They Scanned Her ID and Laughed — Until the Screen Flashed Red: SEAL Division

 

Part 1

The laminated rectangle looked ordinary in her palm—an older Navy ID soft at the edges from years of pockets and checkpoints. Lieutenant Commander Rachel K. Morgan, U.S. Navy. A simple headshot: gray threaded through dark hair pulled into a no-nonsense ponytail, a line beside the right eye like a hyphen in a biography no one had read yet. She wore jeans and a Navy t-shirt under a light jacket because San Diego always pretended to be summer, even when morning fog bit at the wrist.

“Ma’am, this is a restricted facility,” the petty officer said, polite because the instruction manual told him to be, skeptical because his life had given him so few reasons not to be. The second sailor, younger, tried and failed not to stare at the sinew in her forearms, at the easy way her weight settled on the balls of her feet. Two boys at a gate imagining dragons and seeing a woman with crow’s feet.

“Only authorized Naval Special Warfare personnel past this point,” the petty officer continued. “You might be at the wrong gate.”

Rachel smiled the way a patient smiles when a brand-new intern explains how to put in an IV. “This is the right gate,” she said. “Special operations medical conference. I’m presenting.”

The younger sailor half-whispered behind his hand, loud enough that anyone with ears could hear him. “Maybe she’s support. Like… base clinic. Or admin.”

The petty officer took her ID. He studied it the way you study a map when you think a road must be mislabeled. Then, almost apologetically, he fed the card into the reader.

The screen blinked. A beat. Then it flooded red.

It wasn’t the red that meant “no.” Not the siren-red that brings supervisors at a jog. This was deeper, steadier. A classified red. A very specific color used at Naval Special Warfare facilities for only one category the sailors would talk about in whispers and video games. The text that bled across the display had its own gravity: MORGAN, RACHEL K. — LCDR, USN — SEAL DIVISION — CLEARANCE: TIER 1 — SPECIAL ACCESS: DEVGRU — ALERT: VIP PERSONNEL.

The petty officer’s mouth opened, closed. He glanced up, down to the screen, up again. The second sailor leaned forward so fast his forehead almost tapped the glass.

“Yes,” Rachel said, taking her ID back when he offered it with both hands, as if it had become fragile in the last ten seconds. “I know the way, thank you.”

“Ma’am,” the petty officer blurted, cheeks remembering how to be pink. “Apologies. We… didn’t realize.”

“It’s the hair,” she deadpanned. “Screams dental hygienist.”

The younger sailor’s laugh was a small explosion he tried to swallow. The petty officer shot him a look he’d learned from chiefs. “Ma’am, if you’d like an escort—”

“I could walk this base blindfolded,” Rachel said, softer now. “But I appreciate the offer.”

She passed through the gate, the fog licking her ankles. Behind her, the whisper arrived on schedule.

“Dude,” the seaman breathed. “Tier One.”

“Dev…,” the petty officer began, and didn’t finish because some words you don’t say out loud unless you’re wearing them.

Rachel had heard variations of that moment for five years, ever since an office in a windowless building had decided a small portion of her career could be officially real. Before that, she had been a rumor. A work-around. A ghost in photos with faces blurred, the blur somehow never reaching hers.

She crossed the compound with the gait of someone who’d spent decades being two steps to the left of the official story. Coronado’s buildings wore that clean, low-slung pragmatism she loved about the Navy—nothing unnecessary, everything with a job. A bell rang somewhere further down the strand. The smell of salt clung to concrete.

Inside the conference center, registration had the chaos of competence. Laptops, lanyards, the polite power of corpsmen who know exactly where everyone will sit eventually. The clerk took her name and then, involuntarily, did the quick blink of recognition when the list loaded.

“Yes, ma’am—keynote, tomorrow morning,” the clerk said. “Some of the guys were expecting…” She faltered. “Different.”

“Commander Mike,” Rachel said, laying the joke on the table so the clerk didn’t have to lay down her own embarrassment. “He’s busy. You get me.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.” The smile again. She had always been kind when it cost her nothing and steel when it did.

She took a seat in the back of the afternoon session. A young lieutenant with the haircut of ambition stepped to a podium and began his PowerPoint on field trauma care. He said all the right words in the right order, in the tone people use when they’ve memorized a language and not yet had to speak it in a storm. Tourniquets. TCCC guidelines. Airway, breathing, circulation. “Under fire” in quotes you could almost hear.

