Doctor’s Plot

I. Captain Levy

At eleven in the morning of a drizzly day in June, Captain Howard Brett Levy, M.D., was seized and manacled, hurried from a barracks courtroom, and carried off in a staff car to the stockade at Fort Jackson, S.C. He stayed the night in a small bare cell behind a crude wood-and-wire door, and the next day was inexplicably moved to an empty ward at the post hospital where he had served for nearly two years. There he is confined, under constant watch by an M.P., as he begins a sentence of three years at hard labor for crimes of conscience and belief. In a sense, Levy concurred in the findings of the court martial. He did what they said he did, and he is not sorry. He killed no guard, threw no bomb, raped no white woman, stole no secrets, packed no pumpkin. Nobody framed him; he is the wanted man. What is in contention is not the fact of his actions, but their meaning. Levy refuses to be complicit in a war he abhors; the Army calls that disobedient. He accepts responsibility for the consequences of his acts; that is unbecoming conduct, and it promotes disloyalty. Levy did not seek to change the Army, but to ignore it, and he wanted not martyrdom but expression. The Army, in the way it often does, gave him just what he did not want.

Levy’s progress from Brooklyn, where he was born thirty years ago, to the Fort Jackson stockade is lined with milestones familiar to his generation. He was the only child of conventionally nice Jewish parents. Toward the end of high school, he became vaguely aware of politics: “If I had been old enough I would have voted for Eisenhower.” At N.Y.U. he studied hard (I had to, I wasn’t brilliant”), assembled a respectable record, and became the president of a fraternity which he helped found. “It was designed to do everything that fraternities don’t do,” he said. In that case, it was a useful way of avoiding the conformism of the era without actually opting out.

“The most radical thing I did in the Fifties,” Levy said in the course of a long conversation one afternoon in the middle of the court martial, “was to go to folk music concerts, or read the Elektra Records catalogue.” He went to Downstate Medical Center in 1958; in 1962 he interned at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. “I was interested in the money part of medicine,” he said. “But then a real change happened. I took part of my residency at Bellevue, and I was working with people who were destitute and downtrodden and completely cynical about the system. I began to identify with their problems in a real way.”

There were others in America who were turning off “the system” in those years, but the effect of the new “generational” mood was indirect at best. “There was absolutely nobody to talk to. I tried to talk all the time. Everyone I knew disagreed. You know, if you hang around with old socialists all the time you begin to think that everyone’s a socialist; it just ain’t true. If you hang around with liberals, you think that everyone’s a liberal. That just ain’t true. But the people I hung around with were racists, and most people are racists. Period.”

Levy read Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills and went to lectures by Negro radicals. He listened to WBAI, the audience-supported radio station, and when its license was in jeopardy, he wrote a letter to the FCC. The license was renewed, and Levy was encouraged to write to President Johnson and the New York senators—“all those irrelevant people”—on weightier matters. But now the letters did not do much good. The first “really activist thing” he did was join a welfare workers’ picket line in 1965 in New York. “I was uncomfortable as hell,” he remembered. “It was freezing and raining and a terrible day. But most of it was just the fear of having my friends see me.”

AT ABOUT THAT TIME, Levy’s marriage began to disintegrate. He had married right after medical school, before his ideas of himself and his world began to change. “I said screw all the materialism; I don’t want to be poor, but I’m not interested in the money part.” Like many of his contemporaries whom he had never met and who were also changing, Levy began to believe that he might spend a part of his life in jail. There was nothing romantic about it. “Individual martyrdom is irrelevant in this society,” he thought, “but sometimes you get yourself into situations. At Bellevue I saw people lined up in the morning defecating without even screens between them. That’s just degrading. The aim is degradation. I feel more strongly about that than about Vietnam.”

In medical school, Levy had signed up with the Army’s Berry Plan, which allows doctors to finish their training before accepting the inevitable draft call. There is no “selective” service for doctors; it is an across-the-board sweep, with no deferments for family status, few for physical impairments, and eligibility until the age of thirty-six. Levy was to report to the Army in July, 1965. Because of the crush of new commissions at the end of the academic year, there was no room for him in the orientation course given most Army doctors at Fort Sam Houston, Tex. He was expected at Fort Jackson, and for weeks before-hand he was anxious and depressed. He drank a lot and came home sick. His marriage was about over, and it was hard for him to separate the two traumas of change.

