The crowd broke into a brief moment of conversation, partly in anger at the reminder of Gillespie’s shooting and partly in relief at the good news that he would likely survive.
“Then, at the Twelfth Precinct, Bob Hairrell protested when a young girl tried to vote. He’d made challenges to those kinds of stunts all day. He’d been ignored every time, but this time Bob knew she was seventeen. She even admitted she was seventeen. That’s when Minus Wilburn just hit him across the skull with a blackjack! Then he kicked Bob in the face and let the girl vote!” Bill White had had a few run-ins with Wilburn, and he knew more than enough about the deputy sheriff’s baton and boot.
“Now, the good news is that we’ve won by a three-to-one margin in precincts where the vote’s been counted honestly, in the open.” The crowd applauded tentatively, knowing there was more to come.
“But the bad news,” said Buttram, waving his hands to quiet the crowd, “and it’s very bad news, is that Cantrell’s got most of the rest of the ballot boxes locked up in that jail.” The crowd booed.
“He can count them behind closed doors however he wants, and he’s got his cronies on the election board inside there to certify it. Once that happens there’s no court around here that’s gonna change it. We’ve been down this road before and we know where it leads. The question is, what are we gonna do about it this time?”
Bill White had heard just about enough. He didn’t know what the crowd intended to do, but he had a pretty good idea what they should do. Bill thought back to everything he’d been through: killer sharks; months of starvation; the Imperial Army of Japan. He saw the faces of all the dead Marines he’d buried with his own hands and the enemy troops he’d killed in the name of freedom. It all boiled over.
“Listen!” Bill yelled over the noise of the crowd, which had taken Buttram’s last question as an invitation to argue over an answer.
“Listen to me, dammit!” He didn’t have Jim Buttram’s natural talent for projecting his voice, but Bill White could be heard when he wanted to be.
“I fought with the bravest of the brave and the best of the best.” His voice softened, just a bit. “Nobody could have been any better or braver.” Bill had never talked about the war before.
“They fought for democracy,” he said. “All of us fought for democracy. And I’ll be damned if I can figure out why you’d fight for it over there, and not over here!”
Bill wasn’t sure whether he was moving the crowd, but he could feel his own emotions building.
“You call yourselves GIs?” He looked his fellow veterans in the eyes, repeating the question he’d asked a smaller group earlier in the day. “You go over there and fight two or three years, but you are gonna let a bunch of yellow-bellied draft dodgers push you around? A bunch of hoodlums who stayed here while we watched our friends die?”
By now the applause had begun, and Bill was fighting to be heard over the “Hell no’s!” of an increasingly animated crowd.
“If you people don’t stop this, and now is the time and place,” shouted Bill, “you wouldn’t make a pimple on a fightin’ GI’s ass!”
As the crowd accepted the challenge with a thunderous roar of applause, Bill ordered his friends and neighbors to exercise one of the rights they had all fought so hard to protect.
“Get your guns, boys!” ordered Bill White. “And then meet me at the jail.”
9:00 P.M.
The common law of Tennessee provides that every citizen has the right to stop a criminal in the act of committing a felony. In a similar spirit, the state constitution’s Declaration of Rights says: “That government, being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”
These abstract doctrines, however, were as far from Bill White’s mind that night as they had been at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. He was no lawyer or philosopher; Bill White was a fighter, and he didn’t need anyone or anything to tell him whether to fight for the things he believed to be right.
Bill stood across the street from the McMinn County Jail and shouted, “We’ve come for the ballot boxes!” The redbrick fortress now protected Paul Cantrell, Windy Wise, sixty deputies, and the ballot boxes that, if counted fairly, would hand the Cantrell machine its first political defeat.
Behind Bill White, in the darkness, was a semicircle of five hundred armed veterans and GI supporters. Farmers held shotguns that had hung peacefully above their fireplaces for decades. Hunters carried their .22s and veterans their .45s. There was even a contingent of skinny, baby-faced teenagers who’d come with BB guns and visions of glory. More ominous for the Cantrell machine was the collection of military rifles taken from the local armory and divvied among men who had last used them in places like Bastogne and Iwo Jima.
“Bring out those damn ballot boxes!” Bill called again.
Perhaps because of the darkness, Windy Wise didn’t realize the size of the force opposing him, or perhaps he was simply so accustomed to having his way that it never occurred to him to hold his tongue. He had earned his nickname, after all, for being long-winded as a boy. Whatever the reason, Wise’s next words made it clear that those in the jail were not taking the situation as seriously as they should have.
“Why don’t you call the law?” Wise called out a second-story window as the “law” inside the jail laughed along with his joke.
“There ain’t no law in McMinn County!” Bill fired back, not amused.
