No Fortunate Son

More than a year after their son Barry Winchell was murdered in an Army barracks in Kentucky, Pat and Wally Kutteles finally heard 10 words they'd desperately longed to hear: "We take full responsibility for what happened to Private Winchell."

The sentence was uttered on July 21 by the Army's chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki -- the man charged with guiding the rank and file into the 21st century. But it wasn't meant for the Kutteleses. At the time Shinseki made the comment, they were at home in their blue-trimmed ranch house near Bannister Mall, and Shinseki was standing before a phalanx of reporters in Washington, D.C.

When Pat heard the statement -- on TV, just like everyone else -- she thought to herself, "It's about time." Months earlier, she had become convinced that the Army was responsible for her son's death. Fueled by a desire for justice, she and her husband had taken to the national stage, making countless appearances in the media and at political rallies across the country. The court of public opinion had long since handed the Army a guilty verdict. With Shinseki's words, it appeared the Army was finally stepping forward to accept it.

But Shinseki's statement was a hollow victory in an ongoing battle, one the Kutteleses now believe they'll never win. Shinseki's words were barely as substantive as the breath that bore them. They were but a small admission in a long press conference heralding the findings of the Army's five-month investigation of Fort Campbell, the base where Barry was killed. Shinseki spent most of the press conference describing the base's "strong command climate" in the months before the crime, which had occurred a year earlier. Despite the Army's long-held conviction that high-ranking commanders bear responsibility for all the actions of their subordinates, the report yielded just one fall guy -- a midlevel sergeant found to be guilty of breeches of command codes. The Army found General Robert T. Clark, Fort Campbell's top commander, and all of his other subordinate officers, innocent.

The report, which climaxed what the Kutteleses believe is a concerted if thin cover-up of the command climate at Barry's base, served as a harbinger of things to come. Three months later, in a move that would define the unwelcome shape of the Kutteleses' new lives, the Army's legal department mailed them a letter rejecting the couple's only legal recourse, stating, in essence, the Army takes no responsibility for what happened to Private Winchell.

The Kutteleses' descent into war with the Army began when the phone rang early on the morning of July 5, 1999. Pat was making coffee when the call came in from a colonel on her son's base, which straddles the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. Barry had been kicked in the head by a booted foot, he told her. A call to a doctor in Nashville confirmed the worst: Barry had suffered irreparable brain damage and was struggling feebly against a coma; his chance of recovery was a distant miracle.

Nothing had prepared the Kutteleses for such news. Throughout his time in the service, their son had called once or twice each week to tell them how well he was doing, to share his dreams of a great military career. Less than a week before his death, he had told them he wanted to become a helicopter pilot, that he wanted to win soldier of the month or, better yet, soldier of the year. And he told them about the accolades he'd earned, being careful not to brag: "Could you imagine me getting medals?"

Pat and Wally boarded a plane at KCI Airport and lit out for Nashville. Army personnel picked them up at the airport, took them to a hospital, and led them up its stairs to the trauma unit. There they found Barry's life clinging to a respirator. They gazed down on his blackened eyes. The skin on his swollen face was stretched tight and shiny. A friend of Barry's came by, but the soldier couldn't summon the courage to see Barry in that condition.

They learned then that it wasn't a boot but a fellow soldier's baseball bat that had rendered their son comatose. But in the months after the Kutteleses' order to take Barry Winchell off life support, they would learn much more. In time, their son's murder would evolve from a random act of violence into the gruesome consequence of a deeply prejudiced and mismanaged military.

Growing up, Barry Winchell was a smart kid, but his intelligence was the kind seldom praised in public schools. He was a champ in Boy Scouts, netting handfuls of awards for his science experiments. But he fell behind in his classes. Diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, he couldn't read until the third grade. Early on he wrote a paper that his parents still hold close in their memories. "If I could read like other kids, then they would know that I'm not dumb," it read.

While living with his family in Tarpon Springs, Florida, Barry dropped out of high school and enrolled in a technical school, where he thrived. On his way to earning a GED, he learned welding and hoped the skill would one day become a career.