Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter Read Free Book Online

best challenge he could get. It was because he felt confident that the military was one place he could excel. He felt sure that it might be the place where he might make an impact and that was something he desperately wanted to do. His skills were physical. But still, he thought about it for a day.
    And then, just like that, his mind was made up. And though his mother always said that he had never been indecisive—he had been. But he would never let it show. That was another reason the military’s culture suited him: its ethos of invisibility matched his. Somewhere he had developed a deep belief that a man was someone who acted, not someone who spoke, and that honor wasabout discretion and progress. Honor wasn’t about discussing a political decision you hadn’t been a part of over vodka tonics. He was not yet nineteen when he began to form these ideas. They were aspirational, and they were naïve. But as he held on to them they deepened, and soon the ideas began to form him.

CORONADO
    Jason looks at the long stretch of swimming pool and thinks,
You and I are going to be close friends
. It was ten times the size of even the biggest pools he’d seen as a kid. It is the first morning of the first week in California.
    “Flaubert wrote
Madame Bovary
while swimming laps,” Jason says. As soon as he says it he wishes he hadn’t, but the joke was one frequently repeated in his house, meant to underscore the artist’s dislike of exercise.
    “That water’s fucking cold,” says Sam, to another boy in his class. He’d dipped a toe in.
    “It’s not as cold as the ocean.”
    “Admirable optimism.”
    “Survival.”
    It is the first week, otherwise called INDOC, for Indoctrination Course. INDOC was the crucial first step, five weeks in which, among other things, the guys get to know one another—and get to know the water: the pool, and the surf. It’s about about getting acquainted with the cold, with being wet, and with a culture of self-preservation and endurance. BUD/S is the base camp of an aspiring operator’s Everest, and it is here that they begin to learnthe language, draw the boundaries, and fall even more for the lure of what could lie ahead if they are allowed to progress.
    In just days, Jason loses several pounds. He is not quite sure why. He is almost certain that the opposite should have happened. Even with all this running and rolling and pushing and lifting, his muscle mass should be increasing, and so should his base weight. Still, when he looks in the mirror, he can see his ribs. He is covered in sand, but he can still see his bones poking through.
    Calories: the concept of counting them is ridiculous, something for silly girls on diets, not for warriors. But calories provide key data points, and calories give you what you needed to survive. Survival means making it successfully from one evolution to the next without dropping out.
The only easy day was yesterday
. This is one of many mantras they will learn and then internalize.
There is no second place in a gunfight
is another one. That one is easy to tease about in the early days of training; it will be only about eighteen months from now when their proximity to the reality of those words will make them much more serious. “Attention to detail, men. Attention to detail is what is going to get you through this. Attention to detail and commitment to team.”
    The instructors yell variations of the same seemingly simple ideas and words over and over, until they become oddly foreign, and then newly familiar as particular to this time and place.
Team. Detail. Drop. Push. Hoo-yah
. Master Chief Jones is the instructors’ instructor, and he is very precise in how he talked to his class. Jason thinks that in another life and another time, the master chief and his mother would have made a great match. He can see them fighting about language and politics—about everything, really.But he can also see them caring deeply about the simple things. Jones, not