I also speak (and, yes, write) fluent Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic – apparently these were the languages necessary to speak to damn near anyone on the planet. Go figure. I just wanted to get prepped for whatever was coming.
I also – still – had the worst fucking headache of my life.
“Please be aware that most implants are generated at birth, allowing the brain pan to grow and adjust over time. Those who receive their implants after puberty will often experience varying degrees of pain until their body fully assimilates the implant hardware.”
Well fuck.
Chapter 11: School
I didn’t really associate with many of my fellow recruits. I’d seen some of them and interacted during required social periods (meals, indoctrination sessions, etc..), I didn’t really interact with them other than acknowledging their presence in a civil but impartial manner.
I later learned that the week-long boat ride was absurdly slow for that vessel. It was extended that long to both provide time for those of us who needed to adapt to our implants, as well as for us and others to start adjusting to the regimentation after having been, well, in relatively anarchist environments up until this part of our lives. All 120 of us actually disembarked at a port, and were then hustled aboard a utilitarian troop transport and flown to a dirt airstrip.
When we arrived at… hm. I don’t think they ever did tell us where that location was – although in retrospect, I could easily pinpoint it on a map. Coincidentally, I *have* looked on various maps, since, and that particular location is neither inhabited, nor particularly useful to anyone other than the occasional deer or rabbit.
In any event, when we arrived, we were greeted by… go figure.
Master Sergeant Ballard and Master Corporal Hotez.
This should be interesting… I looked at her and smiled; she did not smile back. She did come over to me, though – and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Ahhhh Recruit Wolf, you mangy sack of putrid dog feces. Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse, you and your ignorance any further show up to wreck my day. That’ll cost you fifty pushups.”
I had no idea what the fuck a pushup was. “Corporal Hotez, what is a pushup?”
In case you’ve read any other stories about basic training, yes, some of them have some similarity to reality. Asking questions that everyone else seems commonplace, that get you into a world of trouble, is universally a bad idea.
Hotass slugged me in the gut, and I curled over, grasping my stomach - and got ready to pull Rage off my belt and carve her like a piece of meat.
Ballard was right next to me faster than I could blink, kneeling so he could get a hand into my hair and yank my head back as he whispered, “tut tut, The Colonel warned you, boyo.”
He let go when I took my hand off the hilt, and I stood back up. “Corporal Hotez, I do not underst-“
That bitch slugged me again! I could hear muttering from the crowd of other recruits, and barely heard several words… “personal space violation”..
“A pushup, you diseased excuse for a dog, means,” and she walked around me as I was curled over, and kicked my ass – literally – that resulted in me sprawled on the ground, still groaning in pain, “that you get on the ground, and push. Up.”
As I started to get back to my feet, she put a boot on my shoulders and pushed me back down. “nuh-uh, mangy, push. With your arms, you lazy shitbag.”
She left her boot on my shoulders, making “push ups” even harder, as she addressed the rest of the crowd. “RECRUITS! Be aware that yes, I have violated Mr. Wolf’s personal space. I will also violate YOUR personal space, whenever I feel it is incumbent that I provide you the instruction you so desperately require, to make you into effective soldiers in the United States Consolidated Armed Forces. As of the moment you accepted entrance into the USCAF, you gave up any rights you had as a citizen, until such time as you are either honorably discharged, or you die.”
I had barely gotten to 15 pushups when she pushed down harder, as I was halfway up, forcing me back onto my face in the dirt. “That last one doesn’t count, puppy, do it over again.”
She continued speaking to everyone else. “You WILL address all training staff by their rank and name, if they are enlisted. You WILL address all others, both commissioned officers as well as anyone not wearing a uniform, as ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’. You have implants, most of you grew up with them, and there is no excuse for mistaking enlisted for commissioned officers. If you encounter an enlisted person not in uniform, you damn well better remember their rank and name, and address them accordingly. Again, you have implants, use them. There will be no excuses, and pushups are the least of the punishment you will receive for failure to follow a direct order from your training staff – namely, myself – Master Corporal Hotez, and Master Sergeant Ballard. For purposes of expediency, you may address me as ‘Master Corporal Hotez’ and him, “ and she jabbed her thumb at Ballard, “Master Sergeant Ballard. Not ‘Sergeant’, not ‘Corporal’ – and never ‘ma’am,’ never ‘sir.’”
I’d somehow managed to make it to 41, when she took her foot off my back. “Get up, you lazy fuck. Your company commander is on the way, and I will NOT have my troops looking like a bag of dog shit.”
I stood, and she whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “And if you ever refer to me as ‘hot ass’ again to anyone other than myself, I will make you regret it.”
I wonder what she’d do if I called her hot ass to her face when no-one else was around? I thought to myself.
I’d fuck you to death, and claim it was a training accident. The answer was her voice, but she hadn’t said a word. What the fuck? I’d found out the hard way, training staff could “read” thoughts from streetganger kids, real-time, thanks to that implant. Fortunately, this was only during recruit training.
