Instructor Deek Gammin got out of the car at 0430 on Monday morning and stood in the SEAL compound as a free woman.

It had been years of wrestling with conflicting feelings and she’d finally had the balls to do it. “Just rip the bandaid off. These guys can handle it. I’ve proven myself as a combat operator. A job is a job, doesn’t matter to me anymore, it feels good,” she thought, looking down at her red nails and leather skirt.

Today was a new day, Deek was now Deeka.

She knew it wouldn’t be easy but nothing in life came easy.

Later that morning…

“The fucking cat is out of the bag sir.”

“Goddammit,” Raven thought to himself. He knew exactly what Master Chief Jackson was talking about.

Deek Gammin, one of their toughest Phase One SEAL instructors had confided to Jackson, after too much Guinness at McP’s Irish pub in Coronado, that he wanted to be a she.

Jackson laughed it off at first until he realized it was not a joke.

At the time Jackson couldn’t care if Deek wanted to put on a pink unicorn outfit and eat ass for breakfast, and he told him as much. He was from south Florida after all, and they made’em weird down in those parts. However, undeniably, Deek was a killer, a combat-proven operator and Jackson felt for him/her.

The issue Jackson talked about with Raven was over timing and method of delivery. The dark clouds of publicity were sure to form on the horizon and this was not something Jackson or his boss, Raven, would be looking forward to.

“Where n thee fuck, do I even begin with this shit,” he thought to himself. Fucking pronouns giving me a three-alarm fucking headache these days. The blogs and news media will eat this up and sure as shit, some SEAL is going to go on Fox News and talk about how Deek is going to Hell, and Webb will be on CNN with Anderson Cooper telling the other side the story and how it’s “ok.” He liked Webb but Goddamn, hasn’t that motherfucker sold enough books already?

And this all was at a time when the community was already overexposed in the press and books were flying off the shelves like whores in Thailand on Navy payday.

That was two weeks earlier after he thought he’d talked sense into Deek about waiting just a bit.

“Leave the Navy and then handle this business, Deek. Why you have to drag the community through this now?” Deek nodded and Jackson thought he’d narrowly escaped an explosion. He thought wrong.

Now Jackson was in a pronoun shit storm. He was standing in Raven’s office because Deek, without telling anyone just showed up one day at the first phase office dressed as a woman and PT’d the class on the beach in lipstick and UDTs! “What the fuck,” Jackson said out loud to himself.

“I thought we had this handled?” Raven said to Jackson.

“Sir, don’t get me started with that crazy south Florida fucker. Not to mention he is one ugly woman! Had the nerve to just strut into the SEAL compound in a skirt with his/her nails all done up, ready to run the 5 am PT with lipstick on. The students were too afraid to say anything and the instructors actually thought it was a joke, and went along with it until they realized it wasn’t. Then the shit started flying. I had to calm the whole compound down. Finally got things somewhat under control.”

“The ladies who work at the office are a wreck; they were in tears all day about it. First from laughter, then the real tears came when they realized the situation was NOT a practical joke. They started balling because they felt so bad to have laughed at Deek, now ‘Deeka.'”

“I don’t know what the Hell to think but we got a situation on our hands, sir.”

Raven, sat quietly and thought for a minute.

“Ok Master Chief, send ‘Deeka’ out to the Rock. He can augment the third phase staff and you and I can fly out there to speak with him later in the week to sort this all out. At least out there he’ll be out of sight and it will limit any press access. Let’s see if we can’t get the cat back in the bag .”

“Yes, sir, I’m on it.”

Tuesday morning. “The Rock,” San Clemente Island.

Deeka was picked up at the airport by a big X division farm boy-looking kid sent out to augment the third phase staff as slave labor until he was shipped out to the USS Never Dock. The kid made the mistake of cracking a smile since word had made it around about Deek’s transformation. Two seconds later wished he hadn’t.

Gammin popped him in the throat with a knife-hand jab that left him gagging for air. “I’ll fuck you up, Jones, I’ve killed better men than you. You think this is some kind of game for me?” Jones just shook his head and choked back tears as he and Gammin rode in silence the 15 minutes it took to get to the SEAL training compound.

The next morning would be a surprise for class 222 as they would be re-introduced to Instructor “Deeka” Gammin and she had some pent-up energy headed their way…

To be continued…

Click here to read all the installments of The Reservation.

“The Reservation” is a new experiment, a novel in progress, shared with SOFREP readers weekly and created by former Navy SEAL sniper Brandon Webb. Stand by for weekly updates as the story unfolds and our unit wanders “off the reservation.”