“It wasn’t the regimentation of the Army that bothered me,” Levy said, “although I didn’t like it. It was Vietnam; it bothered me a lot then, and it bothers me a lot more now.” He was two days late for duty at Fort Jackson (car trouble). He checked into the B.O.Q. the first night, discovered there was no hot water in the shower, and moved to an off-post apartment the next day. The second rebellion came soon afterward when he found a twelve-dollar bill for officers’ club dues on his desk. He never paid it—or the bills which followed. He was not terribly popular with his superiors.

FORT JACKSON is a basic-training center with a large transient population and not much connection with the neighboring city of Columbia. “Fort Jackson is barren of intellect, barren of life: the people aren’t really alive in any sense of the term,” Levy said. He felt isolated. One Saturday morning in a Columbia coffee shop he noticed an item in the paper about a Negro voter registration drive in a town called Newberry, S.C. Levy had no idea where it was. But he quickly paid his check and started out to find the action. Somehow, he made his way to the county courthouse, where a demonstration was in progress. He found the local organizer, a young white Army veteran named Bill Treanor, and volunteered his services.

“It was very simple then, very romantic. The next afternoon we registered an old man in his nineties,” Levy recalled. “He was all bent over, a sharecropper all his life, and he was so proud with his yellow registration slip. It made us feel so good. I don’t think I’d feel the same way today.”

Levy went to Newberry every weekend that summer, and in the fall joined in civil rights work in Columbia. Later, he staged a fund-raising rhythm-and-blues show (“it was monumentally unsuccessful financially but extremely successful artistically”), and last year began to publish an eight-page biweekly newspaper for the movement called Contrast. But civil rights organizing is not a usual pastime for a white Army officer in South Carolina, and Levy soon piqued the interest of the Counter-Intelligence Corps. Investigators got to him shortly after the summer project was over and questioned him closely about his politics, his reading matter, and his organizational affiliations. They were worried about the sponsorship of the Negro radicals’ lectures (Trotskyist), and were not calmed by Levy’s assurances that he only went to listen. They asked him to take a lie-detector test, and he refused. Finally, they asked whether he would follow an order of a superior officer under any circumstances, and Levy said, of course he would not.

All along, there had been minor run-ins with authority. Levy never could manage to wear his uniform correctly, nor keep his shoes shined, nor remember to have his hair cut. His manner is abrupt and defensive at times, but he can easily be warm and eager with those for whom he feels some companionship. More than anything, he is Brooklynesque, with none of the assimilated “shoe-ness” of the med-student style. That suits Levy and his friends, but it is not always successful with the types at Fort Jackson. One day he had an argument with an M.P. officer: something about a parking ticket. “I was short with him,” Levy admitted. In his report, the M.P. gave more details:

When told to come to attention and salute, subject smirked, came to attention on one leg and half heartedly put his hand near his head with his fingers in a crumpled position, then threw his hand in the direction of the wall. His left hand remained in his pocket. Throughout the conversation, CAPT. LEVY was insubordinate by facial expression, body movement and vocal inflection. Subject needed a haircut and his branch and US insignia were in reverse manner.

II. Colonel Fancy

On post, Levy spent his time running a small dermatology clinic for soldiers (V.D.), dependents (acne), and retired personnel (psoriasis). He was well thought of professionally. Col. Chester H. Davis, the hospital’s executive officer, had no complaints about the way Levy treated him for a dry spot on the buttocks (“Don’t wash so much”). Then Fort Jackson initiated a training program for Special Forces medical aidmen—the part-combat, part-medic complement of the Green Berets—and Levy was assigned to give each of them five days of instruction in dermatology.

He trained them for three or four months—“with some reservations”—and found them the most interesting people on the base. There was a striking similarity between the backgrounds of the Green Berets and white civil rights workers: the alienation from middle-class families, the feeling of being trapped by the society, the urge to have some effect of one’s own.

I talked to them about the war and about themselves, but after a while I realized that it wasn’t doing any good. For a time, I pulled the kind of crap that some of the other doctors did—they just let the aidmen hang around and never really trained them. Then, last June, I just kicked them out.

It wasn’t intellectualized in the beginning, but I had two reasons. First, I don’t think you can possibly train guys for five days in dermatology to a point where they’ll do more good than harm. And second, I don’t think medicine should be used for political purposes. You can’t separate it from the war. It’s part and parcel of the same thing.

