From The Memoirs Of A Non-Enemy Combatant Part 22

"It baffles me how things turned out," he said.

"I'm sorry, Boy." It was all I could think to answer.

"I have a confession," he said.

This made me quite nervous. I was afraid he was about to violate the gag order, and even though I wouldn't write about it, I feared that the Pentagon would somehow find out anyway. "You don't have to say anything, Boy. I'm here as a friend. Not a journalist."

He laughed. "No, I wouldn't lay that on you, man."

What followed was the first I heard of the doc.u.ment Boy had been a.s.signed to write for his federal interrogator. Catallano had been working on getting the Pentagon to release it into Boy's possession and was fairly optimistic about retrieving it, in part because it was used as evidence in Boy's CSRT and should be made public.

"I want you to read it for me," he said. "If you could, I'd like you to tell me whether it can be published. It's important to me that it's handled by someone I know...who knew me before all this."

The confession, as Boy explained, detailed his life in America leading up to the time of his capture. What I did not know was that it was also a portrait of the island prison during its most volatile period.

I agreed to help him.

Boy once again brought up the Brewbaker play. He couldn't come to terms with it being the only written work about his life as the fas.h.i.+on terrorist. If he could only get his confession out into the world, then his time in prison wouldn't be a complete waste. This was Boy's way to regain control, to take back the power his former captors still held over him. If his words had carried the strength to convince the convening authority in Was.h.i.+ngton of his innocence, then, he believed, they might also reverse his exile. For Boy, the publication of his confession could be the first step in his journey back to America.

There was a knock at the door, and Von Trump joined us. She was still wearing the red sequined tube dress and blond wig from her show. After she introduced herself to me, she took a seat next to Boy on the plush sofa and placed her hands in his lap. Once again the conversation turned to fas.h.i.+on. He wanted Von Trump to know just how big he had been in New York, how his name had popped up in conversations, how his clothes had appeared in fas.h.i.+on editorials in all the major magazines. He wanted her to hear what other designers had thought of him, what I had thought of him, and he couldn't disguise his own need to hear it too. His mania and his momentum made it seem like he was bouncing around the carpeted walls of the small red room. Von Trump said she'd never seen him like this before. He put his arm around her and asked, "Gil, what was the piece you wrote about me called again? Tell her, I forget."

"It was 'The Fall of Boy.'"

I knew he hadn't forgotten. He couldn't have. But he needed to know someone else remembered. And then his eyes went distant, as if he were looking through me, imagining everyone who once knew him by his name.

1. Hicks was the first to be tried and convicted under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and was released to Australia in 2007. Al-s.h.i.+hri, who was also released in 2007, has most recently appeared in an al-Qaeda propaganda video in which he implicates himself in an emba.s.sy bombing in Saudi Arabia. Al-s.h.i.+hri was released into Saudi Arabia's custody, where he underwent a rehabilitation program for former jihadis, only to fall in with al-Qaeda once again.

2. OGA: other government agency.

3. "Panic in Tallapoosa," New York Post, June 4, 2006.

4. I suspect that the administration purposefully left this typo in order for the charges to have more gravity. It is, however, amended at the end of the charges.

5. The second Cooperating Witness in the Hernandez case was later identified as Hajji, also known as Habib Naseer.

end.