It Didn’t Kill Me
It Didn’t Kill Me When I was eleven, my father sat me down and asked me a question no kid should have to answer: “If I lay dead or dying, and the enemy kicked in our front door during World War III, and you had one gun with two bullets, what would you do?” That was his idea of preparation. Not bedtime stories. Not How was school? But If the world burns and your mother’s life is on the line, what are you going to do about it? That was my training ground. By the time I joined the Navy, I was already living by that training. A year or so earlier, I’d been working a dock job, cutting angle iron with a grinder. The cut pinched, the grinder leapt, and it tore a four-inch gash across my arm. Blood everywhere, but the job wasn’t done. So I finished the cut, smoothed the edges, kept working. An hour later I showed up to lunch streaked in dried blood, and only then did someone else freak out, drag me into a bathroom, scrub and bandage me. That was my normal: finish the job first, bleed later. So...