Recruit

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  “You heard about Proctor, right?” Ryck asked.

  “Yeah, DOR’d. That shocked me, I be sayin’. Did you talk to him?” Joshua asked.

  “Only for a minute. I was platoon runner for the day and had to take some papers to the company office. He was out on the bench, waiting,” Ryck told him.

  The “bench” was right outside the company office hatch. Any recruits leaving training, whether being dropped or by DOR, sat on the bench while awaiting their series and company commander interviews. Occasionally, a recruit being dropped could convince the officers to overrule the DIs and give a recruit another chance, but normally, once they had plopped their butt on the bench, it was the start of an inextirpable exit process. The other recruits considered it bad juju to catch the eye of anyone on the bench, so they were usually studiously ignored.

  “I asked him what happened, and he said it was just too tough. I didn’t have much time to ask anything else, and, you know . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. You didn’t want any of that bad karma rubbing off. He was on a 556 contract, right? So he’s goin’ to be a squid now?” Joshua asked.

  “Yeah. Remember, he already got his enlistment bonus, so he has to serve for three years in the Navy,” Ryck confirmed.

  Most of the recruits were on a normal 550 contract. This enlistment contract technically provided only for the opportunity to serve. If a recruit DOR’d or was dropped, then no harm, no foul. The recruit usually just went home. The 556 contract was given only offered to highly-qualified recruits, and it came with certain guarantees along with an enlistment bonus. If a recruit was dropped, he might or might not be required to “pay back” his bonus with service in the Navy. It depended on just why he was being dropped. If a 556 baby DOR’d though, it was usually to be shipped off for three year’s service as a sailor.

  “He got us to switch to the Corps, but he be DOR’in’ himself. That be messed up. That is messed up,” he said, correcting himself.

  On Prophesy, the Tortillites seemed to take pride in their differences, including their manner of speaking, almost keeping those differences as badges of distinction. At Camp Charles, though, there was a significant gravitation to the center, that being Earth Standard. At least Joshua’s accent and speech really wasn’t that much different. Many of the recruits came from planets where another language was primary, but they also spoke Standard as did 99% of humanity. Some recruits had more difficulty. There was K’Ato Pluz from First Squad, for example. The DIs rode him unmercifully on his almost incomprehensible speech. The rest of the squad had to drill him on cleaning up his Standard.

  “So what else is goin’ on with you?” Joshua asked. “1044 goin’ to stay booger platoon?”

  “Oh, man, don’t even think it,” Ryck said. “King Tong’s going batshit crazy. He says he’s never had a booger platoon, and we’re not going to be the first. I swear, if I have to ‘visit’ The Lost Lady one more time, I’m just going to lose it.”

  “You know our heavy hat, Sorensen, right? Even he thinks Phana-whatever-tong be certified looney,” Joshua said. “1042’s supposed to be messin’ up, too. You think you can catch them?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got platoon RCET tomorrow. That’s a graded event. I think we’re doing OK, but who the hell knows?”

  “Well, good luck on that,” Joshua said as the first of the recruits in his platoon started standing to get rid of their trays. “What about your sister? She OK?” he asked before shoveling in the last of his eggs.

  “Check it out,” Ryck said, pulling out his PDA and opening the gallery and selecting a photo.

  “She got married? And look at her! If my dear mama wouldn’t die of a heart attack, if you had told me she was this hot, I would have come an’ grabbed her!”

  “In your grubbing dreams,” Ryck told him. “She got married Friday night. That’s what she said, at least, but maybe it was really in the morning. I think she’s trying to adjust date and time since I’m over here on Tarawa. So she either meant Friday night in Williamson, Friday night here at Camp Charles, or Friday night Universal Greenwich.”

  “1045, get it moving,” Joshua’s platoon guide shouted out.

  “It seems as if my esteemed leader desires our presence post haste in order to stave off the incipient vitriol of our drill instructors, so while I would love to offer discourse on your sibling’s matrimony, I must take leave, monsieur,” Joshua said as he stood up and offered a sweeping Three Musketeers bow. “Adieu!”

