Chapter 5
I was present the morning the inquiry closed. I was in a different part of the building, completing the documentation on a separate case that had been assigned to my unit, and I learned about the closure through an administrative notification that appeared in my queue between two other items. I read it. I noted the outcome. I returned to the documentation I had been completing, because the documentation was due and the work did not stop for the things that had resolved.
Collins found me in the medical bay three days after the inquiry closed. He was out of uniform, which meant he was there on his own rather than in any official capacity, and he was carrying two coffees in the way that people carry two coffees when they want the second cup to communicate something that words would make awkward.
He handed me one.
"I've been thinking about what you said," he said. "On the tarmac. When I put the zip ties on."
"It was accurate," I said.
"Yeah." He held his cup with both hands. "I wanted to say something. That day. When he hit you."
I looked at him. He was young and he had done the right thing in the only way available to him at the time, which was to make the zip ties as loose as possible and to say I'm sorry with his voice instead of his rank, and that had been what he had to work with and he had used it correctly.
"You did say something," I said. "The looseness of the restraints is in the inquiry record."
He looked at his coffee.
"That's not the same as saying something out loud."
"No," I said. "It's not. But it was honest, and it was what you had."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said he was putting in a transfer request to the medical support unit. He wanted to work with people who made decisions the way I had made them on that tarmac — not based on rank or who was watching, but based on what needed to happen and what it was going to cost.
I told him we were currently one corpsman short.
He started the following Monday.
The patient — the intelligence officer whose airway I had secured while eight thousand people watched and a vice admiral demanded to know who was in charge — sent a card through channels that took three weeks to reach my desk because of the classification requirements surrounding his identification. The card had no return address. It said four words in handwriting that had the slight imprecision of a man who had recently relearned the use of his right hand after a period of oxygen deprivation.
It said: you were in charge.
May you like
I put it in the drawer where I kept the things that were worth keeping.
Then I went back to work, because there was always more work, and because that was the answer to every question this job had ever asked me.
