Reconnaissance was another interesting one, and again, my previous experiences helped me out pretty good. After all, you don’t want to just rush in shooting.. you want to know what’s there first, so you can appropriately plan your attack.
Fighting positions and barriers were… meh. I hated shoveling. It felt too much like gardening – and like I was planting myself.
Minefield operations was… honestly, kind of fun. I loved watching something blow up, and it was fun learning how to make sure I wasn’t the something in question – I always remembered the claymore emplacement around my empire headquarters, every time we got to play with mines. I think I weirded out the instructors here, because I would start making little things out of the Semtex when we had to make our own improvised land mines.
The only course I really struggled with was communications. We had to learn how to use radios – which I’d always steered clear from. These weren’t even in the same city, much less neighborhood as those, though – milspec radios were hardened against electromagnetic pulse attacks (and that concept was a complete null to me until we covered it in basic training), but the radio protocols and checks and language was just.. difficult. When things got crazy and you had an entire platoon of guys all yammering at the same time, I found it hard to keep track of things. Fortunately, my implant had access to the whole military library that it was all based on, plus extra material that the instructors didn’t make obvious to us in classroom settings. It’s almost like they were forcing us to have to explore and learn on our own, rather than just feeding it all to us.
I must have done okay; I passed the course without any issues, without having to repeat any portion of the thirteen months involved.
The real surprise was when I was called to the commandant’s (not the Commander, oh hell no!) office.
“Private Wolf, reporting as ordered sir!” I’d learned to cover my face with a not-quite-angry look, staring directly ahead, and offering a crisp salute to a man who held the ability to make my life a living hell with little more than a word or two.
The commandant, Colonel Marshall, was a slightly pudgy looking guy with brown hair, and a receding hairline. He ran the AIT school here, which covered - as I’d mentioned previously - both Infantry and Armor AIT courses. He looked pudgy… but he had a reputation as a fierce fighter. No-one really knew where, the rumor was just that he was the kind of person you didn’t ever fight – you just shot him from as far away as you could, and then ran, hoping you killed him.
“Mister Wolf… sit.” He nodded at the solitary chair in the office, facing directly across from him, as he sat behind his desk. He leaned forward, steepling his hands in front of his face, fingertips touching his chin.
“Tell me, Private, what has been your impression of your advanced individual infantry training course?”
“Sir, the private has absorbed all knowledge made available to him by instructors, and has pursued additional training on his personal time in order to be capable, competent, and soldierly per Infantry Command requirements sir!” I hated that third-person speaking stuff. It sounded idiotic in my own ears, and I never did it except when I was dealing with an officer, or enlisted when I was assigned to them for training.
“Apparently, so, Mister Wolf. Your scores are….not the best we’ve ever seen, but they are quite good, and notably better than nearly all of your classmates.” That surprised me, I didn’t think there were ‘scores’ – just an instructor’s ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ in regard to any given student.
“You will not be assigned to a unit immediately; rather, you will be attending the Armor AIT course.” I felt my mouth go dry. That wasn’t anything anyone had ever told me was even possible, and I wondered if I’d done something stupid and was getting transitioned into Armor instead of Infantry.
It was as if he read my mind. “Normally, you would be assigned to a unit, as occurs with the majority of privates who attend training here. However, your grades are better than everyone else; that, coupled with the recommendation of a former commander of mine, means that you will take a slightly different path as occurs every few classes. We do not like to waste talent in the army, despite what some might say about being ableist.” That was interesting… almost like the military was a different social structure than what that self-absorbed twat in basic had described to us.
“Effective immediately,” and he nudged a small box across the desk at me, “you are promoted to Private First Class. This does not grant you any special privileges or rights, but it does give you a small increase in pay, and accounts for the lack of time in a unit that your classmates will get, that you will not.” He fell silent, still staring at me. I opened the simple box, and it held the PFC insignia inside – nothing fancy, but still…
“Uhh…, Thank you sir!” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
It was, apparently, the right thing to say. A very slight upward turn at the corners of his mouth suggested so, anyway. “Very well. Dismissed, private.”
I stood and stepped behind the chair and saluted again. He returned the salute and I turned in precisely the fashion shown in the training videos we’d learned to mimic, and left.
Chapter 13: Structure
PFC, oooo… look at me, mister big shot!
Some of this factors into my story later, but now’s a good time to review, so you’ll understand better. Everyone out of basic was a private. After they finished AIT, and went to their unit, they became eligible, in time, to be a private “first class” – which is to say, they’ve done everything they should to at least the minimum expectation. Important to note is that generally, you have to go from one rank to the next, no significant exceptions. The next step up was Corporal. As a corporal, you’d expect to lead a squad, maybe more. You’ve figured out how to do it on your own, so now you get to figure out how to make sure OTHER people are doing it too, while you continue to do your own thing. With enough time, you get to be a “corporal first class” – same as with a private, now you’ve figured it out.
