Williamson is stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Colonel Williamson was David Hudson's immediate superior during both phases of his Special Forces training. Colonel, Mr. Carroll is here to ask you some questions.”
The Special Forces officer smiled amicably. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Carroll. May I sit down?”
“Please, Colonel,” Carroll said. Both men sat down, followed by Captain Hawkins, who would remain in the room for the interview, a matter of protocol.
“What is it you need to know about David?”
“The two of you were on a first-name basis?”
“Yes, I knew David Hudson fairly well. I should amend that, to be as accurate as possible. I spent some time with David Hudson. Not at or because of the Special Forces school. This was after the war. I bumped into him a few times. At different veterans affairs, mostly. We were both active. We had a couple of beers together a couple of times.”
“Tell me about it, Colonel. What was Hudson like? What was he like to have a beer with?”
Carroll controlled his eagerness to ask more probing questions. His mind was still clouded from the long morning at the FBI, but he knew better than to pressure a Special Forces colonel.
“David Hudson was stiff at first. Though he tried like the devil not to be. Then he was just fine. He knew a lot about a lot of things. He was a thoughtful man, extremely bright.”
“Colonel Hudson's army career seemed to disintegrate after Vietnam. Do you know why?”
Duriel Williamson shrugged. “That's something that's always troubled me. All I can say is that David Hudson was a very outspoken man.”
“Meaning, Colonel?” Carroll continued to probe carefully.
“Meaning he was capable of making important enemies inside the army… He was also extremely disappointed. Bitter, I guess is the better word.”
Bitter, Carroll thought. Exactly how bitter? He studied the colonel in silence.
“The treatment our men got after Vietnam made David Hudson a very angry person. I think it disillusioned him more than most of us. He considered it a natural disgrace. He blamed President Nixon at first. He wrote personal letters to the president, also to the chief of staff.”
“Just letters? Was that the extent of his protests for the veterans?” I need somebody, Carroll thought, with the kind of bitterness that would go well beyond letters. Hell, anybody could sit down and write a crank letter.
“Actually, no. He was involved in several of the more vocal protests.”
“Colonel, any answers you can elaborate on would be helpful. I've got all night to listen.”
“He called attention to Washington 's long string of broken promises to our veterans. All the betrayals. ‘The disposable GI’ was a phrase he liked to use… Let me tell you, Mr. Carroll, that kind of high-profile activity can earn you a fast assignment to Timbuktu, or to some Podunk reserve unit. That would put him in the Pentagon computers, too. Hudson was very active with radical veterans.”
“What about his training at the Special Forces school? At Fort Bragg?” Carroll then asked. “Colonel, please try to be thorough.”
“Some of this was quite a while ago. It didn't seem so important at the time. I'll try.”
For almost an hour Colonel Williamson painstakingly described a brilliant young army officer, with boundless energy, with small-town American enthusiasm and talent-a model soldier. Many of the epithets Carroll had read earlier in the 211 files, he heard again from Colonel Williamson.
“What I remember most, though,” Williamson said, “what stands out to this day about Hudson, is the time at Fort Bragg. We were instructed to push and drive him. Push him to his physical and emotional limits. We redlined David Hudson at Bragg.”
“More than other officers who were assigned to the Bragg program?”
“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Without any doubt we pushed him more. No punches were pulled. His POW experience was used to pump up his hatred for ‘our enemies.’ Hudson was programmed to seek revenge, to hate. In my opinion, he was a walking time bomb.”
“Who instructed you to do that, Colonel? Who told you to push Colonel Hudson? Somebody obviously must have singled him out for special attention.”
Colonel Hudson paused. His dark eyes didn't leave Carroll's face, but there was a perceptible change in him. Carroll couldn't quite read the change at first.
“I suppose you're right. At this point, uh, after all these years… I'm not sure I can tell you who, though… Isn't that funny? I remember we were unusually tough on him. Also that Hudson was pretty much up to it. He definitely had character to spare. Great stamina. The heart of a teenager.”
“But his training wasn't typical, not the regular course? His was different somehow?”
“Yes. David Hudson's training at Fort Bragg was beyond the established norm, which was demanding in itself.”
“Give me some idea, Colonel. Put me at the training camp. Can you make it come alive for me? What was the actual training like?”
