Chapter 6
The formal debrief happened that afternoon in Shaw's office, which was the kind of office that accumulated the specific artifacts of a career spent making decisions that mattered — photographs, commendations, a challenge coin collection that took up most of one shelf, and very little that was decorative. Shaw sat across the desk and asked me a specific set of questions about the technique sequence, about my training background, about the decision to accept the challenge through official channels rather than declining it or addressing it informally.
I told him the truth: that the challenge had been designed to produce a public outcome regardless of whether I participated, and that the best available option for controlling the nature of that outcome was to participate under conditions I had some hand in shaping. That a demonstration in a sanctioned environment with command oversight and a crowd of witnesses produced a record of the encounter that the informal version would not have produced. That Briggs's argument — that the integrated program was producing credentials without capability — was a real argument that deserved a real answer, and the answer was more persuasive in the middle of a field in front of several hundred people than it would have been in a memo.
Shaw listened.
Then he asked whether I had been confident I would win.
I thought about that honestly.
"I was confident in my training," I said. "Those aren't the same thing. But they're close enough to proceed on."
He looked at me for a moment.
"The right answer was probably that you were confident," he said.
"I know," I said. "I gave you the accurate one instead."
Something moved in his expression. Not quite a smile. The thing that exists near a smile when the person producing it has decided the situation doesn't call for one but the feeling is there anyway.
He said that he was reassigning me to the academy's combatives instruction program, effective the following Monday, pending the administrative processing that the reassignment required. He said the program had a vacancy in the advanced techniques curriculum that had been open for four months and that the morning's demonstration had clarified his thinking about how to fill it.
I told him I understood.
May you like
He told me that the demonstration footage — the stadium had a recording system for training events — would be included in the program's curriculum materials, pending review.
I asked him what capacity.
