She nodded angrily, and leaned on me breathing heavily, until she could stand up again. I could tell that needing assistance, even briefly, was killing her pride. “Thanks, uh,” she glanced at my name tag, “Bishop. God damn it’s hot here. I’m from Seattle.”
"Ha! Northern Maine here. You don't know what cold is. " She let me hold onto her shoulders to steady her a few seconds, until her legs stopped shaking. Ten feet away, a guy's knees buckled suddenly, and he face planted in the dirt, another victim of the sudden heat. Miller recovered and climbed stiffly into the back of the truck by herself. Once the truck was loaded, we drove off to a tent city that was being built atop a bluff. I looked around, trying to savor my first moments on an alien world. There wasn't much to savor. It was dry, and dusty, and the air still smelled burnt, so the smell wasn't from the dropship's engine exhaust. Low vegetation clustered around rocks, it appeared to be a type of pulpy, fleshy lichen. I guessed the plant stored its own water supply, like a cactus. Bouncing around in the back of the truck, we looked at each other and grimaced knowingly. Camp Alpha was our first alien planet. And it sucked.
Sitting on the truck was my only time to savor the experience, as soon as we got to our assigned campsite, the Army put us to work setting up tents. The heat wasn't so bad, now that I'd had time to get used to it, but the extra gravity was a bitch, and the burnt smell had saturated my nose. A staff sergeant assigned me, Cornpone and five others to set up a large medical structure, made of prefab insulated wall panels. It was tougher than it looked. "Let's start with this side wall section," I said, hoping that the sooner the tent was complete, the sooner we could go for chow.
There was a muffled sound like a really long, high-pitched fart, then the moaning started.
"Is that, bagpipes? WTF?" Cornpone exclaimed.
"Yeah, there's a British battalion on the other side of the camp." I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, to where I'd seen the Brits building their encampment.
"And they play bagpipes? For real? I thought that was an Irish thing."
Garibaldi scoffed. "Scottish, not Irish, you bonehead. Damn, don't you know nothin'?"
Valdez said "Hey, you hear the one about the Scottish guy? He's sitting at a bar, drowning his sorrows in whisky."
"Everybody got a good grip on it?" I asked "Lift with your legs, not your back."
Cornpone snorted. "Damn, Bish, you sound like my mother. We got this."
"So he says to the bartender," Valdez grunted with the effort, "he says, so, you build thirty houses, and when you walk down the street, do people say 'there goes MacDougal, the home builder? no, they don't'."
We got the wall up on top of our knees, and I told the team to get under it, and lift it to our shoulders. The extra gravity was killing me.
"Then he says 'you save five children from a burning building, and when you walk down the street, do people say 'there goes MacDougal, the rescuer? no, they don't."
"Valdez, will you shut up a minute? All right, people, lift!" I said in my best US Army voice of authority.
We got that bitch of a wall unit up above our shoulders, and were winning the fight against gravity, when Valdez gasped "'Then MacDougal says, ‘but you fuck one sheep’-."
We lost it. Men scattered as the wall unit came crashing down, and people were rolling on the ground laughing. I tried to bark an order, but I was laughing so hard that a snot bubble came out of my nose, and when people saw that, they fell over laughing again.
Lieutenant Gonzalez shot a dirty look at us, and a sergeant started walking in our direction. It was official, I had no business being in charge of anything, the Army made a huge mistake giving me even responsibility to set up a tent. I got the men back together, and we tried to lift the wall unit again, but every time we got it a few inches off the ground, Valdez started laughing at his own joke, and it cracked everyone up. Finally, I sent Valdez away to get us some water, called over a half dozen more guys, and we got the damn thing set upright and fixed into place.
"One sheep." Cornpone laughed, and I couldn't help joining him.
