The Chaplain's War

by Brad R Torgersen

  Which surprised me. Book work? In Basic? But book work there was, and a surprisingly large amount of it, too. In addition to helmets and body armor and field packs, each recruit was given a use-worn e-pad with a built-in library of Fleet manuals, pamphlets, regulations, and so forth. Including an all-in-one quick guide to IST, which I found myself referencing quite often for general orders and reminders on Fleet jargon, in addition to bits of recent history about the Fleet, and the war with the mantis aliens.

  All of us recruits were required to carry the e-pad on our person—as part of our uniform—and if at any point the platoon was stopped for any moment, be it waiting in line for chow or waiting out on the field as the DSs switched out for the afternoon, we were to pull out the e-pad and study. Study, study, study. Which made even my eyes glaze over—and I’d been pretty good in school. But I’d never had to read and memorize while functioning on this little sleep and doing this much daily physical work.

  Of course the e-pad became an easy thing to lose, too. And it was apparent that losing anything became a guaranteed ticket to discipline. Our names were on every scrap of clothing and piece of equipment. If ever a DS found anything with your name on it not secured in your locker or on your person, you were suddenly in a personal world of hurt.

  On three separate occasions, I ran across e-pads which had been left in the head, left on the floor, or in one case, left on one of the bench seats in the cafeterialike mess hall where we ate three times a day. Rather than stare dumbly at the things, I scooped them up each time and surreptitiously sleuthed out the owners.

  “Thanks,” said one of the other platoon’s troops, named Zaratanski, when I found her one afternoon while we filed up the stairs to our separate bays. The e-pad passed quickly between us. “I was almost sick thinking about where I could have put it. I appreciate you getting it back to me.”

  “No problem,” I said, smiling. “If we don’t look out for each other, who will, right?”

  She smiled back at me, and I knew I’d made an instant friend.

  Before I headed into the bay, I thought I caught DS Schmetkin watching me out of the corner of her eye. Had she seen what I’d just done? If she had, she gave no hint that it mattered to her.

  Going into week two we each had a heavy batch of required reading to prepare for the next exam. So much so that most of us stole an hour or more after lights-out, our heads and e-pads carefully concealed beneath our blankets while we caught up on all the crap that we hadn’t been able to get to during the day.

  Which was pretty much Standard Operating Procedure—SOP—for the third week as well. Never enough time. Never, ever enough. The single hour at night—the hour the recruiters had promised us would be for personal business—was gone. It invariably wound up being the only time some of us could reasonably find to thoroughly shower and get the salt, oil, and dirt out of the cracks of our bodies, not to mention prepping equipment for the next day’s training.

  The e-pads were equipped to send and receive monitored e-mail once an evening through the battalion centralized wireless server, but I only had enough time to jot my mother a quick hello, letting her know I’d arrived and was up to my eyebrows in training, before I was either studying for the exams or doing something else that I’d rather not have to be doing.

  Meanwhile I kept feeling Thukhan’s eyes on me. During odd moments, when I thought nobody in the bay or in the platoon could possibly care enough to pay attention to me. I’d look up, and there Batbayar would be, watching without saying anything, and I would just turn away and silently feel angry that I was letting the asshole psych me out.

  After ten days of such mind games, I decided I’d had enough.

  It was our first visit to the armory, and as the platoon filed up onto some bleachers for our initial introduction to our assigned weapons, I deliberately sat next to Thukhan.

  Batbayar looked at me, but I deliberately didn’t look back. I stared straight ahead as one of the range cadre—sergeants without campaign hats, and remarkably nice people, too—began to explain the functions of the R77A5 automatic rifle.

  “Each of you,” said the cadre member, a female sergeant first class named Secce, “will become intimately familiar with this weapon.”

  Secce held it up: a longish metal tube with an attached fiberglass stock.

