A new story by alumni Elizabeth Eslami (fiction, ’03) appears in The Sun:
Victory Forge
I.
YOUR BROTHER sends you letters from Basic Training, where they are making him into someone else.
He is six years younger than you, and, although he’s over six foot now, you think of him still as “the boy.” He takes to the military quickly, memorizing the Soldier’s Creed, believing the army religion that all things can be improved. He eats their food and wakes to their song. Not long ago you sat with him on the school bus on his first day of kindergarten. Now he says he should’ve been born into his combat trousers instead of skin. He’s a patriot, a gunfighter, a warrior.
He speaks a strange tongue, though he hasn’t yet left for Afghanistan: Fire rate. Recoil. Enhanced m16. He has new friends from Texas and South Dakota, places he’s never been to or even thought about. He’s assigned a partner, a “battle buddy,” the second word to soften the first.
