My fists could have given him a bad afternoon.

My restraint took his whole life.

I have never once regretted choosing the second one.

And I want to add the other half of that, because the restraint is only part of the lesson, and the smaller part.

The larger part is what I did after, the transfer to the shore-duty station ten miles away, the promise never again to be five thousand miles from her, the presence at every one of those long, painful physical-therapy sessions.

Because if the ordeal taught me how to defeat cruel people, it taught me something even more important about how the whole thing had been allowed to happen in the first place, and that lesson was about my own absence.