You just need to wait and let the structure do what unstable structures always eventually do.
I didn’t know yet how quickly or how completely that structure was about to come down, but I had a feeling, and in my experience, feelings like that are rarely wrong.
The letter landed on the desk of Lieutenant General Marcus Reynolds on a Tuesday morning in late September, tucked into a stack of routine correspondence his aid had already flagged for review.
I only know the specifics of what happened next because Marcus told me himself weeks later over a phone call that started serious and ended with both of us laughing harder than either of us had in months.
Marcus and I went back a long way.
We’d served together early in my career before he climbed into the rarified air of three-star command and I settled into the work I do now at futures command.
He wasn’t just a colleague. He was one of the handful of people who’d watched me grow from a green second lieutenant into someone who could hold a room of colonels silent with a single sentence.
And over the years, he’d developed what I can only describe as a very specific dry sense of humor about anyone foolish enough to underestimate me.
He told me later that he read the first paragraph of Gregory’s letter, an aggrieved account of conduct unbecoming an officer involving an unprovoked physical assault at a private social gathering and had to set it down for a moment because he was laughing too hard to keep reading.
Denise Whitfield, he told me he’d said out loud to an empty office, got challenged to a fight, and this man is mad she won.
But amusement isn’t the same as dismissal. And Marcus, whatever else he is, has always been thorough. An inquiry was opened exactly as Gregory had hoped it would be.
Statements were requested. Video evidence of which there was an abundance given how many phones had been recording that Labor Day evening was reviewed in full.
Within days, it was clear beyond any reasonable dispute that I had done nothing except respond with considerable restraint to a challenge thrown at me in front of dozens of witnesses.
The inquiry into my conduct closed almost as quickly as it opened with a formal note in the record commending the composure I’d shown under public provocation. But inquiries once opened have a way of generating their own momentum.
