The Ledger

12.2 Armed Forces

In this episode (12.2), a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran is murdered by some of his fellow soldiers because he threatened to expose their massacre of civilians in a village during the war. Briscoe and Green investigate, and McCoy and Southerlyn prosecute.

The episode begins inside a fancy restaurant's kitchen, where a manager is yelling at everyone to do things better. An Asian dishwasher (who looks Vietnamese to me), drops a tray full of glasses, and as he cleans up, takes his mess outside, where he comes across the body. Briscoe and Green arrive, and Green chastises a police officer for yelling at the Asian kid. Green says of the white officer, "When is he going to realize he's the minority in the city."

They look over the body, and with ME Rodgers help back at the office, determine the man is a shoeshiner. They visit Foley Square, talk to a beat cop who points them to a guy at a deli, and they get a partial ID on their victim: his name is Joe, and he lives in Queens. In his shinebox, which he had left with the deli owner, they find some expensive glasses. They trace the glasses to their rightful owner, but he's not much help, but he does say that Joe got mugged by some Asian gangmembers. They track down a girl who was also mugged by these guys, the Mott Street Ghost Shadows, and she identifies one of the men who robbed her by recognizing him in a wanted poster.

They bring in this wise-ass gangmember, Kenny Eng, for questioning. He says he saw Joe talking to two older white guys next to a dark blue Mercedes sedan.

Cordova helps them ID their victim as Joseph Eastman, and tells them he is an army veteran. They search his apartment, and find a package containing his service medals: two purple hearts and a bronze star. He was a war hero. They talk to his old uncle, who sent him the package, and he says Joe was diagnosed with a terminal illness and recently expressed interest in the items from the war.

They check his medical records, and learn one of his listed contacts is Nolan Tinsdale, an oil company executive, and Joe's lieutenant in the army. They question him at his office. He doesn't drive a Mercedes.

They track down another old contact of Joe's: Mr Fletcher, now mayor of a New Jersey town. He is more curt and evasive than Tinsdale. And he drives a Mercedes matching the one seen by Kenny Eng.

They talk to Joe's psychiatrist and learn he had suicidal thoughts and was troubled by something having to do with a village. He also had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They visit the Veterans Administration and learn he recently sought information about returning his medals.

Southerlyn talks to Tinsdale, in front of his wife, to find out why. It makes no sense for SS to have taken over the investigation at this point, but whatever. Through Tinsdale, she gets interested in another army guy, Steven Morehouse. In the meantime, Tinsdale's wife offers a weak alibi for her husband.

SS heads to the Vietnamese embassy and the man there says that his country's records indicate that the event for which Joe received his medals was actually a massacre of civilians. He found a 50-year-old woman in Vietnam to tell the story. SS and McCoy visit Morehouse in Somerville, MA. He gives some vague indication he's not comfortable with the army's official version of events. He also says that Tinsdale and Fletcher met with Joe the night of his death.

They arraign Tinsdale and Fletcher (41'), and the defense soon moves to suppress any testimony about what happened at that village. The theory of the crime is that Tinsdale and Fletcher killed Eastman to prevent him from triggering an investigation into the massacre. At a motion hearing to determine inadmissibility, the Vietnamese woman speaks and discusses how her close relatives were killed. However, she did not see these events as they happened with her own eyes -- she was fleeing the village -- so her testimony is ruled inadmissible, a fact which understandably upsets her greatly. In Vietnamese, she says, "Thirty years and you still can't tell the truth."

During this proceeding, an official looking Army person enters the courtroom. He later talks to McCoy and says he doesn't want to blemish the reputations of these good men through an investigation. He basically asks McCoy to be careful in his investigation so as to spare the Army and these men any bad press related to the war. I found it strange that he's so concerned about the court case making the massacre public, given that all testimony related to it has just been suppressed. Anyway.

Everybody gathers in the family conference room, and Mayor Fletcher and Tinsdale seem ready to continue stonewalling. But then SS dramatically brings Morehouse into the room, and he makes it clear that he will testify against them -- both regarding the village and the murder of Joe. In the face of this, Tinsdale confesses, against Fletcher's objections, and takes a deal for Man 2.

In the epilogue, we see McCoy, Briscoe, and the old uncle attending Joe's tiny miltiary funeral, where "Taps" is played on a boombox.

Character background: Van Buren asks Briscoe whether he keeps in touch with any of his army buddies. He says not really.

This episode is pretty decent...slightly better than average, I guess. It holds your interest and doesn't get boring, although it creeps into the land of the not believable every now and then.

Note the correlation between the teaser (with the Asian dishwasher) and the rest of the episode.

Posted by adm at September 18, 2004 07:12 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thousandrobots.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/237

Comments

Post a comment

validate