Life went on this way for years, me spending a few hours every afternoon with Dad and his friends, and Lauren constantly finding social events to drag me to.
On Sundays it was church. I never cared much for church, and I don’t think Dad did either. I have no problem with Christianity, or religion in general. Jesus seemed like a genuinely nice guy, considering the central tenant of his teachings was for people to love one another. I don’t see much of a problem with that philosophy—I even pray sometimes, in my darker moments. I just did not like dressing up in slacks, and a button-down shirt and tie, and sitting on a damn uncomfortable wooden bench, and being stifled and still for an hour and singing old hymns I didn’t understand. Church always seemed to me like a bunch of people singing badly, and saying amen at the proper times, and listening to some paunchy old dunce tell them how to live.
I especially did not like the preacher. He was tall and broad, an ex-athlete gone to fat. His face jiggled and shook when he talked, and he had squinty little eyes that reminded me of a pig. He smelled of stale cigarettes, and cheap aftershave, and when he spoke he leaned in too close so you could smell the coffee on his breath. He made me uneasy.
The year I turned twelve, as the result of a nationwide sting operation by the FBI, he was arrested for possession of child pornography. He posted bond, drove home, locked himself in his bedroom, and blew his brains out with a shotgun. Justified my opinion of him, I suppose.
We stopped going to church after that.
Lauren tried to get me into sports, but I never cared much for them. In those days, I would much rather run BWT’s close-quarters combat course than play baseball or soccer. Eventually, she gave up.
By the time I was thirteen, I could run the courses at BWT with sufficient precision and skill to qualify as an instructor. By fourteen, I was six feet tall and a hundred-eighty pounds, and the instructors at my dojo had me start training with the adults.
During the summers, I worked on a ranch not far from BWT. Feeding horses, mucking out stalls, that sort of thing. I developed an affinity for horses that persists to this day. There are few things I enjoy in life more than leaning forward in the saddle, hands loose on the reins, and letting the magnificent creature beneath me stretch out its stride, hurtling the both of us full tilt across open plain. Nothing else like it.
As I got older, my training increased in difficulty and intensity. I learned skills very few people ever do, and some I’m reasonably certain were illegal.
From the ages of twelve to sixteen, Mike Holden taught me the art of the sniper. How to break in a ghillie suit, how to camouflage it, to pick hides, to use my scope as a rangefinder, to compensate for drop and windage, to work the lever on a bolt-action rifle without coming off my point of aim, to use night vision and infrared, to move silently and slowly through dense foliage, to stalk someone without being seen. Most U.S. military snipers’ initial training is between eight to twelve weeks, depending on their branch of service and what year they went through it.
Mine lasted four years.
Then there’s Tyrel. The man who taught me how to pick locks, gave me my first set of picks, taught me how to hotwire old cars and trucks and construction equipment, the best ways to kill a man with a knife and keep it quiet, how to swim properly, how to shoot a pistol accurately with one hand while on the run—a skill which has saved my life many times—and how anything, absolutely anything, can be used as a weapon.
Dad and Blake handled the rest of my training: Patrolling, calling for fire (although I never got a chance to do it for real until after I joined the Army), how to use, break down, and clean a variety of weapons, combat tactics and marksmanship, booby traps, demolitions, survival and evasion, making bombs from household materials, vehicle searches, tradecraft (dead drops, brief encounters, pickups, load and unload signals, danger and safe signals, surveillance and counter-surveillance, etcetera, etcetera), dynamic room entry and clearing, urban combat, and, after I obtained a driver’s license, an advanced driving course.
In summation, I was raised by a former Delta Force operator, a SEAL, a Force Recon Marine, and a Green Beret. These men had access to one of the most well equipped training facilities you will ever see outside the military special operations community. They all cared for me a great deal—Blake and Tyrel were unmarried and had no children of their own—and they took great pleasure in training me. Furthermore, I took to the military lifestyle like a fish to water. I loved it. I loved them.
And let’s not forget Lauren. Any discussion of my upbringing would be incomplete without mentioning the love of literature she passed on to me.
When it came to schoolwork, I taught myself for the most part. The textbooks and assignments all seemed simple to me. I never understood why so many of the children I knew who went to public school found it so difficult. I aced exams with little trouble and wrote papers and essays quickly. Math was just a question of diligence and practice. I will not say I liked schoolwork as much as combat training, but I did not mind it either.
Beyond the standard required curriculum, Lauren had me read the classics: Dickens, Faulkner, Thoreau, Kipling, and Dostoyevsky, just to name a few. On my own, I devoured Bradbury, Asimov, Herbert, and Heinlein. I marveled at the prose of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Salinger, and Shakespeare. The poetry of Yeats, Dickenson, and Frost roared through me like thunder over the mountains. At night, in the late, cricket-chirp hours when most people plant themselves on a couch and stare at a television, I sat cross-legged on my bed with lamplight glowing soft and yellow from my bedside table, book in hand, exploring the world as only an imaginative young boy can.
I followed Robert Jordan and his band of guerillas as they struggled with their mission and each other. I felt my heart beating with the earth as I lay on the ground, leg broken, and waited for the enemy officer to appear in my sights. I wondered what became of Pilar, Pablo, and Maria. Their side lost the war, after all.
Wang Lung made me like him, then hate him, then grudgingly respect him, and I felt sorry for him when he was an old man. I wept when, after knowing crippling poverty and starvation and war and surviving to become wealthy and prosperous, he told O-lan on her deathbed he would trade all he had gained to save her life.
I strode the kingdoms of Hyboria, sword in hand, dealing death to enemies, drinking deep of wine and women and life. Great was my mirth and great was my melancholy. And by my own hand, I became a king.
Through books, all this and more did I live and know.
When I was seventeen, after all the years of feeling the rifle buck against my shoulder, the pistol snapping in my hand, the rubber grip of training knives, the smell of cordite in cold morning air, the satisfying ping of a steel target in the distance, the echo of my father’s .308 across the hills as the deer bolted, faltered, and fell, the power of horseflesh rearing beneath me, and the smiles and laughter and thousand little corrections from Dad, Lauren, Mike, Tyrel, and Blake, I finally had occasion to put my training to use.
The year I turned seventeen was the first time I killed a man.
SEVEN
The car was a 1998 Honda Accord.
Price: $2500.00. Odometer reading: 98,319.
I could not have cared less about the mileage. After five summers at the Lazy J Ranch, weekends mowing lawns around the neighborhood, and afternoons swapping bullet riddled paper targets at Black Wolf Tactical for five bucks an hour, it was mine. Any excuse to go for a ride was fine by me—a fact Lauren had no qualms about taking advantage of.
Caleb, could you run to the grocery store and pick up some milk?
Sure.
Would you mind taking this package to the post office for me?
Not a problem.
Your dad forgot his lunch. Could you take it to him, please?