Sergeant Ballard addressed us all at that point. “Some of you come from the streets and have been given an opportunity to show that you have more going on between your ears than just empty space. Understand, that as your training staff – all the way up to the Base Commandant, and anyone else so authorized, your implants can and will be monitored. If you are found to be considering any negative action, you will be caught, and you will be punished harshly. This opportunity is not for the faint of heart, and it’s worth far more than most of you can even grasp at this point – and we will not permit you to stain or otherwise dishonor this opportunity and this organization.”
Hotass turned to walk over to stand next to Ballard, surreptitiously winking at me with a particularly nasty grin on her face, when no-one else could see.
That was our.. introduction to boot camp. Fun, no?
We all had the basic training (since, that’s the name of the place as well as what it does) that everyone else did, and it was equally as brutal, and equally as surprising as our greeting.
Those of us who owed our lives to a rough upbringing on the streets instead of a nice comfy arkscraper, required remedial education to get us to the same level of education as everyone else. Unfortunately, we had the privilege of giving up any spare time to do that – when others had weekend passes (which meant they didn’t have to do the daily morning inspection, nor attend military training classes), we also got to use our spare time on that remedial education. Everyone else just called it, “Idiot School.” The joke was on them, though, because they’d taken literally years to learn it all. Those of us from the streets? We did it in eight months. All of it.
There were five of us in Idiot School, so at least I wasn’t alone in those classes – but my particular history meant I had advantages the others didn’t. I already knew about implants, and thanks to Fathead’s knowledge, I had an idea of what they could do – which the other four streetgangers didn’t really know. That knowledge meant that the eight months I mentioned, was more like 5 for me – I learned a LOT more than the other kids did, either the Idiot School students, or the Arkie kids. I leveraged that, too – not to take advantage of them, but
rather, to show them that I could learn faster by using my implant like I knew Fathead had, and showing them how to do the same - for a price.
That price was knowledge… not the knowledge that I could already find, but rather, the knowledge of where they came from, what they’d done, how they’d gotten here. It didn’t occur to me that I could just ask them and they might tell me – but it did provide an opportunity to build some relationships. That was, coincidentally, a part of our military education – some shit about winning friends and influencing them so that they’d be more open to our point of view. I wanted it for other reasons, though, and it ended up that I was doing precisely what the military wanted me to. More of that Colonel Bradburry shit… but now I was learning how to do it myself.
Speaking of point of view, wow, the training.. sucked ass. Yeah, most of it made sense and was good training – how to shoot, how to maneuver, first aid (DAMN I wish I’d had that knowledge when I was running the Bronx empire!), navigation both rural and urban, tactics, strategy, all kinds of stuff. All the military training (and they specifically divided it up for us and TOLD us what classes were military training, and those that weren’t) made sense, and I absorbed it as much as I could, even spending what little private time I didn’t have to go to Idiot School for. Some of the Idiot School stuff, though, really was stupid.
Sensitivity training? Who the fuck cares if someone’s butthurt about something you say. They used this goofy little rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, and names will also hurt me.” The way I saw it, if someone was upset because of mere words, it was time for me to pull out Rage or whatever else I had available to me, and rid the world of their bullshit influence. I didn’t see any value at all to being sensitive to someone’s ‘Ethnic Heritage’ – on the streets, no-one cares what color your skin is. Apparently, there was a big deal about “racism” in the arkscrapers – someone who had been born in another country couldn’t be spoken to in ‘hurtful ways’ lest it negatively impact them.
The same applied to people who weren’t as capable – if they were ‘weight challenged,’ it was ‘ableist’ to point it out. Shit, if they managed to get fat, more power to ‘em! The way I saw it, it didn’t matter if they were skinny or fat, white or black… If they could do whatever needed to be done, who cared? I suspected – and later confirmed this directly with my own eyes and ears – that people felt guilty after being mean to someone, and wanted you to feel guilty too. Fuck that.
The only other Idiot School topic (and there were many) that I’ll touch on was… Sexual Sensitivity. I laughed because it made me think about how tight Hotass was, and if I’d ever get a chance to find out. As it turns out, the class was about how women are just as equal to men, or somehow better. It was also about fags, trannies, etc… And we all just burst out laughing, 5 minutes into the class. The lady who was teaching it was quite upset with us, and called Ballard. He showed up in minutes, and we all got dragged outside to crank out a hundred pushups each as a result, and were told every time we disturbed the class like that we’d get the same – and that if he had to come back more than twice, he’d escalate to the next punishment regiment.
We didn’t laugh out loud anymore, but we did laugh inside, and cracked up after class, talking about it.
This lady didn’t understand that where we’d come from, no-one gave a shit if you were straight, gay, bi, queer, trans, or whatever. Power was everything. Mary? She got used as a fuckrag because she had no power to do anything about it. But but but that’s UNFAIR! Sorry toots, life ain’t fair. Harsh reality was that most women like her were simply no match for even an average dude. That was MOST, but not all, though. Remember the beat-down I got from Hotass when I first showed up at basic? Yeah, definitely not all.
