Chapter 6
Jenkins was reassigned to a base with a command culture that had been evaluated clean in two consecutive cycles. I know this because Dana Park, the IG investigator who led the formal review, sent me a one-line message four months after the proceedings closed, which said simply: Jenkins is doing well.
I read it in a transit lounge at Ramstein on my way to the next assignment, which was in a different country and involved different names and a different blank transfer sheet, because that was how the work ran. You arrived blank, you documented what was there, you provided the report, and you moved to the next place that needed the same thing.
My hair grew back in approximately six weeks. Not all the way, but enough that the cold was less persistent and the overhead lights in briefing rooms stopped reflecting off my scalp in the specific way that had been making junior officers look sideways. I had not particularly minded the shaved head. It was the hair I had had at intake, which was the hair that belonged to the person who arrived at Black Ridge with a blank transfer sheet, and when it grew back it was growing back on a different side of the thing that had happened, which was its own kind of accurate.
Vexley sent a formal note to the JSOC evaluation office three months after the review closed. I was not the addressee. The note was to the deputy director who had made the phone call that had produced my orders. It said, in the specific measured language of a general writing something official, that the evaluation had been conducted with professionalism and thoroughness, and that the documentation had been comprehensive, and that the outcome had served the command's best interest.
The deputy director forwarded it to me without comment, which was also a form of communication.
I filed it with the other documents and boarded the next flight.
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The work was what it had always been.
I was the person who had always done it.
