Eleven Days Read Online Free PDF

herself with people who had too much education and discrete wills to practical action.
    Sara’s fears about the downside of her son forgoing Cambridgeand convention were mainly fears about adverse psychological effects, not safety. Fears for his safety would come later. While he trained, she was mainly afraid of his drifting onto just another kind of commune, one that would set him apart from the majority of his peers and would certainly result in what finance professors call “high opportunity cost.” What would he do after? Would Wall Street or neurosurgery residencies still be available? What were the merits of learning to parachute into the ocean and shoot rocket launchers? She worried that there was an element of play in this that was, well, play qua play. And in some very deep place that she would never admit to him, she worried that the games would be so much fun that they would not permit him to reenter the less rarefied air of real life.
    That will to orbit Earth was in his DNA. Starting military training was not the sign she had hoped for. This was not an ordinary boy, interested in ordinary things. Jason felt her fears came from her love, and her ignorance. She was his mother, so he forgave her. She was all he had. He knew that she felt he was all she had, too.
    *
    There aren’t many poets in the mix at Coronado, and there aren’t many men who talk to their mothers as often as he does. Or maybe there are, but they don’t let on. Some have wives, or girlfriends. Some have children. Family life crowds out intellectual pleasures, to some extent. Yet if Jason is sneaking sonnets, no one knows what else was being read at night, after hours. Epictetus?
The New Republic
? His experience with these guys so far is that they’re all pretty relaxed, at least on the surface, and yet they’reall inordinately driven. Imagine surfers who hide the
summas
on their degrees.
    Leadership
is a word used religiously here; and it is about success in action but also about a will to learn. There is a small shelf of books for borrowing at the base. The titles include classics like
Profiles in Courage
and
The Best and the Brightest
. Histories, mainly political or military-based, are stacked up alongside and on top of single volumes left behind by former classes: Clancy, Sledge, Couch, Le Carré, Sun Tzu. Some are signed and dated on the inside; others have annotations that mirror the only-just-post-adolescent enthusiasms of their readers, like “not fucking possible” and “beast.” When he describes the books one night to his mother, she says, “It sounds like you need a librarian.” Two days later a large box of books arrives with a note from her: “For that shelf.” Suddenly the aspiring sailors had Shakespeare. The plays went largely untouched, even
Titus
, but they provided room for broad mockery of the recipient.
    BUD/S was about cultivating trust and about learning to attend to detail. The mission of the instructors was not to break their students but to identify and support the best among them. The program had three parts: First Phase, also known as “Two Weeks and a Long Day,” was two weeks of rigorous conditioning plus ocean and boat training, followed by Hell Week, where sleep deprivation and disorientation were added to the mix. It is a mystery to physicians and military historians why some succeed and others do not, but often the first boy will drop out within days, and Hell Week can cut what remains of any given class in half. As always, everything is about the team: trust in the team, development of the team, not tipping the delicate ecology of the team. “Being an individual is not the same thing as being a leader,” oneof their instructors said. He spat out the word “in-di-vi-joo
-el
” as if it were an expletive.
    *
    Jason soon starts thinking he might choose to spend the rest of his life with most of the men he has met here so far over most of the men he has met at home or in school the last