Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 15

My stuff arrives the next day. The battalion doesn’t even bother to send out a staff monkey to deliver my few civilian possessions. Instead, they arrive in a standard military goods mailer, a little plastic tub that’s barely bigger than a meal tray. Inside are the two sets of clothes I had with me when I went off to Basic, the clothes I only wore for my trip to Fort Shughart after that.

It feels weird to see my civilian stuff again. It’s my last tangible connection to my old life. One of the sets is the ensemble I wore when I went to see my father—a half-sleeved shirt, a pair of jeans made out of synthetic cotton, and a thin hooded jacket in inoffensive gray. This is flimsy stuff that costs just a few dollars to produce, rags for the peasantry. When I try out my old clothes, I suddenly feel inferior, unworthy, out of place. In a way, I’m back to being nobody: no longer a TA trooper, and not yet in the Navy.

I change back into my hospital clothes. As drab and simple as they are, they’re a uniform of sorts, and they change me back into somebody who has business being in this room at the military medical center. I no longer feel like a hood rat who has managed to sneak into a place where he doesn’t belong.

When I get down to the chow lounge for the now-customary afternoon coffee with Sergeant Fallon, the spot where my PDP used to sit in my waistband feels unnaturally empty. I didn’t fully appreciate just how much I relied on it until they took it away.

“Hey, Sarge,” I greet Sergeant Fallon as I sit down across the table from her. She’s wearing her dark hair open today, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her without her usual helmet-friendly hairstyle. She looks a lot more feminine this way, and the strands of hair framing her face greatly soften her chiseled features. She’s an attractive woman, and if she wore a set of glasses, she could pass for a librarian instead of a soldier, if she wore clothes loose enough to conceal her rock-hard warrior build.

“Hey there, Navy puke.”

I grin at her salutation.

“Not yet. I have to wait until the doc says that I’m back to normal, and then I have to report to Great Lakes straight from here for the next available training cycle.”

“Well, good for you,” she says. “So I guess I won’t see you again after tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“They’re sending me to a different facility for rehab. A few weeks of some Medical Corps therapist showing me how to walk. I’ll be totally out of shape by the time I get back to the battalion.”

I’d be willing to bet half my discharge bonus that Sergeant Fallon is doing push-ups and pull-ups in her room every day already. She’s not the type to sit on her butt, watch Network shows, and eat pastries for a few weeks. I already pity the poor therapist who almost certainly won’t be able to keep up with his new patient.

“The major took my PDP when I signed the transfer paperwork,” I say. “I can’t get in touch with anyone right now. If you make it back to the squad before the Navy gives me a fully enabled PDP…”

I don’t know whether I want her to tell my squad mates that I’m sorry, or that I miss them, or that I’m ashamed I have to leave them without even saying good-bye, so I don’t finish the sentence, but Sergeant Fallon merely nods.

Then she reaches across the table and holds out her hand.

“You’re not in my squad anymore. You’re not even TA anymore, technically speaking, so we can just go by first names now. I’m Briana.”

I take her hand and shake it.

“Andrew, but you knew that already.”

It’s a bit weird to think of her as Briana instead of Sergeant Fallon. A week ago, addressing her by that name would have been inappropriate chumminess and borderline insubordination. Now we’re just two people, no longer bound by the complex rules dictated by military tradition and protocol.

Still, a part of me will never stop thinking of her as my sergeant. She’s the toughest, most competent, and most even-handed soldier I’ve known, and she runs her squad as a strict meritocracy. If only a tenth of the military consisted of people like Sergeant Fallon, we would have kicked the SRA off of every inhabited celestial body between Earth and Zeta Reticuli fifty years ago already. As things stand, we’re weighed down by people like Major Unwerth, who coast through the system doing only the expected minimum. If a military is the reflection of the society it serves, it’s amazing that the Commonwealth is still at the top of the food chain on Terra. Even with all the dead wood in our ranks, we have been able to hold the line against the SRA, and the dozens of regional powers in the Middle East and the Pacific Rim that are short on resources and long on grievances with their neighbors.

“I hope I’ll see you again,” I say. “Can I stay in touch through MilNet?”

“Of course,” she says. “And when you get to take your leave, and you end up coming back Earthside for a week or two to visit the folks, stop by at Shughart and drop in on the squad, okay?”

“You can count on it,” I reply, even though I know that if I come back to Terra on leave, I’ll make a very wide berth around the old homestead.

“Space,” she says, in a tone that suggests the idea is the dumbest one she’s heard in weeks. “You couldn’t pay me enough to be a Navy puke, that’s for sure.”

“You’ve never wanted to get off Earth?”

“Hell, no.” She picks up her plastic coffee mug and takes a sip.

