Starship Troopers

by Robert A. Heinlein

  So why shouldn’t I go career?

  All right, all right—but how about this nonsense of greasing for a commission? That was something else again. I could see myself putting in twenty years and then taking it easy, the way Ace had described, with ribbons on my chest and carpet slippers on my feet…or evenings down at the Veterans Hall, rehashing old times with others who belonged. But O.C.S.? I could hear Al Jenkins, in one of the bull sessions we had about such things: “I’m a private! I’m going to stay a private! When you’re a private they don’t expect anything of you. Who wants to be an officer? Or even a sergeant? You’re breathing the same air, aren’t you? Eating the same food. Going the same places, making the same drops. But no worries.”

  Al had a point. What had chevrons ever gotten me?—aside from lumps.

  Nevertheless I knew I would take sergeant if it was ever offered to me. You don’t refuse, a cap trooper doesn’t refuse anything; he steps up and takes a swing at it. Commission, too, I supposed.

  Not that it would happen. Who was I to think that I could ever be what Lieutenant Rasczak had been?

  My walk had taken me close to the candidates’ school, though I don’t believe I intended to come that way. A company of cadets were out on their parade ground, drilling at trot, looking for all the world like boots in Basic. The sun was hot and it looked not nearly as comfortable as a bull session in the drop room of the Rodger Young—why, I hadn’t marched farther than bulkhead thirty since I had finished Basic; that breaking-in nonsense was past.

  I watched them a bit, sweating through their uniforms; I heard them being chewed out—by sergeants, too. Old Home Week. I shook my head and walked away from there—

  —went back to the accommodation barracks, over to the B.O.Q. wing, found Jelly’s room.

  He was in it, his feet up on a table and reading a magazine. I knocked on the frame of the door. He looked up and growled, “Yeah?”

  “Sarge—I mean, Lieutenant—”

  “Spit it out!”

  “Sir, I want to go career.”

  He dropped his feet to the desk. “Put up your right hand.”

  He swore me, reached into the drawer of the table and pulled out papers.

  He had my papers already made out, waiting for me ready to sign. And I hadn’t even told Ace. How about that?

  XII

  It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable… He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor… No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate.

  True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending…the ships themselves must be ruled under a system of absolute despotism.

  I trust that I have now made clear to you the tremendous responsibilities… We must do the best we can with what we have.

  —John Paul Jones, September 14, 1775; excerpts from a letter to the naval committee of the N.A. insurrectionists

  The Rodger Young was again returning to Base for replacements, both capsules and men. Al Jenkins had bought his farm, covering a pickup—and that one had cost us the Padre, too. And besides that, I had to be replaced. I was wearing brand-new sergeant’s chevrons (vice Migliaccio) but I had a hunch that Ace would be wearing them as soon as I was out of the ship—they were mostly honorary, I knew; the promotion was Jelly’s way of giving me a good send-off as I was detached for O.C.S.

  But it didn’t keep me from being proud of them. At the Fleet landing field I went through the exit gate with my nose in the air and strode up to the quarantine desk to have my orders stamped. As this was being done I heard a polite, respectful voice behind me: “Excuse me, Sergeant, but that boat that just came down—is it from the Rodger—”

  I turned to see the speaker, flicked my eyes over his sleeves, saw that it was a small, slightly stoop-shouldered corporal, no doubt one of our—

  “Father!”

  Then the corporal had his arms around me. “Juan! Juan! Oh, my little Johnnie!”

  I kissed him and hugged him and started to cry. Maybe that civilian clerk at the quarantine desk had never seen two non-coms kiss each other before. Well, if I had noticed him so much as lifting an eyebrow, I would have pasted him. But I didn’t notice him; I was busy. He had to remind me to take my orders with me.

  By then we had blown our noses and quit making an open spectacle of ourselves. I said, “Father, let’s find a corner somewhere and sit down and talk. I want to know…well, everything!” I took a deep breath. “I thought you were dead.”

  “No. Came close to buying it once or twice, maybe. But, Son… Sergeant—I really do have to find out about that landing boat. You see—”

  “Oh, that. It’s from the Rodger Young. I just—”

  He looked terribly disappointed. “Then I’ve got to bounce, right now. I’ve got to report in.” Then he added eagerly, “But you’ll be back aboard soon, won’t you, Juanito? Or are you going on R&R?”

  “Uh, no.” I thought fast. Of all the ways to have things roll! “Look, Father, I know the boat schedule. You can’t go aboard for at least an hour and a bit. That boat is not on a fast retrieve; she’ll make a minimum-fuel rendezvous when the Rog completes this pass—if the pilot doesn’t have to wait over for the next pass after that; they’ve got to load first.”

  He said dubiously, “My orders read to report at once to the pilot of the first available ship’s boat.”

