Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page A

unlike Sara, despised pretension.
    Detail
and
Team
are two of Jones’s favorite words, and they describe the larger concept: little things matter, and the fabric holding together the little things is the fabric of the Team. When a Team doesn’t coalesce, the entire Team is blamed. There is no room—yet—for entrepreneurial thinking. And there is no room for assholes. Jones drills things into them. For him, training was an almost philosophical experience.
    Once the focus of their training moves to the pool, Jason earns a nickname: Priest. Jones starts to call him that because he’s so quiet and because he paces the hallways at night while reading (“prepping the sermons”), but also because all the instructors tease him saying that he must have a direct line to God from the pool. His ability to stay underwater without breathing for so long, and with such ease, was something they had not seen before. The others guys notice this gift and how lightly he wears it. “What do you say in your prayers,” shouts the master chief. “Do you pray we don’t find your third lung?”
    *
    When he was a baby, Jason and his mother lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. There was no bathtub. Sara would bathe him in an old plastic crate she’d emptied of books, set on the floor of the shower stall. He was swimming at two. “My little fish,” she’d tell friends as they watched, horrified, as she pushed him out into the pool. “Don’t worry. He can do it.” By six he was swimming lengths underwater, for fun.
    *
    He isn’t writing novels but sometimes, when he is underwater, when he is swimming as opposed to performing a task, Jason lets his mind wander. He thinks about the moments that have led to this one, and he questions his decision. He will never admit it, but sometimes he does question things. These concentrated thoughts allow him to forget the physical pain. He has made mistakes. On the obstacle course, in the second week, he had slipped and fallen, badly. His ankle had swelled up like a softball, but because he had heard of guys who kept running on broken legs to stay in training, he tried not to let it show. He had always had a system for managing discomfort, and until this point in his life it had worked well: he let his mind wander. He thought about his father. He would imagine meeting him in some exotic place—maybe near the Indian Ocean, maybe in the Middle East, maybe in “Mecca,” a word he’d first heard on the answering machine in one of David’s runic messages. These waking dreams acted like anesthesia. And he needs them now: for the first time in his life, Jason is experiencing true, sharp physical pain.
    *
    That last day that last summer at home before he’d left for San Diego, his mother had sat on his bed while he packed and begged him to reconsider his future. Again. She had said, “Don’t make me beg.” And then she said, “And I want you to know that if you get hurt, you have to tell someone. You cannot hide it anymore.” He understood. The irony of which they were both aware that day was the fact that Jason’s sense of determination, the same thing that gave rise to his pride, had to have come from somewhere. It had to have come from someone, and it could only have come from her. At least that was what Jason was thinking. Sara was thinking aboutthe fact that her life was a case study in purposelessness. And here was her son, potential future four-star admiral.
    If he survives
. That was the subtext of her fears. And very soon she would learn that every choice and every moment and every thing in the military, and in the lives of family members who waited back home for their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and lovers, was infused with the same fear. The threat of imminent, physical danger, something she’d only read about in books, was now going to be a central part of her life. But he wanted it. He was clear-headed and that clarity would serve him