Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 14

My PDP still won’t let me onto MilNet, but the document reader still works. Most troopers in my platoon only use the reader for field manuals and military reference materials, but I figured out a while ago that it works with any form of electronic text. There are plenty of public repositories for literature out there, and it takes me all of two hours to shovel a small library worth of classic books onto my PDP.

I’m a third of the way through “Heart of Darkness”, and halfway through my second donut, when the door opens, and Major Unwerth walks into my room.

“As you were, Private,” he says as I wipe my mouth and dump donut, napkin, and PDP onto my night stand. I hate the fact that he’s in full Class A uniform, and I’m in flimsy hospital garb. The difference in dress makes me feel vulnerable, and the fact that I’m in bed only makes it worse. The only way I could feel more uncomfortable would be if he walked in on me in the bathroom while I’m taking a dump.

“Major,” I say. “Did you go all the way to Shughart and back since breakfast?”

“Yes,” he says. “I had a meeting with the battalion commander over lunch. I see they’re feeding you okay in here.”

“Yes, sir. All the luxuries of home.”

“Well, good. Do you feel up to a debriefing? I need to get your version of events on the official record.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to having a Legal Corps officer in the room, if you’re going to do that, sir.”

Major Unwerth makes a face as if he just caught a whiff of something unpleasant. His amiable demeanor evaporates in a blink.

“You’re entitled to nothing, Private. You’re about three nanometers away from a court-martial, and you can be damn glad I didn’t bring a pair of MPs with me to park outside your room and escort you every time you leave to take a piss. I’d keep a low profile if I were you. Now, you can give me your version of the events to record, or I can write down that you refused to give a statement. Come to think of it, I’d appreciate it if you just did that and saved me a bunch of paperwork. I’m getting a bit tired of your attitude.”

I’ve changed my mind about the disciplinary offense. I reach out to grab the major by the lapels of his Class A smock, but before I can get a hold of him, someone yanks him backward violently. I see the look of grim satisfaction on his face replaced by one of shocked surprise.

The major left the door open, and neither of us heard Sergeant Fallon come in. She is out of her powered chair, and even with a missing lower leg, she has the strength and leverage to haul Major Unwerth away from my bed as if he’s merely a moderately stuffed combat pack. He falls on his ass in a rather ungraceful fashion, and Sergeant Fallon is on top of him in a blink. She seizes him by the collar with one hand, and pins him to the floor. With the other hand, she snatches one of the pens the major carries in the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. She uncaps the pen with a flick of her thumb, and presses the pointy end right against the major’s throat. Then she brings her face close to Major Unwerth’s, until their noses almost touch.

“Listen up, fuckhead,” she says. Her voice is so infused with anger that it comes out as a hoarse growl.

“That man over there is one of mine. He dragged me through half a mile of hostile territory. If I ever hear you talking to him again like he’s some green recruit who overstayed his weekend leave, I will tear out your trachea and piss down your neck. Is that understood?”

I can see Major Unwerth’s throat move under the tip of the pen as he swallows. There’s naked fear in his eyes now, and the sight of it gives me intense satisfaction. Part of me wants Sergeant Fallon to drive the barrel of that pen right through his throat.

Finally, he gives an almost imperceptible nod. Sergeant Fallon releases him and drops the pen in front of him. Her face is contorted with disgust, as if she has just cleaned out a latrine with her bare hands.

“You are out of control, Sergeant,” Major Unwerth says. He tries to sound assertive, but his voice is unsteady. “Assaulting a superior officer, again. That’ll get you drummed out, Medal of Honor or not.”

“You can go back and report me,” Sergeant Fallon says. “They may even manage to lock me up before I get a hold of you again. In fact, you better hope they do. I’ll tell you one thing, though. Every last grunt in the battalion is going to know about the stunt you’re trying to pull with Grayson, and then your life won’t be worth a bucket of warm piss. Have fun checking the shitter for frag grenades.”

“You are out of your mind, Fallon,” Major Unwerth says. He stands up and straightens his jacket collar and tie. “You can’t threaten me like that. The CO is going to throw you into a cell and throw away the access code.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Fallon says. “He might. And think about what lovely headlines that would make for the fucking Army Times. ‘Medal of Honor Winner Tries To Kill Officer’. There’s a morale booster for you. I’m sure the civilian press is going to be all over that one.”

She steps in front of him again, and he recoils.