  “Father, Father! Do you have to be so confounded regulation? The girl who’s pushing that heap won’t care whether you board the boat now, or just as they button up. Anyhow they’ll play the ship’s recall over the speakers in here ten minutes before boost and announce it. You can’t miss it.”

  He let me lead him over to an empty corner. As we sat down he added, “Will you be going up in the same boat, Juan? Or later?”

  “Uh—” I showed him my orders; it seemed the simplest way to break the news. Ships that pass in the night, like the Evangeline story—cripes, what a way for things to break!

  He read them and got tears in his eyes and I said hastily, “Look, Father, I’m going to try to come back—I wouldn’t want any other outfit than the Roughnecks. And with you in them…oh, I know it’s disappointing but—”

  “It’s not disappointment, Juan.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s pride. My boy is going to be an officer. My little Johnnie—Oh, it’s disappointment, too; I had waited for this day. But I can wait a while longer.” He smiled through his tears. “You’ve grown, lad. And filled out, too.”

  “Uh, I guess so. But, Father, I’m not an officer yet and I might only be out of the Rog a few days. I mean, they sometimes bust ’em out pretty fast and—”

  “Enough of that, young man!”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll make it. Let’s have no more talk of ‘busting out.’” Suddenly he smiled. “That’s the first time I’ve been able to tell a sergeant to shut up.”

  “Well… I’ll certainly try, Father. And if I do make it, I’ll certainly put in for the old Rog. But—” I trailed off.

  “Yes, I know. Your request won’t mean anything unless there’s a billet for you. Never mind. If this hour is all we have, we’ll make the most of it—and I’m so proud of you I’m splitting my seams. How have you been, Johnnie?”

  “Oh, fine, just fine.” I was thinking that it wasn’t all bad. He would be better off in the Roughnecks than in any other outfit. All my friends…they’d take care of him, keep him alive. I’d have to send a gram to Ace—Father like as not wouldn’t even let them know he was related. “Father, how long have you been in?”

  “A little over a year.”

  “And corporal already!”

  Father smiled grimly. “They’re making them fast these days.”

  I didn’t have to ask what he meant. Casualties. There were alw
ays vacancies in the T.O.; you couldn’t get enough trained soldiers to fill them. Instead I said, “Uh…but, Father, you’re—Well, I mean, aren’t you sort of old to be soldiering? I mean the Navy, or Logistics, or—”

  “I wanted the M.I. and I got it!” he said emphatically. “And I’m no older than many sergeants—not as old, in fact. Son, the mere fact that I am twenty-two years older than you are doesn’t put me in a wheel chair. And age has its advantages, too.”

  Well, there was something in that. I recalled how Sergeant Zim had always tried the older men first, when he was dealing out boot chevrons. And Father would never have goofed in Basic the way I had—no lashes for him. He was probably spotted as non-com material before he ever finished Basic. The Army needs a lot of really grown-up men in the middle grades; it’s a paternalistic organization.

  I didn’t have to ask him why he had wanted M.I., nor why or how he had wound up in my ship—I just felt warm about it, more flattered by it than any praise he had ever given me in words. And I didn’t want to ask him why he had joined up; I felt that I knew. Mother. Neither of us had mentioned her—too painful.

  So I changed the subject abruptly. “Bring me up to date. Tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”

  “Well, I trained at Camp San Martín—”

  “Huh? Not Currie?”

  “New one. But the same old lumps, I understand. Only they rush you through two months faster, you don’t get Sundays off. Then I requested the Rodger Young—and didn’t get it—and wound up in McSlattery’s Volunteers. A good outfit.”

  “Yes, I know.” They had had a reputation for being rough, tough, and nasty—almost as good as the Roughnecks.

  “I should say that it was a good outfit. I made several drops with them and some of the boys bought it and after a while I got these.” He glanced at his chevrons. “I was a corporal when we dropped on Sheol—”

  “You were there? So was I!” With a sudden warm flood of emotion I felt closer to my father than I ever had before in my life.

  “I know. At least I knew your outfit was there. I was about fifty miles north of you, near as I can guess. We soaked up that counterattack when they came boiling up out of the ground like bats out of a cave.” Father shrugged. “So when it was over I was a corporal without an outfit, not enough of us left to make a healthy cadre. So they sent me here. I could have gone with King’s Kodiak Bears, but I had a word with the placement sergeant—and, sure as sunrise, the Rodger Young came back with a billet for a corporal. So here I am.”

  “And when did you join up?” I realized that it was the wrong remark as soon as I had made it—but I had to get the subject away from McSlattery’s Volunteers; an orphan from a dead outfit wants to forget it.

  Father said quietly, “Shortly after Buenos Aires.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  Father didn’t say anything for several moments. Then he said softly, “I’m not sure that you do see, Son.”

  “Sir?”