Rachel’s hands made small notes only she could read. Not corrections; addenda. How to improvise a retractor from a bent titanium spoon. How to clamp a pulsing nightmare with the wrong clamps and the right pressure and your own courage. How to tell the difference, by smell and color, between blood you could lose in a hurry and blood you couldn’t. She drew a sketch of a chest tube assembled from things you’d find in a fishing boat’s toolbox.

At the break, a cluster of twenty-somethings gaggled near the coffee urn. One scrolled the schedule on his phone. “Tomorrow’s keynote is… Lieutenant Commander Rachel Morgan,” he said, skepticism baked in.

“I Googled,” another said. “She’s like… fifty-something? Probably hospital track. Maybe they need diversity on the program. I’m gonna hit the range instead.”

Rachel poured herself coffee she would not drink, stirred a sugar packet into nothing, and thought about all the things she had been called besides her name. In Bosnia, when she was twenty-three and touched blood in an empty schoolhouse lit by candles jammed into bullet holes in the wall, they had called her Doc and meant it. In Afghanistan, they called her Ma’am and meant respect and gender and fear and gratitude all at once. Back home, they called her “administrative irregularity” and meant woman.

She slept that night like she always slept before she taught: shallow and ready, a medic’s sleep with one ear still in a country ten time zones away.

 

Part 2

Uniforms do different things at different ages. On a twenty-two-year-old, dress whites are a promise. On a woman in her fifties, they are a receipt.

Rachel stood backstage with the weight of thirty years stitched above her heart. Bronze Star with V. Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster. Navy Commendation with V. A row of ribbons that meant heat and glass and noise and hands in places hands should never have to go. Classified unit citations—small, unassuming rectangles for work that tried to erase itself.

The moderator’s introduction was brief, clinical. “Lieutenant Commander Rachel Morgan, combat trauma surgeon, Naval Special Warfare. Sixteen deployments. Over two hundred surgical procedures in field conditions.” A pause, then the kind of reverent whistle people don’t know escapes their teeth sometimes.

She walked out. Three hundred operators, corpsmen, medics, EOD techs. Mostly men. Calm, curious, unconvinced. She took in their faces—freckles and scars and a thousand stories they wouldn’t tell outside of bars and funerals. She felt the familiar war between her body’s wish to vanish and her duty to be seen.

“Good morning,” she said, voice steady, the vowel stretched by an Ohio childhood she hadn’t been able to lose entirely, no matter how far she had flown. “Some of you were expecting Commander Mike Morgan.” A ripple of laughter. She let it settle. “You get me instead. I’m Rachel. I don’t look like what some of you expect. Let’s tackle that first, so we can move on to work.”

She clicked. The first slide was a grainy photo from a headlamp era, blown up until the pixels whispered their age. A bunker or a basement. A young woman in battle rattle, sleeves rolled, latex gloves gray with dust and blood. Her hands disappeared into a chest cavity lit by a cheap LED clamped in her teeth; sweat made constellations at her temple.

“This is Afghanistan,” she said. “I was twenty-seven hours into a seventy-two-hour operation because weather grounded medevac and no one else was coming. He had a sucking chest wound, a collapsed lung, and the kind of bleeding textbooks call incompatible with life. Textbooks are often wrong in places like this.”

Click. A team photo outside a compound somewhere the GPS would lie about. Men in multicam, faces half-turned from the lens by habit. One woman among them, the watermark of a fiction laid gently over a fact.

“Iraq, 2008,” she said. “Attached for six months. Officially, that didn’t happen. Unofficially, they needed a trauma surgeon and argued with whoever would listen until the right person stopped saying ‘no’ in public and started saying ‘yes’ in the quiet places.”

Click. A surgical kit splayed on desert camo: clamps, scalpels, sutures, a rib spreader that had seen better days.

“This is my house,” she said. “Seventy-three instruments. Forty pounds. I have done thoracotomies in moving vehicles, amputations under fire, and more chest tubes than any human should be able to count. I’ve used fishing line for sutures and a headlamp for an OR light and my own left hand as a clamp when nothing else would fit.”

