THREE DAYS IN AUGUST
A U.S. Army Special Forces Soldier’s
Fight for Military Justice
by
Bob McCarty
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Bob McCarty LLC on Smashwords
THREE DAYS IN AUGUST
A U.S. Army Special Forces Soldier’s
Fight for Military Justice
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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ABOUT THE COVER
A U.S. flag waves in the breeze as the sun sets over a U.S. military camp in Iraq August 3, 2007. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Christopher Perez.
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CONTENTS
Longing to do Something Extraordinary
The Night That Changed A Soldier’s Life
DAY ONE:
DAY TWO:
DAY THREE:
‘I Wasn’t Going to be That Dog’
Leaving Fort Leavenworth Again
Foreword
In recent years, America’s fighting men and women have faced an ever-increasing barrage of legal battles stemming from their actions on battlefields and in combat zones around the world. Perhaps most notable is the case of Army Ranger First Lieutenant Michael Behenna.
On July 31, 2008, Lieutenant Behenna was charged with the premeditated murder of Ali Mansur, a known Al-Qaeda agent operating near Albu Toma, an area north of Baghdad. Seven months later, the leader of the 18-member Delta Company, 5th platoon of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Infantry Division was convicted of unpremeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years confinement—later reduced to 15—at the U.S. Military Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
One expert called to testify during Lieutenant Behenna’s court-martial contends to this day that Army prosecutors committed a Brady violation when they suppressed evidence favorable to the lieutenant’s defense and, in doing so, violated due process and his right to a fair and impartial proceeding. The real “kicker” in the case lies in the identity of the person from whom the allegation of prosecutorial misconduct came. Surprisingly, it wasn’t someone on the defense side of the courtroom. Instead, it was the Army’s own witness, a renowned forensics expert.
Prosecutors flew Dr. Herbert Leon MacDonell from Corning, New York, to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for the trial, but never allowed him to testify. Why? Because, during the trial, he had the opportunity to examine key pieces of evidence prosecutors had not shared with him prior to his arrival at the proceedings. When he told prosecutors that his examination of that evidence had caused him to change his mind and believe Lieutenant Behenna was telling the truth, they opted against having the court hear his testimony—words that likely would have resulted in a favorable outcome for the young officer.
As this book went to press, the lieutenant, his friends and members of his family were awaiting the final ruling in his appeal process. Worst-case scenario: He’ll be released from prison March 19, 2024—at age 40.
Sadly, Lieutenant Behenna is not alone when it comes to unjust prosecution of men and women in uniform.
Another case involved a group of men who came to be known as the “Haditha Marines.”
Lieutenant Colonel Jeffery Chessani, commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, was responsible for approximately 2,000 American and Iraqi forces. At about 7:15 in the morning November 19, 2005, a squad of Colonel Chessani’s Marines was leading a convoy when it was ambushed by an enemy using a roadside bomb and small arms fire from nearby houses. The bomb detonated under a Humvee, killing one Marine and injuring two others. An ensuing house-to-house battle between insurgents and an outnumbered Marine “fire team” resulted in the deaths of 24 Iraqis, including 15 civilians.
After Colonel Chessani and seven Marines in his unit were charged with murder, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.)—a now-deceased former Marine—proclaimed the Marines overreacted and killed 24 Iraqi civilians “in cold blood.” A costly, yearlong legal battle followed.
On March 26, 2008, Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based nonprofit group that represented Colonel Chessani, summed up the environment within which the Haditha Marines were caught:
“The hysteria and media firestorm over Abu Ghraib and the Pat Tillman investigations lead to fear of a similar media reaction to the Haditha incident, causing the military’s civilian bosses to set up this shadow oversight body,” Thompson said in a news release. “This extraordinary action politicized the military justice system and was a clear signal to top generals that they were expected to hold individuals criminally responsible. The investigation turned into a quest for a prosecution—not justice.”
Eighty-three days later, a military court found Colonel Chessani not guilty on all charges. Charges against six others were dropped, and the outcome of proceedings against one remaining Marine remained uncertain as this book went to press. The Marines and members of their families paid a heavy emotional price—not to mention being out hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees—for service to their country.
More recently, three U.S. Navy SEALs—Julio A. Huertas, Jonathan E. Keefe and Matthew V. McCabe—faced assault charges related to their capture of Ahmed Hashim Abed, the alleged planner of the March 2004 ambush, killing and mutilation of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah, Iraq. Abed alleged he was punched in the gut and received a fat lip while being apprehended.
Offered administrative punishment, all three warriors refused that option. Instead, they chose—at great cost to themselves and their families—to face court-martial proceedings. It was the only way to clear their names entirely of the charges against them.
