TYPICAL Eleven days
I was in the hallway when Mom started crying in the kitchen. She thought I'd already left for Tyler's. I had my keys in one hand and one shoe on, and I stood there listening to the faucet run over nothing, and I didn't go in. I didn't know what you say to your mother when the thing she's afraid of is the thing you want.
I'm eighteen. I signed the contract in August, and in eleven days I ship to Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. Mom is already planning Thanksgiving around the gap. I heard her tell my aunt: one less chair this year. She's grieving me ahead of time, and I'm still here eating her cereal.
Tyler says I'm crazy. He's in his first semester at the community college in Roanoke and keeps telling me to get a trade. Tyler knows what he wants: the house, the truck, the Friday-night game he watches from the bleachers, twenty yards from where he used to play. I don't want that, and not because it's bad. I can see the ceiling of this town from anywhere in it, and I can't explain what I'm looking for except that it isn't here.
Dad says it'll make me a man. He was Army, Iraq, '03 to '07, and he calls it the making of him. I was born the year after he got out, so I've only ever known the finished product: the guy who checks the locks twice, who won't sit with his back to a door, who calls his nightmares "just dreams" when Mom and I both know better. Mom says he came home from deployment different. She says it about once a year, usually in March, and then not again until the next March.
Eight days
A man at the gas station saw the Marines T-shirt my recruiter gave me and thanked me for my service. People keep doing that. I haven't served a day. I've filled out paperwork and done pull-ups.
I believe in the flag, and not in a bumper-sticker way. My great-grandpa landed at Normandy. But I'm also going for the most selfish reason there is: I don't know who I am, and I'm hoping the Marines will tell me.
Two other guys from my class signed this summer. None of us had college money, and the Corps was the one place that looked at us and said come here, we'll hand you a manual. Dad's manual is three pages long: be tough, work hard, don't complain. I need more pages than that. I want a purpose with the instructions printed on the back.
Six days
Mom was at her sister's last night, so Dad grilled and we ate on the porch. He had a beer. I had a Coke, because drinking felt wrong six days out, like I should already be turning into whoever gets off that bus.
Then he said something he's never said to me.
"They'll teach you how to fight. They won't teach you how to stop."
I asked what he meant. He said there's a switch. They train you to flip it, the one that shuts off the part of you that hesitates, and it works, and over there you need it. "But when you come home, nobody teaches you to flip it back. You spend the rest of your life trying to be soft with hands they trained to be hard."
He was looking at his hands when he said it. His actual hands, on the arms of the porch chair.
Then: "I'm proud of you for going. And I'm scared for the parts of you that won't come back."
That's the most words my father has ever said to me at once. I said, "Thanks, Dad," and we watched the sun go down behind the Hendersons' field and didn't talk for an hour. It was a different silence than our usual one. Usually we're in the same place and separate. This time we were both holding the same thing, and neither of us had to name it.
Four days
I made a list last night, two columns, the way Dad does the bills at the kitchen table. On the left: what I owe him. The house. The ball games he drove me to after twelve-hour shifts. The truck he co-signed. His name. I figured I'd pay it back by being what he was, hard enough that he'd look at me and see himself.
The right column was supposed to be what the Corps will cost. I sat there a long time and wrote one thing: whatever Dad lost.
I've read about PTSD and brain injuries and the drinking. Everybody in town quotes a different number for the suicides, so I looked up the real one. The VA's latest report counted 6,488 veteran suicides in 2024, an average of 17.7 a day. I read it twice. I keep thinking some of them were somebody's version of me, a kid who shipped out looking for something and came home carrying something he didn't pack.
I don't think I'm immune. The other version just scares me more: the plant, Fridays in the bleachers, dying at seventy-three without ever finding out who I am outside this county. Tyler would call that stupid. Dad wouldn't say anything, because he already went, and he knows nobody can hand you that answer.
Two days
I packed a bag, then unpacked it, because you don't bring anything to boot camp. They give you everything. The packing was a rehearsal for leaving. The unpacking was a rehearsal for finding out that where I'm going, the old me doesn't get to come.
Part of me wants that. I trust the 5 a.m. wake-ups and the drill instructors and the idea that pain builds something comfort can't. I got that idea from Dad and from the guys at the feed store who'd rather limp for a year than see a doctor. I don't know if suffering is the forge or just the story hard men tell so the hardness was worth something.
Last night I showed Dad the list. He went first on the porch, and I guess it felt like I owed him a turn.
He read it standing up in the garage. Then he took the pen out of my hand, drew a line through the whole left column, and wrote underneath it: Write your mother every week. If the switch won't flip back, tell me. I'll know what it looks like.
He handed it back and went to check the locks.
The night before
Tonight Mom was at the sink again with the water running, and this time I didn't stay in the hallway.
I said, "I'm sorry I didn't come in last week. I heard you. I'm scared too. I'm going to write every week, and I need you to write back, even if it's only about the dog."
She turned off the water and didn't say anything for a while. Then she said, "Even if it's only about the dog," and laughed, and then she was crying again, a different kind, and I stayed for all of it.
My recruiter picks me up at four. I'll write again when I know who I'm writing as.
If someone you love is shipping out, borrow his sentence, in either direction: I'm scared too. Write me, and I'll write back. If the person who comes home seems different, start with our page on what to say to a friend who served about his PTSD. If you're the one leaving, our journal prompts fit in a notebook.
If you or someone you know is struggling right now, call or text 988 in the U.S. (Veterans can press 1 or text 838255), or see our crisis resources.