Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“Yeah,” said Freeman, pushing Bone Brady’s face out of range, turning his attention to maintaining morale. “Well, Orwell said that he sometimes thought life was a constant battle against dirt.” Freeman wiped his eye with his sleeve, hoping that their brownish green camouflage uniforms wouldn’t stand out too starkly against the ice. In frozen marshland the camouflage would be perfect, but not against the white sheet of a frozen lake. “Aussie!” he called out.

“Sir!” shouted Aussie obediently, like a good marine, that is, more formally than he would have had only the team members been present.

“Joke,” ordered the general.

They hit an air pocket.

“Choir barfing?” asked Aussie.

“Not yet,” said Salvini. “Is that the joke?”

There was laughter now in the dark, stuffy, dimly lit interior.

Choir smiled and doffed his Fritz to Aussie as if his horse had just won the Triple Crown. “ Do ,” said Choir, raising his voice, imitating an upper-class snob, “tell us your amusement.”

“My amusement ?” said Aussie, head back in mock surprise. “Screwing.”

“Screwing what ?” shouted a marine, name tag “Picard.”

“Anything that moves!” shouted Salvini.

“Birds,” said Aussie, feigning indignation, using the Australian slang for young women. “Nice-looking birds.”

“How ’bout one of those protected—” began a marine, name tag “Jackson, K.,” who was nursing a squad automatic weapon, “—What d’you call those birds?”

“Cranes,” said Marine Picard. “Yeah, would you screw a crane, Aussie?”

“He’d have to stand very still,” Aussie answered. “I wouldn’t chase the bugger!”

Catcalls and raucous laughter broke out so noisily that they momentarily drowned out the “whoomp whoomp” of the Stallion.

“Fussy,” said Choir, now adopting a cockney accent that made his pronunciation sound like “pussy.”

Aussie was suddenly alert. “Pussy? Where?”

The entire marine platoon was laughing and chortling at the silly banter, Marine Jackson, who’d initiated the exchange with Aussie, now being referred to as “Pussy,” a name that he knew as a marine would stick to him as long as he was in the corps — or dead.

“Joke!” another marine insisted. “That Aussie isn’t quitting on us, is he?”

“No way!” replied Aussie.

“Keep it clean,” said Freeman. “Women aboard.”

Aussie’s head shot up. “ Where? Show me where!”

A lone hand was raised. She was an African American, Melissa Thomas, Tibbet’s MEU’s first woman combatant.

“No problem,” said Aussie. “It’s as clean as a whistle.”

“Stand up!” someone ordered Aussie.

“For the lady, sure,” said Aussie. “I don’t mind—”

“No,” shouted a SAW gunner. “So we can fuckin’ shoot you if it isn’t funny.” That got a big laugh, one of the loudest coming from the general who, as much as any of them, probably wouldn’t have laughed at this nonsense during stand-down time but whose unspoken anxiety about going into combat would lead him to grasp on to anything that would offer temporary relief.

“Well,” said Aussie, “this young married couple, both marines—”

“Hey!” shouted someone. “No same-sex marriage in the corps bullshit. Right, Thomas?”

“Right!” Melissa shouted.

“Let him finish,” said a gunny, one of those sergeants who ran the corps.

“Right,” said Aussie, raising his voice to a near shout. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah, get on with it!”

“So,” began Aussie, “this couple are arguin’ about who should get up to make coffee every morning, and the guy says to his wife, ‘I think you should be the one to brew the coffee. You’re the woman of the house,’ and she says, ‘Don’t give me that crap. We’re both working, so I don’t see why you can’t get up and brew the coffee.’ So this argument goes on about who should brew the friggin’ coffee an’ she sees it’s going nowhere so she says, ‘Will you take scriptural authority on this?’ The guy says, ‘Scriptural? — You mean the Bible?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ He thinks for a mo, then says, ‘Okay. Bring it out.’ And there it was in the New Testament: ‘ He -brews.’”

There was a concerted groan within the Super Stallion. “Shoot ’im!” someone shouted, but still they liked it. The joke had done just what Freeman had wanted it to do, channeling the precombat jitters, especially amongst those, such as Melissa Thomas, who Tibbet had told Freeman had been too young for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and for whom “Operation Bird Rescue” was their first real mission.

“That,” the general told Aussie, “is the corniest damn joke I’ve ever heard.”

“I like it!” shouted Choir.

“Yeah, you would,” said Aussie, “you Bible-thumping Welsh turd.”

“Thank you,” riposted Choir, “very much.”

Freeman was grinning, but Melissa Thomas, sitting at the rear of the starboard row of canvas-webbed seats by the Stallion’s door, wasn’t. She envied the ease with which each member of Freeman’s six-man SpecWar team enjoyed one another’s humor. She still couldn’t get that kind of response from her rifle squad, no matter that ever since she’d responded to the commercial on TV that showed marines fast-roping down from a haze-gray helicopter, freeze-framed as they raced into action from the helo, she’d done all that was required of her. “Can you do it?” the commercial’s narrator had challenged. “If you can, you’re one of the best.”

Her brother Danny “dissed” the ad as elitist, and that’s precisely what appealed to her — that and the stirring background rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” It was an old story: the military as the African American’s way out of the ghetto. If you couldn’t dribble and sink a basketball in her Detroit ghetto or get a scholarship to college, your horizons were very limited. The Marine Corps, after a dogged battle against Congress, had finally been forced to yield, and women were in. But that was only half the battle. Female marines had not been allowed in ground combat units. Being assigned to Operation Bird Rescue meant that Melissa Thomas was the first female marine in history to be purposely put in harm’s way rather than in a supportive capacity aboard ship. Melissa had learned much, particularly about self-reliance, the corps having the lowest officer-to-personnel ratio in any of the United States Armed Forces, and she said a prayer asking God to help her to be strong, conscious of the fact that she was a trailblazer, not only as an African American but as the first female marine to be in combat on the ground. She thought of the bus journey to Parris Island along the lonely, two-lane elevated road over the swamps and the ebb and flow of the salt marshes of South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, recalling the moment when she’d first come to stand in the painted yellow footprints in front of the receiving shed, knowing that there were drill instructors who wanted her to fail.

Ever since she was a young girl in Detroit she had always wanted to be part of a shipboard marine contingent, her uncle explaining how a marine’s original role in the English navy was to go aloft, high into the rigging, so as to snipe the enemy and to enforce the captain’s discipline on their own ship. With images of raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima dancing in her head during the hard, unforgiving physical and mental conditioning of Parris now behind her, she had become the first ever female marine combatant to be assigned to an amphibious unit aboard the floating military airbase called Yorktown . But with few exceptions, Melissa had been only grudgingly accepted by her fellow marines, an outsider informally assigned to little more than “swab deck” status aboard Yorktown , no matter that she had qualified in everything they threw at her. She’d run the marine gauntlet from the recruits’ “fright night” in her “Forming Phase” to Phase I’s backbreaking, sinew-sapping PT to Phase II’s mastery of the M16A2 5.56 mm combat rifle to North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune as the first female recruit ever to attend the School of Infantry, hitherto the sole preserve of male recruits. And finally, there was graduation day when her DI presented her with the coveted eagle-topped globe and anchor emblem of the United State Marine Corps, and for Melissa the special moment when she introduced her dad, now frail with age and eyes brimming with tears of pride, to DI Morgana Schmidt. Schmidt, a black belt — level martial arts drill instructor of the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion, had overseen recruit Thomas and the other 69 recruits in the platoon all the way from Pick-Up briefing to graduation, carefully, at times roughly, guiding Melissa through the morphing of yet another civilian into a United States Marine.