After we got the tent set up, Cornpone and I finally connected with the other two guys of our old fireteam; Sergeant Greg Koch, and Private Dave Czajka. We called Koch 'Sergeant', he had a nickname but you needed at least sergeant stripes to use it, unless you wanted a six foot three shaved head black man from Georgia glaring at you. You didn't. Dave we called 'Ski', because he was from Polish stock around Milwaukee, and even though his last name didn't end in '-ski', the rest of us figured it should have. Really, it was his fault for not having a decent nickname when he joined our unit. Damn, it was good to get the band back together! I had trusted all three of them with my life. We'd gotten into some hairy shit in Nigeria, we'd come through with nothing worse than some scars and bad memories. Before I left home, I'd sort of kept in touch with them by spotty emails, but I hadn't heard from them since then, and Cornpone and I weren't sure either of them had made the trip from Earth. They had, they'd been on a different Kristang ship, and arrived at Camp Alpha a few hours before us. Koch got us bunked into a tent, which we had to help set up, and he figured out where to go for chow. We were happy campers.
Sergeant Koch went off to do important sergeant things, and the dining facility wasn't opening for dinner until another three hours, so Cornpone dug into his pack for snacks.
"What you got?" Ski asked.
Cornpone winked. "Uh, let's see. Damn! I got a gen-u-ine smorgasbord of Hooah! bars."
"A smorgasbord?" I asked skeptically. "Really?"
"Oh yeah, a smorgasbord at least. Could be a plethora, maybe even, oooh, an honest to God, gosh-darned corn-u-copia of snack foods." It was funny to hear Jesse say 'plethora' in his deep southern accent.
"Cut the bullshit, man, you're making me hungry." Ski protested. "What flavors you got in there?"
"Well, I got Cinnamon Cardboard, of course, also Raisins 'n' Gravel, and, my personal fave, Original Sawdust."
Crap. I got stuck with Raisin 'n' Gravel. The raisins were harder to chew than the gravel.
The next morning, we were marched out to the shooting range after chow time. It was cold, the thermometer outside our tent said it was near freezing. Excitement was high; we all expected to finally get our hands on some incredible, super high-tech weapons from the Kristang. And maybe clothing that automatically heated and cooled you. I felt naked without a rifle. Standing in front of us was a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant with a crew cut so severe, it looked like it could cut your hand if your touched it. He wore combat pants and boots, but over his top was a red US Marine Corps sweatshirt.
“I am Gunnery Sergeant Cragen, of the United States Marine Corps.” Cragen paused as shouts of 'Oorah' and ‘Semper Fi’ rang out from the crowd. “I am relieved to hear that we have a few qualified riflemen among us. Since the rest of you are Army, I’ll try to talk slowly, so you can understand.” The other Marines laughed at that remark.
“Listen up, people!” There was a gray box on a table in front of him, he touched a button on the side of the box, and it swung open silently. Everyone craned their necks, we were finally going to see the super high-tech weapons that we'd be killing hamsters with. So it was understandable to hear the grousing when Sergeant Cragen pulled what looked like a standard M4 rifle from the box.
"Oh, fuck me!"
"You got to be kidding me!"
"This is bullshit, man!"
"An M fucking four?"
"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!" Which meant, of course, What The Fuck?
"Man, this is for shit," Ski whispered to me and Cornpone. Cornpone just spit on the burnt dusty ground.
Those were some of the milder comments. Cragen let the protests die down, rather than chewing us out for lack of discipline. "People, say hello to what we humans are calling the M4B1. The Kristang don't trust us with anything more powerful, and we won't need it for the missions we'll be assigned for the immediate future. The M4 Bravo unit fires ammo similar to the five point five six mike mike calib
er, two two three long cartridge you're used to. The difference is this," he picked up a bullet from the table, and pointed to the tip. "This is an explosive charge. The Kristang assure us this ammo will penetrate the body armor that Ruhar soldiers wear, if you select the explosive option, because the explosive is a shape charge. Like a HEAT round our tanks use. You can also select to deactivate the explosive, which you will do, depending on the rules of engagement in effect at the time. The way you select the mode for the explosive tip is with this switch here," he pointed to a recessed button on the back of the grip, which was convenient for right and left handed soldiers. "You slide up this cover in the grip, to expose this recessed button. It is recessed, so you knuckleheads don't activate the explosive tip option by accident. After firing nine rounds, which you can do in standard single shots or three round bursts, you have to press the button again to select explosives."