A brief silence followed, broken by the unmistakable locking sound of a shotgun’s barrel snapping into its handle.
“Aw, go to hell!” shouted the deputy who had loaded the weapon. Bill had only a moment to wonder which deputy it was before the man aimed into the crowd of GIs and pulled the trigger.
The blast echoed down White Street, past the Dixie Café and the county courthouse beyond. Fifteen of the pellets found GI supporter Edgar Miller’s shoulder and eight more lodged into supporter Harold Powers’s neck. Like Tom Gillespie’s, their wounds were not fatal.
Powers refused to leave the jail, but he did take cover, as did Bill White and the hundreds of men around him. Several dozen ran into a boardinghouse directly opposite the jail, where the windows of guest rooms provided the perfect cover from which to fire back at the thieves and bullies across the street.
Before those running for the boardinghouse could make it up the stairs, a barrage of gunfire rang out from those on their side who had found protection outdoors, behind cars and trees and the short walls of a nearby hillside. Glass windows shattered, and sparks punctuated the darkness.
Bill White fired both cartridges from his double-barreled shotgun, emptied the rounds in his rifle, and then shot his pistol until no bullets remained.
Then he reloaded all three weapons and repeated the cycle.
One more time, he thought to himself. One last fight for what’s right.
The battle for Athens had begun.
August 2, 1946
1:15 A.M.
Windy Wise had seen Paul Cantrell many times, but never like this. On a normal day, Cantrell strode down the streets of Athens with the most confident of airs and the most distinguished of looks. This look featured a walking cane that he did not need, rimless glasses and suspenders, and the hat of a southern gentleman, always tipped off to the side just so. The political boss had been so sure of his position, so invincible in his own mind, that he’d named his prize bird dog “Lady Fee-grabber.”
But four hours into the Battle of Athens, with bullet holes in the walls and several deputies on the floor bleeding and dying, Paul Cantrell was feeling something he hadn’t felt in more than a decade: fear. The hat and cane were gone, the fidgety twitch he’d tried to suppress since childhood had returned, and sweat was streaming down his large head and onto his small neck.
“Any word from the governor?” asked Wise, walking into Cantrell’s makeshift office, where torn and crumpled ballots lay strewn across the floor. Their markings were irrelevant to the vote count Cantrell would report if he could survive the siege.
“Don’t know,” Cantrell said in his slow southern drawl. “The GI boys shot out the phone lines fifteen minutes ago.” He wiped a stream of sweat from his forehead. “Last we heard, the National Guard was on its way.”
Since their first volley, the GIs had kept up periodic barrages of fire. Their ammunition, which they’d retrieved from homes, hardware stores, and the local armory, seemed endless. In contrast, Cantrell’s men had spent most of their bullets in the first half hour of gunplay. They needed to save the rest to defend against what they believed to be an inevitable storming of the jail.
The state guard, which was under the command of a politically loyal governor, was the Cantrell machine’s best hope, though many in the jail doubted whether the governor in Nashville would risk his reputation to save a mountain county boss fighting a band of popular and heroic war veterans.
“Think they’ll come?” asked Wise.
Cantrell wiped his forehead again and fidgeted with a pipe.
When he finally looked Wise in the eye, he looked as afraid as his deputies cowering in the jailhouse.
“No.”
2:45 A.M.
Crouched behind a copse of trees he had been using all night for cover, Bill White knew that time was not on his side. The GIs had been winning the battle, but the siege could only last so long. How many armed supporters, brave enough to stand by him in darkness, would cautiously melt away at dawn? And what about the rumors of the National Guard coming to Cantrell’s rescue?
“There’s an old saying,” Jim Buttram said to Bill. “If you’re gonna shoot at the king . . .” Buttram paused. “Don’t miss.”
Bill knew he was right. If reinforcements from the governor arrived before Cantrell surrendered the ballot boxes, his regime would somehow survive. And if it did, his vengeance would be sure and swift. Bill White knew that he would likely be the first to experience it.
“I had a few boys go out and get some dynamite,” Bill said, pulling a couple of sticks of the explosives from his jacket pocket. Then, for the first time that night, he flashed a wide smile. “I think it’s time we end this thing.”
Buttram nodded in agreement, and within minutes Bill had taped three sticks of dynamite together and heaved the first bundle toward the jail.
As soon as the dynamite left Bill’s hand, he knew it was going to land short of the jail. It did, sliding under a deputy sheriff’s Chrysler in the no-man’s-land of parked cars separating the jail from the GIs. The massive car lifted into the air, turned over, and crashed back to the pavement, its windows shattering.
Before the wheels on the upside-down sedan had stopped spinning, White reared back and heaved another bundle of dynamite toward the jail.
