Chapter 5
Sergeant First Class Marcus Webb had not died in the explosion.
He had been recovered, critically injured, by a local medical team operating near the blast site, and had spent eight weeks in a hospital that was operating outside the area's communication network during an infrastructure disruption, and the initial recovery team had misidentified a second casualty as Webb based on equipment markings that had been separated from their actual owner in the blast. The error had been corrected in the records within four months, but the notification had not successfully reached everyone it was supposed to reach, and Webb himself had been transferred through three different medical facilities during the period when the correction was supposed to be propagating, and the combination of those factors had produced a two-year gap between the error's correction and the arrival of the corrected information at the units and families it needed to reach.
He had been working with the demonstration coordination team for the past three weeks as part of a rehabilitation-to-civilian-employment program that placed retired military personnel with contractor training support roles.
Nobody on the base had connected the name in the program roster to the name in Rex's transfer file.
Rex had connected something else.
The formal investigation into the notification failure ran for four months. It identified seven points at which the error's correction should have been transmitted and was not, for reasons ranging from administrative oversight to system migration during a records update to one instance in which the correcting notification had simply been filed incorrectly in a folder for a different unit. The investigation's findings were entered into the record and recommendations were made about the notification process.
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The grave marker at Arlington is a more complicated matter, and one that I understand is still being addressed through processes that move at the pace such processes move.
Aiden completed Rex's handler certification that fall. He requested, and received, a temporary exception to the standard handler assignment protocol that allowed Webb to participate in Rex's continued training on a consulting basis during the transition period, which was irregular but not without precedent in cases where a working dog's behavioral history made the presence of a specific known individual therapeutically significant.
