CHANGE

Over ten years ago… (Names have been changed)

Young first year plebes in uniform popped to attention as I determinedly strode through their company areas. “Good evening, ma’am,” they would all say. Normally, I would have replied casually and instanteously, for I remember how slighted I had felt when I was a plebe, to remain unrecognized. But tonight I was stern, wordless.
I can’t remember who had called the meeting, who was going to be there, or how I had even found out about it. Snippets of scenes coagulate to form my memory of the event, despite gaps of information that leave me wondering if something could have saved me from it.
I pushed on the double doors that opened onto the tennis courts. A few yards away sat a couple of guys that I knew, three others that I didn’t. Ethan was sitting on the edge of a bench, unwittingly spilling ashes from the cigarette in his hand as he spoke. Engaged, no one noticed me edging towards them until I was right next to Ethan. “Hey, ” I said. He replied with the same.
What is distinct in my mind is the tone in which we all spoke. We were the abused, the betrayed, faced with what seemed an insurmountable task. Without coming out and saying it, we were all aware of each other’s plight, the stages of the day that had ended with our meeting on the 5th wing tennis courts.
Ethan introduced me to one of the guys I didn’t know. I managed a grin, and neither one of us mentioned that we had seen each other at Hubbard Hall. I was sitting in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s (NCIS) pergatory, between steps of a process I did not know, and was never warned about. Of all of the buildings on the yard (campus), this one I had been to only once, during Plebe Summer, for a mandatory introduction to the Naval Academy’s Crew Team Center. So, Hubbarb Hall was to pull me in full circle, at the beginning of my Naval Academy career, and at its end. I sat atop a sturdy but old brown leather couch, clutching my cover (uniform hat), waiting. It was at that moment that I realized waiting for the unknown is worse that waiting for the inevitable. The mind’s capablilty to forage into the depths of the unknown, to create chilling scenarios of misery and treachery is limitless, merciless. It is never content to rest upon a satisfactory result, but goads itself into peering over the edge, to witness how expanse the distance is between the safety of the cliff and the blackness of the ground below.
I saw him. He was walking through what I now noticed to be a fingerprinting station. We gazed at each other for a second. He looked like I felt. Akin to how a lamb must feel as it passes through the stages of preparation before its imminent slaughter. I didn’t recognize him, so I thought he was a subordinate, and dispatched immediately with thinking about him. I had to think about myself. Nervousness fearformed a destructive funnel in my mind that would blur my vision and impair my faculty of reasoning. Unannounced, the Special Agent appeared (to be continued…)