The corporal locked me inside a holding cell on the Marine base I was about to command, and my brother Glenn smiled at me through the bars.

“I told you they’d figure you out,” he said.

I didn’t answer him.

A few minutes later, the officer of the day walked into the hallway carrying a folder of paperwork, glanced through the bars out of routine, and stopped so suddenly that even Glenn noticed the change in him.

That moment had actually started hours earlier, with a decision that had seemed simple enough at the time.

I’d arrived at the installation in civilian clothes on purpose, because I wanted to see the place before anyone had a chance to polish it for my benefit. No escort waited beside my car when I pulled up outside the main gate. There was no convoy, no formal reception line, no carefully rehearsed row of officers standing by ready to tell an incoming commander exactly what they thought she wanted to hear. I wanted the ordinary version of the base — the version that existed on a Tuesday when nobody important was supposed to be watching. I wanted to see how the gate actually ran on a regular morning, hear how Marines spoke to each other when they didn’t think a general was listening, get a real feel for the place before ceremony and pressed uniforms changed the whole atmosphere of it.

So I drove my own car, an old gray sedan I’d owned for eleven years and had no intention of trading in just because I’d been selected for a star. My official orders sat in a folder on the passenger seat, along with the newly reissued credential I expected to use to get through the gate without any trouble at all.

Glenn sat beside me the whole drive down.

Bringing him had been my second decision that morning, and it turned out to be the one I would spend a long time thinking about afterward. He’d been making jokes about my career since I was eighteen years old, sitting across from me at our parents’ dinner table the night I first announced I wanted to earn a Marine Corps commission. I remember my father laughing before I’d even finished the sentence — not a cruel laugh, exactly, more the kind of laugh you give a child who’s just announced she wants to be an astronaut, fond and dismissive all at once. Glenn laughed right along with him, sixteen years old at the time, delighted to have a fresh joke handed to him on a silver platter.