by Tom Kratman
At legion level—most other armies would have said “division level”—there was also an artillery cohort available to be attached to each tercio (though ours would instead be an organic part of the Tercio Amazona). It could have three batteries of either very heavy mortars (160 millimeter!), mostly for the Marine tercios, 122 millimeter self-propelled guns for the mechanized infantry, or light, auxiliary powered (they had a small engine mounted to move them short distances) 85 millimeter guns for the infantry. These made excellent antiarmor weapons, at least against medium armor, too, by the way. The artillery cohort had a headquarters and support battery, as well.
The headquarters and support cohort of the tercio had companies of personnel administrators, military intelligence pukes (“self-propelled oxymorons,” we called them), communications soldiers, medics, mechanics, truck drivers, supply rats, and a headquarters detachment. The recruiting maniple, training maniple, and band were also assigned to the headquarters.
If a tercio was to be reinforced by its share of its legion’s heavy stuff, it would pick up another engineer maniple, along with companies of medium tanks, heavy (forty-two ton) self-propelled tank destroyers, and a heavy antiaircraft battery. Possibly it might also get a cohort or two of heavier artillery pieces and rocket launchers.
All in all, it came to about forty-one hundred soldiers for the men, without being reinforced by legion or with their normal artillery cohort, a bit under seventy-eight hundred for us. That includes having our own artillery cohort. Maybe sixteen hundred of those could be expected to be on maternity leave at any given time.
That was if, and only if, we were ever to be allowed to expand to a full tercio. Carrera had made clear that this was a matter of some doubt in some important circles. Sure, we had been trained to be pretty damned good light infantry. This said precisely nothing about whether or not we could handle other weapons and pieces of equipment. It was a great looming question mark hanging over our future.
* * *
About a third of us had been picked to go to Cazador School. That was the sine qua non of being promoted to centurion or officer rank. Only one girl who hadn’t completed the “sickener” was picked for Cazador School, and she had crawled three miles dragging a broken leg before passing out just short of the finish. Not everyone who had finished was picked.
Some of the others had to be trained on different jobs for the tercio, clerks to cooks, medics to mechanics. We had anywhere from three weeks to three months to wait for those schools to begin. The legion kept us on active duty for that time. The rest had been “asked” (sure we were!) to volunteer to take part in some experiments to see what, besides infantry, we could and could not do.
It was something of a shock, after the sheer brutal meanness of our training cadre in Basic, to be treated so…pleasantly by the men who taught us how to use, to the extent we and they could, the heavy weapons. I think this was because of three different factors. One, we really were soldiers now; part of the team, albeit an uncertain part, so there was no real need for condescension or reason for contempt. Two, we were sharp, alert, and on the go, more so than an equivalent group of men usually were. The instructors probably appreciated that. Three—let’s be honest—we were damned cute after all that exercise, and with our hair beginning to grow back and our skin to heal. And these instructors were straight.
They sent us a female tribune. There were still a few holdovers from the days when political connections could get you a commission and the old Civic Force had been less selective about commissioning people than the legion was. She wasn’t a real soldier, though. She knew it, we knew it, and she knew we knew it. Her name was Claudia and, I suppose, for the merely administrative crap she had to do she was adequate. To be fair, I understand she also wasn’t a bad Intel analyst, not to say that kind of work takes a real officer or anything. But we never respected her at all; she wasn’t one of us.
Someone we did respect was the temporary first centurion they sent to keep us in line. He was a straight male, seconded to us from the Tercio Santa Cecilia, the place where the disabled and mentally retarded did their service. Centurion Robles had lost the use of the lower half of his body in a training accident, smashed spine. That’s how he ended up in the TSC. Despite that, and even bound in a wheelchair, he kept us on a tight rein. He divided us into the groups that would rotate through the various experiments the legion wanted to run on us and managed the whole thing.