In the third row, a young lieutenant with a jaw too sharp for his own good leaned forward, the skepticism siphoned out of his posture. Rachel had overheard him yesterday. Diversity. Range instead. She looked at him and didn’t look away.

“You can call this diversity if it helps you sleep,” she said. “I call it survival. The work doesn’t care what you look like. The work cares if you can do it.”

For ninety minutes, she didn’t so much teach as confess. She showed hands, not theories. She talked about the precise slant a tourniquet needs on a thigh built like a tree trunk. About the particular tone a tactical radio adopts when someone is trying not to scream. About the way the body becomes geography you can learn like a route if you are forced to.

“In 2009, Afghanistan,” she said, eyes scanning faces to make sure they were with her and not in the place in their mind that stiffens and refuses, “we took a round to a femoral artery. Textbook says three minutes. We had ninety seconds. I put my index finger inside the wound and used it as a plug while I reached for the clamp with the other hand. Not in any manual. In my manual now.”

She spoke about triage the way she wished someone had spoken to her when she was twenty-four and thought that choosing who to save would kill parts of her she needed. She showed a slide with six names and three circles and left the others uncircled and said, quietly, “This is the thing they do not tell you. You will send the private home and you will write to his mother and you will name your first dog after him when you are forty-three because you don’t know what else to do with that kind of arithmetic.”

When she finished, the applause had the ragged edges of relief. Men who do not clap for a living clapped like the sound might keep the room from cracking.

“Ma’am,” the young lieutenant said, catching her near the edge of the stage so she couldn’t pretend not to notice. “I’m Jake. I said yesterday you were probably a diversity pick.” The admission had weight; she watched him lift it deliberately. “I was an idiot. That was… that was the best instruction I’ve had. I’m sorry.”

“Accepted,” she said. “What did you learn?”

“That I make assumptions based on nothing. That I should read a bio instead of a face. That the person with the most to give doesn’t always come in the packaging I expect.”

“Good,” she said. “Now don’t forget.”

A master chief approached then, the kind of man whose presence improves a room’s integrity. Fifty-something. Hands like roots. A mouth that had learned to default to a horizontal line.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Tom Reynolds. We’ve met. You were… under a different name.” He looked at the floor. “2006. There was an ambush. A compound we can’t talk about. You worked on Martinez while we were still taking fire. He has three kids now. He grills too much and sends me pictures of the smoke like it’s a personality trait. He exists because you refused to accept the word ‘fatal.’”

Rachel could feel her throat try to close and refused it. “Tom,” she said, tasting the name for familiarity, and then, because she doesn’t pretend she is iron anymore, she let her eyes shine. “How is his wife?”

“A saint,” Reynolds said. “Thinks the Navy taught him to vacuum. I haven’t corrected her.”

That night, in her off-base rental with the thin walls, Rachel took off her uniform, hung it just so, and sat on the edge of the bed. Her scars woke up sometimes after days like this and hummed along the lines where shrapnel had done its sketching. She pressed two fingers to the place on her right thigh where a fragment had tried to write its name and whispered, “Not today.”

She slept deliberately and woke hungry.

 

Part 3

In the corridor outside the breakout rooms, young corpsmen flanked her like planets, spinning questions faster than she could catch them all.

“How do you close a chest when you’re out of staples?”

“Steri-strips if you have them, then duct tape, then prayer,” she said. “In that order.”

“What do you do when the pilot won’t slow down?”

“Yell,” she said. “Louder. Pilots respond to volume—they call it ‘authority gradient.’ Throw the clamp at the bulkhead if you need dramatic effect.”

“Is it true,” a baby-faced EOD tech asked, “that you did a laparotomy on a moving boat?”

“Yes,” she said, “and if you can avoid it, do. Boats prefer to be metaphors. They resent multi-system trauma.”

Between sessions, she ducked into an empty classroom and sat on a table that had taught generations of operators how to improvise. She opened an email from a Gmail address she knew by heart even though she never said it out loud. Hey, Mom, the subject read. I saw your name on Twitter. Were you in Iraq? Are you okay?

She had a daughter who was twenty-seven and a public defender in Portland and either a miracle or proof that God has a sense of humor. Rachel had not been allowed to tell her much of anything until the machine had outed her via a partial declassification. They had spoken in a language of half-truths and whole meals. It had not been fair. She had made that choice because the work asked her to. She still bites down on anger when people tell her that secrecy is the noblest thing—because the noblest thing is telling your kid where you are at night.

