A Chaplain's Test of Faith

Now he practiced that lesson himself.

"I knew I could not let the stress of the situation overtake me," he writes. He drew strength from the biblical and Koranic stories of the prophet Joseph, "an innocent man who was unjustly accused and wrongly imprisoned."

Most troubling to him were thoughts of his family, especially his wife and daughter. They had been in Syria with Huda's family during Yee's Guantanamo deployment. They were flying back on Sept. 11, the day after his arrest, and expected him to meet them at the airport outside Seattle.

He never showed, and for days no one in the family knew where he was.

They learned finally on Sept. 20, when news of the arrest was first leaked to the media.

The government's case began to unravel almost immediately. The most serious charges it could mount were two counts of mishandling classified information and another of lying to an investigator. On Nov. 25, 2003, he was released from prison to await trial. But on the same day, U.S. Southern Command, which oversaw Guantanamo, announced the adultery and pornography charges.

By then, Huda had been questioned repeatedly by investigators, often as Sarah sat on her lap, and her apartment had been searched. In one particularly wrenching attempt to squeeze information from her, a female agent showed her pictures of three women and accused her husband of having affairs with them. "Your husband is not the person you think he is," the agent said.

When the charges were later made public -- and splashed across the headlines -- Huda was pushed to the brink. "It wasn't the first time that Huda had suggested a desire to die since my arrest," Yee writes of the time she held the gun, "but it had never gone this far." Yee ended up calling the Olympia police, who took Huda to a hospital and confiscated the gun.

Yee pointedly avoids saying whether he was guilty of the adultery and pornography charges. Investigators told Huda he had affairs with three women, but charged him with sleeping with only one. Huda declined a request for an interview. "Huda is a very private person," he says. "We've discussed this and we decided we're not going to talk about our private life."

In the book, he accuses the military of filing the charges, and making them public on the day of his release, as a way of pulling attention away from the fact that its national security case was without merit.

Mistrust Lingers

Much of the government's case is still a mystery to Yee. It was dropped before his lawyers received any evidentiary material from prosecutors. Much of that material remains classified. His writing draws on material published in the media about the origins and collapse of the case. But the book does fill in some of the blanks.

Of the classified sketch of the base he was allegedly caught with, he says it was a diagram of the human anatomy he had drawn in a small green notepad during a combat stress lecture. Of the six foreign bank accounts he allegedly held, which a military judge ruled made him a flight risk, he says he had only one active account outside the country -- his military account in Guantanamo.

Yee left the military on Jan. 7 of this year, an honorable discharge in hand but deep in debt from legal bills. He continues to live with his wife and daughter -- who is now in kindergarten -- in Olympia. He is a course away from completing his master's degree in international relations. The family has been living off a small advance from his publisher, he says.

He is still hopeful that someday the military will apologize to him and his family. He's frequently reminded, though, of why that may never happen. In March, FBI agents visited his landlord and asked about him. And just two months ago, he was stopped trying to board a plane and told he was on the government's no-fly list.

He is still an object of suspicion.