The Corporal Who Locked Out A Colonel
Roger sat beside me with that folder of orders between us, flipping through it like a man reading a menu he had already decided not to order from. “All this for a desk job,” he said, somewhere around the Kansas-Oklahoma line, and I kept my eyes on the road and did not answer, because I had learned a long time ago that silence costs me nothing and arguing costs me an afternoon.
We reached the visitor’s gate at Fort Calder a little after two in the afternoon. It was an ordinary gate, concrete barriers, a guard shack with tinted windows, a young soldier in Army Combat Uniform stepping out to meet my car with the particular alertness of someone who has been told, more than once, not to get complacent.
His name tape read Pike. I would learn later that his first name was Ryan, that he was twenty-two years old, that he had been standing that gate alone, without a senior noncommissioned officer physically present, for exactly twelve days, since the soldier who normally supervised him had gone on emergency leave. I would also learn that in those twelve days, Corporal Pike had already caught two attempted unauthorized entries, one of them a man trying to use an expired dependent card to bring a trunkload of merchandise onto the installation to sell door to door in the barracks. He was not a careless kid playing with power. He was a young soldier doing exactly what he had been trained to do, at the exact moment that training collided with the worst possible example of why that training matters.
I handed him my identification card. He ran it through the scanner mounted at his station, and I watched his face change from routine to uncertain as the little screen returned an error instead of my photo and rank.
“Ma’am, this card isn’t reading,” he said. “Do you have a second form of ID?”
I had my driver’s license, and I had the folder of orders, a stack of official paperwork identifying me by name and gaining command of the very installation he was standing guard over. I handed both across. He looked at the orders for a long moment, then back at me, a woman in a windbreaker standing beside her own dented sedan, then at Roger in the passenger seat, who chose that exact moment to lean across and say, cheerfully, to a total stranger holding a weapon and a radio, “Don’t worry about her, son, she does this. She likes to tell people she runs things.”