She typed with the deliberate care of a surgeon suturing skin in a place everyone will see. I was in a lot of places. I was okay enough to come home. Do you need anything? The second sentence was an apology her daughter understood.

At the afternoon workshop, Rachel taught what no one advertises. How to rehearse pain management when you have lost your morphine, your fentanyl, and your temper. The exact number of seconds a man’s eyes go blank when ketamine lands and the thing you need to do in that window while his body is a theater without actors. How to triage when six men look at you and you can only pick three and the math sits on your chest for the next seventy years.

A captain in the back raised a hand. “Ma’am,” he said, “you mentioned yesterday that you were wounded twice. Why go back?”

She could have said the line she’d used in interviews: duty. Or the other one: because they went. She could have said nothing. That was sometimes the most accurate thing.

“Because I’m good at this,” she said, steady. “Because I am better at this than I am at anything else. Because men who run toward the wrong kind of noise deserve a surgeon who does, too.”

The room didn’t move. You could feel the air nod.

After class, a woman in nondescript civilian clothes hovered near the door and waited until the room emptied. She had the posture. Rachel knew it in a glance. Someone who’d learned not to take up official space and was therefore dangerous.

“You’re why I’m here,” the woman said, and Rachel felt the floor tilt a little.

“Where’s ‘here’?” Rachel asked.

“C-ninet—” The woman caught the word like a glass and set it down gently. “A place with a number. I’m attached as… the thing you were.” She didn’t name it because some things still don’t want to be dragged through fluorescent light. “They told me not to expect a friendly face.”

“Did they tell you to bring a second headlamp?” Rachel said. “They never do. Bring one.”

The woman laughed. Relief has a particular sound; it isn’t loud. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Rachel,” she said. “Or Doc. Or Shadow, if you must.” Shadow was not a call sign she’d picked. The first time someone had called her that, she’d felt both seen and erased. Names have dual citizenship like that.

“You’ll do fine,” Rachel said. “Here’s the other thing they won’t tell you. When a guy on the team… forgets how to be respectful, correct him once. Twice. The third time, tell the master chief. After that, open the freezer, remove all the ice cream, eat it yourself, and tell him the corpsman said his blood sugar was too high for dairy.”

The woman snorted. “Is that… in the SOP?”

“It is now.”

That evening, Rachel sat on a low wall near the beach and watched men in fins turn themselves into dark lines at the edge of the world. She remembered a night in 1999 when she had run three city blocks in Mosul with a bag of blood tight against her chest so it wouldn’t rupture and a twelve-year-old boy’s mother had shouted something at her in a language Rachel didn’t have and Rachel had shouted “Yes” back in English, which was not what the mother asked but was the answer she could make.

She once thought the work would empty her out. Instead, it made her very particular. A grocery list in her handwriting looked like a mission brief. A friendship with her came with the promise that she would tell you if your dog needed the vet, immediately, no matter how inconvenient your schedule said that was. Her daughter called her at midnight sometimes to say, “Tell me what to do,” and Rachel always did, and it was always the answer that saved the most living.

 

Part 4

Two years later, the stage was different and the light fell kinder. Naval Amphibious Base Coronado’s hall had been hung with flags for her retirement because even places that warehoused secrecy knew how to decorate courage. The seating chart was a kind of poetry—operators past and present in their one good sports coat, chiefs with backs that could still carry people, doctors with civilians buzzing around them like bees because everyone loves a miracle worker.

Rachel’s daughter sat in the front row between a three-star admiral and a man with a beard who had “I don’t smile for photos” tattooed somewhere inside his bones. She held tissues she would not admit to needing. When she caught her mother’s eye, she mouthed I’m proud and felt, for the first time since she was six, that pride for her mother did not require forfeiting a secret.

The admiral spoke like he’d stolen words from a better writer and didn’t intend to return them. He talked about numbers because numbers are the only way to corral awe in a uniform. Thirty years of service. Twenty-four embedded with Naval Special Warfare. Sixteen deployments. Two hundred field surgical procedures. Dozens of lives saved that they could count, and some they couldn’t because of math they could not show their work on.