Here’s where things get interesting: Sometimes, you do it REALLY well, but the powers that be don’t want to promote you since you’ll likely have to go to another unit, or, if you’re in battle, you inherit more responsibility and much faster. So… you get to be a “master” at your current rank level. After CFC? You’re a Master Corporal. In the army, an infantry platoon would normally have about forty soldiers in it, broken down as follows:
A squad would have three privates or PFCs, plus a Corporal (or CFC or MCP) as a leader. One of the privates would be ‘senior’ to the other two, so that you’ve got a leader plus an alternate.
Three squads, four soldiers in each, would make up a ‘section’, and would have a Master Corporal, Sergeant, or Sergeant First Class in it as a leader – for a total of 13 soldiers. Occasionally, you’d have another MCP or SGT attached to a section, so that there was an alternate for the section leader.
Three sections, each with thirteen soldiers, make up a platoon, and the platoon needs an officer to run it – so 39 troops plus an officer. Sometimes, a platoon would also have a Master Sergeant in it as well as an alternate leader.
All told, in a ‘standard’ platoon, you’d see between 40 and 44 troops. Sometimes, you’d see oversized platoons that had 50 or more soldiers in it – that was usually an exception, though.
Armor was a little different. A ‘squad’ still had four people – three plus a leader (which was called a Tank Commander) – and they were all in a tank together. Three tanks (each holding a squad of soldiers) make up a section, and three sections of 3 tanks each – 9 total – would make a platoon of tanks. 36 troops.
That was kind of weird, though, because you didn’t have extra ‘leaders’ for a section of the platoon as a whole. What happened, in that case, was that we added another tank – a command tank – and that meant another 4 people.
To keep things from breaking down too hard in the event that a tank (and it’s crew) was destroyed, we didn’t put ALL comm
and staff in the tank. The Lieutenant (the platoon leader) would be running one tank as it’s commander, and his platoon second in command (a Sergeant First Class or a Master Sergeant) would be the tank commander in some other tank.
We had to shuffle things around in other ways, too, since there was limited space in the tanks. You couldn’t really fit any ‘extra’ people into the cramped confines of a tank. 40 soldiers, 10 tanks, but there was a higher number of Master Corporals and Sergeants or SFCs than you’d expect, and fewer privates, as well. I learned later that this was even crazier when you got into Army Aviation, because pilots tended to be all officers – the flipside there, though, was that Logistics, the guys who fueled, repaired, and maintained the aircraft had a ridiculous number of privates and PFCs. In the end, it worked out fairly well from the perspective of a Table of Organization for the army.
What all of this boiled down to was that as a PFC,I outranked pretty much everyone else in my AIT classes – by a whole whopping ONE rank. I was still at the bottom of the rank structure, so I wasn’t mister bigshot except to the other students in my class. Remember, at this point, I hadn’t even had any direct experience in a unit!
Well… in the army, anyway. I’d already commanded a larger force than nearly anyone on the base, including Colonel Marshall. It wasn’t an equivalent force, but I’d had that experience, just the same.
Armor was, however, even more different… I was dealing with small unit tactics with a LOT of firepower in each unit. I should mention, too, it wasn’t only about the tactics… we got into maintenance and operations in a way bigger way than we had in Infantry AIT – here, we took a tank apart to almost the depot maintenance level, kind of like we did with the M34 in Infantry AIT. I learned how to swap an engine and a transmission, how to break track – MYSELF (and holy shit, cracking the fittings to take a track off of a tank was ridiculously backbreaking work!).. Most of the stuff, like the powerpack replacement (ie. The Engine and Transmission, which were packaged together) we only learned so that we better understood the platform.
We did learn about basic stuff – like breechblock disassembly and reassembly, since that was a combat system. Generally speaking, anything systems failures other than combat systems were pre-packaged, and usually meant the tank was deadlined and required a full maintenance depot. Combat systems on the other hand, we needed to know, since it was critical to be able to continue fighting the tank, even if we lost maneuverability.
The lion’s share of what we learned, though, was about common parts removal and replacement, lubrication and calibration of various parts and systems, and of course, breaking track.
Map reading and scouting techniques were… both similar and different than what I’d learned in infantry AIT. Where armor was concerned, there were weight considerations – you can’t scout if you have to go across existing roads and bridges that aren’t designed to hold the weight of your beast. You also had to account for mobility needs – bounding with and without formations (column, staggered column, line, coil, herringbone…) and overwatch in any of it.
Scouting was also different in that it wasn’t the same as hop ‘n pop like when you’re humping your own gear through a field or over a hill.. You have noise concerns, elevation concerns, etc..
