Eleven Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

twenty-one years. The men who had moved in and out of Sara’s life, who wrote articles about ideas and who positioned and repositioned themselves for increasingly powerful civilian jobs, seemed less intimidating to him now. Was he growing up? Or was he changing. The anger he held against so many of those men was not complicated: he was protecting her. Even after thirteen years, he believed that his father would return. He would return, and they would be a family. And while she would never say as much, he felt that Sara believed this, too, as she carefully deflected each suitor’s increasingly serious invitations (dinner, a trip, marriage) by stating that she wasn’t over David, and that David was Jason’s father. After years of that, they finally left her alone, Penelope unraveling her looms. As far as her son knew, she had not had one real romance in almost ten years, but the admirers remained, lurking around the house like stray cats. She lived a very spare life, and his leaving home had been very difficult but he knew it was time, and he knew leaving would help strengthen her, too.
    Training hard with a group brings out emotion. Jason has always prided himself on not showing too much, but cool becomes elusive when you’re tired, cold, and wet. He doesn’t love running, although he’s not bad at it. Sometimes the instructors drive alongside the guys during nighttime runs. If you walk to the beach you can see them, lit by the car’s lights. One night the jeep rollsup and when the window rolls down, Jason can hear someone inside reciting the St. Crispin’s Day speech from
Henry V
. “We happy few,” etc. It’s a message:
You have support, and you will get through this
.
    He is not yet sure whom he can trust, although slowly the personalities of his classmates emerge. They are all fiercely independent. They have all been overachievers. Many come from families who understand and value the sacrifices that go along with this training; they understand and value it as necessary—or at least, not abnormal. Most of the men arrive in Coronado quite confident that they will succeed, especially those who are back for the second or third time. Each class is never entirely new; a small percentage is always made up of guys who were “rolled back” from previous classes due to injury. One night Jason asks one of those guys, back for his third—and final—try, “How do you do it all over again?”
    And the guy thinks about it and says, “Amnesia?” And then, after a long pause, “I just know it’s what I want.”
    “Can you still make it if you’re not sure what you want?”
    “Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that question.”
    Expectations management is only second to pain management in the process of making it through each day. And then, a distant third, comes anger management. Pain management allows you to move through the moment; expectations management allows you to move through the day; and anger management allows you to move through being denied not only any privacy but any acknowledgment of being you. When an instructor tips your drawers upside down during room inspection, then fails you for having clothes spilled on the floor? That is a test of the extent to which you can control your anger, and your desire for praise. A rigged room inspection might break a boy who could run thebeach in three-minute miles, but it might tell a teacher something about that boy’s character that no O-course can.
    The quiet nights now give him time to think through his accumulated emotions and all those years in which he’d tried not to express them. He doesn’t like to spend too much time thinking about them; it’s one reason he’s chosen a far less cerebral path than so many of his self-appointed mentors in Washington. They still casually question his choice, not to him but to Sara and to one another. He knows and he doesn’t care. Do they question it because they worry it is a waste of time, that it is