Fortunately, all three were found not guilty on all counts during courts-martial in the spring of 2010.
There are, of course, many more cases of U.S. service members facing charges stemming from their actions on the battlefield. Three Army noncommissioned officers—Master Sergeant John Hatley, Sergeant First Class Joseph Mayo and Sergeant Michael Leahy—stand as but a handful of those now serving time in military prisons. Convicted of war crimes. For killing enemy combatants. On battlefields awash with bureaucratic rules of engagement.
In this book, however, I share the appalling details of another wrongful-conviction case in which an Army Special Forces soldier was convicted of alleged crimes that took place far from the combat zones of the Middle East where he had already witnessed firsthand the horrors of war. I share the travesty of military justice embodied in the case, United States vs. Kelly A. Stewart, a case decided during three days in August.
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In an effort to provide readers thorough and complete knowledge of the facts of this case, I relied upon the official Record of Trial as well as other documents and observations obtained from individuals close to the case. In addition, I reached out to both the accused and the accuser in this case.
The accused soldier, U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Kelly A. Stewart, spent hours and hours with me on the phone and via email, answering every question I threw at him. Conversely, his accuser refused to discuss the case.
Responding to my email sent July 15, 2010, German attorney Hans-Peter Schmitt told me he was “not authorized to answer my questions” by order of his client, Stewart’s accuser.
Because this case is less about the accuser than it is about the military justice system that convicted Stewart, the name that appears in this book as that of the accuser—including instances where it appears in the Record of Trial—has been changed. Aside from instances where the name of the accused has been replaced with a fictitious name, all other excerpts from the Record of Trial—misspellings included—that appear in this book have not been altered except for the occasional formatting or spacing alteration. Aside from the accuser and the name of the woman who she befriended while both were inpatients at a mental institution, all other names appearing in this book are the actual names of the individuals involved in this case as shown in the Record of Trial.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
This book includes often-graphic language and descriptions of a sexual nature taken directly from the official Record of Trial; hence, this book is not recommended for young readers.
“You always hope that somebody’s got your back.”
— Neal Riley, U.S. Army Special Forces, Ret.
Longing To Do Something Extraordinary
Kelly Antonio Stewart was born in Landstuhl, Germany, in 1973, the son of John and Renate (pronounced “Ree-naw-tuh”) Stewart.
He was the second of two children born to this multinational couple—an American dad and a German mother who kept the household humming while her husband was away. His sister, Sylvia “Diana” was born in Bitburg five years earlier.
Growing up on military installations in Germany and Italy, Stewart found himself different than most of the American kids around him: his first language was German; he grew up playing soccer instead of baseball, basketball or American football; the lunches he took to school almost never contained white bread; and many of the clothes he wore were hand-made by his mother who used patterns and fabric purchased at the Post Exchange.
“I had knock-offs before knock-offs were even cool,” he said, explaining that his mom often made and affixed labels to clothes to make them look like popular, name-brand items.
Beyond making clothes, Stewart said his mother possessed many talents.
“My mom, you know, she was a great woman, growing up with six sisters post-World War II,” Stewart said, explaining that her formal education stopped at about the 12th grade when she started working in the factory along with her two older sisters to help their single mother support a household of seven girls. “She was very industrial, but that was her education as a kid.”
When it came to simple things like excusal notes for school, Stewart had to write them for his mom to sign. At that time, she wasn’t very good at writing in English.
Though lacking in formal education, his mom could pretty much do anything she set her mind to when it came to household chores, repairs, construction, etc. And she had to. After all, her husband was gone eight to nine months out of the year for most of the time her kids were growing up.
Stewart’s dad had a three-decades-long career in Air Force Special Operations. The time he spent away from home resulted in him having a somewhat-distant relationship his son. But it was not without memories.
As a kid during the ‘70s and ‘80s, Stewart never really knew much about his dad’s work, but he knew his dad was well respected and had a job that required him to always keep a “go bag” packed and ready. He knew his dad collected stamps and money from around the world as a way to help him keep track of where he had gone around the world.
“During the late ‘80s when Special Operations was becoming really big, my dad was part of that,” Stewart said. “When you look at some of the incidents that happened during the ‘80s—the TWA hijacking, Terri Waite, the Achille Lauro—all those things happened during my dad’s time in Special Operations, and my dad was a part of (them) in some shape, form or fashion with what he did in the Air Force.”
One of Stewart’s dad’s biggest accomplishments, never getting divorced, made him something of a rarity in the Special Ops community.