Cragen went on at length about the M4 Bravo, but for most people, the thrill was gone. Where was the self-guided ammo, the lasers, the genetic enhancements to make us super soldiers, the bionic eyes, the mech suits that allowed us to jump thirty feet in the air and run a hundred miles per hour? Where was all the cool stuff we'd seen in sci-fi movies? This was bullshit! The Ruhar could pound us from orbit with masers, railguns and smart missiles, and all we had were Vietnam-era rifles with fancy firecracker bullets?
Total bullshit.
A couple hours later, I got an M4 Bravo in my hands, on the firing range. It felt exactly like my trusty old M4, which I'd left behind at Fort Drum when I'd gone home on leave. And I never went back to Drum, so my rifle might still be there. The Kristang supplied us with conversion kits for our regular M4s, and the ammo with explosive tips. We learned later that much of our ammo came straight from Earth, with no fancy enhancements, because the Kristang had a limited supply of the explosive stuff. Each squad would get Kristang clips equal to half the normal weapons load, the rest would be regular 5.56MM ammo. Our allies figured we wouldn't need fancy ammo for the missions they were assigning to us. It was a bit insulting; any tough jobs in this war would be done by the adults, us human soldiers were sitting at the children's table.
My M4B1 came with two clips of explosive-tipped ammo, I took my turn on the firing range, practicing using the button to select explosives or not. The explosive mode was impressive, there was much cheering along the firing line as we saw metal targets shredded. Our regular bullets bounced off the targets, leaving only little shiny dents. One advantage of Kristang ammo is that every cartridge was exactly the same, down to the nano level; even better than what our snipers called 'matched ammunition'. And Kristang ammo fired much cooler and cleaner, so you could rock 'n' roll without melting or fouling the barrel. We still needed to take our weapon apart and put it back together. Blindfolded. And clean it. I took one of the Kristang bullets out of a clip and examined it closely. Other than being a different color and being perfectly smooth with absolutely no scuff marks or scratches, it looked like the standard NATO ammo I'd been using for years.
We were going into battle with none of the hoped-for enhancements, having to hitch a ride to every planet, and we weren't entrusted with any important missions. It was like the Kristang were merely humoring our desire to get into the fight. This was the future.
It wasn’t what I expected.
That first afternoon while we were on the firing range, a group of aircraft flew by, low and close enough for us to see them clearly. The aircraft circled around for hours, practicing landings, takeoffs and formation flying. I say aircraft instead of spacecraft, because the instructors on the firing range told us that's what they were, designed to fly in an atmosphere, and not capable of reaching orbit. What surprised me is they were Ruhar aircraft, not Kristang. Wherever we were going next, the Kristang wanted our pilots ready to use equipment captured from the hamsters, instead of the Kristang having to transport their own equipment across the star lanes. There were two basic types, known by the names given by humans; the Buzzard, which was a transport ship like a V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, and a sort of two person gunship like an Apache, that we called a Chicken. Just like the way we called the Ruhar hamsters, we gave disrespectful names to their aircraft. They were both vertical takeoff and landing craft like helicopters or tiltrotors, but they had jet engine pods at the end of their short wings, not rotor blades. We all had to admit they looked cool. And we were all proud to know humans were flying them, and would be flying them in combat. Soon, we hoped.
The next day, we got some of the other minimally upgraded toys the Kristang were allowing us to have. The most useful toy was a personal tactical radio that hopped frequencies, transmitted in encrypted bursts, and used wide-field white noise jamming in the background so their location was very tough to pinpoint. We all got a personal radio the size of a typical Earth smartphone, except it was thin as a credit card, with a touchscreen that couldn't be scratched, and you couldn't damage it unless you shot it with an explosive-tipped round. With the radio came an earpiece and microphone to wear under our helmets. Our helmet cameras transmitted video through the new radios, so squad, platoon, and company leaders could see what their soldiers were seeing. We could also take the radios off our belts, and use the screen to select cameras in our squad to view anyone else's camera. And, instead of one person in a unit being the designated radio operator, and lugging a heavy piece of equipment around, every soldier now had the ability to communicate to anyone else, across the planet. The touchscreen popped up a menu written in whatever human language you spoke into it. English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Hindi, you name it, the radio understood it all. We all had to admit that was cool stuff. People who had a Military Occupational Specialty related to comm equipment were out of a job, since humans were not allowed to screw with the gear, and didn't understand it anyway. Personally, it was all magic to me.
