Speaker A
Danny went dead quiet, put his fork [music] down, and I could see it happening behind his eyes. This whole plan assembling itself. Three weeks later, he called me and goes, "I signed the papers. Marines. I'm going to be an officer." I said, "You're going to be a what?" He goes, "An officer. They outrank everybody. I looked it up." I said, "Danny, to be an officer, you need a college degree. You don't have a degree." Long pause. He goes, "Okay, so I'm enlisting first, and then I'll get the degree and outrank you." I told him that's not how any of this works, and he hung up on [music] me. So, he goes to boot camp, and the whole time my mom keeps texting me these updates like it's a reality show. "Danny says he's going to be your superior officer by Christmas." I'd write back, "Mom, that's genuinely impossible." And she'd send back a thumbs up, which I've learned means she read zero words of what I said. Cut to that first Thanksgiving. He shows up in this crisp uniform, brand new private, the lowest rank there [music] is, and he's got this smug little smile. He shakes Dad's hand, hugs Mom, and then he turns to me and delivers the "You have to call me sir" line like he'd been rehearsing it in the car. And here's the thing, by then I'd made sergeant. So, I said, "Danny, do you actually know what rank you are?" He goes, "I'm a Marine." I said, "Right, but what's your actual rank?" He goes, "The Marine [music] rank." My Dad, who did four years back in the day, nearly choked on his water. So, I pulled it up on my phone. I showed him the chart. I pointed at the very bottom, private. That's him. And then I dragged my finger up and up and up past private first class, past lance corporal, past corporal, all the way to sergeant, and I tapped it. "That's me," I said. "You'd have to get promoted four times just to catch up to where I am today, and I'm getting promoted, too. You will never mathematically outrank me, ever." He stared at that phone like it had personally betrayed him. And then, because he's Danny, he goes, "Okay, but Marines outrank Army. Everybody knows that." And my Dad, God bless him, said, "Son, that is a thing people say at bars. It is not a real thing." So, Danny sits down, doesn't say much through dinner, and I honestly thought that was the end of it. The whole plan collapsed on the dining room table. But he's stewing. I can see it. He's doing math in his napkin with a pen. Around dessert, he perks up and goes, "How long until I'm a sergeant?" I said, "If you do everything right, 4-5 years." He goes, "And how long until you're out?" And I realized what he was doing. He wasn't trying to beat me at Thanksgiving anymore. He was playing the long game. He was going to wait me out. I said, "Danny, I re-enlisted. I'm in for 6 more." His face [music] just fell. Mom's patting his hand going, "It's okay, sweetheart. You tried." But here's where it turned, and this is the part I didn't expect because he sat there another minute, and then he looked up, and the smug was gone. And he goes, real quiet, "Wait, so you've been doing this the whole time? Supervising people, getting promoted, moving up like actually good at it?" [music] And I said, "Yeah, Danny, that's what I've been doing." And he nodded slow, and he looked almost embarrassed, and he said, "I think I joined for a stupid reason." I said, "Yeah, you kind of did." [music] And he goes, "Will you actually teach me how to not be terrible at this?" And that's the moment my little brother stopped trying to outrank me, sitting at Mom's table with a pen and a napkin, and asked me, a sergeant, to be the person who taught him how.
