My mother heard it. She said nothing.
So I took my cap and I moved myself to a table at the very back, alone, and I sat there while my brother worked the room — especially the CEO of his company, Leon Okafor, a man he’d pointed out to me in the car four separate times.
Then the lights went down, and General Frances Kerr, four stars, spoke about my grandfather for eleven minutes.
And then she said, “Tonight we honor not one soldier — but two,” and lifted a folder, and began to read a citation.
Mine.
Chapter 2: The Citation
I had told them I’d been deployed three times. That part was true.
I had let them believe the deployments were quiet. Supply. Logistics, even — a family in-joke, the sister who drove trucks while the brother ran a company that moved them.
The citation General Kerr read into that microphone was not quiet.
