Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

“ Recruit Olafsson ,” he barks.

Olafsson, who sits right across the center aisle from me, suddenly jerks awake and looks around with a panicked expression.

“You seem to have a problem remaining conscious,” Sergeant Burke says amicably. “I suspect it’s a lack of oxygen. Get on your feet, now.”

Recruit Olafsson obeys, clearly distraught about being the sudden center of attention.

“You will join Sergeant Riley on the quarterdeck,” Sergeant Burke says, indicating the front of the platoon bay, where there’s a generous amount of open space between the first row of bunks and the window to the Senior Drill Instructor’s office. Sergeant Riley is standing in the middle of the quarterdeck already, hands folded behind her back.

If the exercise on the quarterdeck under Sergeant Riley’s tutelage is supposed to restore some oxygen to Olafsson’s system, it seems to have the opposite effect. Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Burke has finished his lecture on the Territorial Army, and Recruit Olafsson’s face is a dark shade of red as he works through his sixth cycle of push-ups and sit-ups.

“Your attention is on me ,” Sergeant Burke barks when he catches a few of us glancing over to the quarterdeck. “I promise you that each and every one of you will have ample opportunity to spend time on the quarterdeck in the next twelve weeks.”

He moves on to the history and mission of the Navy, and Recruit Olafsson continues his efforts on the quarterdeck, with an impassive Sergeant Riley standing over him as he struggles through yet another set of push-ups.

Eleven weeks and five days to go, I tell myself. Eighty-two days of running, getting yelled at, and doing punishment workouts on the quarterdeck.

I briefly consider standing up and walking over to Sergeant Burke to announce that I want to quit, before I end up spending weeks sweating my ass off, only to wash out anyway without anything to show for the work. Then I recall the PRC—the smell of piss and puke in the hallways and staircases, the garbage everywhere, the thugs rousting people just out of meanness and boredom, and I banish the thought. As much as I hate working out and getting bossed around, having to take a shuttle back to that place would be much worse.

Hell, I think as Sergeant Burke drones on about the structure and organization of the Commonwealth Navy. At least I’ll be in great shape when I get out of here.

My battle armor is scuffed and beaten to hell, but I love it anyway. I love the rifle in my hands, too, more than a sane individual should love a mere object. Together, the rifle and the armor turn me into something different, something more advanced than the sum of myself and the technology in which I am wrapped.

We’re in our seventh week of training, and squad-level combat training is the first thing I’ve done in the military that I wouldn’t mind doing every day. We have spent the last few weeks getting to know our rifles and our gear, and learning the basics of infantry combat: moving as squads and fire teams, assault, defense, the basic steps in the dance that is modern integrated ground warfare.

The first time we practiced squad movements with the help of the integrated tactical network, I felt like I’ve been myopic all my life without knowing it, and somebody finally slipped a set of prescription glasses in front of my eyes. The helmet has more computing power built into it than all the computers in my old high school classroom put together. On the inside of the eye shield, there’s a sort of monocle over the left eye, and that’s the truly magical part of the suit. It’s the holographic projector linked to the suit’s tactical computer. The computer analyzes everything I see, overlays my field of vision with tactical symbols over every friend or foe in the vicinity, and then transmits the data to the rest of the squad. Whatever I see, the rest of my squad can see as their computers integrate the feed coming in from mine. If one of us spots a new threat, their tactical computer automatically sends the new data to the other squad computers through the encrypted wireless network, and the entire squad is aware of the threat within a few milliseconds. We’ve only been taught the use of the system two weeks ago, but I am already so used to the information feed that I feel blind and dumb when I am out of the battle armor.

The rifle is linked to the computer as well. It doesn’t aim or sight itself, but it does everything else automatically. Whenever I aim the rifle at a target, the computer selects the right burst length and cadence for the threat. My rifle doesn’t spit out any actual flechettes, but there’s a hydraulic feedback system built into the butt end that simulates the recoil of live firing. To make the illusion complete, there’s a sound module that gives off a report.

Advancing with a squad and engaging other squads on the mock battlefields of the training facility is a strangely intoxicating experience. We’re training for war, and I know that the enemy out in the real world is going to shoot high-density flechettes and explosives at me instead of harmless beams, but so far, it all feels like a very exciting sort of sporting competition. The squads square up against each other in training, and we win or lose matches, just like in high school. There’s even the customary locker room bragging in the showers after the training rounds, with gloating winners and sulking losers. Nobody dies, or gets hurt, except for a few bruises here and there. The battle armor gives off a bit of a zap when you’re “hit” by enemy fire, but it’s not really painful, just unpleasant, like brushing your hand against a stripped low-voltage wire.

We’re just past the halfway point of Basic, and there are twenty-seven of us left. We have lost thirteen recruits in six and a half weeks. In the first week, it was just the linebacker who decided to quit in the middle of our first run, but since then, the pace of washouts has accelerated. Nine have left voluntarily, and the other four were ejected by our drill instructors for failure to follow orders, or failure to meet standards. Our mess table has lost one member—Cunningham, the girl with the tattoos and the buzzcut. She made it to the third week, and then decided that she’d had enough of Sergeant Riley singling her out for extra sessions on the quarterdeck. One evening in Week Three, she just tossed her PDP onto her bunk, and walked out of the platoon bay. We went off to a class on chemical warfare, and when we returned to get ready for dinner, her bunk was stripped, and her locker emptied out. They never empty a recruit’s locker when the platoon is present, but they never wait around, either.

We’re in the Urban Warfare Training Facility, a mock-up of a generic East Asian city block. It’s situated in the brushy desert on the outskirts of the base, and getting there is a training exercise in itself. We’re on Day Three of our Urban Warfare exercise, and every day, we’ve been ready and in full battle gear by 0530 in the morning. Every day, we’ve marched the twenty miles through the desert to the UWTF, encumbered with battle armor, rifles, fully stuffed backpacks, and three-gallon hydration bladders. The march to the UWTF takes two and a half hours at Sergeant Fallon’s pace, which is a march that’s somewhere between a fast walk and a slow trot.

Our platoon is down to three squads of nine now. Every time we lose recruits, they shuffle the squads around to keep each squad at roughly the same headcount, and now we’re too few to fill out a full platoon of four squads. On this exercise, I am the leader of my fire team of four recruits, and my squad leader is Ricci. We’re one of the two attacking squads, and the defending squad is positioned in defensive spots up ahead in the “city”. The squad leader of the defending squad is Halley, my bunk mate.