Military training was, like I said, interesting to me and I liked it all. That’s not entirely true; there was a military history class that covered some of the ways things had been done in the past.
Apparently, USCAF used to be FIVE different services: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard.
The Army – which is what we are, now – used to be just army. Ground-based combat, that’s it, nothing more with only a very few small exceptions. Infantry, Artillery, Armor, Combat Engineers
The Air Force used to handle planes – basically, anything that was in the air, and used fixed-wings to fly – ie.. “airplanes.” They had some stuff that wasn’t, but that was back before we’d gotten into space – and when that happened, the Air Force became more ‘Space Force’ – and the army got most of the tasks that the Air Force had dealt with, before.
The Navy apparently had aircraft, too – but they split up some of the space-based stuff, and shared it with the Air Force. As a part of that, they gave up all waterborne operations to the Army, too. Call me crazy, but it made sense – one command structure to deal with, based on what your mission was.
The Marines I never really understood. They were apparently considered to be one of the Armed Forces at one point, but they were actually a part of the Navy.. And they also had their own air force. What the hell? That made no sense to me at all – it seemed more like the Navy wanted to do the job that the Air Force and Army were doing, so they just… started doing it, and called it “Marines.” That’s dumb. The marines went away, more due to attrition than anything else, when the first major strikes from China started occurring. We lost a lot of troops in that war, and when the dust settled, the Marine Corps didn’t have a “corps” left, hell, they barely had a battalion.
The Coast Guard? I still laugh… how’d those guys get to be considered a part of the armed forces? From everything we were taught, they sounded like a cross between Police, Border Patrol, and Navy. They’re still around, but they’re a part of the Homeland Defense – and they handle border defense. That’s it, that’s all. We don’t consider them part of the military, because, well, they aren’t. Heck, they don’t even do their own transport – we run their ships and they’re just people on board who do police stuff, but we get them there and handle their logistics.
Some of us might eventually transfer to Space Force, but most of us – myself included – were likely to serve out our time as the Army – or, properly, “The United States Consolidated Armed Forces.”
Whatever. ARMY.
Another course that we had to take was Army Organization & Collaboration. It wasn’t that complicated, but I wanted to mention it because unless you’ve actually served in USCAF, it won’t necessarily make sense to you.
The Army had a unified command structure. That meant one guy at the very top, who answered to the president, but he ran the show. I’ve read rumors that this wasn’t how it always was – that previously, it’d been a civilian, either someone who had only ever been a civilian, or someone who had been military, but wasn’t anymore.
I didn’t understand the civilian need, frankly. Why would you put someone with no comprehension of how the military works…. In charge of the military?
In any case, the man who ran all of the Army was one guy. Right now, that was some guy Commander Deem. There was never more than one Commander.
That commander had few people answering to him – thinking back to running my Bronx Empire, I understood why that was a good thing.
Infantry is pretty much anyone carrying a gun and shooting the enemy. Simple enough, right? Artillery is the guys who make heavy ordnance rain down on the bad guy, when the infantry guys ask for it. Armor on the other hand, were the guys driving armored units, usually in line with infantry. Special Forces aren’t retards, although we sure thought they were window-licking mouth breathers. I found out later that nothing could be further from the truth, but hey, we were recruits. SF were basically infantry guys who were especially lethal, extra ruthless, and really good at shooting the enemy.
Army Aviation was basically what used to be the air force, but now it was ANYTHING in the air. Planes, helicopters, drones…. Didn’t matter. If it flies, it’s Aviation. Naval Operations, likewise, wa
s anything on the water – If floats, it’s Naval Ops.
Intelligence was a hard one. It wasn’t like NSA and CIA (and apparently “CIA” used to be both “CIA” and something called “Federal Bureau of Instigation”). In a nutshell, these guys… know stuff. Rather than shooting bad guys, they learned everything they could about the enemy. Instead of bombing the shit out of the enemy with Armor or Artillery, Intelligence destroyed the enemy’s ability to process information. Spooky fuckers – and, if you ask me, a little cowardly. I personally prefer to look my enemy in the eye (or at least make sure he knows who I am) right before I kill him; these guys hide behind keyboards and screens, and the enemy never knew they existed.
Logistics initially struck me as boring, but they were the glue that held everything else – EVERYTHING ELSE – together. Can’t shoot the enemy unless you have a working weapon and ammunition – both of which Logistics makes sure we have. Can’t drive an airplane, tank, or ship without the gas that Logistics puts into it. You can’t bomb the enemy without ordnance that Logistics delivers to the aviation facility, or gas to fly the planes – again, Logistics. Hell, even Intelligence needed VRCs (Virtual Reality Computers), and ‘net connections. The stuff they did could be initiated with implants, but embedding directly into a technology battle with something that was hardwired to your brain was just a bad idea. The VRCs gave the intel guys a way to firewall off their brains from immediate retribution – although that apparently didn’t protect them 100%, all the time.
Rage & Fury Page 11
