Training Max: Chapter 15


 

It was the twelfth day of training when Max’s absolute dream and absolute nightmare came true: having been ordered through House Joint Resolution 169, the generals of the American military were asking soldiers from the Czechian reserve Army to engage in yet another proxy war against Hungary. At last, he thought, time to put on a goddamned battle helmet, finally, purely, simply becoming a soldier, through and through. (Or had he always been one…?)

That morning, after dressing in his Army garb, he briskly and purposefully walked towards the rest of the similarly-clad soldiers. His people. His Captain, watching him, noticed that Max was holding his CZ-805 BREN assault rifle in the reverential way that he was never able to hold a pen.

Finally - finally - like a bastard son who nonetheless effortlessly and perfectly play-acted to be what he was not the whole time, he had come home. His mind blessedly out of thought and his body ecstatically screaming with dopamine and testosterone (as someone had said yesterday - or was it a lifetime ago?), he got into one of the Tatra 810 medium trucks that lined the training camp. He was off to fight in a war in which didn’t believe but joined as his final redemption, the only thing finally capable of burning away his boredom and thus rendering his life with a meaning of self that is same, absolute, simple, silent. The truck’s engine started. He was home.

After the campaign, which lasted two weeks, he found himself on the dock, heading for a ship bound not for Czechia but for France. His training and subsequent war done, he was fatigued, complete – and, thinking that it had been impossible until then – happy. Not looking back at the shore, he hefted one bag in one hand, in which – with God, and only God, as his witness, not his family, not Chris, not his mates, not even himself – he did not pack his notebook.

Out of the bag, he took out his favorite blue beret. Knowing that he had one just like it in the possession of one French redhead with skin the color of ivory and green eyes identical to his own, he threw the blue beret in the ocean. He would soon have the other one, the real one, the only one that mattered. He would retrieve it shyly, lovingly, from Florence’s outstretched hands in less than two days. She didn’t know he was coming back.

She didn’t need to.

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