They began my group on medium and heavy mortars. Curiously enough, it wasn’t the heavy 120 millimeter mortars that gave us trouble. They were too heavy for anybody to really carry any distance. So was their ammunition. That’s why the 120’s were all truck- or mule-borne, with extra trucks and mules for the ammo. While the chunks of the mortar were heavy, we could and did find techniques that let us set them up and use them quickly enough to meet the legion standards.
The lighter mortars—the 81 millimeter jobs—really were a problem, though. They were light enough, barely, for a group of men to backpack along with their personal equipment. And a maniple of male infantry could carry enough ammunition to make it worthwhile to have the mortars on hand to support them.
The men could also carry the mortar’s forty-two pound bipod, even with all their other gear, without too much trouble. We just couldn’t, not indefinitely. We tried having two of us carry the bipod. That didn’t work; it wasn’t big enough to allow two of us to get under it and still walk. We tried switching off between two of us very frequently. That didn’t work either; with everything else the load was just too heavy even for the brief time someone had to carry it. The 81’s turned us to rabble fast.
We could, and did, sling the bipods on a pole, just like we’d slung our sick sisters’ personal gear during Basic. Like then, it was a misery. It was also much slower getting the mortar into action.
Inez asked one day, “Well, why not dispense with the 81’s and just have us use 120’s?”
Our instructor answered, “Don’t be silly, girl. The reason they don’t give trucks for the 81’s is that they are supposed to be backpacked; to go into places, firing positions, where a truck wouldn’t reach; to support their rifle platoons wherever those platoons might go. 120’s can’t always do that; and their range isn’t all that much better than an 81’s. And forget the notion of giving you 60 millimeter mortars. You would be the only ones with them and supply would be too much of a problem.”
Carrera had given us a solution, though it was a solution not without its costs. The legion gave us mules, the only mules on active service outside of Fifth Mountain Tercio, to help us carry the damned things. They could march almost anywhere we could; almost anywhere the men could. The cost? About four hundred drachma an animal, plus feeding and caring for the surly critters. The Tercio Amazona became one of only three tercios to need a veterinarian on its strength.
(I later heard that there was something of a tiff between Carrera and Parilla over the mules. But, since Parilla had approved—or been tricked into approving—our being designated as a mountain tercio, he could hardly complain about our having the same mules the Fifth Mountain had. Yes, Carrera was a sneaky bastard.)
The last mortars they tested us on were the 160’s, both versions, Zion’s and Volga’s. The legion has both, though it is slowly phasing out the Volgan ones except in fixed fortifications. Both were flops, as far as we were concerned. The Volgan gun was too heavy for us to hope to set up in action, though once it was set up we could load it without too much trouble as it was a breach loader, with the breach low to the ground. The Zioni gun we could set up, barely, but we simply could not lift those ninety pound shells up to the muzzle to drop them down. Christ, a number of us weren’t tall enough to reach the muzzle, not even on tippy toes.
We could use both the mortars found in a cohort, the 81’s and 120’s. That was something.
* * *
We also found that the recoilless rifles used by male tercios were too heavy for us. The solution: more mules. That really
wasn’t so great a solution, though. It’s tough when an enemy tank stumbles up on you and you have to spend extra minutes trying to unpack your gun and ammunition. Well, we could hope they would be gentlemen and give us time. Fat chance. Well, it was our own chance we were taking, wasn’t it?
* * *
The next experiment was in artillery. We started on the 85 millimeter guns. It’s funny, but firing the guns is the easiest thing about them. Digging them in, camouflaging them, above all carrying and breaking down the ammunition for firing, were much, much harder. But, with crews of eleven women (nothing less would do) instead of the usual eight men, we could manage quite well, really. You know they were not going to give us any men to do the heavy work.
I understand that one of the world’s major armies did an experiment on using women to crew artillery pieces, but actually had men do all the setting up, digging in, camouflaging, carrying and breaking down of ammunition, etc. The women just loaded and fired the guns, which were mostly the lightest ones available. I can’t imagine what that proved, other than the ability of any army to make a bad idea look good, through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced routinely and on an heroic scale.
