That is a nine-year-old with an intact sense of her own agency, and I’d be far more worried if she’d kept it.”

Part Twelve: The Conversation With My Brigade Commander

Nobody at Fort Carson asked me a single question about it, which is both the best and the strangest thing about that institution.

Sixty-one people had been on that lawn and eleven of them were Army, and the story was around the brigade by Monday afternoon in some form, and not one soldier, officer or civilian said a word to me about it in uniform for three months.

Colonel Adeyemi called me in on the Wednesday.

He had been in the third row.