  Ryck laughed out loud before responding, “Your still a grubbing land-worm, even if you can manage to sound like a pantywaist.”

  “You wound me, comrade,” Joshua said, still in character, as he walked off.

  “What’s with him?” Hodges asked from the other side of Ryck. “Why’s he talking like that?”

  “Oh you know. He’s with 1045, and they are all messed in the head there,” Ryck said before focusing back on his shit-on-a-shingle.

  Chapter 12

  Ryck liked RCET, but he absolutely loved Camp Lympstone, where the field training was conducted. During Phases 1 and 2, the platoon DIs were God and Satan combined with full and constant control over the recruits. At Lympstone, the DIs were still ever-present, but the TDIs took over more of the recruits’ time. The TDIs were not pushovers, though. They would still explode with the best of the DIs, and they would still assign “motivational training,” but the focus was more on teaching recruits the skills they needed to function as combat Marines.

  Camp Charles was no Hilton resort, but it was plush when compared to Lympstone. Recruits slept in small two-man tents called “bivvies,” bathed in field showers, and ate combat rations twice a day. It was rough, uncomfortable, and Spartan—and Ryck couldn’t get enough.

  As with the Legion, a Marine’s origin was meaningless. What mattered was being a Marine. However, tradition had it that the senior TDI at Lympstone came from the UK back on Earth or from Mollytot, Liverpool, or Barclays, the three UK-settled worlds. Master Sergeant Cletton Smith was no exception to this tradition. He was a short, very dark-skinned SNCO, whose eyes seemed to miss nothing. The officer in charge was Major Simms, who unlike most of the officers at Camp Charles, did not observe from afar but actively got involved with the recruits. Training Drill Instructor Smith scared Ryck, as he scared most recruits, but Ryck knew his place with him. It was disconcerting, though, when running during PT to have Major Simms show up, jogging beside a recruit, casually asking how things were going.

  Part of the Lympstone experience was the use of an entirely new vocabulary. Chow was no longer chow, for example, but “scran,” and the one hot scran each day was served in a “galley,” not a mess hall. The first few days at Charles had been bad enough, learning to use, for example, “head” instead of toilet, “deck” instead of floor, and “hatch” instead of door. At Lympstone, they took it even further, and messing up was sure to result in push-ups—or “press-ups,” that is. The TDI who took it most to heart was not even from a British background. The bull-necked Training Drill Instructor Jorge Jarumba was from Rio Tinto. The Tintoites still spoke Spanish as their primary language, yet the TDI was the most fervent keeper of the tradition.

  “You ready?” Recruit Fire Team Leader Lysander asked Wagons.

  Ryck had been promoted back to fire team leader two more times—which meant he’d been fired from the position, too. The platoon as a whole was down to 52 recruits. Ben Sutcliff had broken a leg on the obstacle course and been recycled, but the rest had been either drops or DORs. The recruits were now organized into three squads of either three or four fire teams each. Somehow, beyond all of Ryck’s expectations, his fire team, with Wagons, Hodges, and Calderón was intact. Hodges was even showing signs of developing into an asset.

  “I was born ready,” Wagons replied. “Let’s kick some ass, OK?”

  ‘That’s fine, except we’re only facing hulks and targets out there. No incoming,” Ryck said.

  “Plenty of incoming, there, recruit,” W
agons told him.

  “You know what I mean. No rounds from an aggressor. The ‘incoming’ is our supporting arms,” Ryck said.

  Today’s training evolution was to be the first of many combined arms exercises. The recruits had practiced every movement up to a company level. They had done it under simulated fire, with enemy “hits” recorded, assessing simulated casualties. They had moved against each other in mini-war games. What they had not yet done was move in conjunction with Navy and Marine Corps space, air, artillery, and armor assets. The day before, they had sat in the stands at Range 109 while the artillery had lit up the range. It had been an amazing sight, and the concussions could be felt shaking their very bones. It had been both impressive and frightening. For the day’s evolution they would have to maneuver in conjunction with not only that level of destruction, but also the presence of a tank.