We also found we could serve the self-propelled 122 millimeter guns. That was the outside limit of our ability, though. The 122 millimeter rocket launchers were impossible, we could not lift the rockets high enough to reload the launchers. They weighed more than some of us did, even with the extra muscle we’d put on. The towed 152 millimeter guns were beyond us for the same reason the rockets were; the ammunition was too heavy. The guns were too heavy also, really. The same proved true of the 180’s.
We could use the 152 millimeter self-propelled guns just fine; they had flick rammers and so did most of the work themselves. It was decided, rightly I think, to call that experiment a failure because, while we could crew the things perfectly well in action, we could not lift the ammunition into the stowage racks inside the turrets. Fat lot of good a gun is, after it’s run out of ammunition, if its crew can’t reload more. And, after one woman had to be invalided out of the tercio line and made into a clerk because she kept trying until she ruined her back (tough girl!), the powers that be simply wrote off any further attempt to turn any of us into medium gunners.
* * *
The Force has three kinds of tanks. We still call them Ocelots, Jaguars, and Pumas, even though the latest ones don’t bear an exact resemblance to what we had way back when.
The Ocelots are light amphibious “tanks.” Really, they were not intended to be used as tanks, even light ones, having been designed as infantry fighting vehicles. They’re a Volgan design, modified by us. Every standard infantry tercio has a maniple of them, twenty tanks. Even with the armor we’ve added on, they weigh less than twenty tons, about the same as a Great Global War medium tank. Ocelots could move pretty quickly across the land, and at a respectable speed in the water. They mounted a 100 millimeter gun, which can fire a useful antitank missile as well though, because of terrain factors, we didn’t use the missile much. With a full crew of three women, we could fight those things just fine. Maintenance was tougher, but still possible.
Don’t get the wrong idea; when an Ocelot ever meets a real tank in battle, head on and in the open, what you will have is a dead Ocelot and three dead Amazons. But, for the other work of supporting the infantry with machine gun and cannon fire that can’t be easily suppressed, or the odd antiarmor ambush, they are superb.
There was something the instructors told us that you might find interesting. We were better tank drivers than the men. They were head-shakingly emphatic on that point.
Why? In our country, most men know how to drive a car. That means they have already acquired a mindset of fairly civilized driving habits before the legion gets them. Most of the Amazonas, on the other hand, didn’t know how to drive a car before enlisting. That meant that we were in no way as restrained as men tankers were. We also didn’t have habits that, while quite appropriate to driving a car on the highway, were equally inappropriate in driving a tank across broken ground with people shooting at you. We could, and did, put those tanks through paces that turned some of our male instructors white to see. Provided you don’t break your neck, it’s a lot of fun jumping a tank over a ditch…or doing one’s bit to prevent forests.
On the other hand, when the first thing you learn to drive is a tank, it can have adverse effects on your driving when you finally do learn to drive a car. Check the statistics: Tercio Amazona tankers are the bar-none, absolute worst civilian vehicle drivers in the country, possibly in the world. Not one has ever gotten a job as a heavy truck driver, though some of our non-tanker women have.
The Pumas and Jaguars should have been even easier than the Ocelots. All three have automatic loaders, so even though most ammunition for the 125 millimeter cannon weighs about one and a half times what an Ocelot’s does, it didn’t make any difference, for loading purposes. But the Ocelot’s missile, as opposed to the high explosive round, had to be hand loaded, which is a bitch.
The auto loader does have a distressing tendency to load arms, shoulders and heads instead of shells. Ah, well, there’s a price for everything.
It is a pity, don’t you think, that tanks crews have to do more than fight their tanks?
Problem number one: Automatic loaders—like all other pieces of complex machinery—break down regularly. For whatever reason, tank autoloaders broke down a lot more often. When that happened, we could not load the main gun, the cannon, by hand, as quickly as the men can and sometimes must. This was true even though the ammunition comes in two parts, projectile and propellant, that are loaded separately.