There was another earsplitting explosion, but once again, the dynamite had landed too far short of the jail to seriously damage it.
“We’re going to have to get some charges up there on the building,” Bill said to Buttram. Both men knew the risks inherent in that proposition. The last time any GIs had exposed themselves in the area near the jail, a single shotgun blast had taken out Edgar Miller and Harold Powers. But compared to what he’d faced in the jungles of Guadalcanal and the beaches of Tarawa, this current mission seemed almost safe.
Bill put together another bundle and crawled under the cover of the earlier explosions’ smoke. He slid right up to the overturned cars, lit a fuse, and pitched the dynamite onto the jail’s front porch. This time he was plenty close enough. The blast shook the jail to its foundation and wooden porch planks flew into the night sky. Windows in neighboring stores rattled.
With the floors beneath them shaking and the ceiling above them trembling, the jail’s defenders, except for Sheriff Mansfield, who had previously managed to sneak into an ambulance that had come to carry away wounded deputies, came rushing out of the battered building they had once been so confident would protect them. With smoke in their eyes and white handkerchiefs held high, the once-arrogant group of deputies tumbled out into the street.
5:45 A.M.
It would be a day before Paul Cantrell, who skipped town in disguise, conceded defeat. And it would be longer than that before Windy Wise felt safe showing his face again in Athens. Not that he had much choice. Wise was tried and sentenced to one to three years in prison for the shooting of Tom Gillespie.
It had taken several hours to deal with the other Cantrell deputies who surrendered to Athens’s GIs that morning. Largely for their own protection, the men, most of whom were out-of-towners, had been returned to the jail they’d fled and locked away until it was safe for them to go home.
Somehow, in a six-hour gunfight involving hundreds of people, no one had died, and in the predawn hours after the shooting stopped, the mature and less vindictive of the GIs made sure it stayed that way.
Bill White finally headed from the city center to his parents’ farm, past the old sign that read “Welcome to Athens, the Friendly City.” He moved at a slightly quicker pace than normal, even though his body ached from almost twenty-four hours on his feet. Some of the speed came from the adrenaline that still flowed through his body. War was hell, but it also provided an unparalleled rush.
As the sun rose over the Smoky Mountains and Bill rounded the bend toward home, the tired young man slowed just a bit. He began to wonder what he would do with his life now that the campaign was over. He’d tried the GI Bill for a few months, but college wasn’t for him. He wanted to find something else like the campaign, a corner of the world where he could right wrongs and stand up to crooks and thugs. He wanted a job that came not just with a paycheck, but also with a purpose.
There was a familiar tune playing in his head as he pondered his prospects; the same melody that had kept coming to mind throughout the night’s battle. It was a song he had heard many times, but one whose title, the “William Tell Overture,” he would never have been able to identify if asked.
“Maybe I’ll be a lawman,” Bill said to himself, holding his shotgun over one shoulder and resting his rifle on the other. “With a silver star on my shirt and a loaded gun in my holster.”
He stopped and looked back toward the town he loved.
After all, Bill thought with a smile, Athens is gonna need some new deputy sheriffs.
11
The My Lai Massacre: A Light in the Darkness
Tuttle-Woods Convalescent Home
Camden, New Jersey
March 15, 2008
Close to midnight, a commotion started halfway down the D-Ward corridor. Though outbursts weren’t all that unusual, this one was different: unceasingly shrill and somewhat violent, like some old codger was trying to raise the dead.
Sticking to unofficial procedure, Everly Davison ignored the rising clatter and pressed on with his crossword puzzle.
Everly, who was better known as E-bomb among his off-duty circle of friends, was head of the security shift that night. This temporary promotion had been awarded by default, not by merit. All three of his useless superiors had called in sick on this cold, rainy, late winter evening.
Not that Everly was complaining. He so rarely got the chance to be the boss that he was making the most of it: feet up on the desk, microwaved hot chocolate with hazelnut Coffee Mate and a secret splash of Jim Beam, and the keys to all the snack machines on his utility belt. Hell, if this was work, he couldn’t wait to see vacation.
That one disturbed resident down the hall was the only thing keeping this from being a great night. No need to make an issue of it, Everly thought. Not just yet. Even crazy people have to blow off a little steam once in a while. Waiting out his outburst would be safer and simpler for all concerned—and keeping things simple was what Everly did best.
Following his early release from Riverfront State Prison, Everly had swabbed out a few thousand of the world’s nastiest porta-johns, manned a medical waste incinerator, delivered pizzas on foot through the worst gang-war hot zones of Newark, washed a nightly truckload of dishes in an institutional kitchen, and spent three bloody weeks as an apprentice on the kill-floor at a slaughterhouse. After all that, he’d finally stuffed enough padding into his ex-con’s résumé to land his first real, full-time job: janitor at Tuttle-Woods.