  “Five mikes!” Shaymall shouted out. “Squad leaders, get at them.”

  Ryck glanced up as the squad’s current leader, Harris Thompson, made a quick check of First Fire Team. With the new skins issued on the last day of Phase 2, there wasn’t as much to check. There was the omnipresent weapons safety check and a quick check of the required battle gear, but their personal Marine armor had proven to be pretty much as advertised. The body armor consisted of two levels. The first was the “skins.” The trousers and blouse looked and felt like normal civvies aside from the cammo patterns. The fabric, though, was interwoven with nano-fibers which offered some ballistic and fire protection, monitored physical readings, and chameleoned to the surroundings. The chameleon function was disabled during boot and was set on a dull yellow for all recruits and then changing to other colors for different training functions, but this was the actual working uniform each recruit would take with him into the fleet.

  The second level was the added armor. Each Marine had a custom-fitted set of armor inserts, the “bones.” The inserts weren’t actually inserted into the skins, though. The bones, which weighed only 5 kg in total, came in 22 pieces, not counting the gloves. Each piece was pushed up against the appropriate body part, and it immediately lampreyed onto the fabric, drawing both power and the appropriate camouflage pattern from it.

  During the first week of Phase 1, each recruit had been required to get his bones on within 30 seconds. Ryck’s first attempt was over one-and-a-half minutes, and he thought 30 seconds was impossible. It really hadn’t taken too many more attempts, though, to reach the required speed. By now, it had already become second nature.

  Harris was shouting at them to get in the bleachers, so Ryck and the other three trooped over and filed in to take their seats. One good thing about Lympstone was that they basically took their “squadbay” with them. Their bivvies were lined up 20 meters in back of the bleachers for Range 109, the Combined Firing Range. Their one hot would be packed out to them, so they had no nice galley at which to sit, but they were not humping back and forth each day while at the range.

  Captain Jericho welcomed them to the range and the day’s evolution. At Charles, the officers did formal inspections and handled interviews for drops or anything else that came up, and they sometimes observed training, but at Lympstone, they were more involved. Each and every safety brief was conducted by an officer. Captain Jericho had done many of their briefs, so he was a familiar face. He had the frame prosthetic that hid his regen for both legs. Rumor had it that this was his fourth regen: two as an enlisted Marine, two as an officer. Regens were rejected after too many attempts, and Ryck didn’t know just how many times that was. If Captain Jericho deployed again and lost another arm or leg, could his body handle one more regen? Would he actually go through life with a prosthetic? That was a sobering thought.

  The safety speech was pretty much the same as for every other training evolution: listen to the TDIs, pay attention to everything, keep the weapon on safe until ready to fire, make sure to identify a target before firing, and so on. The platoon had been doing pretty well in this area, at least. Ben-ben had been their only casualty, and he would be back in a follow-on training company. Platoon 1042 had two recruits seriously hurt, and one of them wasn’t likely to ever fully recover. The worst case was in 1043, though. A recruit had suddenly dropped dead during a simple training run back on T4. They’d only gone a klick or so when bam, he was gone. He was rushed to sickbay within minutes, but the docs couldn’t bring him back.

  Captain Jericho finally finished, and Gunny de Gruit took over. The gunny was the TDI in charge of combined arms training, and he went over the first evolution for the umpteenth time.

  We know, we know, Ryck thought, careful to keep an expression of rapt attention on his face, though. Let’s get this thing going!

  It really was a simple evolution. Each squad would move on line up the range, firing at targets as they popped up. Supporting fires would precede them, walking them up to the objective, which was a trenchline about a klick away. Once they reached the trenchline, the exercise would cease, and they would march back in a column to the start.