“I don’t give a shit, Major. You want to turn me in? Fine. We’ll see if the CO is willing to deal with the bad press. But you let Grayson take the fall for Saturday, and I’ll make sure your ass is in a body bag before the end of the month.”

The major straightens out his tie and jacket. He shoots me a scowl, and then makes eye contact with Sergeant Fallon again. I can almost smell his fear, but he’s trying to maintain poise in front of a lowly private and his squad leader.

“The brass at Division is throwing fits over Detroit, Sergeant. The civvies are up in arms. They’re still putting out the fires, you know. That rocket took out twelve million adjusted dollars of government property, and thirty-seven civilians. You’re out of your mind if you think the battalion can sweep that one under the carpet.”

“Make it happen,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I don’t care how you do it. You sock Grayson with so much as a weekend curfew, you might as well just eat your gun.”

“And how the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“Transfer me,” I say.

Major Unwerth and Sergeant Fallon both look at me in surprise.

“Do what now?” the major asks.

“Transfer me,” I repeat. “Send me to a different service. You get to tell the division brass you’ve kicked me out, and they have something to tell the civvie press.”

“Not a chance,” Major Unwerth says. “You can’t transfer out of TA.”

“Sure he can,” Sergeant Fallon says. “They do inter-service transfers all the time. Get on the comms with your friends in S1, and make it happen.”

“The only way we ever do those is through Occupational Needs transfers. All I could get him would be a shit job. They’d put him in a slot they can’t fill with volunteers.”

“I don’t care,” I say. “I’ll take whatever they have, as long as it gets me off the planet.”

“Do it,” Sergeant Fallon says to the major. “Do it, or I’ll make sure the rest of the battalion knows why I slugged you the first time, before they busted me down to Corporal.”

Major Unwerth just glares at Sergeant Fallon. I have no idea what she has on him, but it must be excellent blackmailing currency, because he bends over, snatches his hat off the floor, and then walks out of the room without another word or glance. He pulls the door shut behind him with emphasis.

“He’ll come back with a dozen MPs and have us both thrown in the brig,” I say.

“No, he won’t,” Sergeant Fallon replies. “Trust me on that one. He’ll call his buddies and shake loose a few favors. You’ll get your transfer, you’ll see.”

“You must have some shit on him,” I say.

“You have no idea.”

She doesn’t share any more details, but I can see that she’s completely unconcerned about just having assaulted and blackmailed the battalion’s S2 staff officer.

“Let’s just say I had a one-time Get Out Of Jail card, and I just used it on your behalf. Now finish your food and take a nap. Don’t worry about Major Unwerth anymore. The next time he comes to see you, he’ll mind his manners.”

The next morning, I find that my PDP has network access again. I’m in the middle of breakfast—scrambled eggs and toast, with a bowl of rice cereal on the side—when I hear the faint chirp that indicates waiting messages in my mail queue. I pull the PDP out of the night stand drawer and check the screen to see eighty-nine messages waiting for me. More than half of them are official company or platoon announcements, schedule changes, and general bulletins, but the rest of my mail queue is personal stuff, messages from platoon mates checking on my well-being. I scan the incoming queue until I find what I had hoped to see—a message from HALLEY D/SBCFS/LUNA/NAVY. The subject line is “Halfway there”.

I open the message with the impatience of a pill head unscrewing the cap on a bottle of black market pain killers.

>Everything OK? Haven’t heard from you in days. Did you pull guard duty on the ass end of your base, or something? Anyway, drop me a note. We’re officially halfway through Flight School. If you think Sergeant Riley was a hard-ass, you should meet my flight instructor. Tomorrow is my first hands-off flight on the right seat. I’d send pictures if they’d let me take some. Check in, will you? That’s an order, Private. (I outrank you now. HA!) —D.

I read her message a few times, just to make sure I can recall it from memory at will if my MilNet access gets turned off again for some reason.

I activate the keypad to write a response. I want to tell her about everything: Saturday’s domestic call, the squad shot up, Stratton and Paterson killed, my injuries, the court martial hanging over my head. But as my fingers hover over the keys, I find that I can’t write it all out after all. No matter how I arrange the words and sentences in my head, the text does not even begin to convey what’s on my mind. The MilNet isn’t the right vehicle for that kind of conversation, and once again, I don’t want to burden Halley with bad news.

