Raised by two schoolteachers in Bethlehem, Pa., along the Lehigh River, Eric Fair was a quiet, marginal student with a weight problem--one of "the kids who don't play sports and who buy their jeans in the husky section." Bullied, he sought shelter under the security of local cops patrolling his paper route and found refuge in the First Presbyterian Church. These early attractions to regimen and service manifest themselves throughout his life in a Presbyterian college, the U.S. Army, the private military contractor CACI, the NSA and seminary at Princeton. With a matter-of-fact, diary-like chronology, Fair's memoir, Consequence, tracks his gradual dissolution as military monotony, war, lies, guilt, marital stress, heart disease and alcoholism eat him alive. At the center of his disintegration is his role as an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Trained in Arabic by the army, he joined CACI for a lucrative assignment questioning and badgering detainees. "They tell us torture works. It always has. It always will." Fair describes the pain and intolerable prison conditions with some detachment, distancing himself from what he sees and does. However, the cruel "Palestinian chair" torture tool pushes him over the edge: "I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it." Although sometimes hard to read, Consequence is Fair's effort to confess and find that atonement--made more disturbing because he may be just one of many trying to understand the barbarity of Abu Ghraib. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.