. This has become a very popular and sometimes even effective defense strategy these days.
    Had she asked me first, however, I would’ve saved her the trouble. Jurors in a civilian court are sometimes susceptible to that defense; they are naturally predisposed to sympathize with a combat veteran, and they have no term of reference for what the vet experienced. Not so a board of battle-hardened veterans who, accurately or not, believe they came out of it perfectly normal, whatever that means in this day and age. What it does not mean is that combat induces some form of moral bulimia.
    More importantly, the chance of persuading them that a clerk—in military jargon, a pogue, a REMF, aka, a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker—was driven by the demons of war to do bad things was about as good as my chance of winning Mr. Collegiality in a beauty pageant. I’m not that beautiful, for one thing.
    Besides, a totally different question, or rather contradiction, was still roiling inside my mind. A lounge inside a prison cellblock? “What rank is Danny, and what was his job title?”
    “Night shift leader for the block. Sergeant.” She