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says he’s wounded, but you know that he’s dead.”
    On Sundays we are encouraged to attend chapel. We line up outside and choose between Catholic or Protestant services. Those who choose not to worship on Sundays stay behind in the barracks and are assigned cleaning details.
    I attend the Protestant service. When the chaplain says something agreeable, soldiers say, “Amen.” The chaplain says we aren’t loud enough. He says, “I wonder what your drill sergeants would think about that? Let’s try it again.” The next week I try the Catholic service. No one says, “Amen,” but the priest tells us that we can’t just come to chapel as an escape from the drill sergeants.
    There’s something about the Army that makes it difficult to go to church. During the week I am singing cadences about blood and foxholes. On Sundays, I’m being told that I’m not yelling loud enough and that I can’t use the church to protect me from the Army. I decide to put my head down and get through basic training without thinking about church. I’m not sure what Don would say about this. I decide not to think about that, either.
    The following week, I decide to skip church and accept whatever consequence Francis has in mind. We stand in formation while the Catholics and Protestants march off to services. When they’re far enough away, Francis looks in their direction and says, “Fucking assholes,” before sending us back to our bunks for extra rest.
    Basic training winds down and we prepare for our follow-on assignments. We stand in the hallway outside Francis’s office and wait for our orders. The first sergeant calls me into his office and laughs. “Arabic? What a waste. Torture a towelhead for me.” Francis stops me in the stairwell. “Linguist? I figured. Don’t fuck it up.”
    As part of my enlistment contract, I am required to attend the Army’s airborne course at Fort Benning, Georgia. It is a three-week program designed to introduce students to the world of military parachute operations. We don a parachute, we board an airplane, we fall out of the airplane, and we try to land without hurting ourselves. The instructors spend the majority of the time making jokes in an effort to alleviate nerves. On the way to the airfield we sing cadences about dying in a parachute accident.
    He hit the ground, the sound was splat, his blood went spurting high!
    His comrades then were heard to say, “A hell of a way to die.”
    He lay there rolling ’round in the welter of his gore
    And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
    On the last day of the course, the entire class marches to the 250-foot towers where we trained earlier in the course. The Army bought the towers in 1940 after witnessing them in action at the World’s Fair in New York. We were dropped from the towers in order to instill a sense of confidence in our equipment. But on the day we’re scheduled to jump, we sit in bleachers in front of the towers and watch mannequins fall to their deaths. The parachutes are rigged to malfunction. One type of malfunction is called a cigarette roll. The parachute deploys but fails to open. It flutters in a straight line as the mannequin plummets to the ground. The mannequins make terrible sounds when they hit the ground. Overhead, a plane flies by with a jumper in tow. The static line is rigged so it fails to release, and the mannequin flaps in the wind behind the plane. We laugh. The instructors wish us luck.
    I jump out of the plane and I don’t die. No one else does, either. But there are a variety of minor injuries. I fail to keep my chin in my chest during an exit and when the risers on my parachute deploy, they tear into my face. On the ground, I stick my finger through my cheek. The instructors send me to the medics and tell me to be back in time for graduation.
    We receive our jump wings on the parade ground. Family and friends attend