“Months at a time, in a big-ass titanium cylinder without windows, getting fat on Navy chow, and the only combat grunts on board are freakin’ Jarheads? No, thank you. I’ll stay on this over-populated ball of shit and slug it out with the Chinese and the Indians, thank you very much. There are still some decent patches of ground left on Terra, you know.”

“Yeah, I do,” I say, remembering the pristine little middle-class town near NACRD Orem, with its manicured trees and lawns, and the clean, snow-capped mountains rising up in the distance. “I just don’t think I’ll ever get a shot at living on one, not on this planet.”

“So you’ll try for twenty years and a spot on a colony ship?”

I shrug in response.

“Colony life is hard, Andrew. You think people are only nasty and mean and violent in the PRCs? You take a thousand of our best and finest, put ‘em on a colony ship, fly ‘em out past the Thirty, and drop ‘em on a newly terraformed pebble by themselves, and you’ll see all the shit attitudes from Terra popping up in short order. You’ll have the slackers, the self-righteous, the social engineers, the power-grabbers, the religious fruitbats, and three months of peace before people gang up in tribes again and start messing with each other’s shit. You think people like Unwerth only make it in the military? I’ve seen dozens of guys just like him in the civilian world. Imagine some jackass like him as your colony administrator, and the next arbitrating body is a few light years away. Some of those outer colonies only get a visit from the Navy once or twice a year, and then it’s some old frigate dropping off supplies and checking satellites before skipping the hell out of the system again as fast as they can unload their hold. You get your patch of land, but you’re truly on your own, at the ass end of the known galaxy.”

She pauses and takes another sip before shaking her head once more.

“That kind of isolation fucks with people’s heads, knowing that you’re so far away from the rest of humanity that your local sun can go nova, and it’ll take a generation before someone on Terra can see the event with a telescope. And then there’s the environment. You could end up in a place where ten below is considered a heat wave. Other places, you have three quarters of the local year without a sunrise, or a sunset.”

I don’t quite know how to answer. Everything she says is true, of course. The colonies are not exactly vacation resorts, despite the fact that the government has to hold lotteries for spots on the colony ships. Just like the military, there are always a hundred times more applicants than slots. Still, there are only a handful of colonies whose population has even broken the million mark, and the idea of sharing a whole planet with a tenth of the number of people living in the Greater Boston area is something I can barely wrap my head around.

“I’ll put up with a few months of darkness if I don’t have to wear another bad air mask for the rest of my life,” I finally reply.

Sergeant Fallon gives me a smile that looks a lot like the ones my mom used to give me whenever I said something charmingly innocent and utterly ridiculous as a little kid.

“There’s no perfect place, you know. You always end up trading one kind of shit for another. Me, I’ll stick with the shit I know.”

“Well,” I say, “I’m sick of this shit, and I want to try a different kind for a change.”

We both laugh. I don’t want to think about the fact that I won’t see her again after today. I’ve laughed more in the last two months than I did in the two years before joining the service. My squad mates are the closest thing I’ve ever had to siblings, and if I have one regret about jumping ship and joining the Navy, it’s giving up my new circle of friends. I’m sure I’ll make new friends in the Navy, but I’ll be the new guy all over again, the one who has to prove himself.

“Well, I hope it works out for you,” she says. “Getting what you want is a rare event in the military, especially at our pay grades. Make the most of it.”

“I will,” I say. “And if I hear some jarhead talking shit about the TA, I promise I’ll pick a fight.”

Sergeant Fallon chuckles in approval.

“You better,” she says. “And just to make sure you don’t forget where you’re coming from, I’m going to make sure they put you in for the Combat Drop Badge. You wear that on your Navy uniform, you might as well have a tattoo on your forehead that says, ‘I am a former TA grunt.’”

The Combat Drop Badge is awarded to line troopers after their first drop involving hostile fire. What exactly constitutes hostile fire is up to the discretion of the battalion commander. Some unit COs set the bar rather low, and count drops where the lead drop ship may have taken a round or two of small arms fire, but the commanding officer of the 365th AIB has higher standards. Still, I have no doubt that anyone who can bend the battalion S2 over a barrel like that would also be able to make good on that promise and have the battalion award the CDB to a private with two battle drops.

“I think you’ve done enough for me, Sarge,” I say. Even though I wouldn’t mind a CDB above my left breast pocket, I don’t want Sergeant Fallon to push her luck with the brass. That Medal of Honor can only get her so much credit with the CO before he decides that she would serve the TA better as a recruiter in some forsaken office in northern Manitoba.

