I have to get this on paper before I die. The few people who might notice won’t give a shit two months later but that’s the way it goes.

Everything changed somewhere around noon when I opened the door. Two Army officers in full drag were out front. I usually ignore knocks, door rings and telephone rings because there’s nothing so important that it can’t wait. I knew better this time.

          And I was right. Blah blah blah Regret To Tell You blah blah blah Your Husband blah blah blah Last Night.

No, there’s no one I’d like to contact. Thank you for your time.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to weep and wail in front of you. You’ve done your job, now get out and let me focus on all the things that have to be done quickly.

          My sister, his sister, his Dad, Kevin (my 40-year prematurely platonic ex) and Wade, my Friend and attorney all needed to be told about the alleged heart attack in the middle of the night. Sad, but wrong.

          Rusty had passed a rigorous medical screening for an Army job in Afghanistan before his C/O at Parris Island denied the transfer request.

‘Sorry, Fire Chief, your department is short on White Shirts just now and you’re doing too good a job cleaning up the shit from the guy before you. Give it a year or so and you’ll be good to go.’

The shit from the guy before him included holing up in his office in his underwear, watching porn on his government computer and figuring out how to smuggle NVGs and other high dollar equipment off base and into his house.

A few months later the Army opened up a position to all Department of Defense employees because after a year of advertising it in-house, no Army federal civilians wanted it. Director of Emergency Services, the #2 slot at a NATO tank training base in Cowturd, Bulgaria. The closest town was 30 miles away, a grey charmless partially-developed hamlet still pining for Mother Russia.

The Director of Emergency Services (DES) was responsible for the law enforcement, physical security, emergency medical, hazmat and fire protection on base. The Bulgarian military was in charge of the front gate.

Because of the installation’s isolated location and mission, the regulations for keeping tabs on assigned personnel, Army Reserve firefighters and DoD civilians, were the same as in other foreign hostile areas. Unless you were on approved leave in the States, you were required to make daily contact with a H.R. Specialist or your supervisor. On assigned duty days, there was one person whose job was to personally see your face or speak with you at the beginning of your shift before you were listed as present. If there wasn’t any contact, all hell was supposed to break loose until you were located.

But the devil is definitely in the details. Because Rusty hadn’t been seen on the installation for three days. Someone told the H.R. Specialist to mark him as present.

During the first Congressional Inquiry, the responding General provided false information that Rusty’s department was known to be sloppy and ‘employees called in for each other.’

Bullshit. What the Army didn’t know was that every unclassified email Rusty sent or received was copied to his civilian email and I had access to it. The week before his death and the six previous times he called in, he had followed orders to notify his supervisor prior to the beginning of his shift that he would not be working that day. And I had the emails to prove it.

I didn’t know they listed Rusty as present and on duty Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday until someone he worked with pulled up the records on the server.

It took another three weeks before the Bulgarian autopsy determined that it took three days for Rusty to bleed out. For his heart to stop a few hours before the troops arrived at his apartment. Four hours. Four fucking hours.

I’ve spent years hoping that he was unconscious while he was bleeding out and not waiting for the rescue that never came.

The female Navy coroner failed to go to his apartment, failed to even look at the photos taken by the Bulgarian investigator. I know this because I spoke with the Director of the Armed Forces Medical Services and his legal counsel. They were shocked because her report had nothing about the blood or injuries and none of the photos. He promised to ‘…obtain the report and photos from the appropriate channels even though it might take six weeks.’ He also promised to get back to me.

I sent him and the legal counsel the photos. There was no response. Ever.

Even when I found a civilian expert medical examiner who’d known the Director for decades; he refused to release records or the bits of Rusty they kept on display for fun and amusement. Not his jurisdiction, he said.

So I wrote to the President of Bulgaria. Who contacted the same Prosecutor who allowed the investigator to release his file and photos to me. And suddenly there was an official Bulgarian Order that I was to be given any and everything pertaining to the case, including pieces of Rusty on two continents.

Bless this Prosecutor and whatever motivated him on two occasions.

Fuck the Army and their continued lies and the probable murder of my Rusty.

But it doesn’t stop there.

On Rusty’s last Friday, he finally had written authorization that the Army would document the carbon monoxide exposure his firefighters were dealing with because of improper apparatus venting. The monitoring levels would be entered in everyone’s Occupational Health records and the required  equipment would be installed in the fire station.

Additionally, he had the accounting data to purchase all the medical, firefighting and hazmat response equipment that had been missing for over a year. The situation was so bad that during one of the main summer training exercises involving thousands of troops, he had the Acting Chief at Parris Island send him supplies.

I’ll give you one guess what happened to the Occ Health and supplies after Rusty’s body was found.

Yep. I checked with the guys and found every thing was cancelled that afternoon.