I start typing out a reply, this one as vague and non-specific as possible, despite all the stuff swirling in my head that feels like it will blow off the top of my skull if I don’t let off some pressure and share my troubles with someone who’s on my side. I tell Halley that I’ve been laid up in sick bay for a few days, but that I’ll be back at battalion soon, that she’s a brown-nosing little instructor pet for getting herself promoted ahead of me, and that it won’t matter because I’ll be a twenty-star general before the Navy abandons all judgment and makes her a genuine officer. They will do just that, of course—on graduation from flight school, they’ll promote her to Ensign and send her to her first fleet assignment. I may not even be in the TA anymore when that happens, and I’ll never know about it, since I won’t have access to the MilNet anymore. If they kick me out of the military, Halley will never be able to contact me again, even if she wanted to stay in touch with a washout who has a dishonorable discharge around his neck for the rest of his life.

The thought of being back in the PRC, forever pondering the opportunity I lost, and being cut off from the only friends I’ve made since getting out of public school, hits me harder than anything else I’ve experienced in the last week. The thought of my impending death back on the streets of Detroit-7 wasn’t half as bothersome. Even the knowledge of Stratton’s death, the squad mate I liked best, doesn’t quite shake me like the thought of being back in the place I left, and being doomed to stay there forever after getting a taste of life elsewhere. Everything in the PRC is bland and gray and hopeless, but I didn’t even know just how bland that life was until I got to be alive for a while. Half the things we do in the military are tedious, boring, or dangerous, but at least you’re alive enough to feel boredom or fear. In the PRC, you have no contrast in emotions. You just wake up every day and feel as inert as the bed you woke up in, just a chunk of public property that’ll be broken down and recycled once it falls into disrepair.

I send the message into the MilNet, up to the satellite and then across the quarter million mile stretch of space between my hospital room and the Spaceborne Combat Flight School on Luna. Then I shut off the PDP, and stow it in the night stand drawer.

I feel like crying for the first time in many years, and there’s nobody in the room to witness it, so I give in to the urge and let the tears come freely.

In the afternoon, I go back down to the chow lounge, to see if Sergeant Fallon is around. I spot her in a corner by one of the projection windows, flexing her right knee and looking at her lower leg. When she sees me approaching, she smiles and raps her knuckles on her new shin, which has the dull gleam of anodized metal.

“Titanium alloy,” she says as I sit down in the chair across the table from her. “Feels weird, but it’s much stronger than the old leg. Maybe I should have the other one replaced, too.”

“That was fast. Didn’t they just fit you for that yesterday?”

“Day before yesterday. They bumped me to the top of the spare parts queue. I’ll have to suffer some dog-and-pony show with a few people from Army Times in return. They’re having me do a few weeks of rehab before I get to go back. As if I don’t know how to walk anymore all of a sudden.”

“Thank you for what you did, Sarge. You didn’t have to put your ass on the line for me. Shit, I’m just a Private with three months in the battalion. You have a whole lot more to lose than I do.”

“Don’t talk out of your ass, Grayson,” she says, and gives me a hard glare. “There’s nobody in the squad worth less than anyone else. You pick up a rifle and stand your watch, you’re one of us, and it doesn’t matter how many stripes you have on your sleeve. Shit, look at Unwerth—he’s a Major, and any of you grunts are worth ten of his kind.”

“Yeah, well, he still has lunch with the battalion commander, and we don’t.”

Sergeant Fallon laughs out loud.

“Let me tell you something about the boss,” she says. “He’s an Infantry grunt. He was actually a sergeant before he went to OCS. And he can’t fucking stand Major Unwerth. Thinks he’s just a ticket puncher, which is right on the money, of course.”

“Ticket puncher?”

“Those are the guys who go up the chain of command and collect promotion points along the way. When they get a field command, they lead from the rear. And when they’ve gotten just the bare minimum time in a combat command to be eligible for the next promotion, they get themselves transferred out. When I got into the battalion, Major Unwerth was First Lieutenant Unwerth, and he was my platoon leader. Best officer the SRA had at Dalian, I tell you that.”

“Is that when you punched him out?” I grin. The story is legend in the battalion, of course, and like all Army stories, it exists in a hundred different variants, each one doubtlessly exaggerated. The mildest versions have Sergeant Fallon storming into the company CP and butt-stroking the platoon leader with her rifle in front of the company commander and the battalion XO.

“Well,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I’m under orders from the boss not to tell that story to anyone, least of all to the junior enlisted. Let’s just say that he made a bunch of bad calls, and he’s lucky he’s still sucking down air.”