Everly was perfectly happy with the work—climate control was a wonderful thing—but a few months later things got even better when he was promoted to security guard. To most people, walking the halls of an old folks’ home on the graveyard shift might not seem that glamorous, but to Everly Davison it was like winning the lottery—even though he knew that lottery ticket was being cashed at someone else’s expense.
A couple of weeks earlier, one of the guards had called the home’s outside security contractor for help with an elderly lady who’d gotten it into her head that her daughter-in-law was coming to kill her and steal all her money. She’d taken a swing at the doctor who was trying to bring her meds, then she grabbed some silverware and holed up in the public bathroom. The rulebook says to call in reinforcements, so to speak, when things get out of hand, and that’s what the guard on duty had done.
The rent-a-cops arrived at the home in riot gear and cleared out the regular workers. They hit the old woman with a Taser and a twelve-gauge beanbag gun, and she died right where she fell.
The security contractors later issued a report saying that the woman had come at them with a butcher knife. The guard who’d called for reinforcements was quickly fired for making noise about what he’d seen, and with nobody else alive willing to say otherwise, that was the end of it. Everly Davison happily accepted his promotion from the janitorial department into his new cushy security job.
The lady from Human Resources had laid out the requirements for the promotion, adding at the very end that she was specifically looking for someone who understood that discretion was the better part of valor. Whatever that phrase had meant when it was first written down, Everly knew what she was getting at. See nothing; say nothing. He nodded his head in agreement and that was that—Everly Davison was officially a security guard.
The yelling on D-Ward hadn’t stopped and now it sounded to Everly like somebody down there had started throwing furniture around. A number of orderlies were in sight and Everly motioned for them to handle the disturbance while he went to the front entrance to answer the shrill buzzing of the doorbell.
The young woman standing outside was not unattractive, though she looked like a drowned rat in the driving rain. She was dressed for business and had an official-looking clipboard in her hand. Everly’s first thought was that she was some kind of a state inspector, which wouldn’t be good at all, but when she pressed her ID against the glass it said she was from the newspaper.
“Thanks,” she said, after he’d let her inside the foyer. “I’m Julia Geller, from the Courier-Post. I made an appointment a couple of days ago. I’m here to interview one of your residents.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Because nobody told me.”
“Sorry to hear that, mister . . .” She wiped the rainwater from her glasses, and squinted at his name tag. “Mr. Davison.” She replaced her spectacles and made a note on her pad. “Should we call up your boss, because—”
“No, no,” Everly said. “I believe you, let’s not make any waves. Come on with me, we’ll find whoever you want to talk to.”
She told him to call her Julie and relayed the name of the resident she’d come to see. When Everly checked the room assignments it was clear that this was more bad news for the trouble-free evening he’d planned. This reporter wanted to talk to that man on D-Ward, the very one who was still down there raging like a lunatic.
“Do you mind if I slip back there so I can see your screen?” Julie asked, edging past him without really waiting for his answer.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to—”
“It’s okay, thanks.” She sat at the computer and started typing and clicking.
“I don’t want to lose my job,” Everly said quietly.
“Neither do I.” In a few seconds she’d found the records for room D-31. “Tell you what, there’s a hundred dollars cash in it for you, if I get what I need for my story. How does that grab you?”
He gave a look around the security station to make sure the coast was clear. “Sounds fine to me, I guess. Just—”
“Good.” After a bit more searching she seemed to find what she was looking for. “Morgan Campbell, age fifty-nine,” she said to herself, and she began writing again on her pad. “No next of kin . . . VA transfer, diabetes, emphysema, cancer survivor, diagnosed in ’01 with early-onset Alzheimer’s. . . .”
“Alzheimer’s,” Everly repeated. “So how’re you going to interview him if he can’t remember anything?”
“Memory’s strange in these patients,” she said, still scrolling through the screens of confidential data. “It’s first-in, last-out. He might not know who the president is, or what day it is, he might not even remember his breakfast this morning. But I’m betting he can tell me all about what happened forty years ago. Tomorrow’s the anniversary.”
She’d said this as though Everly might know what she meant. “Anniversary of what?” he asked.
In the silence that followed, Julie looked up from the computer. “Ever met a mass murderer, Mr. Davison?”
His checkered past being what it was, he had to think about that for a moment. “What do you mean, like three or four people?”
“Like three or four hundred. Maybe more.”
The lights flickered for a second as thunder rolled outside, and right then Everly Davison felt the full weight of the gold plastic badge pinned on his chest.
“No,” he said, “I never have.”
She nodded. “Then come with me.”
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