The Marine Who Shoved Me In The Cafeteria
Around us, the cafeteria had started to notice. A Navy commander near the salad bar turned his whole body to look. Two lieutenants at the closest table had stopped talking mid-sentence, forks paused in the air. A woman in an Air Force flight suit lowered her phone into her lap without taking her eyes off us. The Pentagon’s central court is never silent, there are always trays clattering and espresso machines hissing and low murmured conversations that are probably about things far above my clearance, but something in the room had started to thin out, the way sound does right before a fight starts, or right before somebody very senior walks in.
“I have every right to be in this building,” I said. “I work here.”
“Then you’ll have your badge visible,” he said. “Regulation. You’re not wearing one.”
He was not wrong about the regulation. He was wrong about everything else, but he was not wrong about that, and it needled me more than the shove had, because it meant some of this was actually my fault. I had left my badge clipped inside my jacket pocket that morning instead of on the lanyard where it belonged, because I had spent the last four hours in a closed room with three congressional staffers arguing about a budget line item, and closed rooms in this building do not want you flashing hardware in front of civilians who have not been read in. I had walked out of that meeting still half inside it, distracted, hungry, wearing the plain gray suit I wear on days I do not want to be recognized on sight, and I had walked straight into a young Marine doing exactly what he had been trained and ordered to do.
That did not make the shove acceptable. It made it explainable, which is a different thing, and I have found in my career that people confuse the two more often than they should.
“I’m going to ask you one time to lower your hands and lower your voice,” I said. “After that, we are going to have a different kind of conversation.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think you understand the position you’re in.”
“Corporal,” I said, reading his name tape again on purpose, slow enough that he would notice me doing it, “I understand the position perfectly. I am asking you to reconsider yours.”
He laughed. It was not a cruel laugh, not exactly, it was the laugh of a young man who has been told his whole enlistment that confidence is the same thing as correctness, and who has not yet had a day bad enough to teach him the difference. “Lady, I don’t care if you write policy, handle budgets, or brief senators for a living. Inside this building, rank matters. And right now, you don’t have any that I can see.”
That was true. That was, in fact, the exact and entire truth of my situation, and it was about to become considerably less true.