Elevation concerns, you ask? Yes. The tank is mobile and very versatile, but it can’t work miracles – especially when you go down an excessively steep incline. Standing Order Procedure dictated that if you need to do that, you rotate the turret so that the gun is facing rear-ward, or to the side, circumstances depending. We rotated the gun at other times as well – like when doing a road traverse at higher speeds, or when approaching an allied armored unit, to show that we weren’t a threat (since you can’t shoot someone you’re not facing).
I was talking about the elevation issue, though. What happened if you didn’t spin the turret and point the main gun backwards? You’ll ram the barrel of the main gun into the bottom of the incline you’re descending into – just like the riverbed that one Private Ma in our class tried to maneuver down into. That one incident had subsequent repercussions too, but I’ll talk about that a bit later.
While we did mobile scouting at times, it was more common for a crewman to dismount and do the recon on foot, and report back via radio, or just return to the tank.
Offensive and defensive tactics apparently hadn’t changed much in several hundred years – since, for that matter, tanks had even been in common use in warfare. Formation and Maneuver was the name of the game, whether it was pure armor, or a hybrid approach that integrated other types of units with the armored unit, either in support of, or being supported by. Screening lines, Phase lines, Movement to Contact, Hasty vs. Deliberate attacks, Exploitation and Pursuit… A lot of it was just another variation on what we’d learned in Infantry AIT, but with the added benefit of operating in closer cooperation with units, either of the same, or of different types.
Defensive operations were a little different than with Infantry, mostly due to the speed that was available to us. If it came down to it, it was much easier to simply engage stealth (as long as it still worked!) and boogie out of there as fast as we could. That wasn’t always possible, when you were operating as a mixed command – you might have various elements of the infantry either supporting you, or that you’re supporting, and you couldn’t just bug out and leave them to die.
I did okay with Tactics, but it just wasn’t my strength. I knew the basics and could employ them, but I knew, about two thirds of the way through Armor AIT, that I would never be a big deal in the armored world.
I nearly changed my mind about that when it came time to start learning about strategy.
“Wait, James!” You say. “You were already talking about that!”
No, bub, I wasn’t. I was talking about tactics – tactical means the actual actions that you take to achieve an objective. Strategy was different – and strategy was right up my alley.
We’d talked about strategy in infantry operations, but it was .. different. Infantry strategy was merely an extension of tactics, more like a game that one of my Armor AIT instructors suggested I learn – Chess. In this game, you have a bunch of different pieces, the same as your opponent has, but you have to figure out how to beat your opponent. The way to do that was to environ not just what moves you can make now, but what moves you can make, later – based on what move you make next, and also based on what moves your opponent might make.
I’d done some of this kind of strategic planning when I was getting ready for my assault on the tenements closest to my Bronx empire. Weakening them around the edges, wearing them down, getting them paranoid about the wrong things.. That’s not exactly what strategy required for the use of armored elements, but it was similar.
That chess game was a godsend, too – because it gave me a new awareness, a new way of looking at different kinds of units, engaging the enemy together.
While Armor AIT focused on tanks as the central piece, I knew it was secondary to my expected role – infantry. Ultimately, everything devolved to a ground war, and an infantry-centric ground war at that. I ‘played the game’ where Armor AIT was concerned, but the strategy component I started leveraging in my mind’s eye as a way to integrate disparate forces into an overall fighting force – the strengths of one, overcoming the weaknesses in another in a complementary fashion that infantry just couldn’t do on it’s own.
We worked with air defense artillery, space-based bombardment (although not a lot, since that created a much bigger “boom” than we usually needed!), aviation, and even NavOps in a limited way. Radio communications for all of this was at first a devastating blow to my ego – I KNEW strategy’s foundational principles, but radio communications had been… well, let’s just say it wasn’t my strongest point, in Infantry AIT. Fortunately, this turned out to be a non-issue, when I discovered that it was possible to segregate communications and use not just different frequencies, but also different types of radios. At first I was a l
ittle overwhelmed, but then I realized I could use my implant to tweak how I was handling this.
It all got easier at that point.
Remember Private Ma and the elevation / incline problem? Well, when we had to re-boresight the main gun, he left the boresight…. In the bore. When we test-fired? Yeah.
Ma wasn’t stupid, he just made a lot of really dumb mistakes, none of which would get him booted out, but most of which got him no end of grief from other people.
He got lumped in with a crew when we were doing field maneuvers, and some idiot decided to try to create a smokescreen while they were “sneaking” across a field. You guessed it, Private Ma again. Unfortunately, he’d not fueled the tank properly, and the lower flashpoint of the aviation gas (which was, fortunately, not incompatible with the engine!). The smoke generator – which was nothing more than a plate on the engine manifold that got really hot, and a bleed valve that pushed fuel onto this plate – caught fire. When he hit the fire dispersal system, and started to egress the tank, he neglected to take off his headset, and it caught – not letting him leave the tank. We all watched as the exercise was terminated, and he stood there squealing, “HELLLLP! I’m STUUUUCK!”
Rage & Fury Page 13