Levy’s earlier commander heard that the aidmen had been refused training, but he let the matter slide after an inconclusive interview with the Captain. But Col. Henry Franklin Fancy, who took command of the hospital in mid-summer of 1966, was not quite so complaisant. He had noticed the “flag” on Levy’s personnel file, denoting a security risk; “communistic,” Colonel Fancy thought to himself (as he testified later). Then Fancy began hearing reports that Levy was telling aidmen and patients that the war in Vietnam was wrong, that he would not serve in Vietnam if ordered, and that if he were a Negro soldier he would come home to fight for civil rights. As for the Green Berets: They were “liars and thieves and killers of peasants and murderers of women and children.” Worst of all, Levy had been talking like that to enlisted men, in violation of the responsibilities of rank.

Colonel Fancy was wondering just what to do when an intelligence agent told him the little secrets of Levy’s “G-2” dossier. The full richness of its 180 pages has not yet been revealed even to Levy’s civilian lawyers, but it contained such spicy information as this interview with a sergeant:

Levy expressed very leftist ideas and viewpoints. He spoke favorably about those persons who burned their draft cards, feeling that this was their right, and they should not be prosecuted for this. Source does not consider subject a loyal American because of his statements condemning US policies…. Levy was quite pro-Negro, to the side of the Negroes when discussing civil rights matters, and appeared to think more of the Negroid race than that of the White race.

Colonel Fancy told his executive officer, Colonel Davis, that Levy was a “pinko.” Then, after consultations with Army lawyers, Fancy issued a formal order to Levy to train the Special Forces aidmen. Levy did not comply. Colonel Fancy was ready to take non-judicial disciplinary action when, after another close look at the G-2 dossier, he and Heaven knows who else decided to escalate the proceedings. Fancy charged Levy with willful disobedience of an order (a capital offense in wartime), and with promoting disloyalty and disaffection among the troops. A general court martial was convened.

LEVY IS CONVINCED that the ante was raised because of his politics, or Colonel Fancy’s reading of them. There is nothing to suggest that the commandant was in any way flexible on the subject of pinkness. In a preliminary hearing, Colonel Fancy testified that the communist line, as he understands it, includes “the requirement for world domination…and the lack of what we consider God and their requirement not to believe in God. The requirement to agitate and propagandize in such a way that non-communist people’s minds are maintained in a state of chronic anxiety in the hope that this will not impair their will to resist the communist domination.” The civil rights movement, he said, might well create such anxiety, and the anti-war protest was communist-based. That seemed to take care of Captain Levy. Colonel Fancy felt it necessary to warn a class of aidmen, in a graduation speech, to disregard the blandishments of left-wingers who might have infiltrated his hospital. Still, there was a touch of sentiment in the old bureaucrat. One day after the preliminary hearing had been concluded and the court martial was about to begin, Howard Levy received a birthday card in the mail: “Look to this day for it is life,” the message read. “For yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But today makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Hope your birthday is happy and the year ahead is full of all that means the most to you.” It was signed “Bud and Cooksie Fancy.”

III Captain Shusterman

Exactly why the Army permitted the Levy trial to blow up out of all rational proportions is still unclear. But the proceedings seemed to take on a life of their own. The actors were swept along by a play they never wrote. Last fall, Levy told his girl-friend, an art student at the University of South Carolina named Trina Sahli, that he believed no final action would be taken before he left the Army in July, 1967. Levy’s lawyers gave the authorities any number of escapes—including an application for conscientious-objector status, which was promptly refused. But the charges kept increasing. In February, a third count was added, for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” on the basis of the conversations with enlisted men. A few days later, two more came. They stemmed from a letter Levy wrote to Sgt. Geoffrey Hancock in Vietnam, at the suggestion of Bill Treanor, the civil rights worker in Newberry. Treanor had been stationed in Hawaii with Hancock. The two regularly corresponded, and Hancock (a white man married to a Negro girl) expressed some concern about the Vietnam protest movement at home. Treanor thought Levy could tell Hancock how it was:

I am one of those people back in the states who actively opposes our efforts there and would refuse to serve there if I were so assigned [Levy wrote]…. I do not believe that you can realistically judge the Vietnam war as an isolated incident. It must be viewed in the context of the recent history of our foreign policy—at least from the start of the cold war…. Geoffrey, who are you fighting for? Do you know?…Your real battle is back here in the US, but why must I fight it for you? The same people who suppress Negroes and poor whites here are doing it all over again all over the world and you’re helping them. Why? You…know about the terror the whites have inflicted upon Negroes in our country. Aren’t you guilty of the same thing with regard to the Vietnamese? A dead woman is a dead woman in Alabama and in Vietnam. To destroy a child’s life in Vietnam equals a destroyed life in Harlem.