  There were two platoons doing the exercise, and 1044 would go second, so Ryck settled in for a long wait for his squad’s turn. The first squad to go was lined up, their armor shifting to the red of live-fire training. For this evolution, the recruit squad leader didn’t give any orders. A TDI took over that, standing in the center of the squad line, and two other TDIs followed on either flank. Their skins and bones were adjusted to the bright green of their normal identifying colors, making them stand out against the recruits.

  Training Drill Instructor de Gruit gave the OK, and the squad hesitantly stepped off. Within moments, the impacts of the 60mm mortars were visible, 100 meters downrange. The mortars’

  ECR could be adjusted from 10-60 meters. When the recruits had been introduced to the rounds, boxes had been set up on the range, and a TDI casually sauntered to within about 15 meters from the closest of the boxes. He turned to look back at the expectant recruits as the mortars were fired. Three rounds landed spot on in the middle of the assembled boxes, and they were totally destroyed. The TDI was untouched, and he just as casually sauntered back to the bleachers. The recruits were taught that the mortars sent out a blanket of poly-matrix darts with the darts disintegrating to dust at a set range, but it was a relief to see this actually work in a real life demonstration.

  Despite knowing this, several of the recruits in 1045’s First Squad faltered as the mortars landed. Ryck could sympathize with them—he’d even flinched sitting in the stands another 50 meters back, but he knew they deserved the hell the TDIs dropped on them. One lesson drilled into them over and over was that with combined arms, it was vital to keep in formation. Even when individual infantry positions could be monitored by the arty or mortar sections, a mortar took some time to impact, and moving out of an expected formation could be dangerous.

  In combat, things tended to be more fluid, but in training, it was safety, safety, safety. The envelope would be pushed, especially in Phase 5, so the staff worked to minimize casualties in the earlier phases. Too many dead recruits wouldn’t make the bigwigs back in the Federation Council happy.

  To the side of the range, a big M1 Davis had been sitting idle. It was in defilade, so the recruits could not really see much of the tank, but when it opened up with its 75 mm hypervelocity rail gun, the excitement level perceptibly rose in the bleachers. The firing report was rather subdued, more of a crack as the round exceeded Mach 5, but the explosion as the round impacted on a truck hulk was awe-inspiring. This was the first time any of the recruits had actually witness a tank firing.

  “That’s what I want to do,” Wagons whispered beside him. “Armor is where it’s at.”

  Quite a few of the recruits wanted to go armor, but they would have to prove themselves as infantry first. Those with the aptitude would be siphoned off, just as with other branches. With armor, though, there were size limitations. Larger Marines just need not apply.

  The Davis fired only once, then the 81 and 120mm mortars and the 10
5 and 155 howitzers opened up while Marine air came streaking in, all while the squad moved forward. Several times, targets popped up, and the recruits opened fire. Their reports sounded like little pop guns in the midst of all the bigger explosions.

  Finally, the recruits reached their objective. Flashing range lights indicated a cold range, and the squad was marched back. The recruits took their positions in the stands. Ryck could see they were pretty amped, but he couldn’t just wander over to them and ask them how it had been.

  The range staff and TDIs were going over the monitors, and it took them a good five minutes before the next squad was given the order to get in position. When the squad started moving, it was pretty much a repeat. They got on line, there were lots of explosions, and they reached the objective.

  When the third squad made their run, the Davis’ impact had faded. It had only been assigned one target, an old truck of some sort, and after hitting it twice, it was pretty much scrap. The hypervelocity round didn’t have much to hit, and impacting on the ground was not half as spectacular as when the round hit a vehicle.

  Fourth platoon’s last squad offered something different in the routine, though, and not in a good way. They were about 500 meters downrange when the range lights flashed, sending the range cold. Ryck couldn’t see what had happened. He was too far away for a direct view, and he was not in position to see the monitors, but one of the greenshirts came back escorting a recruit. They reached the stands, and one of Fourth Platoon’s DIs, not the Lympstone TDIs, took over, leading the ashen-faced recruit off the range and back to the bivvie. Ryck didn’t really know the recruit, but he knew he wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, whatever he had done.