“You shut the hell up, and when that badge comes your way in the inter-service mail, you pin it on your Navy smock, and you show those desk moppers and console jockeys that you are a combat grunt.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

Without our afternoon coffee talks, the Medical Center becomes unbearably boring. My only form of decent entertainment, and my link to the world outside, walked out in Major Unwerth’s briefcase. I’ve slept enough to have plenty of sleep stockpiled for a year, and watching the tripe on the Networks got old again after an hour or two, so I spend my time going for increasingly long runs around the Medical Center. I don’t even realize how much I had gotten used to daily runs until now. The hospital-issued footwear is unsuitable for anything faster than a slow walk, so I get out my old civilian shoes, and map out a circuitous route through the miles of corridors in the Medical Center. I run as fast as I can without drawing the ire of the staff, through corridors and hallways, and up and down dozens of staircases. I just have my route perfected, when Corporal Miller comes in one morning just as I am putting on my shoes for another run.

“You do know we have a gym, right?” she says. “It’s on the top floor, right next to the rec room. We use it for light rehab. It has weight machines and everything.”

I was up there once, to see if the rec room was worth my time, and I decided that it wasn’t after seeing the people in there mostly lounging on chairs and watching the Networks on the screens overhead. It’s like the government considers Network access an essential patient need, just like food and medication. It feels disturbingly like being back in the PRC—everything is public property, even the food you eat and the clothes you wear, and everybody just sits around and drools at the Network screen.

“I guess I can stand lifting a few weights again,” I say, and Corporal Miller smiles. I suspect she’s not used to her patients actually wanting to work out again.

“Looks like you’re about back to normal,” she says. “Maybe the doc’s going to release you a bit sooner than we thought. How would you feel about that?”

“I’d probably kiss the doctor on the mouth,” I say. “Regardless of age. Or gender.”

Corporal Miller laughs.

“Well, let me see what I can do. You seem to be bored to tears in here, and if you can spend three hours a day running around the place dodging meal carts, you’re probably ready to go back to your unit.”

A few hours later, the door of my room opens, and one of the doctors comes in. I don’t have a particular doctor assigned—they all work in shifts, and I’ve seen half a dozen different ones since I got here. They all wear Class B uniform shirts under their medical smocks, they all have captain’s bars on one collar and the Medical Corps device on the other, and they all talk in the same detached, semi-interested manner.

“I’d say your nurse assessed you correctly,” he says as he walks in. I have been pumping out a set of push-ups, with my feet on the bed and my body at a slight downward angle. Before I joined the military, I could barely complete twenty regular push-ups. Now I can do three sets of thirty while my legs are up on a bed or window sill, the result of doing hundreds of push-ups a day back in the TA.

“Yes, sir,” I reply as I finish my push-up and jump to my feet in a deliberately light-footed manner.

“You’re not asking what she’s right about,” the doctor smiles.

“Doesn’t matter,” I smile back. “Corporal Miller is right by default.”

“Good attitude,” he says. His name is stenciled onto the breast pocket of his white smock: DR MORELLI.

“So are you going to let me out early?”

“Do you want to be let out early? With your kinds of injuries, you can get by with claiming a few more weeks of downtime.”

“I’ve had about all the downtime I can stand,” I reply. “I’m ready to move on.”

Doctor Morelli consults the clipboard he carries, and shrugs.

“Well, your abdominal fusing worked like a charm, and you’re good as new, medically speaking. Your lungs are back to normal, too, but I guess you’ve already figured that out, since you’ve been breaking the speed limit on every floor in this place.”

He flips through the printouts on his clipboard, and then scribbles something with his pen.

“I’m releasing you back to active duty as of tomorrow morning. If you feel that you require follow-up care after all when you’re back in your unit, you are to report to your designated medical facility on-base. Other than that, I’m marking you as fit for unrestricted duty.”

It’s amazing what modern medicine can do. Two weeks ago, I was shot through my lung and lower intestines, and now I am once again fit for unrestricted duty. Back home in the PRC, anything worse than a headache meant having to go over to the Public Clinic, where you have to wait just about all day just to see a doctor’s assistant, and where any injury more serious than a hangnail means you’ll be in misery for a few weeks because the diluted prescriptions don’t do much for the pain. I still live in government housing, I still eat government food, but my new status as a soldier makes me more worthy of being kept in running condition.

I don’t voice all those thoughts to Doctor Morelli, of course. Instead, I just nod, and try not to look too relieved about being let out of this place.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I say. “I really appreciate it.”

“Not a problem,” he replies, and I can tell that he’s not used to being thanked for active duty releases. There’s no combat here, and the risk of dying is much lower in a hospital rec room than on a spaceship or in an infantry battalion, but all things considered, I’d rather die from small arms fire than boredom.