“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”
I could remember, like I was standing on the right side of a decision.
Officer candidate school had been harder than anything I had encountered academically. Physically demanding, deliberately disorienting, designed to strip away every civilian habit of mind and replace it with something more reliable under pressure.