The letter went on for eight pages, with a great deal of explanation and obvious passion. It ended with an invitation for reply (the two had never met), but Hancock did not answer. He kept the letter for fourteen months in a pile of trash, and when he saw a television news broadcast about the Levy affair on Okinawa, turned it over to his superiors.

At some point, the Army began to worry about the effects of the trial. Its tactics began to seem a little more cool. Col. Earl V. Brown, the service’s chief law officer, was sent down from Washington to be the “judge.” The Fort Jackson commanding general appointed a court martial composed of ten men of rank higher than Levy’s, all career line officers, four of them combat veterans of Vietnam, and all but one Southerners. The line-up was out of a Frank Capra war movie: one quiet Negro, one inscrutable Nisei (both quite junior), and a major whose eye had been lost in a (“friendly”) mine explosion in Vietnam. There were no Jews, or doctors, or captains, or enlisted men, or women, or non-career officers. For the prosecution, the Army found a young Jewish lawyer in a camp in Georgia and brought him to Fort Jackson. Someone in the Pentagon had been reading Zola.

Capt. Richard M. Shusterman presents only one of the countless ironies of the Levy affair. Amiable, ambitious, square, deferential, liberal, and crew-cut, Shusterman is everything that Levy is not. He believes in military necessity and good order, the proper balance between the rights of men and the demands of institutions, the mutability of moral standards. He asserts that the world is too complex to be understood, and he makes a positive value of that uncomprehension. It gets him off the hook. If he had any doubts at the beginning, he had convinced himself of the moral rightness of his side by the time the court martial began. He even seemed to have allayed some of the difficulties he may once have had in supporting US policy in Vietnam.

Shusterman is Levy before Bellevue. He is the part of the generation of the late Fifties—by far the larger piece—which is continuous with its past, unmindful of its future. He votes for liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans, his favorite magazine is The New Republic, and he wishes that New Left students would shave their beards and dress neatly. It would help them sell their ideas in the marketplace. Phi Beta Kappa at Lafayette, a full scholarship to Penn Law, and a job, perhaps, with a tony firm in Philadelphia that now and then takes a few well turned-out Jews. He doesn’t mind the officers’ club at all, but would defend to the death anyone’s right not to like it. Except, of course, when he is the chief prosecutor.

IV. Major Llewellyn

The trial began on May 10, in a small low-ceilinged hut on a sandy knoll at Fort Jackson. The court assembled each morning at 0900 hours, as everyone was fond of saying, in the way tourists on their first trip abroad enjoy the simplest Berlitz phrase. Newsmen and spectators drove to the court through fields of recruits doing calisthenics, romping over the “confidence course” (formerly, the obstacle course), or charging aimlessly with fixed bayonets. Women remarked sadly on the youthfulness of the soldiers marching down the roads.

Shusterman had an easy job. He had to prove that the facts of the case were as everyone agreed they were, that Colonel Fancy’s order was lawful, and that Levy had said and written the words ascribed to him. Colonel Brown, the law officer, ruled that the truth of the statements was immaterial, as was evidence of their effect. As a matter of fact, Howard Levy was not much of a subversive. No one became disaffected or disloyal. Shusterman did, however, have to prove Levy’s intent to commit his crimes, but the court was permitted to draw its conclusions on that matter from the circumstances of the case, and from the pattern of Levy’s political behavior.

Colonel Fancy was first on the stand, reciting softly and with no feeling the tribulations of life in the hospital with a trouble-making pinko. During much of his long testimony, he stared at the thin red carpet beneath him. The men on the court seemed sympathetic; no officer likes to be disobeyed. Levy’s civilian counsel, Charles Morgan, Jr., tried to establish from the succession of aidmen who followed that they were essentially combat soldiers, not medics. Some carried Red Cross insignia on their I.D. cards, and some did not. The point was never established.

