There was still time to stop this.
He preferred stopping problems early.
He lowered his voice.
“Officer, verify the credential through your normal channel.”
“If you have a concern, do that.”
“If you don’t, return my identification and let me continue.”
The officer stared.
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
“I told you how to resolve the question you raised.”
“Same thing.”
“No.”
The officer’s face reddened slightly.
The sailor noticed something else.
The officer had not actually looked closely at the identification.
Not the security elements.
Not the photograph.
Not the expiration.
He had already decided it was false.
The credential was merely a prop inside the argument.
The officer said:
“Where are you stationed?”
The sailor answered.
“Where are you going?”
“To a meeting.”
“What kind?”
“One you’re not currently part of.”
That was the wrong answer for this officer.
The sailor knew it immediately.
The officer smiled without humor.
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The attitude.”
The Command Master Chief said nothing.
The officer tapped the military ID against his own palm.
“You guys always do this.”
The sailor’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.
“You guys?”
The officer heard himself.
Adjusted.
“People pretending to be somebody.”
The sailor looked toward his own uniform.
“You think I dressed like this to walk through an airport?”
“I think people do stupid things for attention.”
A young traveler standing near a charging station raised her phone.
The sailor noticed.
The officer did too.
Instead of calming down, he seemed to straighten.
An audience changed some people.
Made them cautious.
It made others perform.
This officer was the second kind.
The Command Master Chief held out one hand.
“Return my ID.”
“No.”
“Call dispatch.”
“I don’t need you giving orders.”
“Then call your supervisor.”
The officer laughed.
“You really committed to this costume, didn’t you?”
There it was.
The word.
Costume.
The sailor had expected something like it.
He had not expected how much it would irritate him.
Not because the uniform made him important.
He had spent years teaching younger sailors exactly the opposite.
The uniform did not create character.
It revealed responsibility.
What angered him was how casually the officer dismissed everything represented by the fabric.
Thirty years.
Deployments.
Deaths.
Sacrifices made by people whose names were sewn nowhere on it.
And the officer looked at those ribbons as if they came from a party store.
Still, the Command Master Chief kept his voice level.
“Call dispatch.”
The officer stepped closer.
“What if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll make a small problem unnecessarily large.”
The young woman filming whispered to the man beside her:
“Is he actually military?”
The man said: