Exclusive Book Excerpt: Twice by Mitch Albom 

Wesley, no surprise, excelled at basic training and was already on an officer track three months into his stay. In early 1975, he came home for a weekend. He looked so much older. His hair was shaved, and his body was as thickly muscled as a gymnast.

We went for some Italian panzerottis, and he told me a story about his drill instructor. “They’re not supposed to hit the new guys, right? But this DI, he’s a mean son of a gun. He didn’t like the way one private was looking at him so he told him to stand up straight—‘Like this!’ he goes—and then he bangs him in the face with the butt of his rifle! And he got away with it!”

Wesley shook his head. “These military guys are crazy.” He told me he was up for two positions, one on a ship and one at a training center, which sounded kind of boring. “More fun to be on a ship,” I said.

“Yeah,” Wesley said. Then he looked at me and said, “None of it is really fun, you know?” He flew to San Diego the next morning. He took the ship job. I didn’t hear from him for months.

Then, in May, just a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, there was an incident with an American merchant vessel that was seized in international waters by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. The Marines were sent to try to rescue it. That night at the supermarket, I ran into Wesley’s mother. She looked exhausted. She told me Wesley was in the unit attempting the rescue.

“We’re just praying so hard,” she said. “Please pray for him, Alfie.” I said I would, but when I read the news two days later that several helicopters had been destroyed in that incident and dozens of Marines had been killed, I left prayer behind and ran to my bedroom.

I flipped back through my notebooks until I found the day when Wesley had come home and, not even thinking about having to relive the last five months, I flipped myself back to our meal at the panzerotti shop. 
I was so happy to see him, it must have shown on my face.

“What are you all smiles about?” he asked.

“Listen,” I said. “I want to tell you something. It’s a secret I’ve been keeping.” He pushed his glasses back on his nose.

“What?”

“I can do something other people can’t.”

“Drive like an idiot?”

“No.”

Then, for the first time in my life, I blurted it out. “I get to do things twice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. I get to do things twice. If I don’t like the way it first happened, I can go back and do it again. Like time travel. But only one trip.”

Wesley grinned, as if trying to unwrap a riddle. “OK, go back and make Pittsburgh lose the Super Bowl. I hate those guys.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I can’t change things I wasn’t involved in.”

“Oh, right.” He nodded. “In that case, get Jo Ann Donnigan back as your ­girlfriend.”

“Wes.” I exhaled. “That’s how I got her in the first place.” I tried explaining. The second summer of basketball. The sideburns. The information from her best friend.

“Man,” he said, marveling, “you really thought this one out, didn’t you?”

I dropped my head. I wasn’t selling it, and he wasn’t buying it. I realized this whole thing is a lot harder to explain face-to-face than it is to write down. “Look, the reason I’m telling you this is to save your life.”

“Come on, Alf—”

“I’m serious. You have a choice coming up between two jobs, a ship or a training center, right?”

He paused, then grinned. “You got that from my mom. Nice try.”

“Take the training center job.”

“Alfie, stop screwing around—”

“You have a drill sergeant. He’s a jerk. You hate him. He hit one of your guys in the face with a rifle butt.”

Wesley’s mouth dropped. “How do you know that?”

“Because we’ve been here before, Wes. We’ve sat at this table. We’ve had this talk. When the panzerotti comes, you’re gonna burn the roof of your mouth with the first bite.”

“And about five months from now, if you don’t take the training center job, you’re gonna get sent to rescue an American cargo vessel on the island of Koh Tang and a lot of people are going to die.”

“Where the hell is Koh Tang?”

“Cambodia.”

I saw him ­swallow. His voice dropped to a whisper. “What happens to me?”

“I don’t know. All I know is it’s really dangerous. I came back to warn you.”

I looked at Wes’s hands. They were trembling. I leaned in closer. “Just take the training center job, OK?”

This is an excerpt from Twice by Mitch Albom, the author of Tuesdays with Morrie and one of the judges for Reader’s Digest’s Nicest Places in America 2025. 

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