Problem number two: Automatic loaders, again. They are called robust. That just seems to mean they are heavy. When one broke we couldn’t lift or move the things we had to in order to get at it to fix it.
Problem number three: The tracks on which the tanks moved. When a set broke, or the tank threw one off—both of which happened with frightening frequency—the crew had to fix it. This is, even for men, a difficult operation. What three average men could, just barely, do, three unusually strong and robust women could not.
Why didn’t we add a fourth crew-woman to the tanks? Honey, where do you propose we put her? The inside of those things is already cramped beyond belief. I doubt, too, that even four women could fix the track on a Puma or Jaguar. Six sometimes could, under ideal conditions.
Yes, I know, I know. We did use the crews of two or three tanks when we were in the motor pool. Sadly, tanks throw their track at other times and places; times and places where the rest of the tanks can’t stop to help one. Battle.
So, although it had been proposed that the Tercio Amazona have a maniple of heavies as well as lights, that thought died a richly deserved death. For the same reason, we were never given any of the heavy self-propelled tank destroyers, the SPATHAs. Well, Fifth Mountain didn’t have any either. So?
Could we have combined the Gorgidas and Amazona Tercios to make a small brigade or division which could use all those weapons? Yes…probably, but there would have been a price to pay. Could we have dispensed with the idea of a segregated regiment and had men crew the heavier weapons? Just maybe, but at an even greater price.
You’ve got to understand the ideology of a regiment. It isn’t a sausage casing, a dead animal’s intestine, into which one grinds up and stuffs people to make them fit a mold. Besides, anyone so lacking in character that you can make him or her fit a mold isn’t worth the effort. All you’ve got is the appearance of something and then only under pressure. Apply a different pressure and you’ll get a different appearance. Apply the pressure of a line of enemy tanks and infantry with malice in their hearts coming towards that woman and the appearance you’ll get is of the woman’s—or a man’s!—back as she runs away.
Franco had lectured us on this in Basic, at length, in one of our relatively few formal, prepared lectures.
* * *
“A regiment i
s a home, a family,” Franco had said. “It is the largest real family of which mankind is capable. It has its own religion: Courage, fortitude and the traditions of its past feats. It has its own martyrs and saints in the always remembered spirits of its brave, honored dead. Its members look toward its future as their guarantee of a kind of immortal life after death.
“The regiment is selective as to who it admits as family members. Not everyone can fit. At a bare minimum, those who are allowed in must be such as will not disgrace the regiment. That is why the regiment is initially brutal to those who would join it, to quickly and efficiently drive out the weak and the meek who might some terrible day bring down the regiment.
“But from those who can fit into the regiment, much can be tolerated, as any family tolerates its own eccentrics, to include those whose eccentricity is to be unusually creative, courageous, and good. Armies which have no true regiments, being fragile things, held together only by the weak forces of law rather than the insuperable ties of habit, custom, and genuine emotion, cannot tolerate eccentricity in any meaningful and useful form. Without a natural binding force, a special base to hold their members together, these armies must impose an artificial, unnatural and mindless order that stultifies the best in their members.
“A regiment must have a special base for its existence. Among professional, long service armies, that professionalism can provide that base. For others there must be something else.
“Most of the regiments in the legion are geographically based. To take the Second Infantry Tercio as an example, nearly every Rio Abajano naturally thinks his barrio to be the best in the world, however poor in monetary terms. So, too, must be its regiment. And he will certainly try to make it so. Also, one cannot run and hide from one’s roots so easily. Disgrace in his regiment will follow him so long as he remains in that neighborhood. Disgrace in the regiment amounts to internal exile for life.
“For my regiment, the Tercio Gorgidas, our base of existence, our unique quality, is our gender orientation. Whatever you may think of it, whatever anyone may think of it, to the soldiers of the Tercio Gorgidas it is natural, normal, and preferable. And when we are together in our regiment we need neither hide it, nor be ashamed of it, nor defend it against others.
