Usual disclaimers. They're not mine and I'm not making a cent off of them.
Just a few words
By Ultracape
Tears dropped from his eyes and flowed down his cheeks. There was no way to stop them.
Standing in a corridor of the carrier, Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Harmon Rabb, Jr. had completely lost control in front of at least 30 passing junior officers and a dozen or so seamen.
Yet as he held the phone close to his ear his sobs continued nearly choking him.
He didn't want to be on this carrier. He didn't want to go on this yearly inspection of all the JAG offices he oversaw. He didn't want to stand over the shoulders of countless ship JAGs checking over their work and catching errors, sloppy work, poor record keeping, and mishandled evidence, many times when it was too late to make a difference.
Too many of the innocent were convicted when just a few questions would have cleared them. Too many of the guilty were set free when just a little more work would have convicted them.
Their excuses, these inexperienced children who had the audacity to think they were lawyers, filled his head with their unjustified egos, their obsessive fanaticism till it swirled around his mind in useless childish babbling.
Some of their reactions to his presence had even come back to him in the form of unsolicited, "friendly," advice from the carrier group's captain to stop being such a hard ass.
And yet here he was, the stern faced, martinet who had no heart, bawling like a girl.
None of the crewmen passing by or waiting in line to use the phone had any notion of what had done this to Captain Harmon Rabb. None would have dared comment in front of him either, for fear of possible repercussions. He had quickly garnered a reputation of not going easy on subordinates.
But on the other end of the line, his wife Lieutenant Colonel Sarah MacKenzie not only knew why her husband was crying but also did the one thing that was guaranteed to increase his tears.
"Come on sweetheart, this is the first time for him. Say it again,"
"Dada, Dada, Dada."
A/N: I saw the movie "Munich" (excellent by the way) and there was one scene, that as I watched it thought, 'now that's what Harmon Rabb would do.'