And then on a Saturday afternoon at Pine Crest Manor I came within three minutes of breaking it in front of sixty-one people, and the only reason I didn’t is that the four-year-old had turned into a nine-year-old and decided to speak.
That is the ground Pamela Gable walked onto.
A competent, exhausted, badly lonely man with a well-run household and a quiet daughter and a dead wife whose photographs were on the refrigerator.
She did not have to be a mastermind.
She only had to be paying attention.
Part Three: The Two Good Years
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.