“Sometimes the most special operations are not the ones that make documentaries,” he said. “They are the ones performed by a surgeon on a floor that is not clean enough, with a light that does not work, while a woman who isn’t supposed to be there decides to be anyway.”

He didn’t have to say the other thing, but he did, because someone must acknowledge the way a woman’s labor is so often made invisible. “For most of her career, she could not tell her family what she did. She could not list her deployments on a plaque. Young sailors at gates questioned her because no one had told them the stories that explain the red flash on a scanner. She kept showing up anyway, because men needed her to, and because she is built to show up.”

People spoke after the admiral. Men who don’t admit to breaking told stories about the exact angle a clamp must take when the rib spreader is older than sin. A chief described how she’d looked him in the eye fifteen minutes into a disaster and told him to get himself together, and he had, and it had saved three Marines whose names he carried in his wallet. A corpsman thanked her for the phone call she made after his first KIA, the one that told him to go outside and breathe eight times and then take off his boots and wash his feet because sometimes the body needs to be told it is clean before the mind will follow.

Tom Reynolds went last. He held his notes but didn’t look at them. “The thing about her,” he said, and the thing in the room that had been holding its breath exhaled, “is that she refused to make the worst day of your life the day you died. She would not allow it. She would inconvenience God if necessary.”

Rachel did not agree with God about many things, but she loved that line.

When it was her turn, she did not use the jokes she had written because the moment didn’t want clever. She thanked people by name and by nickname. She said her daughter’s name and let herself cry. She said “corpsmen save more lives than anyone gives them credit for” because she believed in accurate accounting. She said, “I did not make myself a shadow. The system did. I stepped into the darkness because there were men there who needed a doctor, and no one else would go.”

She didn’t say the other thing, but her daughter knew she meant it: I am tired. I am glad I do not have to keep a bag by the front door anymore.

When the ceremony ended, someone pulled a tarp off a wall in the medical training facility down the road. Behind it, a plaque waited. The letters were clean, the font utilitarian. LCDR RACHEL “SHADOW” MORGAN, USN. 1989–2019. Combat Trauma Surgeon. Naval Special Warfare. 200+ Field Surgical Procedures. 16 Combat Deployments. “Credentials matter more than assumptions.”

Rachel ran her fingers over the name. Names belong in places. She had been in so many rooms where her name had not been allowed to stick. It felt good to leave one behind on purpose.

 

Part 5

After she retired, people assumed she would move to a place with trees and forget. She tried. She bought a house that has a roof that keeps water out and a kitchen that lets the sun do a soft thing across the counter at 7:12 a.m. She stayed in San Diego because the air had the right salt and because her daughter visited now, and because you don’t leave a coastline you’ve learned to measure your days against.

She taught part-time at a hospital that treated trauma the city way—cars, ladders, kitchens. She put her hands on a nineteen-year-old who’d tried to proof a dough in oil and learned about flashpoint. She told a resident to shut up nicely and learned, again, that the only reason she hadn’t committed a felony in a teaching hospital earlier in life was because she hadn’t had to listen to men explain drills to her.

A letter arrived from a woman attached to a numbered place, careful as always. “We used your headlamp trick. It worked.” Rachel put the letter in the drawer where she kept things that hurt in a good way.

Once, at a small medical conference in a resort where the carpet had opinions, a young man said, “So you were… special?” in the tone of someone in search of a story he could tell later in a bar he wanted to impress. She said, “No, I was necessary,” because she has no patience left for words that depend on the interest of strangers to be true.

Sometimes, at the grocery store, she recognized men by the way they scanned exits. She said hello if that was the right thing and looked away if it wasn’t. Social media tagged her because social media likes to tag. At the gym, an older woman with a pin on her shirt that said “Retired RN” asked, “Did you really do surgery in a helicopter?” Rachel said yes, and told her about the way blades sound in your bones. The woman nodded and said, “I held a baby in a hallway during Katrina because the lights went, and I think that counts the same way,” and Rachel said, “Yes.”

At Coronado’s gate, every few weeks, someone called her back to give a talk because institutions like to prove to themselves that they can learn. The petty officer waved her through now with a grin that had matured into respect. He had ten more wrinkles and a wife and a toddler; Rachel had a tendency to remember these things without writing them down.

