Chapter 4
I moved with him rather than against him, caught his lead arm at the elbow, stepped through, redirected the reach into a hip throw that used his own forward drive as the engine. He went over cleanly and landed on his back again with the same sound as the first time.
He lay there.
I stepped back.
I picked up my notebook from the bench. I looked at the room — at thirty men who had laughed four minutes ago and were now standing in the specific stillness of people who have updated a significant assumption.
"Your technique is loud," I said. "That's why it failed."
I said it to the room, not to Vance specifically, because it was a training observation rather than a personal one, and because I had come here to observe training protocols and what I had observed was worth noting.
Vance was getting to his feet. His face had lost the grin and what was underneath it was harder to name — not quite embarrassment, not quite anger, something more complicated that occupied the space between them.
He looked at me. "Who are you?"
I opened my notebook to the page where I had been writing before he invited me onto the mat, confirmed the notation I had made about the kimura sequence and the held tap, and wrote three words in the margin beneath it.
Same technique problem.
Then I answered his question.
"Chief Petty Officer Declan Marlo," I said. "Joint services training evaluation. I've been noting your methodology since I arrived."
He stared at me. "You're—"
"The evaluator assigned to this facility for the quarter." I turned to a fresh page. "The observation about your technique holding past the tap will be included in my report. So will this." I gestured with the pen toward the board. The participation trophies annotation was visible from where we stood.
The room had the specific quality of air that has been very hot and has just been opened to something cooler.
May you like
The gunnery sergeant who ran the training center arrived seventeen minutes after I returned to my bench. He had been notified by someone in the room — I did not need to know who, because the chain of events that follows a senior training evaluator witnessing a conduct issue on the mat is reasonably predictable. Gunnery Sergeant Torres was a compact man with the face of someone who had been solving problems in this building for a long time and had developed a useful skepticism about the kind of problems that arrived on Monday mornings.
He looked at my evaluation credentials. He looked at the board on the wall. He looked at the annotation with the Sharpie.
