Free Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter Page B

son holding one. She had to let go of that thought. It was too foreign.
    Most of the letters were not about guns or weapons. Only when she prodded him with questions would he answer with an ordnance lesson. She looks through the letters for the one about close quarters training. She wants to see whether there was everany reference to a Kill House. She is sure there wasn’t; she would have remembered that phrase. But her interest is piqued from Sam’s mentioning it. She wants to imagine what it looks like, and she wants to believe that the skills her son learned training in that house are the same skills keeping him alive now, wherever he is. She wants to learn that the nature of his training was so specific—and so rigorous—that it will see him through this, whatever “this” is. He loved history.
    Dear M.,
    I had an e-mail from my history professor at the Naval Academy. He sends me articles, things he thinks I might not otherwise see. He always believed in me. He always listened. He understood why I wanted to do this; he didn’t think it was weak or wrong or easy. Or romantic. He never pushed us into it, but he understood. He was a pilot; did you know that? He was the first one who told us that the way people would fight now would be very different from the way they fought in past wars.
    He was right. What we are learning now is that so much of warfare is fought at close quarters, and the essence of fighting in close quarters is restraint. Restraint, intelligence, conservation. This emphasis changes the calculus of war. Think about 1916: in forty-eight hours, something like four thousand men were wounded. Four thousand men. And by the end of the Battle of the Somme there were another half million casualties. One of the guys here showed me a book where the authors excerpt memoirs written by the medics who helped the wounded in the Great War. The medics all said the same thing: the young men they encountered on their rounds possessed a remarkable selflessness. And many of them, mortally wounded, would say to the medics, “Hey, help the next guy.” Or they would say, “My friend over there needs water.” Most of those soldiers were younger than I am now.
    There was an acceptance of suffering as necessary. People didn’t know anything else. Technology didn’t promise a “surgical” solution. Planes didn’t go down without pilots in them.
    “Teamwork” is the word I hear again and again here. We’re not heading into the Somme, and we know it. But that’s one thing that binds past wars to present ones: everything is about the Team. The aim of fighting now is to restrict casualties. We are being taught how to enter rooms in foreign places, and the most important thing is making sure that anyone in those rooms who is not armed is not hurt.
    I’m trying to say something about the difference between a battlefield and a room. And I’m trying to say that a lot has changed, but some things stay the same.
    Love,
    Jase
    “Think about 1916”: that was very David. Ever so gently professorial. Who said things like that. He wants her to feel like she’s there. He wants her to know he’s learning something. And he never complains. She tries not to complain, but she does feel alone, even with Sam in the house. She thinks about this while sifting through the other letters, and then she sees it, right there on the page, and she realizes that she had either completely forgotten about it or—is it possible—printed out this letter without ever having reading it.
    Dear M.,
    Not much news. More close quarters work. In this phase of the training we use a real house—it’s meant to mimic a real house, but it’s been built for us to train for real-life situations. We use Sims—the Simunitions. The pistols and rifles we use have been re-chambered and re-barreled: they fire, basically, paint pellets.
    The exercises make me think about the paintball games at home. Remember those highly orchestrated all-day “wars” we