him breathing heavily on the phone, and I could imagine how frustrated he must be. I was
bracing myself for him to say something angry or bitter, steeling myself to absorb his
understandable rage. But then the phone suddenly went silent. He’d hung up.
I was unnerved by the call for the rest of the day and couldn’t find sleep that night. I was
haunted by my helpless bureaucratic demurrals in the face of his desperation and the silence
of his response.
The next day he called again, to my relief.
“Mr. Stevenson, I’m sorry, but you have to represent me. I don’t need you to tell me that
you can stop this execution; I don’t need you to say you can get a stay. But I have twenty-nine
days left, and I don’t think I can make it if there is no hope at all. Just say you’ll do
something and let me have some hope.”
It was impossible for me to say no, so I said yes.
“I’m not sure there is anything that we can do to block this, given where things are,” I told
him somberly. “But we’ll try.”
“If you could do something, anything ... well, I’d be very grateful.”
Herbert Richardson was a Vietnam War veteran whose nightmarish experiences in brutal
conditions left him traumatized and scarred. He enlisted in the Army in 1964 at the age of
eighteen, at a time when America was heavily involved in combat. He was assigned to the
11 th Aviation Group, 1 st Cavalry Division, and was sent to Camp Radcliff in An Khe,
Vietnam. The camp was near Pleiku, an area known for extremely heavy fighting in the mid-
1960 s. Herbert endured perilous missions in which he saw friends get killed or seriously
injured. On one mission, his entire platoon was killed in an ambush, and he was severely
injured. He regained consciousness coated in the blood of his fellow soldiers; he was
disoriented and unable to move. It didn’t take long before he experienced a complete mental
breakdown. He attempted suicide after suffering severe headaches. Despite multiple referrals
from commanding officers for psychiatric evaluation, he remained in combat for seven
months before his “crying outbursts” and “uncommunicative withdrawal” resulted in an
honorable discharge in December 1966. Not surprisingly, his trauma followed him home to
Brooklyn, New York, where he had nightmares, suffered disabling headaches, and sometimes
ran out of his house screaming “Incoming!” He married and had children, but his post-
traumatic stress disorder continued to undermine his ability to manage his behavior. He
ended up in a veterans hospital in New York City, where he had a slow, difficult recovery
from severe head pain associated with his war injuries.
Herbert became one of thousands of combat veterans who end up in jail or prison after
completing their military service. One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is
how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are
incarcerated after returning to their communities. By the mid- 1980 s, nearly 20 percent of the
people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate
declined in the 1990 s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked
up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Herbert’s care at the veterans hospital in New York City slowly allowed him to recover. He
eventually met a nurse there, a woman from Dothan, Alabama, whose compassionate care
made him feel comfortable and hopeful for the first time, perhaps, in his entire life. When she