Not the proud-husband questions he used to ask, the ones that sounded supportive but landed slightly off-center, the way someone sounds when they are performing interest rather than feeling it.
He asked specific questions about structure, about command, about what the joint task force designation actually meant in operational terms.
One evening, he sat across from me at the kitchen table and asked me to explain the chain of command I operated in.
I did.
He listened for an hour. He did not interrupt. He did not redirect.
He simply listened.
And when I finished, he was quiet for a moment. And then he said, “I had no idea.”
And I believed him.
That was the difference.
I believed him because I could see, for the first time, that he was not performing comprehension. He was arriving at it.
In late spring of 2026, I received a formal commendation from the joint task force commander for my work on an intelligence coordination project I had been developing for eight months.
It was not a large ceremony. Thirty people, maybe 40. A conference room on base. A brief citation. The standard handshakes.
Frank attended.