The Forge, an excerpt

Happy Memorial Day! Finally published a book I've been working on 20+ years, on and off. Hope you enjoy! Click here or the picture to check it out on Amazon!

I was late for my first day of military school. Singled out and alone, I hauled my stuff up the hill to the C Company area from the parking lot. My father trudged somewhere behind me. With each step forward, the bricks beneath me quivered until the straight-line path broke into a crackling void. All I could focus on was putting one foot in front of the other. At the hilltop, I saw the barracks, a long two-story red brick colonial, stretching on for a city block. As I watched the other new arrivals lined up in rows, their hair freshly shaven, brown and white scalps frying in the August sun, I knew this was my last day as an individual.

My father and I navigated past the lines of sweating plebes and climbed the steps of the Forge’s red brick barracks. Inside everything was cool grey, concrete and indestructible. We took the alcove stairs and made our way through the scant light until we found a door with my name on it. We knocked and entered the room.

My new room was a simple dorm with a steel double-bunk, matching desks and wall lockers made of cheap pine. The furniture legs were scarred from decades of scraping boots. The room’s concrete seemed to close over us. The only sunlight came from a small window. While I stood uselessly in the doorway, my dad sunk down and began unpacking, organizing my neatly folded piles of clothes into my wall locker.

My father, Arnold Soloway, had a full head of black hair, and eyes that were constantly narrowed in disdain. Minus some middle age flab, his body was strong, almost young, though his mind was muddled by time, drink, and labor. He was a man who’d never won anything in his life. He earned it all and hated every step of the way. One time at the dinner table he stripped off everything but his underwear and shouted at the ceiling, challenging God to a fight.

Despite minor psychotic episodes, my father had always been practical. After I’d had my nose broken in a fight at school, he was the one screaming. He didn’t care about the fight. He was pissed I’d written an accurate statement to the police.

Cops don’t help people, he said. They arrest them.

He straightened up my wall locker. I stared out the window. It wasn’t a bad view from the second floor. The library’s columns sat in periphery and the parade field was green, an open expanse in the distance. All of the buildings were institutional brick with white columns. None were taller than three stories. In their muted reds, they seemed permanently indifferent. The impenetrable bricks were stacked for one purpose—to conceal violence.

Immediately below, sergeants drilled plebes, new students not yet recognized as cadets. Both sets of faces were gaunt and distant and grim. The NCO’s shirts were pressed, white and immaculate. Their forearms bulged from their shirt sleeves. While most were about my age—sixteen years old—they seemed years beyond me. One gestured in front of the platoon, shouting, Left! face!

I turned to find my father pulling a sheet over the bottom bunk.

How do you know that bed is mine?

You’re here first, so you get dibs.

It says my roommate’s name is Choi. Where do you think he’s from?

That’s not what matters when you have a roommate. What’s important is that he doesn’t snore, he speaks English, and he doesn’t smell.

After that, we didn’t say anything. Drowsy flies buzzed as my father finished making the bed.

All my life, people said we were alike. Aside from looks, I couldn’t see how. He was a man. Brusque and silent, never surprised or impressed by anything. Something about him scared people. I wanted that. All the other fathers I knew were classic white suburban dads who commuted to offices, drove SUVs, and relentlessly dedicated their lives to comfort—from a very young age, I knew these men had traded away something indispensable to life.

I changed into my PT uniform of shorts and a t-shirt to match the others on the company area below.

I’m going down now, I said, swallowing a knot in my throat.

Your funeral, he said, without looking up.

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I exited my new room, and made my way downstairs into the company area’s slanting light.

Too nervous to ask directions, I merged into a large group of plebes and lost myself in the commands. I got the expected result. I gestured cluelessly until a blond-haired sergeant tapped my shoulder and tugged me aside to learn the basics.

Up in the trees, black objects, dress shoes, swung lazily on laces curled over boughs. Names and dates of forgotten cadets were painted in white-out on the soles. There was an entire lineage of dismissed cadets lynched in the trees, their feet long gone, drummed out of the gates while their shoes waved farewell in the wind.

Staring up at the shoes, I knew I was paying the price for every moment of my life that came before this one. To survive, I’d have to blend in with the others. I’d have to learn to obey.

The blond sergeant, whose name I’d later learn was Stoppard, called me to attention. He schooled me in the intricacies of present arms, the military salute. When I didn’t understand the order, he fixed my arm into one of the most awkward positions I’d face all year—the pose of inferiority, the attitude of Yes, Sir.

Bring your arm up to your face. Don’t bring your face to your arm. Your fingers should be extended at a slight angle facing out. Elbow parallel with the deck, Stoppard said.

I winced involuntarily. The salute was painful. I felt like I’d never get used to it.