“All right. I don't think you can imagine it, unless you actually went through it… Up at two-thirty in the morning. Physical abuse. Drug-induced nightmares. Interrogation by the best in the army. Pushed like a dirt-farm tractor until you dropped at eight. Up again at two-thirty-I mean pushed, drained. Each day was one hundred percent harder than the last. Physically and emotionally, and psychologically… The men chosen to go to Bragg were all considered top rank. Hudson had West Point
Carroll, hearing the word
“Meaning what, Colonel? What does a good rep mean in that context? As a military assassin.”
“It means he wasn't a thrill killer-which most of the top hitters were… A very real problem is what to do with some of those guys once they leave the army. If the generals had decided to take out Ho Chi Minh, someone very big, very delicate, Hudson most likely would have been considered. I'm telling you, he was one of the fair- haired boys.”
“You seem a little awed by Hudson yourself.”
Williamson smiled absently; he finally chuckled softly into his chest full of medals. “I don't know about awe. Awe isn't the right word. Definitely respect, though.”
“Why?”
“He was one of the best soldiers I've ever trained. He had physical endurance and all the technical skills. He had strength and tremendous smarts. A martial-arts background. He also had something else. Dignity.”
“So what went wrong? What happened to Hudson after the war? Why did he finally leave the army in 1976?”
Colonel Williamson rubbed his hard-boned, clean-shaven jaw. “As I said, the one potential problem was his attitude. He could be extremely judgmental… He also thought he had answers to some controversial army problems. Some career officers might not have appreciated Hudson 's judgment of them and their actions. The other thing was the loss of his arm. David Hudson had big, big plans for himself. How many one-armed generals are you aware of?”
Arch Carroll thought before he spoke again. For all the apparent cooperation, he had a sneaking feeling that Colonel Williamson was still holding something back. It was the army way, he remembered from extensive past dealings with the Pentagon. Everything had to be a huge “need to know” secret, shared only inside the sacred fraternity of army blood brothers, shared only with the other warriors.
“Colonel Williamson, I've got to ask the next few questions with the authority of the commander in chief. That means I need complete answers.”
“That's what you've been getting, Mr. Carroll.”
“Colonel Williamson, did you know the official purpose of David Hudson's Special Forces training at Fort Bragg? Why was he at the JFK school? If that information was in any of your orders, if you heard it anywhere on the base I need to know it.”
Colonel Duriel Williamson stared back hard at Arch Carroll, then at Captain Hawkins. When he spoke, his voice was softer, deeper than it had been. “Nothing was ever written down in any of the orders… As I said, I don't remember who actually issued our daily orders. I do know
“Go on. Please, Colonel Williamson.”
“It was something we were told at the very first briefing on David Hudson. Verbally told. The first briefing sounded like total CIA bullshit, by the way. Until we actually met Hudson… You see… they told us Colonel David Hudson had been specially chosen to be our version of the Third World superterrorist. David Hudson was selected and trained to be our version of the terrorist Juan Carlos.”
Arch Carroll became very tense now. He leaned forward on his chair. “That's why he was at the Bragg school? Why he was pushed ahead, beyond all the others?”
“That's what we helped teach him to be… And Mr. Carroll, Hudson was frightening. He is
Carroll didn't speak-because right at that moment he couldn't. The realization that the United States Army had secretly trained its own Carlos, and that he had now quite possibly turned, was unbelievable. Colonel Williamson's words rang in his ears:
“Colonel Williamson, in your opinion, could David Hudson have been involved with Green Band? Could he have technically masterminded an operation like that?”
“I don't doubt it, Mr. Carroll. He has all the technical skills.”
Williamson sighed. “One more fact about Colonel David Hudson, though. When I knew him, at least, and I think I knew the man fairly well, he loved the United States very much. He loved America. Make no mistake, David Hudson was a patriot.”
When Arch Carroll drove out of the vast, nearly empty Pentagon parking area at a little past ten that night, his mind was rapidly turning over all kinds of possibilities. Finally, something had connected. Something made sense in Green Band.
As he drove, weary and stone-faced, to the Washington Hotel, he tried to review the long day. His eyes were red and they burned. But he felt legitimately close to something for the first time since Green Band had begun.
Colonel David Hudson was trained to be our version of Carlos… our version of Monserrat.
