Free Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter Page A

luxury suites in the trenches. She pulls out the next letter.
    Dear M.,
    Remember that little baby turtle? I kept him in that dish. And then he escaped. He had a lot of courage to climb out of that dish, didn’t he—and out of our house. They call it “turtle-backing” when we swim on the surface. Turtle backing helps conserve energy, which perhaps explains our little prisoner’s strength for his solo expedition back to the pond.
    Conservation is key. In the water, with your weapons—you’re always conserving something. I know you like stories of swimming or soaring through the air, but the learning of what we do on the ground has felt less a curve than a hockey stick: quick panic and first failure followed by a steady upward trajectory. Some things require less physical endurance but more mental precision. Most of the guys here are not entirely new to guns.
    Whatever happened to the guns in the basement in Virginia? If there is anything left in our basement now, I promise I can identify each piece. I could also put a price tag on each piece. Who knows: you might have a very valuable collection. More valuable than melons.
    I can now use the following: an M4 rifle, and Mk46 machine gun; an Mk48 machine gun; an AK-47; a hand grenade; a Carl Gustaf rocket; a LAAW; a Claymore mine. (“LAAW” stands for Light Anti Armor Weapon, by the way.) Before this the only weapon I had any skill with was my electric toothbrush.
    I’ve been thinking about Dad a lot. I wish I had had thechance to talk with him again. There are so many questions I was never able to ask.
    I know he had his reasons for leaving. I can remember certain things he said. I remember him saying: where your skills intersect with your interests is where you should try and spend the majority of your time, or the man who finds the work he loves, the gods have smiled on him, or carpe diem. I think my skills intersect with my interests in the navy. I know you probably don’t want to hear that. It’s true. You can tell my godfather. Please tell him I bet they don’t teach land warfare to legislative aides.
    How is that garden? I know the neighbors invite you over every night, and I know you never go. You should go.
    Love,
    Jason
    She had called his godfather after receiving that letter and gone insane about the weapons.
    He was laughing on the other end of the line.
    “He’s enjoying himself.”
    “He’s not meant to be
enjoying
himself!”
    “Sara.”
    “It sounds dangerous.”
    “Sara.”
    “It sounds unsupervised.”
    “
Sara
.”
    “Rocket?”
    “What did you expect, Sara? That he’d be baking apple pies? War requires weapons, and someone has to shoot them. This is what war means. Remember: Naval Special
War
fare?”
    “I thought—”
    “But don’t worry: the training’s all a bunch of simulations. He’s at no risk.”
    “None?”
    “None. You think they want to soak up that liability? They just shake them up and scare them.”
    “No risk?”
    “Risk comes later.”
    “That’s comforting.”
    “I was the one who tried to talk him out of it.” And there was a long pause on the line, and she could hear him wishing he hadn’t just said that.
    “I don’t think I can handle this,” she said, eventually.
    “It gets easier,” he said gently. “And statistically, I can assure you that he will be fine.”
    “Statistically. And emotionally?”
    “That’s why I’m waiting to have children until I no longer feel anything.”
    She had gone and methodically looked up each one of those guns online. The only one she’d ever heard of before was the AK-47, and that was from some movie about the Soviets in Afghanistan. Google gave up the facts: Kalashnikov was twenty-seven when he designed the AK; he attributed its simplicity to ideas he’d learned reading Russian novels. And he said, she read, “to make something simple is a thousand times harder than to make something complicated.” When she looked at the pictures of it, she imagined her