The Army wanted us to call the new tactical radios 'TacRs', for Tactical Radios. Some jokers were calling it the 'zPhone', because Z was as far beyond I in the alphabet, as the zPhone was beyond the iPhone. I'm sure the Army had some official name like Radio, Tactical, Multipurpose, Kristang Supplied, in accordance with Mil Standard blah blah blah. Whatever. The coolest feature of the TacRs was they could be used as translators, which was great, because none of us spoke a single word of Ruhar. I spoke some broken Spanish, and had learned some useful phrases in Hausa and Yoruba when I was in Nigeria, but really, I wasn't even all that good at speaking American. Your and you're still got me confused, which drove my mother bananas when I sent her email with grammatical errors. We all got to practice with our TacRs in translator mode, what you did was put the earpiece in one ear, and speak slowly and clearly into the little boom microphone near your mouth. You had to speak a couple pages of your native language when you first used your TacR, so the translator could understand your particular speech pattern. Somehow, the thing was able to figure the difference between my Downeast accent and Cornpone's Southern drawl. That was impressive by itself. You spoke into the mic, paused, and your words came out of the TacR's speaker in whatever language you selected. It could even detect another language being spoken near you, and automatically translate that into your own language. The sound on either end was smoother than I expected, although it still was clearly a computer voice. What impressed me was that the TacR handled slang pretty well, even ubiquitous military slang. When it didn't understand something, it made a humming sound, the machine equivalent of 'uh'. There was a French battalion a couple kilometers away at Alpha, a couple of their squads came over to visit one day, and the Frenchies got bombarded with requests to talk, so we could both try out our TacRs in translate mode. It was great, they spoke their Frenchie babble into their mics, and I heard it in English. I learned, for one thing, that French toast is not called 'French toast' in France, it's called 'pain perdu'. Which makes sense, when you think about it, I mean, why wouldn't the French just call it 'toast'? Although, why did we call our cheese 'American cheese'? Why didn't we just say 'cheese'? Right? Mayb
e I'm getting off the subject. Anyway, it was weird to hear me speak, and the TacR repeat my words in French, especially since the TacR actually used a French accent. It was so funny, for both sides, that we had great fun saying stupid stuff, and hearing the TacR translate it. Probably that was not the training the Army intended, but we did get a lot of use out of the translator and got comfortable with using it.
Some people reported they had tried the translator with Chinese and Indian troops, on visits to their parts of the base, and it worked darn well. As for how it worked with the Ruhar, we practiced with a computer speaking Ruhar, and all I can say is, I sure hoped the darned thing worked as well in the field as it did in practice.
Another new toy drew more groans when it was shown to us. Gunny Cragen again was standing on a platform in front of us, this time he pulled a bulky tube out of a box. "Say hello to the FGM-148 Bravo Javelin missile."
Shit. The Javelin was a decent enough weapon, a man portable fire-and-forget antitank missile that I'd used in Nigeria, but it had some issues. For starters, the description of 'man portable' was pushing the practical limit, the damned thing weighed fifty pounds. Civilians may think a weapon that enables a single soldier to destroy a main battle tank is worth every one of its fifty pounds, but they haven't humped one through the bush day after day. And that's fifty pounds on top of your rifle, 180 rounds of ammo, radio gear, canteen, MREs and everything else the Army thinks you need to carry. So Javelins are assigned to two-man teams, at least. In battle, one man acts as a spotter while the other operates the weapon, then they both get the hell out of there as fast as they can. Shoot and scoot, we call it.
Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) Page 6