  “The first thing you need to remember is that while you might not always have ammunition for this rifle on your person, the rifle itself will be on your person for the rest of the time you’re in Induction Service Training. Your rifle will go with you when you go to sleep. Your rifle will be with you when you go to PT in the morning. Your rifle will be with you as you train each and every day. Your rifle is the thing that makes you valuable as a fighter in the modern arena of battle.

  “Some of you may have already had experience with firearms, especially pistols, but you’ll notice that nobody in IST ever carries a pistol. The reason for that is because the pistol is a very specialized weapon that is practically useless in open terrain, or across long distances. A pistol lacks the power of a rifle cartridge—the ability to hit and knock a mantis out of the fight—and this is what learning to handle and use the R77A5 is all about.”

  I felt Thukhan’s eyes on me, but ignored him and kept watching SFC Secce.

  “If you’ve done your homework,” said Secce, “then you should already know a lot about this weapon, even before you’ve handled it. Unlike some other kinds of rifles you might have fired, this one is built to operate aboard spacecraft. It uses caseless ammunition, which does not employ traditional powder explosives, but rather a split mixture of chemical propellant. This propellant is not active until the round has been discharged in the rifle’s firing chamber. Which means the ammunition is extremely resistant to heat and moisture, and will seldom cook off or prematurely fire under adverse conditions.”

  Secce held up an example of the caseless round, and stepped to the foot of the bleachers. She told the nearest recruit to look at it, then pass the round along.

  “Also, because this round is not powder-based, there is far less carbon to foul the breach and barrel, meaning longer duration between mandatory cleaning, and less chance of a jam or a malfunction. Likewise there is no spent casing—no brass—for you to hassle with, which means less work for you when you come off the ranges, but more importantly, when you get out into the Fleet and have to do real fighting, less dead weight, and more room for you to carry more ammo.”

  “What do you want?” Thukhan finally growled at me, as he passed the round to me. I ignored him long enough to hold the single piece of ammunition up to my eyes. The e-pad specs said that the bullet itself was ten millimeters wide, but the actual cartridge—which felt a little bit like soft plastic, and was transparent so that I could see the bullet and the two differently-colored liquid chemicals behind it—was much wider, and many times longer. According to the operational guide, when the trigger on the rifle was pulled, the firing pin would plunge into the back of the cartridge, puncturing the internal wall that kept the chemicals separate, thus causing an instant reaction that vaporized both the chemicals and the rubbery plastic shell, expelling it all as hot gas behind the bullet, which would be forced down the length of the barrel and out the muzzle at approximately one thousand meters per second.

  “I want you to either tell me what your effing problem is,” I said to Thukhan, continuing to examine the round, “or get off my case and quit acting like I don’t know you’re trying to eff with me.”

  I turned to him and held the round up between us, looking Batbayar square in the face and using the round for a point of emphasis.

  “Here,” I said, handing it back to him.

  “This round is also vacuum-proof,” said Secce to the platoon, “which you will find comes in very handy later in IST when you get to your orbital combat training phase. It can even be fired in water, in fully oxygen-depleted gaseous environments, and will not rust or corrode, nor does it require any oil.”

  “I
don’t know what you’re talking about,” Batbayar said, grasping the round in his hand, his eyes still locked on mine.

  “Bullshit,” I breathed.

  Secce continued, “As a result of all these wonderful abilities that modern weapons technology has given us, the round for the R77A5 is very expensive—as is the R77A5 itself.

  “On the table in front of me you can see approximately sixty-seven different accessories for this weapon, making the R77A5 highly mission-flexible, with a variety of stock and grip options, scoping and sighting options, and load-bearing options which will make the weapon both easier to hump and easier to shoot than a traditional sport rifle.

  “But, for the purposes of IST, you will not being seeing most of these specialized pieces of equipment. You will instead be using the R77A5 in its factory-issued mode: fixed shoulder stock, flat forward grip on the barrel, twenty-round magazine, and basic three-power scope with manual zeroing studs and flip-cap aperture protection.”

