“He’s a country boy, just like the rest of us,” said Mark Plunkett, who played high school basketball with John Lee. “You throw a suitcase with a million dollars in front of us, who knows what we would do?”

Chris Guin, who considers himself one of Major Cockerham’s best friends, shook his head. “That don’t sound like John Lee,” he said. “I think he’s being railroaded.”

While others from Castor have achieved more than Major Cockerham, few started with his disadvantages. From outside the family’s run-down four-room house, it is hard to see where he got the nerve to dream. Growing up, the boys slept in one room, the girls in another, said his brother Charles. They lived on grits in the morning and corn bread at night. For water, he said, the children hauled buckets from a nearby stream.

Charles Cockerham said his father, John Lee Sr., who worked at the local sawmill, did not finish high school, but encouraged his children to do so. His mother, Clara, who worked as a teacher until her brood got too big, was even more emphatic about education.

“He used to come to my house after school and stick his head in my encyclopedias,” said Verba Egans, who is so close to Major Cockerham that he calls her Mom. She added, “It was never easy for him, but he worked hard because he was determined to make something of himself.”

The Army as a Way Out

Like many poor young people from rural towns across America, John Cockerham saw the Army as the best way to advancement. He joined right out of high school in 1984 and married a fellow soldier, Melissa Jordan, while stationed at Fort Knox, Ky. Later, he went to Northeastern Louisiana University on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, graduating in 1993 with an Army commission.

Image Verba Egans of Castor, La., and her husband, Roy, friends of Maj. John Lee Cockerham, who has been accused in a bribery scheme in Iraq. Credit... Mario Villafuerte for The New York Times

Over the next decade, according to family and military records, he served in Haiti and Germany, and earned a master’s in business from Webster University in 2004. In June of that year, he was assigned to Camp Arifjan, one of the Pentagon’s busiest supply centers.