The first indication that Levy was not alone in his concern about complicity and responsibility at the Fort Jackson hospital came in the testimony of another Brooklyn Jewish doctor named Ivan Mauer. Levy had once told him: “You’re no better than the rest. You’re in sympathy with me, but you want to walk the tightrope.” At last, Captain Mauer got off the tightrope. He was not teaching aidmen at present, he said, and he would not participate in the program if he were assigned. There seemed to be a small “doctors’ revolt” brewing. A Negro ophthalmologist (who in the thousandth irony of the case was treating the wounded one-eyed major on the court) testified for Levy that he had serious doubts about training aidmen. He compromised with his scruples by merely letting the students look over his shoulder as he worked, with no formal instruction. He told the law officer he was afraid to say even that much, for fear of prosecution.

Morgan had begun the defense’s case with a battery of character witnesses—Levy’s father, Negro civil rights workers—and was admittedly creating “an aura of Nuremberg” when the law officer interrupted. If Morgan wanted seriously to invoke the Nuremberg defense—that soldiers have a duty not to obey orders to commit war crimes—then he had to prove that the US was following “a general policy or a pattern or practice” of war crimes in Vietnam. Morgan was stunned. “Give me an extra day,” he asked Colonel Brown, half seriously.

Morgan actually had five days, but the task was hopeless from the start. For tactical and political reasons (for example, dissension within the American Civil Liberties Union, for which Morgan is Southern Regional Director), he decided to limit his testimony to criminal actions by the small Special Forces contingent in Vietnam. That eliminated evidence of saturation bombing, napalming, and genocide. A platoon of ACLU lawyers and staff assistants flew into Columbia from New York, accompanied by scores of new reporters. There were rumors of famous witnesses on the way—Sartre, Bertrand Russell, leaders of the NLF. At the end, there were only three: Robin Moore, the author of The Green Berets; Donald Duncan, the Ramparts editor who had served in the Special Forces himself and had told all in a magazine article; and Peter Bourne, a British-born US Army psychiatrist just back from a study tour in a Special Forces camp in Vietnam.

Moore was never actually a Green Beret. He was a Sheraton Hotels P.R. man who went through Special Forces training to write his book (3 1/2 million copies sold), and has not yet gone back to the P.R. business. He was embarrassingly chummy on the stand (“no sweat,” he told the judge, and he called the Montagnards “Yards”—which indeed was kinder than a prosecution witness who called the Viet Cong “Luke the Gook”). But, like Duncan after him, he did provide some grisly tales of the tactics of Special Forces when they are done winning the hearts and minds of the natives. No one seemed particularly moved. Moore, Shusterman, and Colonel Brown kept chatting about the cheapness of life in the Orient, the superstitions of the Vietnamese, and the exigencies of war.

Peter Bourne provided the most convincing testimony about the way in which the Special Forces turn over prisoners to the South Vietnamese, to torture them as they please. The US maintains no prisoner-of-war camps, and “military necessity” demands the transfer to the South Vietnamese. Under the rules of war, military units that take prisoners are responsible for their well-being, but none of the testimony satisfied the law officer. He ruled the next day that a case for war crimes as a policy had not been made, and he did not allow the testimony of “isolated incidents” to go before the full court.

NUREMBERG DAY was followed by Ethics Day. The defense went back to its original line, that Colonel Fancy’s order to Levy need not have been obeyed if it was contrary to the principles of medical ethics—that is, the rules against teaching medicine to those who will not practice it ethically. Three physicians (Victor Sidel of Harvard, Louis Lasagna of Johns Hopkins, and Benjamin Spock of everywhere) and a non-physician faculty member at Harvard, Jean Mayer, testified lucidly about the role of ethics in a physician’s life. Shusterman tried to get them to admit that whatever good the Special Forces aidmen might do in Vietnam justifies their military role, or at least is distinct from it. But they would not buy his cheerful pluralism. The aidman’s role is inextricable from the war policy. The aidmen and the pacification teams and the winners of peasants’ hearts and minds do not make war any better; they merely make it (possibly) more complete, more effective, more legitimate.

