Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 7

My new unit is B Company, 365th Autonomous Infantry Regiment, Third Infantry Division. The 365th is stationed at Fort Shughart, a massive base on the outskirts of the Dayton metroplex. The TA seems ruthlessly efficient—I am expecting a repeat of the administrative snail trail from the first day of my service career, but I am directed to my company building, assigned to a squad, and given a locker and bunk in one of the squad rooms not thirty minutes after my arrival on the military bus from the Dayton shuttle port.

In Basic, there was one big room for the entire platoon. Here at B Company, the squads are quartered in rooms. The officers and noncoms get their private rooms, but the enlisted have to share, four troops to a room. There are two double bunk beds, four lockers, and a table with four chairs to every room. The building is old, but well-maintained—the paint is fading, and the polymer coating on the floors is worn, but everything is clean. There’s a communal head on each floor, and the toilets and showers have actual stalls built around them.

When I walk into my assigned squad room, my squad mates are gathered around the table, playing a game of cards. They all turn around to look at me, and I wave a hand in greeting. Two of my new roommates are guys, and one is a very pretty girl.

“Grayson,” I say. “Fresh out of Basic. I guess I’m your new squad mate.”

“Come on in,” one of them says. They all study me with curiosity, undoubtedly sizing me up.

“Your locker’s over there,” he points to his left, where a row of lockers stands lined up against a wall of the room. “It’s the one closest to the window.”

“Thanks.”

I walk over to the locker and open the door. There’s issue clothing already hanging on the rack, and the locker is dressed to boot camp perfection, with brand new pairs of boots neatly lined up on the bottom shelf.

“This one’s taken already,” I say, and my new squad mates chuckle in unison.

“It’s your new gear. Check the name tags. Supply got your data as soon as they assigned you to the battalion. They stock your locker for you ahead of time.”

“Well, that’s handy.”

The lockers are laid out just like the ones we had in Basic. I put my meager pile of personal clothing and gear into the only empty drawer in the locker. There’s a lockable compartment for valuables, and it contains a PDP, a much smaller and sleeker model than the one they issued in Basic. I take the PDP out and turn it on to find that it already has my personal login on the main screen. It also has options on the main screen that weren’t there before—the standard issue PDP is fully network-enabled, unlike the hobbled models in Basic that would only let us communicate with our instructors and fellow platoon members.

“We’re off duty already,” one of my squad mates says behind me. “You can take your time stowing your stuff. Chow hall is going to be open for another forty-five minutes, if you want to grab something.”

“Thanks.”

My fellow squad mates are wearing the TA version of Individual Combat Uniforms. The camouflage patterns are different for each service: the Marines have a polychromatic pattern that changes depending on the environment, and the Navy likes a blue-and-gray pattern that looks like a geometry illustration. The Territorial Army issues a digital pattern that’s black, gray, and washed-out green, the non-colors of the urban battlefield. Of all the issue patterns, it’s the most sinister and business-looking one. I change into the ICUs to match the rest of my squad. The new boots fit well, but they have the annoying squeakiness of unissued footwear. It took me the better part of twelve weeks to get my issue boots in Basic to conform to my feet, and now I have to start the process all over again.

“So where’d you go to Basic?” someone asks, and gestures to an empty chair. I walk over to the table and sit down with the rest of my roommates.

“You know what? I have no idea. They never told us, and I never asked.”

“Swampland, brushy desert, or nothing but cornfields?”

“Brushy desert,” I reply.

“NACRD Orem,” another soldier says. “I went there, too. Not too bad. You don’t have the bugs and the humidity the poor fuckers at NACRD Charleston have to deal with.”

All of my roommates have chevrons on their collars. Two of them are E-2s, with single chevrons, and the third is an E-3, a Private First Class, a chevron with a rocker underneath. People don’t usually make E-2 right out of Basic unless they were top flight in their training battalion like Halley, and E-3 promotions don’t ever happen before a year of active service.

“Am I the only new guy in this squad?” I ask.

“Yep,” one of them confirms. “Our platoon got four this cycle, I think, including you. They trickle the new guys in like that, so you can learn on the job. Grayson, is it?”

“Yeah.”

The soldier across the table from me extends his hand, and I shake it.

“I’m Baker. The cheating fuck over there trying to look at my cards is Priest, and the one with the ponytail is Hansen.”

I nod at each of them in turn.

