It was an April morning when Tommy spoke with Roberta. Her husband had been killed in Iraq in October of the previous year. He wanted to find out why the Sergeant didn’t have plaque at the Fernley Veterans Cemetery near the couples home.
“The veteran’s administration is refusing to allow the Wiccan symbol to be placed on his plaque,” Roberta said.
Tommy was appalled by this news and immediately set about investigating the refusal. In his way of thinking and being a military veteran himself, the U.S. Constitution should have protected the rights of Roberta’s husband who had died for his country. It appeared it hadn’t worked in the case of his family
Tommy wanted to know why. Not only did he interview Roberta but he spoke with several people who had been fighting the same injustice for nearly ten-years. “What do you mean “nearly ten-years?” Tommy asked the Sergeant’s widow.
“The Department of Veteran Affairs has refused the Wiccan Symbol of faith for nearly ten-years because they claim that there isn’t a centralized church to represent the religion,” Roberta replied.
Tommy was on the telephone to former commanding officer Colonel Jim Gibbons, who retired after Desert Storm and ran for the U.S. Congress and won. He was now a candidate for Nevada’s Governorship.
“How can a soldier die for his country and then be refused the symbol of his religious preference,” Tommy asked Gibbons.
“I don’t have any idea, but I’m gonna find out right away,” the Congressman told Tommy.
Meanwhile, Tommy worked for three days researching and writing the news story. He also realized that even though he would “break” the story, it would only appear in the Sparks Tribune.
“There’s got to be a way to make a bigger splash with this story,” he said to himself as he continued to write the article.
The following morning Tommy called a his friend in Las Vegas, whom he’d met while covering another news story. Tommy explained to him how he felt it was more important to get the story out to all the media outlets, rather than allowing it to run in a small town paper and go nowhere.
“Here’s how we’ll do it,” he told Tommy. “You collect and write the information. I’ll use my name on the byline here and give you credit at the bottom and you do the same up there. We’ll run the story on the same day.”
The two conspirators agreed that their article would run on a Friday, however because someone didn’t like the size of Tommy’s article, they chopped it into three parts. The story didn’t run on Friday as planned, coming out on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday.
Tommy realized that he was in a bad position. It would look as if he had plagiarized the story and that he could find himself fired from his job.
He had Monday’s off, but that didn’t prevent Angela from calling him on his cell-phone and instructing him to meet with her at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, the day the third installment was published.
When he arrived at the office, Angela was already there. He went directly to publisher office where he knew she’d be since he was out of town most of the time.
“This is crap,” she said. “You took this story almost line for line from this article.”
Angela held up a copy she had printed from the internet. It was written slightly different from Tommy’s but contained most of the material and quotes from his various sources. Then she added, “I have half a mind to fire you for this.”
Tommy sat there quietly. He didn’t say anything because he was certain that she would not listen or hear what he was saying. Tommy figured that Angela had her mind made up already and that there was no sense in attempting to explain what happened.
“Care to tell me how this happened?” she demanded.
Slowly Tommy laid out the details about how he had called his friend and together they planned to get the news story out in a bigger way than the Tribune could. Angela surprised Tommy by quietly listening.
“We had planned to run it on the same day, but it got split into three installments and was a day behind,” Tommy said. “That screwed everything up.”
“What you two did is wrong,” Angela said after Tommy finished talking. “This looks exactly like plagiarism on your part.”
She also said that once an article is published in a paper, that article was property of that newspaper. Angela told Tommy that she would discuss the matter with publisher and together they’d decide what to do about it.
Tommy worked for the next day and a half with what he felt was a gray cloud hanging over his head. He had succeeded in helping Roberta get her story out about her dead husband’s denial of a religious symbol, but now he believed that he would be getting fired for having done it the way he did.
“Look,” he said once the publisher arrived in the office later that week, “All I wanted to do was get it up onto the newswire. That’s something we don’t have the pleasure of doing around here like they do in Las Vegas.”
The publisher politely listened and then replied, “I’m just going to call it a mistake that you’ve learned from. Don’t do it again though.”
Tommy said, “Thanks, I won’t make that mistake again.”