Sergeant Fallon folds the leg of her hospital pants back over the metal of her new lower leg. She never wastes a movement. All her actions are always efficient and to the point. I watch as she folds the bottom of the pants leg exactly three times, tugging the completed fold once to make sure there are no wrinkles in it.

How much can one person push their luck? I wonder. She’s survived a lot of dangerous missions, collected a Medal of Honor along the way, and never even thought about quitting, even when she had full retirement offered to her on a silver platter. They blow off half her leg, and she shrugs and goes back to work a few weeks later. This is her job, and she will do it until they shoot something off the medics can’t replace. I know I’m not cut from the same cloth as Major Unwerth, but I also know that I am not made from the same stuff as Sergeant Fallon.

“I hate to leave the squad short,” I say.

She looks up and smiles at me. Sergeant Fallon’s smiles are so rare that she looks like a completely different person for a moment.

“Don’t even worry about that, Grayson,” she says. “They’ll send a few new guys fresh out of Basic. If you can get the Army by the balls and make them give you what you want, you have to take the opportunity, because that only happens once in a blue moon. The screwing usually goes the other way.”

“I just don’t want the squad to think I’m bailing on them, Sarge.”

“They won’t,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I’ll let them know what went down.”

We look at each other across the table. Something strange has happened since Saturday. She’s still my sergeant, and I’m still her private, but somehow our relationship has changed. We’re still as far apart in rank and position as we were before we dropped into Detroit, but on a certain level, we’re equals. In a way, I feel closer to her than to anyone else, even Halley.

“I’ll miss them,” I say. “I’ll miss Stratton. He was a trip.”

“He was, wasn’t he?” Sergeant Fallon smiles again. “Always running that mouth of his, making jokes about everything and everyone. I’ll miss the cocky little bastard. He was a good guy.”

We sit in silence for a while. Sergeant Fallon studies her untouched mug of coffee, while I look at the smooth plastic surface of the table and stare at the spot where my coffee would sit, had I ordered any.

At the end of the week, I am bored to tears. There’s only so much network watching my brain can endure before I want to stick a fork into my ear. The only things that keep me sane are my daily chats with Sergeant Fallon down in the chow lounge, and the messages I’m exchanging with Halley and my squad mates. I learn that Halley passed her first flight on the right-hand seat with flying colors. The right seat is where the pilot-in-command of a drop ship sits, an arrangement that is the opposite of any other ship class in the arsenal. Apparently, she’s a natural with a Wasp.

I also learn that Stratton and Paterson are being buried in their hometowns this weekend. Stratton is from SeaTacVan, Seattle-Tacoma-Vancouver, and Paterson grew up in some small city on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s TA tradition that the squad mates of a fallen trooper provide the honor guard, and the squad leader heads the funeral detail, but Sergeant Fallon is still in rehab, so Battalion is going to send the platoon leader instead, Lieutenant Weaving. Most of the squad is still on light duty, but everybody opted to go anyway. Stratton was my best friend in the squad, and I would have liked the chance to tell his folks how well we got along from the start, and how he had made me feel at ease when I came into the squad. It’s the kind of thing I figure I would want to know if my son went off to join the service, and came home in a coffin two years later.

On Friday, just before lunch, the door to my room opens again, and Major Unwerth walks in, immaculately dressed in his ironed Class A smock.

“At ease,” he says as he enters the room. I am fit enough to do push-ups once again, but I wouldn’t have snapped to attention for him anyway, but he just said the phrase on autopilot anyway, saving both of us a great deal of discomfort.

He walks up next to my bed, hat tucked underneath his arm. I look up at him and pointedly close my PDP. I was in the middle of composing a message to Halley, and I’m mildly irritated at the interruption, but Major Unwerth still has my fate in his hands, so there’s a great deal of anxiety mixed in with the irritation. I am, however, determined not to show this prick any more weakness, so I merely meet his disapproving gaze with what I hope is a neutral expression.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. “I got you an inter-service transfer to the Navy.”

I feel a sudden buoyancy in my stomach, and it’s pretty clear that I can’t quite keep the sudden relief out of my face, because Major Unwerth gives me a grim smile.

“However, there are some things you won’t like. For starters, your time-in-service counter will reset. That means you’ll start with the Navy as if you had just finished Basic. Your service time with the 365th won’t count towards your sixty-two-month obligation, or promotion eligibility.”