“You’re in luck, Grayson. You’re in the squad with the best squad leader in the entire battalion.”

“In the entire brigade,” Hansen corrects. She has almond-shaped eyes and very white and even teeth, evidence of better dental care than you can get anywhere within ten miles of a Public Residence Cluster.

“Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”

“Her name.” Priest gives up his attempt to sneak a peek at Baker’s cards, and leans back in his chair. “Staff Sergeant Fallon. She used to be a First Sergeant, but they busted her down for striking an officer.”

“I thought they kicked you out of the service for hitting a superior,” I say, smelling a military fish tale.

“Oh, they do,” Hansen says. “That’s unless you’re a Medal of Honor winner. They don’t get rid of certified heroes. It would be bad PR.”

“Medal of Honor?” I ask, and the disbelief in my face makes my three roommates grin with delight. “As in, that blue ribbon with the white stars that goes on top of all the other ribbons?”

“That’s the one. She got it when the NAC did that excursion into mainland China a few years back, at the Battle of Dalian. You get the Medal, you can ask for any assignment anywhere in the Service, and she went right back to her old unit once she was out of the hospital.”

“That’s pretty wild. Is she a complete hard-ass?”

“Not at all. She’s got no patience for slackers, but as long as you pull your weight and don’t look like you’re clueless, she’s hands-off.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I say. “I was expecting…hell, I have no idea what I was expecting, actually.”

“You were expecting some sort of penal colony,” Baker says amicably. “You thought you pulled the shittiest card in the deck when they told you that you’re going TA, right?”

There’s no point denying it, so I nod.

“That’s what everyone thinks at first. We all did. But this is a good outfit. Our sergeants know their shit, and our officers mostly leave us alone. We get the job done, and we look after each other. I’ve been TA for almost two years, and I wouldn’t take a garrison post on a colony if you paid me double.”

The others at the table nod in agreement.

I’m still disappointed about not going into space, and I have no idea whether I’ll feel the same way about the TA in two years. For better or for worse, however, this place will be my home until my service time is up, so I decide that I might as well make the best of it.

“You play cards, Grayson?” Hansen asks.

“Sure,” I say, and pull my chair up to the table.

Reveille in the morning is a low-key affair. The wake-up call comes over the ceiling speakers and all the PDPs at 0545, which is almost an hour later than our wake-up call in Basic Training. At first call, I drop out of bed and grab my personal hygiene kit out of the locker to file out to the head, but my roommates don’t seem to be in a hurry.

“Take your time,” Baker says as he climbs out of bed. “Nobody’ll check on us, or anything. Chow hall is open at six, and Orders are at seven. They don’t hold your hand and rush you through shit like in Basic.”

“The TA assumes that you can figure out for yourself how to get squared away in the mornings,” Priest says from the bunk above mine. “Just don’t miss Orders out in front of the building at 0700, or you’re in deep shit.”

“Got it,” I say.

It’s an odd experience to be left alone in the morning. Back home, I never got out of bed before nine or ten o’clock, but twelve weeks of boot camp have turned me into an early riser. There was no freedom in Basic Training—with twice as many recruits as sinks, toilets, and shower heads, nobody had much time for leisure in the mornings—but there was also a certain sense of purpose. You could simply turn off your brain and follow the pack, and there was comfort to the predictability of the routine. Now I have to check the clock and take charge of my schedule once more, and as much as I like being able to take my time in front of the sink or in the toilet stall, I find that I miss the rigid structure of Basic a little.

So I do what I’ve been doing since I got off the bus at NACRD Orem—I follow the pack.

My squad mates don’t seem to mind when I tag along with the group to the chow hall. I fall back a little on purpose as we enter the chow hall, so I’ll be behind the others in the breakfast line, which will spare me from having to pick a table and then ending up sitting by myself. I watch the others with one eye as load up my breakfast tray, and then follow them to their table.

There are other soldiers sitting at the table as well, people I don’t know yet, and for just a moment I consider peeling off and picking my own table after all. Then Hansen catches my eye, and she waves me over.

“Don’t be shy, now. Have a seat, and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the squad.”

She pulls out a chair, and I put my tray onto the table before sitting down.

“Guys and girls, this is Private Grayson. He’s the new guy for this quarter. Grayson, this is the whole squad. These four clowns are in the room next to ours.”

The other members of the squad size me up just like my roommates did yesterday, and I nod at them.

“Thank God,” one of them says. “That means I’m officially no longer the FNG. Thank you, Grayson.”

