Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page B

well.
    Sara’s height belied her strength. She was five foot six to her son’s five foot eleven. He’d surpassed her in fifth grade. When he’d started at Annapolis, she’d taken up running, a form of exercise she’d long mocked as a “transportation sport.” She had been born to dreamers, fallen in love with a dreamer, and then given birth to a dreamer, but she was furiously practical. She saved ribbons. She clipped coupons. She didn’t dye her hair. Everything about her appearance was natural, another aberration for twenty-first-century postfeminists, everything right up to yet excluding the bright streak of white in her otherwise true brunette hair. It was a birthmark. David used to say, “No, it’s my illuminated landing strip, so I can find you from thirty thousand feet at night, when necessary.”
    She didn’t care what people thought about her, which made her a revolutionary in small-town life—or at least that was how Jason saw her. She was well known among his friends primarily for being beautiful, cool—and young. She was careful and consistent in her denial of traditional female rituals, adamant about being the girl who would never wear makeup to the movies orprofess to care about her clothes. But most other women considered Sara less a threat than a tragedy, a spouseless loner in a socially networked world. She preferred reading to shopping. She loved ideas and grew into a woman who helped edit the ideas of others.
    The night before his last day back east, before she would drive him to the airport, and perhaps in some gesture toward the symbols of commencements, Sara wore a white sundress while helping him prepare. Jason knew it was her very best one. She had her hair down that day, too, tied with a white ribbon, a style she rarely chose as she knew it made her look even more like a girl, even less like a mother, perhaps. He was twenty-one and she was forty. As he had moved around his room, finalizing his packing, she must have tucked the tiny wrapped box, his graduation present, under his pillow. It was a simple gold locket, with a St. Christopher on the outside and, on the inside, a picture of the American flag he had brought home from the market that day, the one that now hung outside their house. When he found it he walked down the hall to her bedroom to thank her.
    “I can’t believe how corny this is and how much I love it,” he’d said.
    “I’m allowed to be corny now.” There were tears streaming down her face.
    *
    There were very few whose fathers had not been present at Academy graduation. And there were very few whose ideas of their fathers did not factor into their aspirations to be operators. And the father of all the other fathers is the master chief. It’s the masterchief who leads the men on their drills and on the long beach runs. Master Chief Jones is tough. He’s witty. He has been in the Teams for thirty years. He tells the men stories from other wars, even as he never talks about his own service. He leads the hardest runs during the third week, the Long Day. Have you ever tried running after three nights of no sleep? It’s a bit like kickboxing in honey.
    It is dark. It is three in the morning. It is the fourth night of Hell Week, so by process of deduction, it’s Wednesday. The men are very wet, cold, sandy, and tired. The Hell started on Sunday, with the “breakout.” The thinking behind the breakout is that most battles begin in chaos. Chaos can be accurately simulated. Breakout—and Hell Week, more broadly—attempt to simulate the conditions of battle. These five days and five nights take the stress of extreme physical conditioning, then tack on sleep deprivation and the element of surprise.
    Breakout begins with the men being told to wait in one large room. They are told they can talk and read and eat and relax, but they’ve heard the stories. They know exactly how breakout works: by creating chaos—and fear. When the first shots are fired, some are relieved;