He’s correct—I don’t like that part at all—but he’s setting the terms, and I have a strong feeling that those aren’t up for negotiation if I want to get out of TA and into space.

“Also, you’ll be going into Neural Networks. That specialty is marked Urgent Occupational Need, so once you finish tech school, you’ll be locked into that job for the duration of your first enlistment period.”

I try to recall my knowledge of the TA Neural Network guys, and all I can remember is that it involves sitting on a chair in front of a NN admin console. It doesn’t sound at all like exciting or challenging work, but I already know that this is my only way into the Navy right now, so I just nod my head.

“Finally,” Major Unwerth says, “you leave as soon as you get medical clearance, straight from here. You’ll report to Great Lakes for your slot in the next Navy Indoc training cycle, just like a recruit fresh out of Basic. Five weeks of Indoc, and then it’s off to your tech school. No going back to Shughart once you sign the paperwork.”

That condition is much harder to swallow than the previous two. I don’t care about losing the few months of service time I had built up in the battalion, and I don’t mind learning how to sit in a chair and hold down a computer console for the rest of my service time, but being excised from my squad with such speed and finality feels like I got shot in the gut all over again. Apparently, I can’t quite conceal my sudden dismay, because Major Unwerth frowns at me.

“It’s a bit too late for you to change your mind now. I called in a lot of favors for this. Don’t think I’ll go back and undo all the paperwork now.”

“I’ll sign whatever I need to sign.”

Major Unwerth puts his hat and briefcase down on my bed, all the way by the foot end, and extracts a neat stack of forms from his briefcase.

“Now, I can stand here and let you read all the fine print, if you want, or you can just go ahead and sign, so we can both get on with our lives. There’s no hidden clause that will have you smashing ore in a refinery ship, I promise.”

From what I know about the Major so far, I wouldn’t trust his promise further than I can pull a Hornet-class drop ship with my teeth, but I know that he’s afraid of Sergeant Fallon, and I also know that the Sarge would break Major Unwerth’s neck if he went back on his promise. I hold out my hand for the forms, and he hands them to me. I briefly skim the stack of paper—dense Legalese, just like our enlistment forms back at Orem—and turn to the last page. There’s a pen clipped to the document clasp that holds the forms together.

For the third time in my short military career, I sign a bunch of forms and change my status with the stroke of a pen.

“As of this moment, you’re no longer in the Territorial Army, Mister Grayson. Your status is Assigned Navy, as if you had just finished your Basic training. You’re still a member of the Armed Forces of the NAC, but you’re not in the Navy until you report to Great Lakes.”

I nod slowly as I hand the stack of forms back to the Major. He tucks them into his briefcase, and then looks at me expectantly.

“The PDP is TA property,” he says when I shrug in response. “You need to turn it in. They’ll issue you a new one in the Navy.”

I take my PDP, with the half-finished message to Halley still on it, and hand it to the Major with numb fingers. The PDP won’t reveal my personal files to anyone, and the data is stored on the MilNet directly. As soon as I open my new PDP, my half-written message will be on the screen, exactly at the point where I left off, but it still feels as if I’m handing over my diary to a bully. Major Unwerth takes the PDP and slides it into his briefcase without even glancing at it. Then he takes a folded set of forms out of a side pocket and tosses them onto the bed.

“These are your transfer orders, and that concludes our business. Farewell, Mister Grayson,” he says, and turns to walk out.

“Wait a second,” I say. “I don’t have my personal gear from Shughart.”

“I’ll have them send your stuff,” he says without pausing. He opens the door and walks out without looking back. He doesn’t even take the time to close the door behind him, as if I’m no longer worthy of any expenditure of energy on his part. I watch as he briskly walks down the hallway to the elevators.

Deprived of my PDP, I have no entertainment left, no contact with my squad mates or Halley. I lie down on the thin pillow again and stare at the projection window that is selling me the illusion of a windy autumn lakeshore outside.

I got what I had wanted since I walked into the recruiting office—a slot in a space-going service. When the doctor releases me for active duty, I’ll take a military shuttle up to Great Lakes, where all the new Navy recruits get their initial training, and in six weeks, I’ll go to my tech school on Luna. I’ll finally go into space and see the planet from a few hundred thousand miles away. After my training, I’ll travel on an interstellar warship that will take me dozens of light years away from this place.

So why do I feel like I’ve just been kicked to the curb and abandoned?