Hailey's War Read Online Free Page A

When it was time for my appointment with the guidance counselor, and she asked me what I thought I might like to do for a living, I told her about West Point. Her eyebrows inched toward her hairline, and I couldn’t blame her: Nothing in my life that far suggested any latent achieverhood. To give her credit, she didn’t voice her skepticism. Instead, she asked me if I’d thought about the Air Force Academy in Colorado—remember,we were in Air Force territory. I told her to fuck off the way fourteen-year-olds tell adults to fuck off—“I’ll think about it”—and she nodded and then did something to my file that switched me from graduation track to college preparatory.
    She explained the drill: four years of math, four years of English, three years of science, two years of foreign language. I asked her if there was any way I could get credit for studying Latin instead of the Spanish, French, or German our school offered. Her eyebrows made that same ascent and she said she didn’t see how that would work, and besides, for a military officer who might be stationed overseas, French would be a much more useful language.
    I spited her by enrolling in Spanish instead, and on my own time I studied Latin. By the time I was a junior, the principal was sufficiently impressed with my resolve that he signed off on the deal that let me out of study hall twice a week to bus over to the community college to take Latin classes there.
    It’s hard for me to explain what Latin means to me. My guidance counselor had been right: It wasn’t at all useful to a military career. But to be fair, I think Latin got me into West Point, because studying it was how I learned I could do difficult things. Hard things had happened to me—my father’s death, most of all—but Latin was the first burden I picked up of my own choice.
    It has to be said that I wasn’t squeaky clean in high school. I got in some fights, and I got in some backseats. I can’t say I don’t know what a meth high feels like. You have to grow up in a small town to understand. On Friday and Saturday nights, things go on in farmhouses that would shock the ghetto. But I was always in homeroom with my schoolwork done on Monday morning, so the adults around me never knew. That’s something that all smart kids figure out pretty early on: As long as your grades are good and you don’t smoke or wear heavy eyeliner, the authority figures around you generally don’t look any deeper than that.
    Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a delinquent. I didn’t start fights, but I didn’t back down from them either, so I had some pretty goodscraps with girls I wasn’t even sure how I’d offended. Some of it was about my plans for the future, I guess, my grades and West Point ambitions. Some people will tear you down for no reason other than that you’re trying to build yourself up.
    And the sex? I never actually went all the way, not back then. Like many girls, I protected my reputation by making the distinction between giving head and giving it up. If my generation didn’t invent the idea of “oral sex isn’t sex,” we’d popularized it, and I wasn’t reluctant to show a guy I liked him in that way.
    And maybe on some level I was competing with CJ, who was going through my female classmates at a truly amazing rate. Because while I was becoming somebody different, my cousin was, too.
    All the Mooney kids adapted to California—their accents softened, and they called the freeway “the 246,” not just “246,” and so forth. But it was CJ who went native in a big way. In his freshman year he’d started going to the ocean with friends who had driver’s licenses, and the sun and salt water brought out gold lights in his reddish-blond hair, which he let grow out to his shoulders, smoothing out the tightness of its curls. He traded in his checked flannel