The Court Martial by Darrell Maloney

Author:Darrell Maloney [Maloney, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-08T06:00:00+00:00

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Military officers are generally very task oriented by nature.

Only a trained psychologist can explain why, exactly. But the same character traits, habits and tendencies which define the type of man or woman who’d make a good officer are some of the same things that make him or her meticulous.

Meticulous, task-oriented, very observant, possessing a high sense of logic and a keen eye for detail.

Tim Wilcox was no different.

Some of those same traits made him an excellent surgeon. It made him want to go back for a second look before he closed an incision on an abdominal wound.

Just to make sure none of the blood vessels were seeping blood.

It was why he made three passes when plucking pieces of shrapnel from a leg wound.

Just to make sure nothing got left behind which would cause the patient a lifetime of misery.

Then he used those same traits to notice other things around him. Things most others would have missed.

It was why, in a cell which contained no clocks or any other devices to indicate the time of day, he knew what time it was within five minutes or so.

Anytime, day or night.

It started almost as a game with him.

Like most prisoners with too much time on his hands, he played games with himself to pass some of that time.

He performed one pushup on the first day.

No, he had no delusions that a single pushup would help his physical disposition or build his chest muscles.

But it helped him remember that event as his very first day in the brig. That single pushup cemented it in his mind.

The second day he did two.

The third day he did three, and so on.

On this date, which he expected to be his last, he did sixty one pushups.

Long before, in elementary school, he’d memorized which months always had thirty days. Which ones had thirty one. And that he had to add a day to February every four years.

And if he ever forgot which year was leap year, all he had to remember was which years were presidential election years. For all presidential election years are also leap years.

Even after being in the brig for two months he knew exactly what day it was.

The time, that was a bit trickier since his cell had no clock and they’d confiscated his watch.

When he was being processed into the brig a technical sergeant gave him a mountain of paperwork to complete.

When he was halfway through another sergeant came in to replace the first.

It was shift change.

The clock over the booking sergeant’s head read oh eight hundred hours: eight a.m.

If the mid-shift booking sergeant got off duty at oh eight hundred, that meant day shift would get off at sixteen hundred hours, or four p.m.

And that swing shift would come in at sixteen hundred and get off at twenty four hundred hours, or midnight.

Processing in took over three hours.

It was a long process which included not only the paperwork, but getting sized for a prison jumpsuit, and getting a suicide prevention briefing from a psychiatrist who very recently worked for Tim.

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