Shusterman produced a physician from Duke Medical School to refute the defense’s experts. Doctors may train “paramedical personnel,” the witness said, but they need take no responsibility for what the paramedics do with their training. But the most frightening witness of all was Major Craig Llewellyn, a thirty-year-old Special Forces physician, who ran the program in Vietnam for a year-and-a-half and now directs training at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C. Llewellyn arrived in paratroop boots and an open shirt, his head shaved almost bald and his manner something like a karate instructor’s. With cold passion, he argued that the Special Forces are the best thing that ever happened to Vietnam, or any other counter-insurgency situation, for that matter. The aidmen bring modern medicine to areas that know only “Chinese doctors”—“neither Chinese nor doctors.” Llewellyn’s case was as strong as any Calvinist missionary could ever have made, and with precisely the same logic. He proclaimed the new doctrine of participatory imperialism—let the people decide to accept American intervention. The court was impressed, and Shusterman rested the prosecution’s rebuttal.

V. Charles Morgan

No one could reasonably believe that the court martial would not convict Levy. Aside from the disadvantages of military procedure and the rather disorganized if often brilliant defense, there was simply too much at stake for the Army. Levy was a symbol of anarchy and willfulness.

But at the motel in Columbia where the defense lawyers, Levy and his family, and most of the press hung out, there was a disturbing kind of euphoria. The out-of-towners were isolated and distracted by the strangeness of the small southern capital and the otherworldliness of the army base. More than that, they had developed a sympathy—for many a commitment—to Levy for which there were no appropriate forms of expression. In civil rights marches and peace demonstrations, the committed can shout and stomp and wave banners. If they like, they can make faces or fists at hostile segregationists or pro-war hecklers. But there was no visible enemy to be angry at in Columbia. The substitute was a bizarre, compulsive hilarity. There were gags and songs and cocktails late into the night. Levy joined in as thoroughly as anyone; his parents looked somewhat baffled, but did not leave the scene. No one really could leave. The motel was like some moored ship carrying a cargo of doomed but laughing passengers.

The party began to wear thin in the last few days. Sgt. Charles Sanders, a quiet southern Army lawyer, serving as Levy’s military counsel, was wrenched out of shape. He had started the case as a routine assignment. By the time it was over, he had to question his values, his background, his deepest sense of himself. Levy’s act seemed to touch Sanders directly, at the same personal level on which it was made. Morgan had been working hard on the case for six months, and he was utterly involved and completely worn, but he managed to pull the pieces of the case together for a moving and masterly summation. Where it touched the law was not entirely apparent. But it was so painfully personal and so profoundly felt that even the court may have been moved to mercy.

“Events occur in the life of the world that are irrational, and the reason that they occur is that good men don’t stop them,” Morgan said. He is a great whale of a man, rumpled and sweaty at the slightest exertion, and he ranged around the small courtroom, talking without a script. “This case shouldn’t be here. Dr. Levy shouldn’t even be in the Army. Some place down the line, there was a place for this to stop, but it didn’t. Now it’s your responsibility to stop this thing as it monumentally cascades on to some crazy wild conclusion.”

Morgan knew how things get out of hand. He had been a lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 when he spoke—tentatively at first—against white racism. He was forced to leave the state. “Men are constantly being fitted into structures and sometimes they conform and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes men become martyrs by inadvertance, and around them swirl great movements. I don’t want a martyr. I want acquittal and we’re entitled to it and the Army will not fall if Levy goes free.

“More lives have been taken for hereesy and witchcraft than for all the crimes in human history. More people have been tried for crimes that do not exist than for those which exist. Men are constantly put on trial for their minds and words. Your whole lives are involved in the context of freedom; true patriotism involves a man’s right to dream and believe and think and speak and act. This trial has to do with free men and responsibility. I truly do not want a martyr. I want a free man.”

The court did not oblige. Levy was found guilty on the three major charges, and of a slightly less serious offense on the two counts arising from the letter to Hancock. Shusterman seemed to be having some last-minute doubts about his severity; he asked for a dismissal of those two charges, and Colonel Brown agreed. The next morning Levy was sentenced. As the court rose, Col. Chester Davis—the hospital executive officer now cured of the dry spot on his buttocks—took Levy by the arm and pushed him into a chair. Flushed and trembling, Davis pulled a pair of silver handcuffs from his pocket, fumbled awkwardly, and clasped them around Levy’s wrist. The lawyers shouted, Trina Sahli cried, and Levy started moving through the door. He had a most peculiar smile on his face, which was captured in all the news photos—something between sorrow and contempt, but for whom it was not possible to tell.