She hadn’t learned the rest herself until much later. The explosion had spooked the enemy and the firefight ended. Patton had passed out after seeing Bailey, and though technically conscious when the medic evacuated her, she didn’t remember anything until three days later, when she awoke in a hospital bed in Germany. She had a minor gunshot wound to her left arm and a few broken ribs from the force of the explosion. Not enough, she thought, to warrant being sent all the way back to Landstuhl.

“Why am I here?” she asked of everyone who came into her room, but they only responded by taking her blood pressure or temperature. Not until the third day did a member of the JAG Corps appear in her room to say that, while there would certainly be an investigation, he didn’t think a court-martial was likely under the circumstances.

“What circumstances?” said Patton. And then he told her.

Her radio message of the coordinates of the village that the man in the explosive vest had given them triggered an air strike. Patton Jackson Harcourt, whose family members had died in friendly fire incidents in three different wars, had called in an air strike that had killed all but three members of an American squad—nine soldiers. When the JAG officer told her, she had cried so long and so hard that the nurse had to reconnect her saline drip to keep her from dehydrating. She had spent three months in psychological care in Germany, and eventually, as the officer had predicted, there had been an investigation and a hearing, though not, ultimately, a court-martial. The hearing had made no final determination about what had happened. Had Patton or Bailey or Thomas (neither of whom survived to testify) gotten the name of the village wrong or had the man in the vest lied to them? Or had Patton radioed the wrong coordinates? Had she misread the map or reversed two numbers when she made the call under duress? She had sat in that hearing room and listened to every sickening possibility, and the whole time she had stared into the eyes of the three surviving members of the squad—Bob Macmillan, Ted Grosswald, and Franklin Rendell. She had memorized their faces, mentally recorded the sounds of their voices when they testified, and absorbed their hatred. Though they never made any specific threats against her, she knew that one day they would retire from the military and would have a score to settle with her. She assumed, as a matter of course, that they would one day track her down and kill her, and she didn’t even fear that day. She deserved it, so why not expect it?