Rusty had been scheduled to return home and back to Parris Island in a couple of weeks after he died. During the first week of January, he told me that he would be making an appointment to talk with the Army Inspector General. He had some things to pass on that he couldn’t tell me over the phone or in an email.

There were a few things I found out: expensive gym equipment being ordered for and given to a GS-14 civilian and several civilians, including her, never paying for their meals. That’s easy to trace because payment could only be made by credit card. It doesn’t sound like much but when one of Rusty’s underlings left, he bragged that he had saved himself over $3K.

The only really big thing I discovered a few years later was that a few months before Rusty died the Army base in Romania had several million dollars’ worth of fuel stolen by local employees and organized crime. Rusty’s base, being isolated and used for tank training, had a much larger fuel farm. I wondered whether this was what he intended to tell the IG about.

I asked the most senior of Rusty’s firefighters to send me photos of where the body was and eventually, he did. Uncropped. With blood spattered on an inside door, a wall and thick crusts of black blood spreading out over a two-foot radius.

After the autopsy, when the impound on the apartment was released, Rusty’s senior firefighters were inventorying his belongings and found more blood covering the underside of a platform bed and the floor.

The police and the Army weren’t interested. As the local investigator told me, shrugging his shoulders, ‘He was old. It happens.’

Rusty was 57.

The Acting Site Director, the guy who certified each day’s attendance report, instructed all personnel not to answer any of my questions or respond at all. And when questioned, denied having said this.

Two days after the first Congressional Inquiry hit, he removed Rusty’s framed photo and flags and threw them into a storage closet. Then he had chains wrapped around the posts set in concrete that supported the ‘Hesmondhalgh Hall’ memorial sign in front of the Fire Department and yanked everything out of the ground.

The Casualty Officer we were assigned did everything he could to keep us from going overseas. He failed to tell us that the government would pay for us and an escort to bring the body back. That we could have Rusty brought back to Dover Air Force Base or any other location. That we could have a second autopsy since the Bulgarian one had been such a mess.

The Casualty Officer also refused to help us renew our government passports.

‘Go sit at the Passport Office in New Orleans and maybe they’ll get to you.’

Luckily no one in the Army knew that I had coordinated all Rusty’s stateside hires when he was Fire Chief in Naples, Italy. I knew the procedure for a 24-hour ‘walk through’ passport. And when he refused to help with that, I called the Fire Chief at NAS Pensacola. Navy takes care of Navy.

I ended up with an email from the Casualty Officer’s supervisor telling me how much I fucked up his boy’s attempts to help us by making my own arrangements. I guess the Army wants their bereaved dependent families to be ignorant and compliant.

Fuck that.

If you’re curious as to how an autopsy can be botched, here are a few easy ways: turn three trainees loose on the body. Pop both eyeballs out of the corpse. Cut off the ears. Lose the nose. Fail to test for poisons or other incapacitating substances. (But check for alcohol and drugs just in case you can blame the dead for their condition.)

Fail to photograph, describe or attempt to explain bruises on the front and back of Rusty’s legs and on his throat,  a series of parallel scratches on his stomach and rectangular cuts around his eyes. Attempt to explain away the massive blood loss in the police photographs by falsely stating he had a ‘blood-clotting disorder.’ After 37 years in the military, the Navy failed to correct this although I brought it to their attention. The Department of Defense also permanently misplaced his military medical records and his civilian Occ Health records the week after his death.

The Navy medical examiner was pissed when I asked about the blood and demanded to know how I knew. Fuck you, I thought. I owe you nothing, bitch.

She then snidely suggested it was purge and I didn’t know the difference. I did. And when I was at the apartment, I took several evidence kits and bagged sections of the cork flooring with the blood.

That was another curious and inaccurate conclusion in the Bulgarian autopsy: a statement that all external trauma was due to contact with objects in the area.

Rusty’s body was stretched out neatly between the bedroom wall and the thin plywood footboard of an unused platform bed. His head was within a few inches of the closed door. He hadn’t hit the bed on the way down because a blanket and a jacket were still folded on top; if he had knocked into them, they would’ve fallen with him.

And the floor was made of half-inch thick cork tiles. They were spongy to walk on. They may have broken his nose but couldn’t have done the other damage to his face or legs.

But nobody cared.

I was told to expect a call from Army CID.

They didn’t call.

I called them at the Embassy in Sofia and was told I wasn’t allowed to call them.

Then I was told the Status of Forces Agreement prohibited them from conducting an investigation. It took multiple emails and calls over three months but I was finally given copies of the SoFA and Annexes. And sure enough, I was lied to.

Bulgaria specifically waived all sovereignty with regard to matters of law enforcement and suspected criminal activity unless they requested it in writing. Translation: Army CID was required to investigate Rusty’s death BUT could have done so in conjunction or collaboration with local law enforcement.

At this point it starts to feel like a cheap conspiracy novel.

I finally remembered Rusty’s computer password. There didn’t seem to be anything unexpected until I clicked on the Microsoft Updates page.

