My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.
I am a major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Eleven years, this June.
I have a commission, two decorations, and a law degree my parents paid nothing toward and were not invited to the ceremony for, which was my decision and which I do not regret.
For four of those eleven years I was at the legal assistance office at Fort Weyland.
I want to explain what that work is, because it is the whole hinge of this and almost nobody outside knows it exists.
A soldier who is about to deploy needs a will. A twenty-year-old with a wife and a baby and a deployment date needs a will, a power of attorney, and somebody to sit down and explain what those two things are and what they are not.
That is what the legal assistance office does. Every day, all day, for free, for anybody with a military ID.
I estimate I have drafted or reviewed something in the region of nine hundred wills.
I can tell you what most of them look like. A nineteen-year-old private with a savings account containing eleven hundred dollars and a truck he is still paying off, sitting across a folding table from me, being asked to think about a thing nobody that age should have to think about.
The forms take about forty minutes. The conversation takes as long as it takes.
I have had three of those young men come back afterwards and sit down again and tell me things that had nothing to do with a will, because forty minutes across a table is longer than anybody in their family had spent asking them a direct question in years.
That is the job. It is not glamorous and it is not what people picture when they hear the word lawyer, and I have never wanted to do anything else.
I have explained the difference between a power of attorney and ownership to more people than I could count. I have explained testamentary capacity to nineteen-year-olds. I have talked more frightened young men through what happens to their money than I have done any other single thing in my adult life.
So Vernon Slaught stood in a courtroom in Marrow County and told a judge that the beneficiary was incapable of managing an estate.
And that judge was, at that moment, holding a page that said the beneficiary drafts them professionally.
That is why she stopped. It was not the rank. Judges are not impressed by rank, and Amabel Ferro has been on that bench for nineteen years and has seen everything.
She stopped because she had just listened to nineteen minutes about a woman who could not be trusted with money, and then turned a page and found out what that woman does for a living.
I have since read the transcript, which is a strange thing to do to your own life.
The gap between Slaught’s last sentence and hers is recorded as a pause. There is no length given. Transcripts do not record how long a silence is, which is the single greatest failure of my profession, because in a courtroom the length of a silence is most of the information.
What is in the transcript is that after she asked the question, and after my father asked his, Judge Ferro said one further sentence before she moved on.
She said: Mr Slaught, is your client aware of the contents of the exhibit he has filed?
That is a judge being extremely polite about something. I have been on the other end of that politeness twice in eleven years and I remember both.
Now the part that I still find remarkable.
Slaught put that file in front of her.
It was in his bundle. His exhibit. He had subpoenaed my service record himself, on my parents’ instructions, to support the second half of their claim.
He was after two pages of it — a medical entry from 2019 and a deployment history he thought made me look isolated and unwell.
Those are the two pages he flagged. Those are the two pages he read.
The file is a hundred and forty pages long.
He did not read the rest, because he did not think he needed to. He already knew what I was. He had been told, at length, over three months, by two people who had been telling that story since 1987.
I have thought about Vernon Slaught a great deal and I do not think he is a bad lawyer. I think he is an average lawyer who accepted a characterisation from his clients and then went looking only for what confirmed it.
That is the most common failure in my profession and it is not rare and it is not stupid. It is what everybody does when they are certain.
He paid four hundred dollars an hour of my parents’ money to fetch the single document that ended their case, and then he handed it to the judge himself, in a folder with his own firm’s name on the front.
