Chapter 5

For about two weeks after, I heard the rumor version. The one that went around the company, then around the battalion, then around the post.

The rumor went like this: Mullins lost his temper at a slow gate, shoved a junior soldier in front of a line of cars, and got himself relieved because there happened to be an audit going on. A bad morning. A career-ending bad morning, sure, but one bad morning. People said he was stressed. They said his mother had been sick. They said the morning push had grown into something nobody could handle alone, and Delgado — that's me — was the slowest guard on the lane, and Mullins had just carried it for a year too long and finally broke.

I heard a first sergeant say it out loud at the smoke pit. "Man just snapped," the first sergeant said. "Happens."

That version passed around like currency. I heard it from a supply clerk, a cook, a driver who ran the trash route. I heard it from my own platoon sergeant, who told me not to worry, that the command was going to treat the shove as an isolated incident, that Mullins would probably get an Article 15 and maybe a reduction and be reassigned somewhere out of the way, and that I should be proud of myself for keeping calm.