“In the last unit my dad was part of, the 7th SOS out of Rhein Mein, there weren’t too many people in that unit that had any family,” Stewart said, adding that so much time away from home—and living out of “go bags”—often led to divorce in Special Ops households.
While growing up in Germany, Stewart remembered nervous occasions—including one after the United States’ airstrike on Libya in 1986—when terrorism fears prompted military officials to have security police escort school buses. He recalled that one service member at Rhein-Mein Air Base was killed by a bomb while he was there.
Incredibly, it was only after Stewart’s dad took an assignment to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, in the late 1980s that Stewart learned he was in the Air Force. His dad took the Langley assignment—his first desk job in decades—because he wanted to be able to spend more time with his family, and it required him, for the first time, to start wearing Air Force blue uniforms his now-teenage son had never seen him wear before. Uniforms plastered with lots of ribbons and medals on his chest. Gone were the all-purpose fatigues-style uniforms and Australian-style bush hats he had worn for so long.
Perhaps the result of watching his dad work so hard, both at home and away, Stewart longed to do something extraordinary with his life.
“Even back then, I thought it was really cool,” he said. “I had gone to so many air shows with my dad. As a young kid, I actually wanted to be a pilot or an astronaut. Those were my two big things that I always wanted to do.”
Within a couple years of his family’s move to Virginia, Stewart had begun a life he would later describe as one of a “knucklehead” living a dead-end lifestyle. He blamed it on having so much to see and do as compared to his life in Germany.
Stewart dropped out of high school during his junior year in 1991, got his GED and began going to community college. At the same time, he was working and living with a girlfriend.
In 1994, Stewart was involved in a bad motorcycle.
Stewart recalled his dad visiting him in the hospital and telling him about how he expected him to do something bigger and better with his life.
“He told me he saw so much potential in me and I wasn’t using it,” Stewart said, “and that I was kind of being lazy.”
Within a month or two of that accident, their roles were reversed after his now-retired dad suffered a heart attack and had to undergo bypass surgery.
“I remember sitting there, seeing him in the hospital in a very weird state, not the man that I’d seen before, very frail,” Stewart said, “and I remember making a promise to him, telling him that I’m not going to let him down, that ‘you can’t go yet, because there’s a lot of things I have to do.’”
A short while later, Stewart began keeping that promise.
In 1995, he moved to Kearney, Nebraska, to live with his sister Sylvia and her family. It was an opportunity to get his education, to change his ways and refocus. And it worked out well.
Part of the arrangement with his sister required that he help babysit her infant son while she was working on her master’s degree at the University of Nebraska-Kearney and her husband was at work as a teacher.
Up until that point, Stewart had been a very selfish person, concerned only with what he wanted to do in life. Taking care of and hanging out with the youngster taught him to love someone other than himself. At the same time, it helped prepare him to do that extraordinary something he had always longed to do.
‘Poster Boy’
Things continued to go well for Stewart in Nebraska. He was knocking out classes at the local community college and working two jobs—one at a restaurant, the other at a hotel—when he saw an Army recruiting poster while on a shopping trip at the local Walmart. With visions of doing extraordinary things still in his mind, he called the local recruiter.
Though President Bill Clinton had the U.S. military in a drawdown phase following the end of the first Gulf War and people were being paid to accept early discharges, Stewart was able to talk the recruiter into meeting with him.
During that meeting, Stewart told the recruiter about his days as a self-described “knucklehead” in Virginia and explained that several major moving violations on his driving record were the result of having a fast car and not wanting to listen to anybody.
The recruiter told Stewart that his driving history, combined with the fact that he dropped out of high school and opted to get a GED instead of a diploma, would keep him from getting into the Army right away. He would probably have to join the Army National Guard as a stepping stone toward going on active duty.
Stewart visited the Nebraska Army National Guard recruiter’s office next. There, he watched videos for several possible jobs he could train for in the Army. From among them, he chose medic and joined the Guard in November 1995.
In January 1996, Stewart began basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in south central Missouri. Eight weeks later, he graduated and moved on to Advanced Individualized Training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. There, he realized he had found his niche in medicine.
“I noticed this was really the job for me,” Stewart said. “To me, it came very easy, almost like working on cars. I understood the dynamics of it.”
It marked the first time in Stewart’s life that anything like that had ever come easy to him, where he understood it. Medicine was “the easiest job in the world.”
After training in San Antonio, Stewart found he really liked the military life and asked his Guard recruiter to help him go on active duty. Several months later, he began a 180-day stint of active Guard status during which he accompanied a recruiter to high schools as something of a “poster boy” for the Army.
