An EA-6B Prowler jet swoops low into a valley, banking and weaving in perfect concert with contours of the terrain. It is a crystal clear day, the mountains' quietude broken only by the thunder of the aircraft's turbojet engines as they blast the plane through the valley at 550 mph.
It is the pilot's last flight on the Prowler—he is graduating to the F-18—and it is the navigator's last military flight ever, as he is leaving the service. Technically, they're flying too low, but this is their final flight, it's a perfect day for flying, and anyway the pilot has the best hands in the squadron. So they skim the riverbeds and buzz the trees on their way back to base, at times less than four hundred feet off the ground. They come over a rise in the terrain, stabilize the aircraft, and in an instant a blur of yellow flashes into view; they are only three seconds from hitting it. At the very moment the captain's brain processes the thought—“gondola”—he is banking the aircraft hard left, so that he misses a direct collision by no more than forty meters. But his right wing severs the cable that holds the gondola aloft. It tumbles over several times before striking the ground.
Describing the accident in the Dolomite mountain range near Cavalese, Italy, on February 3, 1998, Marine Lieutenant Colonel V. Stuart Couch '87 lowers his chin to his fists and winces as he remembers the twenty people who died. The destruction of the gondola and its occupants initiated the first high-profile case of his legal career: prelude to—and, in an odd way, preparation for—the moral crisis whose resolution thrust him into the limelight and earned him the reluctant celebrity he has only recently learned to embrace.
The crisis occurred after the towers came down on 9/11, and Couch volunteered for the military commissions President George W. Bush established under the aegis of the Defense Department to prosecute terrorist suspects. When he began to suspect that one of the defendants was being tortured, he was caught in a moral predicament that challenged his deepest convictions. Confronted with conflicting obligations—to his superiors, to his country, and to his God—Couch would draw on insights from his faith and his military career to inform the hardest decision of his life.
When The Wall Street Journal discovered that Couch had ultimately decided to drop the case, it ran a front-page feature that kicked off a flurry of media attention. As the leadership of the “war on terror” became less popular by the day, and America continued to hemorrhage credibility, here was the refreshing tale of a “colonel with a conscience.” 60 Minutes, ABC News, TIME, and PBS all lined up to court Couch. The American Bar Association announced it would present its Minister of Justice Award to Couch in a ceremony in Washington on November 2. He will be the first military prosecutor ever to receive the honor.
When relaxed, Couch's mouth turns slightly downward, so unless smiling or laughing he looks permanently morose, a singular misrepresentation of his decidedly affable demeanor. Plaid shirtsleeves tucked firmly into jeans or khakis are standard fare for Couch, when he's not in uniform. The unabashed Southern accent and inflection—sirs and ma'ams all around—complete the impression of an uncomplicated good ol' boy, and it's easy at first blush not to take him seriously. But then, as a trial lawyer, he knows how to play the natural tendency to underestimate him to his advantage. “People let their guard down,” he says, and during a cross examination, a small opening is all Couch needs. In an instant, he can activate a hardened austerity that is intimidating.
He learned this early in his career, prosecuting the notorious Dolomite mountains gondola case. Couch was only a year and a half out of law school then, a major, but because he was a prosecutor with an aviation background—he had been a Marine pilot before entering law school—and because he was stationed at the pilots' home base, he was asked to help prosecute one of the biggest cases in Marine Corps history.
Couch volunteered to be the liaison to the victims' families, the one in living rooms with a cup of tea and a saucer bearing witness to the alternating currents of unbearable pain and implacable rage. There was one woman in particular who for Couch crystallized the sense of outrage the victims' families felt toward the U.S. Emma Aurich was her name, a widow from Burgstadt, Germany, whose only child had been on the gondola that day. Once, when Couch was meeting with the families in Germany, she stood up overflowing with rage, screaming words as fast as her mind could conceive new condemnations while a shell-shocked interpreter struggled to keep pace. You people took my son and have done nothing to help us was her message, and Couch felt as if he were being held personally responsible simply because he was there, though that very fact should have absolved him.
One superior questioned the time Couch spent with the families, who, he reminded Couch, would only play a role in sentencing—if the case got that far—but not in securing a conviction. But, although Couch's loyalty is unwavering, he is an Evangelical Christian and has another duty to fulfill. “My magnetic north points to Christ,” he says. One of the most profound obligations of his faith is to “respect the dignity of a fellow human being,” and in his judgment, the treatment of the victims' families wasn't right. He saw suffering and sought to address it. “I've got a job as a prosecutor,” Couch told the families, “but to the extent that I can, I want to be a voice for you. I want to help you make sense of the incomprehensible.”
He and his fellow prosecutors labored for a year to build a rock-solid case, while he attended also to the emotional needs of the victims' families even as he seldom saw his own. And when it was time, Aurich and members of the families of other victims came to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, to see the conviction handed down.
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