|
But it wasn't. The pilot was acquitted of both negligent homicide and involuntary manslaughter. (The pilot was subsequently convicted of obstruction of justice for destroying a videotape record of the flight, and the navigator pleaded guilty to the same charge.) Couch turned to look at the families who had crossed oceans for this moment. A reporter caught him whisper the words “I'm sorry.” The next day he stayed in his pajamas, floating in shadows around his home. “I know you're hurting,” his brother called to say. “But, in the long run, this will be a valuable experience.”
Couch and his wife went to a dinner the next night with some of the family members, a dinner that should have been a celebration of the end of this chapter in their lives, the realization of Couch's assurances that justice would be done. Now, Couch was as far down as he had ever been. He began to doubt himself. “Maybe I got too personally invested in it. I don't know.”
And it was there, outside the restaurant, that Aurich came up to Couch and kissed him on the cheek and said, “How are you?” and he wept.
Couch wasn't always a man of ardent faith. Born at Duke Medical Center and reared in Asheboro, North Carolina, he was an observant Christian, just not a particularly pious one. He went to Duke just as both his parents, two of his grandparents, an aunt, and a brother had done and signed on with the Navy ROTC program, eventually rising in rank to battalion commander. On Christmas Eve his sophomore year, he saw a pretty girl in a store and said to himself, “I thought I knew all the blondes in town.”
Her name was Kim Wilder, and her family was Evangelical. Being around them, Couch began to take his own faith more seriously, although he “still wasn't living for it at Duke.” He was still “going to parties, Thursday night kegs, all that stuff.” And while “some people graduated summa cum laude, some people magna cum laude,” he says, “I graduated thank the good lawdy.” He dropped out of his fraternity his last year, thinking “there's gotta be more to it than this.”
Two years later, he and Kim, now his wife, were living in Morehead City, North Carolina. She took him to a church that her grandparents had attended, and a minister named King Cole came on, cracking jokes in the pulpit and generally taking himself less than seriously. “He had a resurrection party on Easter Sunday, with two kegs up on his back porch.” Couch started going to Bible study.
Being an Evangelical seemed to work for Couch in the military, and it served a purpose: He's seen how faith has empowered soldiers. “I've seen the believers. They're as fearless as anyone, because they say, ‘Look, I already know what the rest of my deal is.' ” Couch remembers a letter a staff sergeant who had died in Iraq left his family. It said, “You all need to be rejoicing with me, I am back with my creator. I did what I believed in, and now I'm reaping the rewards.”
As he recites the letter, though, he realizes he could just as well be describing the bad guys. “That's where they think they are, too. It is similar, and that's why this battle we find ourselves in—it's not going to be over anytime soon.”
Couch is a military man through and through, and whether he's exchanging an “ooh-rah, Marine!” with a passerby on the street or congratulating a commercial pilot for a “good crosswind landing” after arriving at Chicago O'Hare, evidence abounds that he relished his time in the Marines. Back in the early '90s when he was flying C-130s out of Cherry Point, North Carolina, he and Kim formed a social circle around his friends in the squadron. “It was like a fraternity,” Kim Couch recalls. They made friends with people like Michael “Rocks” Horrocks, tall, good-looking, and athletic, with a pilot's typical personality profile: unflinchingly confident and always a joker. Horrocks' wife and Kim worked at the same hospital, and they all became part of a tight-knit community of pilots and their wives. They worked and played together, went out to dinner together, and that camaraderie was something they thrived on—this was one of the best times of their lives.
The litigation in the gondola case was over in June 1999. Couch left active duty soon afterward, brokenhearted. But in a peculiar way, the case had made him stronger; every challenge that came after would be minor, manageable. “What am I going to do, lose one of the biggest cases in the history of the Marine Corps? I've already done that.”
As it turned out, even in defeat his career was jump-started. “You get this reputation as one of three people who tried this great big case—it put me on the fast track.” He was soon sitting in his new office at a private law firm. He didn't stay long, though, because he's first and foremost a litigator, and he wasn't getting to litigate. So he moved on to the DA's office in Eastern North Carolina to prosecute “shrimp boat captains who get drunk and fight on Sunday night.” All along, Kim wanted him back in the Marines, back in his element, doing what she knew made him happiest.
But Couch wasn't quite ready to return to active duty, the gondola case still fresh in his mind. Then, in August 2001, the opportunity came to help prosecute Marine officers accused of falsifying maintenance records related to the new MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Couch was tempted.
“I really loved the Marine Corps, I liked working on a case like that, and I was thinking about returning to active duty anyway.”
He could sign on for the life of the case, dip his toe in. If it didn't work out—well, no harm done.
Meanwhile, the Horrockses had gone on to have a daughter and then a son. Rocks became a flight instructor in Pensacola and then started flying passenger jets for United Airlines. The civilian world welcomed his experience, just as it had Couch's. Horrocks found himself sitting first officer on a flight one day, traveling from the East Coast on a brilliantly clear morning, when he heard a suspicious transmission from another plane, something that sounded like “stay in your seats.” They radioed it to ground control, learned that the flight had been hijacked, and were ordered to keep their distance. Horrocks had just heard the last transmission from American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the north tower of the World Trade Center less then ten minutes later.
Then Horrocks' own aircraft changed beacon codes twice in the same minute. Curiously, it climbed above its assigned altitude. Air traffic control tried to contact the pilots but couldn't get a response. The plane then commenced a power dive, and just before 9:00, it began a sharp left turn, assuming a northeasterly heading toward New York City.
Couch logged onto Yahoo that morning, after staying up all night preparing a court motion. He saw the initial reports of an aircraft hitting the World Trade Center, immediately turned on the television, and watched the footage of his friend's plane crashing into the south tower.
The events of 9/11 galvanized Couch. Any hesitation he had about returning to military service disappeared. “I wanted to get back on active duty, because now we're going to war,” he recalls. “Any time you have a war, military justice is going to be a necessity. And that's what I like best: I like being a Marine lawyer.”
When the U.S. started capturing terror suspects and sending them to Guantánamo, Couch got a call from one of his mentors in the military justice system. “Look man,” he said to Couch, “they're talking about doing military commissions. We haven't done those since World War II. You know they're going to be looking for people with experience.”
• continues on page
three. |