Then, with the help of a waiver, he landed a slot in the active-duty Army January 28, 1997.
“I took a bus to Omaha and, from Omaha, they put me on a plane, and I flew down to Killeen, Texas,” Stewart explained.
At Fort Hood, he served as a medic in the 1st Cavalry Division’s 3rd Battalion/8th Cavalry Regiment. After 12 months on station, he began trying to land an assignment in Germany, where he grew up. That didn’t work out immediately, in part, because he was only a private. Instead of returning to the land of his childhood, he deployed with his unit to Kuwait for four months at about the time two U.S. embassies—one in Kenya, the other in Tanzania—were bombed by terrorists August 7, 1998.
While living in the field, Stewart took care of several patients who had been injured during training along the Iraq-Kuwait border and thought his job was the greatest thing in the world. Soon after, however, he received orders to Germany for an assignment with 40th Engineers Battalion, 1st Armored Division. He reported for duty there in December 1998.
A motivated young soldier, Stewart did everything he could to live up to the potential his dad had seen in him. He was laying down “markers” for his future.
In addition to serving as a member of the Color Guard and carrying the guidon during battalion runs each Friday, he did something that medics had never done before; he trained with the guys “down on the line.”
“I wanted nothing more than to be the combat arms guy with a little bit of medicine,” Stewart explained, saying such a stance was unusual. “In my experience, there are only two types of medics in the Army, those who love medicine and those who don’t love medicine.
“You can tell, because some guys want to be these combat arms guys and don’t know the first thing about medicine,” he said. “Then there are guys who know everything about medicine but don’t know the first thing about combat arms. I made it a point to get a balance on that.”
While assigned to the 40th Engineers, Stewart was the only one in a training group of three dozen people trying to earn the Expert Field Medical Badge. On average, the course had an 11 percent pass rate. When the course had ended, he was the only person in his brigade to earn the badge. Another marker.
“I was doing the right things and being in the right places. I was getting promoted,” he said.
That helped him earn a spot as the only medic out of a group of 15 in his unit selected for a deployment to Kosovo in 1999. There, Stewart got his feet “wet with war” and understood for the first time what war was about.
When Stewart returned to Germany as an E-4 after several months in Kosovo, he told his friend he would like to get to know Freija (sounds like “Frazier”), a woman to whom he had been introduced shortly before being deployed. His friend, recently divorced and not wanting to risk losing his buddy to a woman, tried to talk him out of pursuing her, but he persisted in courting this out-of-the-ordinary woman.
“If she was a dude,” Stewart said, “she’d be a Green Beret. I know she would, because she’s such a strong woman and she loves to do all those things.”
Those things included ruck-marching—carrying heavily weighted packs on hikes and runs of 5 and 10 miles and longer—alongside Stewart as he trained for his newest career ambition, a shot in Special Forces.
The young soldier had made it his goal to become a member of the Army’s elite fraternity after meeting a handful of SF soldiers and seeing firsthand the kind of people they were.
Even after Stewart learned that two really sharp, harder-than-nails members of his unit had been selected for SF training only to quit or wash out later, he kept his focus. And Freija helped.
“What woman wants to go with a guy ruck-marching when you’re dating each other, you know?” he quipped. “She was all about me going to Special Forces, and she loved the military, and she liked to ruck, so she’d come out with me on Saturdays, and we’d go ruck-marching.”
Stewart explained that Freija, a single mother at the time, sometimes carried her baby girl in a little backpack carrier while he was carrying his weight for the rucks.
“That’s just how we did things,” he said.
Apparently, it worked.
Freija married Stewart after only four months of dating.
“Up until this point in my military career, everything I tried I pretty much made with ease,” Stewart said. So, when the opportunity presented itself, he asked an SF captain what he thought was a simple, straightforward question: “Do you think I have what it takes to become Special Forces?
“I remember him looking at me, staring me in the face and telling me, ‘No. The fact that you have to ask me, that’s not the kind of person we want in Special Forces.’”
The captain’s words hurt Stewart’s feelings and motivated him at the same time.
“Alright, you don’t think I can do it,” he recalled thinking to himself, “I’ll show everybody that I can do it.” He never even told his dad about this internal conversation.
With their time in Germany nearing an end, Stewart and his bride took advantage of the Army Married Couples Program and were able to land an assignment together at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Army’s Special Forces in April 2001.
Now a junior E-5 with a stellar record, Stewart completed Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, en route to an assignment with the 82nd Airborne Infantry Division. Freija, meanwhile, was assigned to the 44th Medical Brigade as a medic.
