National Affairs: Guilty

Sergeant James Gallagher, looking blandly poised, took the stand last week to defend himself against charges that he had consorted with the Chinese Communists while a prisoner of war in Korea, and had caused the deaths of three of his comrades (TIME, Aug. 22). Before him in the courtroom on Governors Island in New York Harbor sat a court-martial of three colonels, four lieutenant-colonels and a major; behind him, amid the rows of spectators, sat his mother.

During his 33 months as a prisoner, Gallagher testified, he was not a murderer, but a dispenser of mercy to the weaker prisoners; he said that he had not informed upon his fellow prisoners, nor accepted rewards from the Communists. Gallagher admitted that he had signed a Communist peace petition urging U.S. troops to stop the "useless war," that he sometimes took the Communist side in camp discussion groups, that he had strung up a sick fellow prisoner from a peg; his purpose, said Gallagher, was to give the sick patient exercise. "I did not have too many friends," he said. "The men just didn't like me. When I would walk up to another squad, the men would say, 'Shut up, here comes Gallagher.' So I associated with the 'progressives' . . . I tried to keep myself out of trouble, but just didn't believe what they taught us. There was no sense in asking for trouble from the enemy."

Sergeant Gallagher admitted that he had ejected a corporal suffering from dysentery out of his hut into 40°-below-zero cold, but he insisted that he did not thereby cause or hasten the death of the man. Gallagher denied that he had ejected a second emaciated man into the snow, as charged by six prosecution witnesses. When Sergeant Lloyd Pate, leader of the camp's anti-Communist "reactionaries," taxed him with the death of one of the men in the snow, "I told him to mind his own goddamn business," said Gallagher.

Despite a parade of ten rebuttal witnesses from the prosecution (in all, 28 former P.W.s testified against him), Sergeant Gallagher remained calm. At week's end, the court-martial gave its verdict: guilty of the unpremeditated murder of both the sick men he put out into the snow, of the maltreatment—but not the murder—of the third man he had strung from the peg, guilty of collaborating with the enemy. The sentence was the maximum: confinement at hard labor "for the term of your natural life."