I met Pamela at a fundraiser for a veterans’ housing nonprofit in Denver that I had been sent to because my brigade commander did not want to go.

She was at my table.

She asked what I did and then, when I gave the short answer, asked a follow-up question that was specific enough that I looked at her properly for the first time.

She did not ask about deployments.

Everybody asks about deployments.

She asked what the hardest part of command was, and when I said personnel, she said, “It’s always personnel,” and told me a story about a sales region she had inherited.