Chapter 3
Colonel Warren stepped forward, his salute finally breaking as he addressed the formation instead of me. "Recruits, at ease. Some of you are about to learn something you'll remember longer than anything else this course teaches you." He turned to me. "Ma'am, I apologize. I should have recognized the designation the moment you walked through that gate. I let a briefing memo sit unread on my desk this morning, and that's on me, not on any of these cadets."
"It's on both," I said. "But you're right that it starts with the memo." I looked past him to the formation. "For those of you wondering, the mark on my back isn't decoration. It's a classified operational designation carried by a small number of personnel who've worked joint assignments requiring us to move through training environments like this one without announcing who we are first. I'm not here to test your marksmanship or your fitness scores. I'm here to observe how a unit treats an unknown quantity before that unknown quantity proves anything to you. Rank, gender, what someone's wearing when they walk in the gate, none of that is supposed to determine how much respect a stranger gets on a battlefield you don't control." I paused, letting the mud, the storm clouds, the dead silence do some of the work for me. "This morning, every one of you decided who I was before I said a word. Reeves decided it hard enough to put his hands on me. That's the finding that's going in my report today. Not whether you can run an obstacle course."
May you like
Reeves's jaw worked, the color completely gone from his face now. "Ma'am, I'll accept whatever discipline—"
"You will," I said. "But the discipline isn't really the point either. You're going to deploy someday, Reeves, maybe soon. Somewhere overseas, an unassuming person in plain clothes is going to walk up to your position, and you will not know if that person is a farmer, an informant, an interpreter, or someone who outranks your entire chain of command by a classification level you're not cleared to know about. How you treat that person in the first ten seconds, before you know anything, is going to matter more than every push-up you've ever done." I looked around at the rest of the formation, all of them dead still in the mud. "Today it cost you a torn shirt and a bruised ego. Next time, the stakes might not be that forgiving."