  The corner of Batbayar’s lip curled, just as it had on the bus on Pickup Day.

  “It’s not my fault if you’re nervous, cunt.”

  “Eff you,” I growled.

  I felt my fists closing up into balls, and suddenly there was a peculiar silence.

  “Do we have a problem, recruits?”

  I broke eye contact with Thukhan and realized that SFC Secce—and the rest of the platoon—were staring at me. I blushed and sat up, facing forward.

  “Negative, Sergeant,” I said. “Recruit Barlow does not have a problem, Sergeant.”

  “You?” Secce said, raising an eyebrow at Thukhan.

  Batbayar repeated what I had said.

  “Very well then,” Secce said, continuing the lecture.

  “Just stay the hell away from me,” I said in a rasp, through clenched teeth.

  Thukhan said nothing, but I was pretty sure the corner of Batbayar’s mouth resumed its disquieting curl.

  One hour later, each recruit in second platoon was holding his or her own R77A5. None of the weapons looked nearly as new as the one Secce had shown us, but all the weapons were clean, and all of them had been issued as promised: factory spec, nothing less and nothing more. It was a much lighter than it looked, and I felt both excited and intimidated.

  No rounds had been issued, as the platoon was still at least one full week away from going anywhere near a range. But we were instructed strictly in the proper carry of the weapon while in cantonment, as well as in the field. Which basically meant that at no time would the barrel of the weapon ever rise towards or aim at another human being. Such an action—which Secce called “flagging”—was a serious violation and could be grounds for administrative punishment, in addition to corrective training. Repeated flagging would result in potential recycle—being sent back to Reception as a holdover and then placed into a new batch at a different IST battalion—or expulsion to the dreaded and mythic Alcatraz battalion.

  I found myself quickly emulating Secce and the other cadre, who demonstrated what they called a practical carry, with the rifle’s single shoulder strap hooked over my elbow while I held the rifle’s handle—located behind the trigger and trigger guard—in my right hand, barrel towards the ground, the straight forward grip in my left.

  The platoon was also trained in integrating the rifle into the drill and ceremony movements we’d learned the previous week, with additional movements performed strictly from the position of attention, such as order-arms, right- and left-shoulder arms, and so forth. I managed to stay fairly well away from Thukhan through most of it, and actually enjoyed the instruction and training—which was given while out from under the baleful eye of the DSs, who had quietly been banished during armory cadre instruction.

  But the joy did not last. As chow time approached, the drill sergeants reappeared, and the platoon was hustled back into platoon formation for several minutes of hard marching around the PT field before being marched back up to the Charlie Company common area, in prep for chow.

  While we waited, huffing and puffing, to take our turn rotating through the limited space of the chow hall, Drill Sergeant Malvino taught us the meaning of “stack arms”—all the rifles being quickly and uniformly pitched into cones, or “teepees,” which would remain outside with a watch detail, rather than be carried into the chow hall, which was verboten. He also spent a significant amount of time warning us about the dire consequences of losing or misplacing our rifles. If losing an e-pad was bad, losing a rifle was about a thousand times worse.

  “That weapon is a part of you now,” Malvino said, walking up and down the ranks. “Treat it as such. You don’t forget your feet or your hands or your mouth when you go somewhere or wake up in the morning, so you shouldn’t forget your weapon either. Unless your weapon has been secured and is under guard—during chow and a few select other times—your weapon will be on you at all times. Is that understood?”

  Second platoon, “YES, DRILL SERGEANT!”

  “Have you been told what will happen if you are caught flagging?”

  “YES, DRILL SERGEANT!”

  “Good, ’cause let me remind you again. We will smoke you so hard you will throw up. You haven’t seen the kind of smoking we’ll give you if you’re stupid enough to leave that weapon, or flag another troop, or an NCO. We’ll smoke you up one side of the bay, and back down the other side. We’ll smoke you clear across the PT field and back, then do it again just to see you cry. We’ll smoke you until you literally don’t have a damn piece of yourself left for us to smoke, and then we’ll smoke you some more.