“My pleasure,” I say. “Just make sure you pass along the handbook, okay?”

“Oh, there’s not much to it. Just keep the fridge in the room stocked, and make sure everyone’s boots are shiny every morning.”

“Don’t listen to Phillips,” Hansen says. “If the job required being good at anything, he would have been fired on Day Two.”

Hansen introduces the rest of the squad to me one by one. Phillips is a tall, freckle-faced guy with wiry red hair and glasses with little circular lenses. Jackson is an equally tall and thin black girl. She wears interesting tattoos under her eyes, some sort of tribal pattern. Stratton is a steel-jawed recruiting poster model who would look terribly intimidating in his perfection if he wasn’t the shortest member of the squad by half a head. Lastly, there’s Paterson, whose buzz cut doesn’t quite conceal the fact that he’s going bald already. Jackson is a corporal, Stratton and Paterson are Privates First Class, and Phillips is a one-chevron private. I am the only member of the squad without a rank device on the collar.

“This is not a training unit,” I say. “I was sort of expecting some more advanced training. The other recruits in my platoon all went on to schools of some kind.”

“Nope, this is a field battalion,” Jackson replies. “TA infantry doesn’t need to send people off to school. You got the skills in Basic, and infantry business is just some more of that, only with live ammo. You’ll learn on the job with us, in the field.”

“We’re a pretty active battalion,” Stratton says. “We have one or two live calls a month. You’ll probably see combat before you have a chance to wear in those new boots.”

I chuckle at this, but none of the soldiers at the breakfast table seem to think Stratton is joking, and my chuckle just kind of dies in my throat when I realize that he isn’t.

“So you’re the new guy,” Staff Sergeant Fallon says when she enters our squad room. She’s a short woman, with dark hair that she wears in a ponytail, and she looks hard enough to beat up half the squad without much trouble. She wears her ICU sleeves rolled up like the Drill Instructors in Basic did, and the muscles on her arms look like steel cables.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and stand at attention, only to be waved off almost instantly.

“At ease,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Jesus, don’t those instructors over at the Depot remove the corn cobs before they send you off into real life?”

“I don’t remember having been issued any sort of vegetables, Staff Sergeant,” I reply, and Sergeant Fallon chuckles.

“A smartass. As if we didn’t have enough of those already. I think you’ll fit in just fine.”

The duty schedule in a field regiment of light infantry is pretty simple, at least for the grunts whose main job is to pull a trigger. When your job is to kill people and blow up stuff, you either learn about how to do your job better, or you practice the skills you’ve already learned. We spend as much time out in the field as we do on manuals and classroom instruction. Fort Shughart has its own Urban Combat training facility, of course, and every platoon gets to spend some time there every week, practicing attack and defense, much like in Basic. There’s a live-fire range, too, and Sergeant Fallon has me qualify on the M-66 rifle in my first week.

My issue rifle feels different from the training version somehow, even though it weighs the same, and operates in exactly the same fashion. Maybe it’s the knowledge that this weapon actually fires live rounds, flechettes that can pierce armor and flesh instead of harmless beams that merely trigger a computer protocol, but somehow I have a lot more respect for this weapon. We don’t practice with live ammo—the issue rifles fire blanks on the Urban Combat course, and training adapters on the muzzle supply the simulated projectiles—but at the firing range, there’s nothing virtual about the flechettes that leave the muzzle of my M-66.

The qualification course of fire for infantry soldiers consists of a hundred pop-up targets at random intervals and distances. I engage them all in turn, centering the reticle of my M-66 on the target and letting the computer determine the rate of fire. The rifle burps short streams of flechettes at each target, and most of the time, they fall down. The moving targets give me a bit of trouble at first, especially the ones that are moving laterally, but after a few missed silhouettes, I figure out the correct amount of lead, and my score improves.

“Not bad at all for a guy fresh out of Basic,” Sergeant Fallon says when I have finished the course and unloaded my weapon for safety inspection. “That’s a seventy-nine. Marksman score. One more hit, and you would have scored Sharpshooter. You can let it stand, or try for Sharpshooter or Expert.”

“I’ll try again,” I say, and Sergeant Fallon nods with approval.

“Marksman’s a good score for cooks and filing clerks, but the Expert badge looks better on an Infantry Class A. Not that it matters in the end, mind you. What really counts is how well you can shoot when your targets are shooting back.”