One of the things about PVT Bee was how his excuses and alibis always sounded so reasonable and believable. His boyishness: blue-eyed, blond, beachy-looking, tall, and fair. He looked so wholesome and clean it was easy to imagine he was just the hapless victim of wrong-place-wrong-time. His measured articulation made you want to believe him. When he was stressed, he became almost manic in his eagerness to please. You should have seen him the day I showed him the letter.
It started with a call from the APO. One of the mail clerks there had a letter addressed to the States that didn't have a return address on it. You can mail a letter in the States with no return address and most likely it will get delivered, but overseas the mail is in the custody of the Army Post Office until it arrives in New York and is turned over to the USPS. And while it is in military hands, all of the military rules apply...one of which is that mail must have a return address. The clerk knew the letter came from my unit; it was in the morning mail bag from our mail room. He said that he had had to open the letter to see if he could determine from the content who had sent it. He said that he had determined the writer and that I had better come to the APO and see what was in the letter...and bring the CID NARC with me.
We only had to wait a few minutes for the CID guy to show up. We went into the office with the head mail clerk and he showed us the letter. It was written by PVT Bee and boy, was it full of interesting things. My first concern was that once we had determined who had written it, the contents would then become private. Mr. CID informed me that if evidence of criminal behavior is discovered in the course of determining who wrote the letter, then the clerk was absolutely in the right to call us in. With that settled, we read over the letter several times. Then we filled out a bunch of chain-of-custody papers and took the letter to my office. I called Bee's platoon sergeant and had him round up Bee and his squad leader and had all three come to my office.
When they all arrived and were seated, I reminded PVT Bee that he was still entitled to have legal counsel present (he was still pending legal action for distribution of a controlled substance and trying to sell pot to an MP). Then I held up the letter and stared at him. You may have seen one of those time-lapse sequences of a flower wilting and falling apart, or a bridge or building eroding away...that is exactly what I watched PVT Bee do right before our eyes. In a matter of seconds he went from his normal cockiness to shock to disbelief to fear to panic and finally he stammered for several minutes trying to come up with a scenario that would explain that letter.
It seems that Bee had a friend in the States who dabbled in drugs, too. Bee told him that he had a righteous source for some absolutely fantastic hash. He said he could get lots of it and mail it back in photo envelopes. He had a detailed plan for this endeavor outlined in the letter. He also mentioned how he had hoodwinked the local cops into thinking he was their snitch and that made it easy for him to make other purchases without fear...if he got caught he would just say it was part of his "investigation". He said he was "throwing the cops a bone" now and then but was protecting his prime source. He also bragged about the foolproof hiding places he had around the company area. All in all, it was a most entertaining letter. And constituted a signed confession to about six different felonies from conspiracy to mail fraud, with drug charges along the way.
After reading the letter to the squad leader and platoon sergeant, I asked them to visit the hiding places to see if there were any goodies hidden there. We sat for a few minutes, silently waiting for the sergeants to return, re-reading the letter. When they came back, they had several bundles of various illegal items. We turned everything, including PVT Bee, over to the CID guy and he led our boy out to his car and took him away... again.