  “Mmm…it will not be easy to explain. Certainly, losing your mother had a great deal to do with it. But I didn’t enroll to avenge her—even though I had that in mind, too. You had more to do with it—”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Son, I always understood what you were doing better than your mother did—don’t blame her; she never had a chance to know, any more than a bird can understand swimming. And perhaps I knew why you did it, even though I beg to doubt that you knew yourself, at the time. At least half of my anger at you was sheer resentment…that you had actually done something that I knew, buried deep in my heart, I should have done. But you weren’t the cause of my joining up, either…you merely helped trigger it and you did control the service I chose.”

  He paused. “I wasn’t in good shape at the time you enrolled. I was seeing my hypnotherapist pretty regularly—you never suspected that, did you?—but we had gotten no farther than a clear recognition that I was enormously dissatisfied. After you left, I took it out on you—but it was not you, and I knew it and my therapist knew it. I suppose I knew that there was real trouble brewing earlier than most; we were invited to bid on military components fully a month before the state of emergency was announced. We had converted almost entirely to war production while you were still in training.

  “I felt better during that period, worked to death and too busy to see my therapist. Then I became more troubled than ever.” He smiled. “Son, do you know about civilians?”

  “Well…we don’t talk the same language. I know that.”

  “Clearly enough put. Do you remember Madame Ruitman? I was on a few days leave after I finished Basic and I went home. I saw some of our friends, said goodby—she among them. She chattered away and said, ‘So you’re really going out? Well, if you reach Faraway, you really must look up my dear friends the Regatos.’

  “I told her, as gently as I could, that it seemed unlikely, since the Arachnids had occupied Faraway.

  “It didn’t faze her in the least. She said, ‘Oh, that’s all right—they’re civilians!’” Father smiled cynically.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “But I’m getting ahead of my story. I told you that I was getting still more upset. Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do…even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

  “Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

  “Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock—you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain—and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.”

  At that moment, before I could answer anything, the wall speakers around us sang: “—shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young!” and a girl’s voice added, “Personnel for F.C.T. Rodger Young, stand to boat. Berth H. Nine minutes.”

  Father bounced to his feet, grabbed his kit roll. “That’s mine! Take care of yourself, Son—and hit those exams. Or you’ll find you’re still not too big to paddle.”

  “I will, Father.”

  He embraced me hastily. “See you when we get back!” And he was gone, on the bounce.

  In the Commandant’s outer office I reported to a fleet sergeant who looked remarkably like Sergeant Ho, even to lacking an arm. However, he lacked Sergeant Ho’s smile as well. I said, “Career Sergeant Juan Rico, to report to the Commandant pursuant to orders.”

  He glanced at the clock. “Your boat was down seventy-three minutes ago. Well?”

  So I told him. He pulled his lip and looked at me meditatively. “I’ve heard every excuse in the book. But you’ve just added a new page. Your father, your own father, really was reporting to your old ship just as you were detached?”

  “The bare truth, Sergeant. You can check it—Corporal Emilio Rico.”

  “We don’t check the statements of the ‘young gentlemen’ around here. We simply cashier them if it ever turns out that they have not told the truth. Okay, a boy who wouldn’t be late in order to see his old man off wouldn’t be worth much in any case. Forget it.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant. Do I report to the Commandant now?”

  “You’ve reported to him.” He made a check mark on a list. “Maybe a month from now he’ll send for you along with a couple of dozen others. Here’s your room assignment, here’s a checkoff list you start with—and you can start by cutting off those chevrons. But save them; you may need them later. But as of this moment you are ‘Mister,’ not ‘Sergeant.’”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I call you ‘sir.’ But you won’t like it.”

  I am not going to describe Officer Candidates
School. It’s like Basic, but squared and cubed with books added. In the mornings we behaved like privates, doing the same old things we had done in Basic and in combat and being chewed out for the way we did them—by sergeants. In the afternoons we were cadets and “gentlemen,” and recited on and were lectured concerning an endless list of subjects: math, science, galactography, xenology, hypnopedia, logistics, strategy and tactics, communications, military law, terrain reading, special weapons, psychology of leadership, anything from the care and feeding of privates to why Xerxes lost the big one. Most especially how to be a one-man catastrophe yourself while keeping track of fifty other men, nursing them, loving them, leading them, saving them—but never babying them.

  We had beds, which we used all too little; we had rooms and showers and inside plumbing; and each four candidates had a civilian servant, to make our beds and clean our rooms and shine our shoes and lay out our uniforms and run errands. This service was not intended as a luxury and was not; its purpose was to give the student more time to accomplish the plainly impossible by relieving him of things any graduate of Basic can already do perfectly.

  Six days shalt thou work and do all thou art able,

  The seventh the same and pound on the cable.

  Or the Army version ends:—and clean out the stable, which shows you how many centuries this sort of thing has been going on. I wish I could catch just one of those civilians who think we loaf and put them through one month of O.C.S.

  In the evenings and all day Sundays we studied until our eyes burned and our ears ached—then slept (if we slept) with a hypnopedic speaker droning away under the pillow.