Chapter 2
I had heard about this by the following morning.
I had sent a message through the appropriate channels that afternoon.
The demonstration had been scheduled for Thursday.
Colonel Shaw had approved it with the specific expression of a man who has learned over thirty years of command that the situations which look most likely to go poorly are sometimes the situations most worth permitting, and that the inverse is also true, and that the skill is in knowing which is which. He had looked at my training record for seven minutes before signing the approval.
The bleachers were at approximately seventy percent capacity — soldiers who had filtered in from the morning's other demonstration events and who had stayed when word moved through the crowd that something was going to happen at the center field that was worth watching. The word that moved through crowds like this one is not precise. It doesn't need to be. It carries the right information: that the thing about to happen has stakes, and that the outcome is not predetermined, and that the watching might matter.
Briggs reached the center line two steps before I did.
He covered the last of those two steps by putting his hand on my shoulder and shoving.
The force was specific and calculated — hard enough to produce a visual effect for the bleachers, not hard enough to constitute anything a formal review would characterize as assault rather than aggressive demonstration contact. His boot scraped audibly against the field surface. The crowd produced a sharp collective sound, not quite a gasp and not quite a shout, the sound of several hundred people revising their anticipation upward simultaneously.
May you like
My boots found the ground under the force of it and I stopped moving.
I looked at him.