After arriving at Fort Bragg, Stewart continued to do everything he could to set himself apart as a soldier. That included competing in soldier-of-the-month competitions and doing everything possible to put himself on the “radar” for selection into the Sergeant Audie Murphy Club, an elite fraternity of soldiers to which he was exposed for the first time when his squad leader at Fort Hood was inducted and asked him to take part in the ceremony.
One way in which Stewart set himself apart was by fixing problems that his predecessor, an E-6, had left behind before being relieved of his duties. A measure of his leadership abilities can be found in the fact that two of the 10 soldiers under his supervision went on to become Army officers and that one became a Green Beret.
Stewart took time away from shaping up his unit to attend an SF briefing for people who thought they were interested in pursuing the opportunity.
“They had a slide show, showed some cool-guy videos and talked about all the incentives of money and everything else,” Stewart said, “but that’s not really what got me. What got me was, when I went in there, they had us sign a statement of non-disclosure.”
Signing that document, of course, restricted him from talking about anything he learned there. He said he thought the secrecy aspect of Special Forces was “kind of cool.”
After the briefers described the workout program and the paperwork he would need to complete before he could get into the program, Stewart decided it was doable.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Sign right here, and you’re in,’” he said. “I had to put some work into it.”
Stewart told himself, “I can do this,” and he did.
He put in the necessary effort, completed all the paperwork required—including his Enlisted Record Brief, a summary of his Army career up to that point—and, eventually, got orders to “Selection.” The recruiter warned him, though, that he would probably meet some resistance from members of his unit when they learned he was trying to go into SF. And the recruiter was right.
“There’s a big rivalry. People either like you and are supportive of you or they’re not,” Stewart said. “In my case, they were not supportive, because they were pretty much grooming me to be a senior noncommissioned officer at some point in the 82nd Airborne Division.”
Fortunately, Stewart’s sergeant major at the time did support him.
At Selection, everyone wore battle-dress uniforms minus name tags and rank insignias, because everyone—regardless of rank, officer and enlisted—had to pass the course the same way based on performance, not rank structure.
Everyday, there was at least one testable event and the rest were training events, but trainees never knew which one would count.
“The testable event today might be a run, but you don’t know the length of the run,” Stewart explained, adding later that, “You’re never tested anywhere on anything in an area that you weren’t trained on. If you can’t retain what they’re teaching you, then you will get failed.”
“Special Forces just really takes what’s great in a person and makes it better,” he said. “They don’t make great people. They train great, but if you don’t have the raw talent somewhere within you... ”
Stewart used shooters as an example.
“Anybody can shoot, but true shooters have a natural ability that’s already instinctively in there, and then they’re trained to become better shooters,” he said, adding, “Some people you can train to become good shooters, but they’re just not going to be phenomenal shooters because they just don’t have that in ‘em.”
Another good analogy highlighted the abilities of Pat Tillman, a linebacker for the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals who joined the Army after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
“He was a small guy and he did not meet the requirements that everybody thought he was gonna need as a football player, but he had a natural, raw talent that exceeded his size and ability,” Stewart said. “He did things that guys twice his size were doing... because he had that natural ability.”
After making it through Selection, Stewart went on to the “Q” Course—the Special Forces Qualifications Course. Perhaps tougher than the negative peer pressure he experienced before heading to Selection, however, was the fact that the so-called “War on Terror” had just kicked off and he realized he could have stayed with his platoon and went to Afghanistan and got into the fight.
A physician assistant friend offered Stewart some words of wisdom that offered some comfort.
“Selection and the Q Course is a marathon, not a quick event,” he said, “and, whether you like it or not, war is still gonna be here.”
“For me, that was a very difficult situation, because I left my platoon to go to the ‘Q’ Course and those guys went to war and some guys did die,” Stewart said. “That always weighed on me that maybe they wouldn’t have died had I not gone.”
At the same time, those feelings of guilt boosted his desire to finish the course.
While Stewart was busy with the Q Course, Freija was coming up for reenlistment and both of them knew she was going to be deployed soon. To boost the chances of them being able to be stationed together in the future, she cross-trained to become a flight medic and graduated at the top of her class. Soon after graduation, she deployed to Iraq.
Freija’s deployment to Iraq meant Stewart would have to complete the Q Course—one of the toughest courses known to man—as something of a “Mr. Mom.”
While that role made him the target of much good-natured ribbing from his peers, it also gave him what he described as his “first experience of really handling what life in Special Forces was gonna be like, the amount of stress and being able to manage that.”
Stewart admits that his marriage suffered a bit during that time, but said the couple began marriage counseling soon after his wife returned from Iraq and that marriage problems would never stand as an excuse for anything that happened in his life.
