Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell

kitchen and suddenly cried out to no one, “Whose idea was it to havethis war, anyway? Whose idiotic idea was it?”
    The quiet came from the Colonel.
    All spring, the big mystery had been why the Colonel was so against TJ enlisting. At first I thought it was my mother who made him say all those things to TJ about how fun college would be and how it would be a shame to miss it. My mother is a former Southern belle debutante, very flowery and chock-full of good manners, but she generally gets what she wants. Only she hardly ever comes right out and forces things to happen. She’s more subtle than that. It wouldn’t be at all unlike her to work behind the scenes, making little suggestions to the Colonel about what he should say to TJ to get him to change his mind about enlisting.
    Add that to the fact that the Colonel is 100 percent gung-ho Army,
hoo-ah,
yes sir, the last person on Earth you’d think would try to keep someone from joining up. How many times had I heard the Colonel talk about the honor of sacrifice? When we were stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he’d driven me and TJ to the veterans’ hospital over in Durham one Christmas just to pay our respectsto the soldiers there, a lot of whom had fought in World War II.
We owe them our gratitude and respect,
the Colonel had said.
The very least we can do is wish them a Merry Christmas.
This was a man who didn’t want his son to enlist?
    So it had to be my mother making the Colonel try to convince TJ to break his enlistment contract, I was sure of it. But one night, when we were sitting at the dining-room table playing Scrabble after dinner, the Colonel said, “You won’t have two seconds to play tic-tac-toe where you’re going, son.” And my mother sighed and said, “Would you please stop, Tom? This has gone on long enough. Please honor TJ’s decision.”
    Well, that rocked me right back in my chair. It was clear from my mother’s tone of voice that the Colonel had been getting on her nerves for some time now, only up until this point she’d been too much of a lady to let it show. But if it wasn’t my mother behind the Colonel’s constant haranguing, what did that mean? That the Colonel himself didn’t want TJ to enlist? This plain floored me. It was as if Thomas Jefferson had stood up inthe middle of writing the Declaration of Independence and declared he was against democracy. It was like Thomas Alva Edison saying, “Oh, heck, what’s so great about electricity after all? Let’s keep using candles.”
    I decided to try to talk to him about it. I was at this time about nine months away from turning thirteen, and I felt I could speak to the Colonel as an equal. Also, I thought this might be an opportunity for me to make a good impression on him. Not that I thought the Colonel had a bad impression of me. He seemed to like me just fine on a day-to-day basis, and I assumed he loved me—not that anyone in my family went around saying, “I love you.” But the Colonel seemed to want me to be happy, and he seemed genuinely pleased when I was happy, and that struck me as a pretty good definition of love when you got right down to it.
    But it’s one thing to like somebody and to love your own child. It’s a whole other thing to be impressed by someone. At age twelve and a quarter, I was not actually all that impressive. I was always spilling on myself at the dinner table, and my hairnever just laid down flat on my head and looked nice, and my grades were not stellar. Good in math, so-so in everything else. I did have a good arm and an ability to memorize football statistics. I was an excellent card player. But my clothes were always wrinkled and in disarray by ten in the morning. I hated extracurricular activities. There was no chance I was going to cure the common cold or rocket into outer space any time soon.
    Still, I kept looking for ways to impress the