Anthony Enlists in the Army

Anthony Casati’s enlistment is both a practical next step after school and a deliberate act of escape. After considering the possibilities presented at a career fair, he signs up for the army, which promises a clear structure and distance from Heillange and his father, Patrick Casati. The departure brings his uncertain adolescence to a sharp threshold: childhood is over, and leaving is finally real.

Background and Recruitment

In March, Anthony’s class visits a career fair in Metz, held in a freezing exposition hall. Schools promote technical and engineering diplomas, while universities present paths he finds daunting and unfamiliar. The army’s booth offers a more vivid alternative. Anthony takes a prospectus and speaks with a cheerful blonde woman in uniform, who gives him a CD showing a marine, a submariner, a helicopter pilot, and jungle-warfare training in Guyana. The display makes military life imaginable through concrete roles and scenes, in contrast to the less graspable academic options around him.

By May, Anthony has turned eighteen. In June he passes the technological baccalauréat without needing to take the oral examinations, but the qualification brings no confidence about what should come next. The narrative presents his enlistment not as the culmination of a settled educational plan, but as a choice made amid limited expectations and a wish to get away.

The Decision and Its Meaning

Anthony signs the enlistment papers in April. His departure is set for July 15, making the decision immediate even before he leaves: on July 14, he knows that tomorrow is the day. The date gives the enlistment a firm boundary, separating the life he has been living from the one he is about to enter.

The army appeals partly because it gives him somewhere to hide. Anthony has spent years getting into trouble, becoming involved in drug deals, stealing scooters, skipping classes, and damaging urban infrastructure. Until adulthood, being a minor has protected him from the full weight of those actions. He now understands that the protection ends: consequences become real, second chances disappear, and people have grown tired of him. Military service offers a different kind of shelter, one based on obedience. There, he believes, he will only have to follow orders.

His most decisive motive is escape. Anthony wants to leave Heillange and put hundreds of miles between himself and his father. The enlistment therefore joins a formal commitment to the army with a private effort to break away from the place and family circumstances that have shaped his adolescence.

Departure and Family Ties

As Anthony prepares to go, his mother lays out what he will need: ironed T-shirts, shirts, underwear, socks, clean jeans, and a new toilet kit stocked with a razor, deodorant, toothpaste, and cotton swabs. The care irritates him and moves him at once. When he finds two Snickers bars tucked beneath the shirts, his throat tightens. The small, practical gesture makes the departure feel final; he recognizes that he is leaving for good and that childhood has ended.

His wish to put distance between himself and Patrick Casati sits alongside the care Anthony has continued to give his father. Patrick lives alone in a small ground-floor studio in a converted barracks outside town. Anthony has found him asleep fully dressed and half-comatose, then filled bags with empty bottles, cleaned the apartment, changed the sheets, and brought him food cooked by his mother. When Anthony is there, Patrick does not drink; Anthony heats lasagna and watches him eat before leaving. These visits show the strained closeness the enlistment does not erase. Leaving is not a simple severing of concern, but an attempt to get away from a relationship burdened by Patrick’s drinking and decline.

The Threshold of Departure

On July 14, the day before he is due to leave, Anthony runs his usual ten miles in the cool morning. He crosses the Petit-Fougeray woods, circles the lake, and follows the departmental highway to the Relais des Chasseurs, where he retrieves his Opel Kadett. He feels light and hard, with an empty head, and feels good. The physical routine gives the eve of departure a contained, purposeful shape: the enlistment has been signed, his things are ready, and the distance he sought is about to become actual.

The army does not appear as a fully formed vocation so much as an available structure for crossing out of adolescence. Anthony’s decision is driven by the contrast between the exposed consequences of his past and the promise of a life organized around orders, and by the possibility of leaving Heillange. The tenderness of his mother’s preparations and his ongoing care for Patrick complicate that escape, making the enlistment a departure from attachments as well as from place.