After more than two years of hard work, the vast majority of which was done as a single father while his wife was deployed, Stewart graduated from the Q Course in 2004. In addition to the standard SF training, the view in the rearview mirror of his mind was full of images from 14 months of medic-specific training as well as completion of the High-Risk Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape (SERE) Course.
Out of 420 guys who started the original 18-D (Special Operations Medical Sergeant) course, only Stewart and 12 others graduated as “first-time goes.” Another 15 graduated after being “recycled”—the word for having to repeat the course—for one reason or another.
In addition to a graduation certificate, new status in the Army and a plethora of new knowledge and skills, Stewart walked away with his very own General Yarborough knife, serial number 2754.
“When you graduate from Special Forces, you get an engraved knife,” Stewart explained, noting that it was something for which he had to sign his name in a book containing the names of SF warriors who had completed the course before him.
Immediately after graduation, Stewart gave the knife to his dad, along with his first Green Beret, and a note, saying, “From One Warrior to Another.”
Pre-deployment training at Fort Carson, Colorado, followed, then Stewart went “downrange” to war with his SF unit. To Iraq.
In Iraq on his first SF deployment, Stewart got what he called his “baptism of fire” in war and became the senior medic on his team within a week of his arrival in country.
“I went there thinking that every life could be saved and every life should be saved,” he explained. “You go there thinking that you’re the most-trained person in the world and you’re so confident... and find that not everybody can be saved.”
A New Assignment in Germany
By Spring 2008, Stewart was at the top of his career, having proven himself in combat as both a medic and a warfighter. At the same time, the buzz circulating through the SF community was about the creation of a new battalion, the 4th Battalion.
Due for a new assignment soon, Stewart fully expected to be assigned to the new battalion. As things turned out, however, his counterparts in another SF group got that assignment instead and guys in his group were given instructor assignments.
Stewart landed a slot at the Survival Division at the International Special Training Center, a half-century-old facility in Pfullendorf, Germany, once dedicated to Cold War purposes and now organized into four divisions: Medical, Patrol, Recognition and Survival.
A Level 1 sniper and combat-tested medic, Stewart drew upon experience gained during several SF assignments in Iraq and elsewhere as he instructed troops—most from other North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and a few U.S. Army soldiers—in the fine art and science of the sniper. And he had a lot of experience from which to draw.
For instance, during one deployment to Iraq, his team conducted an all-intelligence-based mission set. That meant maintaining low-visibility and, basically, riding around dressed up like Iraqis and gathering intelligence during the day about the target sites that we were going to hit at some future moment in time.
At one point, his team generated 75 percent of national intelligence in Iraq proper. Not surprisingly, he was very compartmentalized about what he could talk about with anyone—including his wife and family—during that time.
“It’s very stressful, because you’re basically gathering intelligence on known insurgents and, sometimes, that intelligence doesn’t make it to where it needs to be in a timely manner and people die,” he explained.
“If I found out that there was an IED laying in this road over here, I had to send this report up and try to convince a regular Army unit that I knew what I was talking about—that there’s this IED in the road,” Stewart said, noting the cold fact that, if leaders of that unit decided to ignore the intel he provided, “then they have a patrol that goes out there and a person dies.”
Another example Stewart pointed to involved having a source who couldn’t share information over the phone and would only share it in person.
“By the time he makes it through all the checkpoints and I make it,” Stewart said, “that intelligence is already old, because the action has already happened. It’s very stressful.”
As an instructor, Stewart had no more life-and-death scenarios, so he had to find other ways to measure failure and success. He found that, in part, by looking at his students.
One of Stewart’s first ISTC course graduates—an E-4 at the time—went on to earn a Bronze Star with “V” device (for valor) for his work as a sniper only one week after his arrival in Afghanistan.
“He’s an AFN commercial now,” Stewart said, referring to American Forces Network, the military’s broadcasting unit, which likes to share good-news stories about soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
Finding satisfaction in the accomplishments of his students, however, only went so far.
“Every team guy will tell you this: Once they become a FAG, or a Former Action Guy, meaning they have to go be an instructor somewhere, not actually on a team, 99 percent of the team guys hate that,” he said, “because what they came to Special Forces for was to be on a team and do team stuff. When they have to do admin stuff or be on the schoolhouse team, it’s difficult.
“For me, I didn’t realize how difficult that was gonna be,” Stewart said, “because I was use to being on the team and the camaraderie and everything, and now I’m having to be an instructor.”
In November 2008, members of Stewart’s team stopped off in Germany en route to the Republic of Georgia where a conflict with Russia had surfaced. He wished he could go with them.
