I wrote a book about their fight which told how this fellow had been a WWII combat veteran sent by the army to fight in Korea where he was captured and held prisoner for three years by the Chinese. When the war ended his weight was down from 200 pounds to 97 pounds. He spent two years convalescing in a Navy Hospital on Long Island where one lung, destroyed by tuberculosis, was removed. The day he was discharged from the hospital the United States Army arrested him. They court-martialed him at Fort Meade and convicted him of collaborating with the enemy while a prisoner of war.
He loved the army so much that he would not speak against the charges in his own defense. He was basically a country boy from Maine with no idea that he was now the centerpiece in a political sideshow instigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy who had accused the army of being soft on communists in their ranks. To shut the senator up, the army needed to put an officer on trial as a collaborator with the Chinese communists-- not a West Point officer, but a soldier who had earned his commission in the field. So they chose Alley, convicted him and sent him to Leavenworth prison on a life sentence.
Three years later, after McCarthy had vanished the army quietly sent Alley home to Maine where he began fighting to prove he had been falsely condemned by the army he loved.
Fifty nine years after Major Alley was sent to Leavenworth, the book I wrote about him somehow ended up in the prison library where--as Fate would have it-- in March of this year Lieutenant Clint Lorance read it in his prison cell. He asked his mother to try to contact me just to tell me how much my book had meant to him.
JB: That's quite a story, Don. So, have you actually met Clint's mother or Clint himself?
DS: Three days after I spoke with Anna, I was on the train from Maine to Kansas reading the thousand page court-martial transcript, and each time I looked up and watched the country flying past my window I thought of my father riding a troop train from his small town in Pennsylvania, across these same tracks to Seattle, wondering if he would ever see the country he loved again.
The moment I saw Clint Lorance striding towards me with his shoulders pinned back, these words came to me as we shook hands. "Thank you for your brave service to our country and for going to war so that my son, Jack, did not have to go. "
Our eyes met. "I appreciate that, sir," he said.
And then I said this: "Promise me something, soldier. Promise me that whenever you get out of this place, whenever they let you go, you'll find me and come sit and talk with me."
He smiled, nodded his head and said, "I promise. I've always wanted to see Maine."
There was no trace of self pity in him. He just kept thanking me for coming to see him and telling me that he was only worried about his family.
Early on there was this small exchange between us.
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