It took a minute before my brain decoded what I was looking at, but the date for the last download was five hours after his body was found. The last installation was two days later when the apartment was still under a sealed impound order.

I had set Rusty’s laptop up for him and knew it would shut completely off after thirty minutes on idle. I also knew that in the police photos, the laptop screen was black.

Someone had accessed his computer after he died and had gotten past the first password prompt. But I had no idea what they were looking for, if they’d found it or if they had deleted anything.

Death creates new futures for those it touches.

In my case, an ongoing fight with the Army for an explanation, for disciplinary action against the people who falsified government records and denied him potential life-saving medical intervention.

Even the Military Claims Act we filed (the administrative equivalent of a wrongful death lawsuit) ended in Army collusion.

Our attorney failed to mention that he was asshole buddies with the Army’s claims attorney; ‘Dog’ was doing the same job my attorney had done before retiring and going into private practice. I didn’t discover the conflict of interest until nearly a year later when I received a CC’ed email in which my attorney thanked ‘Dawg’ for being patient with a late response from us.

I knew that officers didn’t use/know nicknames unless they worked together or were acquainted professionally.

Things got weird very fast when Dawg denied our initial claim and his itemized reasons included everything we had specifically and successfully refuted with precedent or regulation in previous correspondent. And my attorney ignored my requests to make an administrative complaint.

It escalated when our only appeal was denied with no justification. And the appeal was signed and delivered by ……Dog.

Yes, the same guy decided that he was qualified to judge his initial response.

If you’re thinking this stinks; it does. And it’s a prohibited practice according to every Bar Association in the country.

I spoke with my attorney and requested itemized copies of all correspondence and call lists between him and Dawg. He refused four requests, stating that I already had everything. If you’re guess that he’s incorrect in his refusal, you’re right.

He also suggested I write a letter to the Army to let them know that Dawg was not authorized to decide the appeal of a case he initially denied. Yeah, that’s not the way that’s supposed to go either.

Do you see how they wear you down?

I’m not even going into how Rusty’s retirement was calculated as though he worked forty-hour weeks. Except for the last year with the Army, he worked either a 56-hour or a 72-hour week. He also lost 240 hours of leave when his supervisor refused to allow him the time off because they were short of manpower.

Want more? Of course you do. If nothing else it will make you happy that you aren’t in the military.

When Rusty was promoted and transferred from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Navy Region Northwest, his drunken thug of a boss, the Regional Fire Chief, refused to sign his travel claim. Rusty kept trying politely for a year until I stamped my little foot and we went to our closest U.S. House Representative. We were reimbursed something in the neighborhood of $28K and Arruda told Rusty he had just committed political suicide.

When the Navy moved all regional fire administration up a full paygrade, Rusty was the only one they retained at the old level. As a Regional Deputy he was supervising Assistant Fire Chiefs who were the same pay grade. This went on for years.

When a buddy he had worked with in Cuba needed to transfer from Italy for medical reasons, he offered the Fire Chief job to Rusty but cautioned it wasn’t worth it.

But when you’re working for someone who ridiculed his gay son until he committed suicide, who routinely punched holes in his office walls and assigned massive projects on Friday nights; how could it possibly be worse?

Here’s how: you step off the plane and the Base C/O tells you your only job is to Not Rock the Boat. Let the Italians do whatever they want to do. (On overseas military installations, only Americans are usually administration . The locals are the firefighters and first-level supervisors.)

The first thing Rusty did at Naples was to audit payroll and leave. He discovered hundreds of thousands of dollars each quarter for leave that was not earned and overtime that wasn’t worked. The Italians fought back with strikes. So Rusty found volunteers in the American enlisted personnel and federal civilians and put them through DoD Firefighter 1 certification training academies.

The Italians would strike and Rusty would activate his invention, the AFFF (Auxiliary Firefighting Force. Also, a pun on the acronym for aviation firefighting foam which I think has been found to be a carcinogen.)

As for our son, he threw away a lucrative, unemotional career in engineering to become a journalist. Hoping to make contacts who would help him uncover what happened to his father and why it happened.

He was accepted into several graduate journalism programs but chose Georgetown University for its reported reputation and proximity to the highest government and military connections.

It was a thrice-cursed decision.

Georgetown’s journalism program provided less instruction than the throwaway courses at his technically-organized undergraduate school. The faculty consisted of adjuncts with few higher degrees who were stuck in mid-level positions. They continually pushed deadlines back and deleted assignments in order to justify the mandatory A-/B+ grades they shovelled out to the whiney 20-somethings.

He spoke to as many investigative journalists as he could, with the following responses about Rusty’s death:

• Sounds like he was working for the C.I.A. so you’ll never be able to find out
• He wasn’t important enough to kill.
• Why don’t you write it up?
• Can I keep the photos? Really. I want to keep the photos.