USD Magazine Spring 2007

feasible. “I’d been married for three years, my second child was due, and the reality was that the Marine Corps wasn’t going to pay for my law school, they were just going to give me the time to do it before I went on active duty as a lawyer.” So Puckett and his wife decided to roll the dice and take whatever assignment came his way. He’d found out that there was a program that would pay for officers to go to law school after their first tour. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to let my dream of going to law school die, I just simply can’t afford it right now.’ It was pure economics.” So he became an intelligence officer, which he describes as“someone who’s familiar with the collection, analysis and dissemination of information about the enemy. ”The enemy at that time was the Soviet Union.“My first real assignment was as an intelligence officer for an infantry battalion,” he recalls.“And the executive officer of my battalion went on to become Gen. Tony Zinni, who was the U.S. central commander right after (Gen.) Schwarzkopf and before (Gen.) Tommy Franks.”Zinni —one-time special U.S. envoy to Israel and the Palestinean Authority, and now vocal critic of the current Iraq war —became one of Puckett’s mentors.

escape drills, of Gonzales yelling to be let go. On cross-examination, Puckett is all business. “You said today that Roughan continued to tell him to relax, that he must have said it three or four times.”Then the response: Yes. “You previously said that you saw nothing out of the ordinary. You didn’t have a need to intervene. Is that correct?”Yes. “If you’d seen something unsafe, you’d have a duty to stop it, isn’t that correct?”Yes. Another Marine testifies that yelling wasn’t unusual in the grueling training. “Every time we played water polo, at least one student would get out of the pool and want to quit the program.” Another adds further context: “Obviously it’s shocking to them the first time they play. We were instructed not to be too intense. We don’t want students out of the water, not participating.” Puckett keeps hammering certain points home: that Roughan held a briefing with instructors just before the training began about class safety. That he again brought instructors aside to remind them not to go overboard. That any of the Marines in the pool that day could have stopped the training if they’d thought

MARSHALL WILLIAMS

Subsequently recruited as a counterintelligence officer, Puckett got into some serious cloak-and-dagger work: “It’s basically the gathering of the human intelligence. Running spies. It’s recruiting host-country nationals to spy against their own government. It’s also the protection of our information and personnel against exploitation by the enemy.” Asked if he was able to come home from a hard day’s work in those days and tell his wife about his day, he laughs out loud. “Absolutely not.” After serving on active duty for four years, Puckett got selected for the Funded Law Education Program, and attended law school at Indiana University. During the summers he’d go on active duty and serve as non-lawyer trial counsel (i.e. a prosecutor). It worked out well when it came to garnering on-the-job training, since Puckett got to prosecute cases in court years before he graduated. “At the lower level of courts- martial, the prosecutor doesn’t have to be a lawyer,” he explains. “Only the defense attorney does.” Upon passing the bar, Puckett received orders to go to Naval Justice School, where he learned military procedure and law, and was subse- quently certified as a judge advocate. In 1984 he lobbied to be assigned to Camp Pendleton. Steadily rising through the ranks, he served as staff judge advocate and chief prosecutor before applying for a special

something unsafe was going on. When a brief recess is called, Puckett takes off his jacket, revealing an immaculately pressed dress shirt and a pair of fancy leather suspenders. As far as revelations go, that’s nothing. Before the day is over, he’ll divulge a piece of evidence that will make spectators gasp. As a teenager growing up in Indiana, Puckett was one of the lucky ones. By the time he started winning speech and debate competitions in high school, he already knew precisely what he wanted to be when he grew up: a litigator. His interest in the Marine Corps came a bit later. “The Marines had a program that let you complete Officer Candidate School, get commissioned as a second lieutenant when you graduated, then defer your active duty until you finished law school.” He leans for- ward, thoroughly engaged. “That’s what interested me; I wanted to go to law school right after college, then go into the Marines because they promised me lots of good courtroom experience. That’s what they were advertising; you come in as a lawyer, you go right into the courtroom, you get your own cases.” It was a good plan, and it would have worked beautifully except that while Puckett was a college freshman at Indiana University he got married; by the time he graduated, going to law school wasn’t financially

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