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“Who Is LTC Shoemaker?”

ieutenant Colonel David Shoemaker had been politely listening
to the confident young woman seated at the head of the
conference table explain how her company intended to operate
when, fifteen minutes in, he couldn’t hold his tongue anymore.

“Your regulatory structure is not going to fly,” he said, interrupting
her.

Elizabeth shot an annoyed look at the bespectacled officer in army
fatigues as he enumerated the various regulations he thought the
approach she’d described fell afoul of. This was not what she wanted to
hear. Shoemaker and the little military delegation he was leading had
been invited to Palo Alto on this morning in November 2011 to bless
Theranos’s plans to deploy its devices in the Afghan war theater, not to
raise objections about its regulatory strategy.

The idea of using Theranos devices on the battlefield had
germinated the previous August when Elizabeth had met James
Mattis, head of the U.S. Central Command, at the Marines’ Memorial
Club in San Francisco. Elizabeth’s impromptu pitch about how her
novel way of testing blood from just a finger prick could help diagnose
and treat wounded soldiers faster, and potentially save lives, had
found a receptive audience in the four-star general. Jim “Mad Dog”
Mattis was fiercely protective of his troops, which made him one of the
most popular commanders in the U.S. military. The hard-charging
general was open to pursuing any technology that might keep his men
safer as they fought the Taliban in the interminable, atrocity-marred