There had been times when Dave Hammond, during two tours in Afghanistan as an army lawyer, had been called on in the middle of a battle to give the O.K. before a bomb could be dropped. That, he’d say, would “get your adrenaline pumping.” And there had been times when, as the military lawyer assigned to assist Chelsea Manning in the appeal of her conviction for disseminating classified documents, he’d been knee-deep in tense courtroom showdowns trying to keep the whistleblower out of prison.
But that sort of high-charged excitement, he’d come to believe, belonged to his past. And good riddance. He’d left the service (although he remained a major in the Army Reserve) and in 2015 had started practicing law in Syracuse, near his wife’s hometown, where they had settled to raise their family, because, as he idyllically imagined it, the time had come for “a simple, quiet life.”