“Now, I’m seeing my team. They’re getting ready to go into the fight and going to do really cool stuff behind enemy lines, and I don’t get to be there,” he said, “and I’ve been there with this group of guys for five, six years, and now I’m not. I’m a FAG—a Former Action Guy. I don’t get to be part of it.”
The stress of war, Stewart said, was “not a tangible thing that you can just put your hand on, like a gas pedal—stop and go, stop and go. It’s a lot of sitting and waiting at the mercy of other people.”
Stewart’s difficulty with being out of the fight would pale in comparison to the difficulties he would soon experience. Still, he would find himself sitting and waiting at the mercy of other people.
The Night That Changed A Soldier’s Life
A few days after he reported for duty as an instructor at the International Special Training Center, part of the 7th Army Joint Multinational Training Command, Stewart headed out for what he thought would be a relaxing night of dancing and hanging out with friends at a local night club. With his eight-months-pregnant wife and young daughter not due to arrive in country for another month, he wanted to get out of his room at the Stuttgart-Marriott Hotel and decided to go dancing at a local night club, See-Studio. It would change his life forever.
The wheels of change in Stewart’s life began rolling at approximately 2:30 a.m. August 23, when a 28-year-old German woman, Greta J. Heinrich, came over to talk to him.
Approximately 5 feet 10 inches tall while wearing black military-style boots, the well-endowed Heinrich had fair skin and a medium build, according to Stewart. Wearing a short skirt and a black halter top that exposed her midsection, she sported shoulder-length black hair that was something akin to the hairstyle worn by rock and roll singer Stevie Nicks during the ‘80s.
Heinrich’s look was perfect for the venue, an ‘80s-oriented bar where one could go to hear American rock and metal music and see people dressing like they did back in the ‘80s—something, Stewart said, Americans like him found humorous.
Conversation led to dancing.
“She’s dancing with me, and I’m not telling her I’m this Green Beret or anything like that, because I’ve been trained not to do that,” Stewart said, “so, I’m telling her kind of like half-truths, if you will. I’m telling her I’m German (and) I’m from Trier, because, at this point, I really had no expectations of anything.
“I just figured it’s small talk,” he continued. “She’s asking me how I know German, and I’m telling her I’m from here, and my mother’s name is this, because in Germany, you can tell where people are from based off their last names—something the Germans ask all the time.”
At one point during the evening, Stewart said she asked him what he did for a living and he told her about his work in medicine, avoiding the subject of being a Green Beret. In turn, she said she worked in the health industry, too. Things were working out. He found her attractive and asked her a question to which he thought he already knew her answer.
“Hey, do you want to come back to my hotel with me?”
She said, “Yes.”
“Sure enough, we go outside, and there was a taxi cab out there,” Stewart said, noting that, after Heinrich told a couple of her friends goodbye, they headed to the Stuttgart-Marriott Hotel in Sindelfingen, his temporary quarters until permanent housing became available.
En route to the hotel, Stewart said he asked the driver to stop at a petrol station to pick up condoms, noting that he had not planned to sleep with a woman prior to meeting Heinrich at See-Studio. When they found the station closed, Stewart said he asked the driver to go ahead and let them out there so he wouldn’t have to do a U-turn and charge them additional meter time.
“So he let’s us out, we crossed the four lanes of highway and we go up to the hotel room,” Stewart continued. “We get through the door, we’re kissing and everything else, and we kind of just have sex right there on the edge of the bed.”
“We have sex—consensual,” said Stewart, noting that it “wasn’t fabulous. It wasn’t something that was eccentric, off the wall or some kind of fetish.
“She takes a shower. I take a shower. The next morning, you know, she gets up to leave, and I’m like, ‘Hey, I’ll give you a ride to where you have to go.’”
When Stewart explained to her that he would go for a run to the spot where his rental car was parked two miles down the road, drive it back and give her a ride to her place, she turned down his offer.
“She’s like, ‘No, I have to be somewhere, so I need to get out of here,’” Stewart recalled, adding later that her destination that day—two hours after she left his hotel—was a wedding.
“So I said, ‘Can you give me your phone number?’ and she said, ‘Sure.’”
Stewart went on to explain that the Vodafone he had was a very basic, pay-as-you-go cell phone he had purchased at the post exchange, the military version of a department store. One could not even change the ringtone on it.
If, while trying to “unlock” the phone, you enter the password-PIN combination incorrectly three times, the phone locks up, and you’re required to call the phone company and provide the company with your phone’s sim card number, known in Germany as a “PUK” number, Stewart said. Given the correct number, they’ll unlock the phone.
