Chapter 6
I learned about this from a card Reeves sent me eight months after I had separated from the Army, processing paperwork in a small apartment in Norfolk, uncertain what I was supposed to do with a career that no longer had a clear next step. The card was short. It said that Reyes had asked, through the board, who had found him.
Reeves had told him my name.
The card said Reyes had taken eleven minutes, letter by letter, to spell out a response.
Thank her.
I keep that card in a drawer beside my bed. I do not need to look at it often. I know what it says.
I think about FOB Resolute sometimes — the generator coughing at 0200, the canvas walls, Keller's certainty, the particular quality of light through the tent flap in the hour before dawn when I would walk back to my quarters after a long shift and feel, for reasons I could not always articulate, that I had done the only thing available to me that was actually correct.
My career did not survive that choice.
Daniel Reyes did.
I do not know how to weigh those two facts against each other, and I have mostly stopped trying. Some debts get paid in currencies that do not appear on any performance review. Some corrections to a chart matter more than the career of the person who insisted on making them.
I think about the eleven minutes it took him to spell out two words.
May you like
I think it was worth it.
I am not certain every day. But on the days I am, that certainty is enough to carry the rest.