  “And then,” Malvino said, not smiling at all, “we’ll take your pay, we’ll take your privileges, and if necessary we’ll take you all the way back to square one. And that means recycle, or Alcatraz. And you all know and we all know that nobody wants that to happen. Do you want that to happen, recruits?”

  “NO, DRILL SERGEANT!”

  “Do any of you want to recycle or be sent to Alcatraz, recruits?”

  “NO, DRILL SERGEANT!!”

  “Good. See that it doesn’t.”

  After chow and after training, when we males and the fewer-in-number females had been sent to our respective bays, maneuvering with the R77A5 proved a challenge. With the full stock and standard barrel, the rifle wasn’t exactly friendly in close quarters. There was also the issue of taking the weapon into the head—which, like taking the weapon into the chow hall—was a no-no. Weapons had to be left in the care of other recruits—volunteers, or those unfortunate enough to be pressed into the job—while people bathed and used the toilet.

  I waited until the very end of the hour to nab a shower. With so much reading to do, and not wanting to endure the ass-tastic, full-court-press of bodies that queued up at the beginning of the hour, a last-minute rinse would have to suffice.

  By the time I was in my flip-flop slippers and PT shorts and T-shirt, there was only five minutes to spare before the DSs came in for the final accountability check of the day, followed by lights out.

  I found the latest rifle-guard-slash-victim standing dumbly by a bunk piled with several weapons. I thanked the poor soul for helping out, he grunted at me, and I added my rifle to the pile, and went to do my business.

  Thankfully the barracks had a near-endless supply of hot water from the high-efficiency all-points heating system. I momentarily luxuriated in the feel of the near-scalding fluid as it flowed over my skin, washing away that day’s layer of grit and filth. Soap, suds, rinse, and I was padding back into the bay with ninety seconds to spare—pure eternity.

  The recruit watching the rifles was not the same recruit I had seen when I’d gone into the head.

  I checked the bunk for my weapon—each of them having been stickered on the shoulder stock with a number and barcode identical to that which had been stamped on our hands in Reception, and printed onto our duffels—and could not find it.

  Sudden, cold panic overtook me.

  “Where’s my rifle?” I asked.

  The male recr
uit just shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Weren’t you watching while you stood here?”

  “Look, people come and go, taking and leaving weapons, I don’t know whose is whose.”

  I rechecked the pile. And rechecked again. The last people exited the head and collected their weapons from the bunk, leaving it empty.

  The recruit guarding them just shrugged at me, and walked away, his own weapon in his hands.

  The cold panic had become a maw of icelike fangs, closing on my heart.

  The bay had begun to line up around the edge of the Dead Zone, each man in his flip-flop slippers, PT shorts, and PT shirt tucked in, rifle butt on the ground at the order-arms position.

  I frantically ran up one side of the bay and down the other, praying that someone happened to have two rifles. I scanned the bunks, and the lockers, and the spaces between the bunks and lockers, and saw nothing. My eyes darted from face to face, finding indifference—or occasional sympathy.

  “Has anyone seen my effing rifle??” I finally begged, to which the other men just shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders.

  Nearly-blinded by desperation, I ran into the head and banged open all the toilet stalls and went through all the shower stalls, madly hoping that somehow I’d forgotten to put the weapon on the bed, but had instead left it hanging on a hook or leaning up in a corner.

  Suddenly, the communal cry of “DRILL SERGEANT ON THE FLOOR!” went up from the bay—somewhat muffled by the head doors—and I knew I was doomed.

  Going out there to toe the line—more naked without my rifle than I would have been if I’d actually been naked but had my rifle—was a thought almost too horrible to bear. I remained frozen at the threshold of the head, my mind and heart spinning wildly. Then I dumbly pushed open the door and walked out into the suddenly harsh and unyielding light of the bay.