Not we didn’t think. Not Arliss decided. Not I was wrong.

A judgment that belonged to nobody.

I said thank you and I hung up and I sat in that cafeteria for about ten minutes, and then I did the only genuinely smart thing I did that month, which was that I did not call a lawyer in Jasper County.

I called the Texas Military Department’s legal assistance office, because I was on active orders and entitled to it, and a captain I had never met spent forty minutes on the phone with me and gave me three names in Houston and one sentence of advice.

He said: “First Sergeant, whatever you do in the next two weeks, do not file anything in that county.