“Ma’am,” he said, once, as she reached for her ID. “We’ve trained the new kids to read the red, not the face.”

“Good,” she said. “That’ll save you.” She did not have to say from what.

She found joy in specifics now. The exact second a pup licks the last water droplet off its nose after drinking. The difference between June marine layer and November marine layer. How to make bread a way that would make Martinez’s wife ask for the recipe. The fact that her daughter said “love you” at the end of phone calls now, like a sigh and an announcement.

She missed adrenaline the way you miss a person who was bad for you but magnificent in bed. She did not go looking for it. When she needed to feel it again, she ran the numbers on an old case, on paper, by hand, until the most astonishing line appeared: alive.

 

Part 6

At the Naval Special Warfare security checkpoint, four years after her retirement, a new petty officer stood his first early-morning watch. He had the ears of a boy who hadn’t finished growing and the shoulders of a man who had. An older chief leaned against the wall with the patience of people who know that the first mistake will arrive soon and that the second mistake will be the interesting one.

A woman in jeans and a Navy shirt walked up, hair gray at the edges, a smile tucked in the pocket of her mouth. The petty officer took her ID.

“Presenting at medical today?” he asked, the way you ask if someone will be wanting ice with that.

“Something like that,” she said.

He slid the ID into the reader. The screen flashed. Red, steady. The text bled the right way. The petty officer’s pulse gave a little friendly punch to his throat.

The chief stepped forward, not in a rush, not because he didn’t trust the kid, but because he wanted to be here and see Rachel Morgan in person once. He had missed her career by three years. He had learned how to battle dress a sucking chest wound from a video of her hands.

“Morning, ma’am,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Chief,” she said, which means more than it sounds like. She tucked her ID into her pocket. “How’s the training module?”

He grinned. “We added the headlamp line.”

“Finally,” she said.

She walked through the gate. The petty officer watched her go and then, unable not to, asked the chief, “Tier One, like… the red—what does it mean?”

The chief’s eyes stayed on the woman’s back until she became part of the base, absorbed like all good legends. “It means,” he said, “don’t laugh until you read the line that says who you’re laughing at.”

He didn’t say the other thing out loud. Not today. That before you decide who belongs in the most dangerous rooms, check the scars on their hands. That sometimes the person at the gate with a kind face and an old ID has more combat in her than a list of men you could recite end to end. That if you are lucky, she will teach you how to sew a person back to the world with seventy-three instruments and a refusal.

Rachel walked the familiar path to the auditorium. A young woman waited on the steps, headlamp case clipped to her backpack. She turned as if she’d been listening for this specific cadence of boot on concrete.

“Doc,” she said, the word half a question, half a declaration.

“Ready?” Rachel asked.

“Always,” the young woman said, because she had learned whose example to follow.

Inside, the projector warmed itself into life. The chairs filled the way they always did. The agenda lay on seats like invitations. The first slide waited—a photo in weak light, a pair of hands in a chest, a story no one would tell in the paper but that would live in ribs and lungs and family albums for the rest of the century.

Rachel waited on the wing, hands quiet at her sides, the only way she knows how to stand before she steps into rooms where people have decided what she can possibly be.

She breathed in salt. She stepped forward.

If you were looking for an ending, you might choose this: a screen that knows which names are written in the places no one talks about; a red flash that says believe the credentials before you believe the story you tell yourself about a woman’s face; a room that has learned to listen to hands; a Navy that will send its daughters in openly now because one of them did it in secret long enough to make policy look stupid.

But there is another ending that Rachel herself would pick. A man named Martinez takes his son to Little League. He stands at the fence and shouts the right amount. His wife eats bread and texts a photo of smoke to a retired surgeon who says, “Your grill is improving.” Three kids grow up in a house with a father because a woman stuck her finger in an artery and said not today.

The rest is epilogue, and as surgeons will tell you, the best epilogues are short: she slept, she taught, she loved, she walked through the gate again, and no one laughed. The red flash did not need to. It just did what it was built to do: reveal the work.

And a hundred young sailors learned that day, and the next, and the next, that before you dismiss someone at the gate, you should read the line that matters. Because sometimes the person you’re deciding about is the one who kept the most dangerous kind of promises when no one was watching.

THE END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.