Part Six: What Okafor Said
That evening, after orientation — which had proceeded with a specific quality of attention from the platoon that the instructor had noted without understanding the cause of — the men of Third Platoon were in the barracks.
Sara was not there. She had been called to a separate briefing, the details of which had not been shared and which several of the men had spent time speculating about without arriving at consensus.
Murray was sitting on his bunk. He was not doing anything — not cleaning his kit, not reviewing materials, not any of the things that his hands usually found to do in quiet moments. He was sitting.
Okafor, who had been making tea with the small electric kettle he had brought from his previous posting and that had become, through the logic of small conveniences in institutional settings, communal property, came and set a cup on the footlocker beside Murray’s bunk.
Murray looked at it.
“I’ve been in six units,” Okafor said. He sat down on his own bunk, facing Murray, with the specific ease of someone who has decided to say a thing and has dispensed with the preamble. “Different bases, different configurations. I’ve seen a lot of new arrivals.”
Murray said nothing.
“The quieter ones are usually the ones who have something to be quiet about,” Okafor said. “Not secrets necessarily. But — ” He looked for the word with the patience of someone who finds the right word worth waiting for. “Weight. They’re carrying something they’re not performing.”
Murray looked at his tea.
“I knew something was off about how we were reading her,” Okafor said. “I should have said something.”
“You couldn’t have known about her father.”
“No,” Okafor agreed. “But I didn’t need to know about her father. I just needed to know she was a person who’d been assigned to us for a reason, and we were treating her like she was something we had to tolerate.” He paused. “That was the problem. The father is — that’s the thing that made everyone pay attention. But it shouldn’t have required that.”
Murray was quiet for a while.
“No,” he said eventually. “It shouldn’t have.”
“She’s good,” Okafor said. “I watched her in the briefing. She’s very good. She knows things — the technical stuff, the command structure, the protocols. She knows more than Chen and Park and she knew more than Briggs when Briggs got here.” He picked up his own tea. “We would have figured that out in a week. If we hadn’t spent the first hour making it harder for her to show us.”
Murray looked at him. “You’re not making me feel better.”
“I know,” Okafor said. “That’s not what this is.”
Murray almost smiled. “You’re the only person in this room who’s been straight with me today.”
“I’m always straight with you,” Okafor said. “You’re usually not listening.”
This time Murray did smile, briefly, the smile of someone who has received an accurate piece of information and is finding it simultaneously uncomfortable and useful.