“The problem is, when you buy a phone at the PX, it’s not registered to you,” Stewart said, noting that a loophole in German law allows phones sold at the PX to stay unregistered.
Describing himself as “stupid and naive,” Stewart said he threw the phone’s box away and no longer had the PUK number for his phone. As a result, he and Heinrich couldn’t unlock the phone and Heinrich couldn’t put her phone number into his phone as she had wanted to. Alternatively, she wrote her phone number on a piece of hotel stationery.
With the phone issue now behind them, Stewart said he gave Heinrich 50 Euros for a taxi cab ride home, and she left.
He, on the other hand, hung around the room for a few minutes before changing into his running clothes, jogging to retrieve his rental car and then going to the PX. Later in the day, he said, he and one of his buddies drove to Trier to see some of his relatives on his mother’s side. They returned two days later.
Stewart said he tried calling Heinrich on Monday with a new phone he had bought for $22 at the PX two days earlier. When she didn’t answer, he left a message on her voicemail. Days and weeks passed, but he never heard from her directly again.
‘Snowball Building’
It wasn’t long after the one-night stand with Heinrich that Stewart’s very-pregnant wife, Freija—who would be assigned 110 miles away at another Army post—arrived in Germany with their young daughter.
Stewart wanted to tell his wife about his infidelity, but was afraid to lose her the same way so many of his SF brothers had lost their wives. So he waited until a day when he thought he might lose her for another reason.
On November 25, 2008, Stewart got a call from his wife that there was some kind of complication with her pregnancy. Doctors detected an abnormality in their unborn child’s heartbeat. An emergency C-section followed. Not only was it “touch and go” for the child, but Freija was not doing well either and Stewart was crying like a baby the whole time.
“I basically prayed to God,” Stewart said. “I said, ‘Listen God, I will never cheat on my wife, and I will never hold anything over her head again,’ because I had so much guilt for what I did.
“I said, ‘I will never be that person again. I promise to be a better person if you save my wife and my child’s life. I’m gonna change the way I’ve been.’
“I kept praying and kept praying and kept praying,” he said.
Freija started to pull through and Stewart went to the next room to find his newborn daughter on oxygen, but alive and awake with her skin tone becoming more normal.
Amidst all of the turmoil of a difficult birth, Stewart wanted to tell Freija about his infidelity soon after the baby was born, but didn’t want to ruin the day of his second daughter’s birth. So he waited until the following day.
About that moment, Stewart said, “I’ll tell ya, it wasn’t a good moment in the history of Kelly Stewart, but it really made me feel better to get that off my chest.
“My wife, being the strong and great person that she is, wasn’t happy,” he recalled. “Her response was, ‘We’re not going to allow this to ruin the birth of our child, and it’s something we’re gonna have to work on.’”
The new year arrived, and Stewart’s unit had just wrapped up some cold weather training when he decided to stop by the finance office on post to check on a pay issue about which he had a concern.
“When I went in there, I had a weird feeling about it, but I didn’t know what it was,” he explained.
Stewart was there to ask for a copy of his Enlisted Record Brief, a document that serves as a one-page record of his career in the Army, because he knew he was being looked at for promotion to E-8 for the first time. Strangely, he said, the female clerk assisting him appeared hesitant to provide him the requested document—and for good reason.
“When I got a copy of it, it had a ‘flag,’” Stewart said, indicating that some sort of adverse action had taken place or that he was under investigation for some reason or another.
Stewart asked her to explain why his records had been flagged and she began “tap dancing” around and advised him to speak with First Sergeant Richard Knapp, an E-8 and the senior enlisted man in the unit with which Stewart had just spent a week in winter training.
When Stewart made the call to find out why he had been flagged, Sergeant Knapp told him he had been instructed by the folks at the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division not to talk with him about it. Still deeply curious, the 11-year veteran headed to the Judge Advocate General’s office.
Stewart thought to himself that the flag must be related to something that happened downrange—perhaps, it had to do with the way he arrested a prisoner of war or how he had killed someone. He would find out soon.
At the JAG’s office, Stewart explained his concern to a young military lawyer, Captain James Hill. In turn, Captain Hill called the prosecutor’s office on the other side of the post and asked what was going on. When the folks at the prosecutor’s office wouldn’t tell him anything, the military lawyer told Stewart to tell anyone who wants to question him that he has legal representation.
“Now, I’m in a serious panic,” Stewart said, “because I’ve got a captain in the Army telling me things don’t normally happen this way, and all I see is a snowball building and I don’t even know what it’s about.”