His account remained measured as the questions moved through the search and the use of force. He did not claim to remember every second precisely; where he had been unable to see something, he said so. When asked what Cheney had done while searching the vehicle, he explained that his face had been toward the road and he could not see inside the Escalade. He knew only what he had heard until investigators later showed him the footage.
That honesty mattered. The defense had prepared to challenge the certainty of an angry man who had experienced something frightening. Nathaniel left them with no exaggerated detail to attack, no imagined intention attributed to Cheney, and no claim that his rank had somehow given him insight into a search he could not see. He spoke as a witness, not as a commander trying to win an argument.
The prosecutor then asked what he thought when Cheney pointed the pistol toward his head. Nathaniel paused. For the first time since taking the stand, he looked away from the lawyer and toward the window high above the courtroom wall. He remembered the heat of the road and the ant moving over the cracked asphalt, absurdly alive in the middle of a moment that could have ended his life.
"I thought that any sudden movement could be interpreted as aggression," he said. "If I raised my head, he might say I tried to get up. If I spoke too sharply, he might say I threatened him. So I decided to become as still as I could. I've made decisions under fire in places where everybody understood we were in a combat zone. I didn't expect to have to make one on a road a few miles from my mother's house."
The room remained silent. Nathaniel continued, not looking at Cheney. "I knew that the words an officer wrote afterward could affect whether anybody believed what had happened. That frightened me almost as much as the weapon. I knew he had the opportunity to write a different story, and I couldn't do anything to stop him from writing it."
During cross-examination, Cheney's lawyer asked whether Nathaniel had challenged the officer by refusing consent to the search. "I stated that we did not consent," Nathaniel replied. "That was not a refusal to comply with a lawful order. It was a statement of a legal position." The lawyer asked whether the general expected special treatment from police officers.
Nathaniel looked at him. "I expected the treatment the law requires," he said. "I expect that for everyone."
The defense tried to suggest that Nathaniel's military training had made him capable of resisting and therefore a reasonable concern to the officer. Nathaniel answered that he had offered no resistance and that Cheney had no evidence of a threat when he drew his gun. The lawyer asked whether a military commander could understand the pressures faced by a small-town patrol officer. Nathaniel said he understood that officers made difficult decisions, but difficult work increased the need for discipline rather than removing it.