Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

Halley .

We’re in touch through the MilNet, and we message each other almost every day. Her training schedule at Fleet School is packed, but she still manages to send one reply to every three messages I send her way. She hates the cramming sessions for Astrophysics and Mathematics, and loves the weightlessness training, where all the Navy trainees get their first taste of the peculiarities of spaceborne duty. The Navy’s ships all have artificial gravity, of course, but trainees still have to learn how to function in a zero-gravity environment, just like the sailors in the old waterborne navy had to be able to swim. After Fleet School, she’s going on to three months of drop ship pilot school, and then she’ll get a co-pilot slot in one of the Navy’s many Combat Aviation squadrons, where she’ll ride in the left seat of a Wasp-class drop ship for a year before getting command of her own Wasp. I am more than just a little envious of her career path, which is pretty much the top job for a five-year enlistee. Halley will spend most of her first service year in training, but she’ll be a junior officer by the end of that year, and she’ll be dropping Marines and flying attack missions on far-off colony planets in a three-hundred-ton war machine. I’ll be slugging it out with belligerents on good old Terra, and the only things I’ll be commanding after a year will be my own pair of boots and the rifle slung across my chest. At the end of our service time, she’ll be a Lieutenant Junior Grade, the equivalent of a TA First Lieutenant, and I’ll be a Corporal at best, eight pay grades and a whole stack of social layers below her.

Strangely enough, it’s Halley who professes to be jealous of my job. When I send her a long and detailed message with the story of our embassy evac—my first combat mission—she replies just a little while later.

>That’s fucking awesome. I wish I could have been there.

>Are you serious? I reply. Real bullets and shit. There were two dozen guys out there trying to kill us.

>Yeah, I’m serious. I’ve spent all month in a classroom, or in my quarters reading training books. The room is about as big as a broom closet, and I’m sharing it with a girl who snores like a fucking dock worker.

I feel an entirely irrational twinge of relief at the revelation that she’s bunking with a girl, and not a male trainee.

>Well, hang in there. Pretty soon you’ll be dodging ground fire on a drop mission to some barely terraformed ball of mud in the Outer Rim.

>Ah, hell. If you gotta go out, might as well make a pretty comet, right?

I laugh at her reply, but part of me is keenly aware that many drop ship jocks have met their fate in exactly that fashion. The drop ships don’t just deliver Marines, they also serve as close air support, and the SLA marines have drop ships and sophisticated anti-air missiles of their own. No craft in the military arsenal is invincible, not even the huge new attack carriers that carry swarms of fighters and enough nukes to turn a fair-sized planet into a ball of glowing slag. A Wasp is a tough machine, but even a lowly rifle grenade can score a lucky hit on a critical part and bring the whole thing down in a fireball.

>Gotta run-next class is in five. More later.

I turn off my PDP and stare at the blank screen for a moment, trying to imagine Halley up on Luna, attending classes and bouncing around in zero-gravity training. She’s where I wanted to be, and I’m ashamed to be jealous of her, but what stings even more is the knowledge that I’ll probably never see her again.

The military is tribal to the core. Fort Shughart is a massive base, and the 365th Autonomous Infantry Battalion is just one of many units stationed here. We share the base with a composite air wing, a transport wing, a military police battalion, a Special Forces Group, and a half dozen other battalions with various specialties. Nominally, we even have a missile regiment of the Strategic Nuclear Command on the base as well, but the missile silos with their ordnance are a hundred miles away in Indiana, and the only part of the regiment actually present at Fort Shughart is a staff company building.

Any branch of the TA sees itself as superior to all the other branches, of course, so there is much competition between the units, both sanctioned and unofficial. There are base-wide sporting events, annual shooting competitions, and weekly brawls in the enlisted and NCO clubs. Infantry soldiers consider combat engineers dumb dirt chuckers, and combat engineers think infantry grunts are overly eager to get killed. The tribalism continues within the battalions, where companies compete against each other, and the companies, where platoons form their own little clans. Within the platoons, the good-natured rivalries extend all the way down to the squad level, and to the teams that make up each squad. Your battalion or regiment is your clan, your company is your extended family, your platoon is your immediate family, and your squad is your household. Like every family, we have our internal quarrels, but when some outsider picks a fight with one of us, we close rank.

“Will you look at that?”

We’re gathered around a table in the chow hall, picking at our dinners, when Jackson nods toward the door.

“Looks like we have dinner guests on base.”

I turn around to face the door. There’s a group of soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms walking through the door, and it takes me a moment to recognize the patterns.

“Holy shit, those are Marines . What the hell are they doing here?”

The Marines don’t look like super-soldiers. In fact, they look like any other grunt in the TA’s infantry battalions: high-and-tight haircuts, no body fat, well-defined arms sticking out of the rolled-up sleeves of their ICUs. The pattern isn’t the only thing different about Marine uniforms—they fold their sleeves so that the lighter inner liner of the ICU jacket shows, whereas TA troopers roll up the sleeves and then fold the last four inches of outer camouflage pattern over the rolled-up part.

The Marines walk into the chow hall with a bit of a swagger, fully aware of the stir their appearance is causing among the TA soldiers. We hardly ever see members of other military branches. Sometimes, a flight of Navy drop ships or shuttles will stop by on the way to a manufacturer refit, but space-going craft are flown by officers, and those don’t mingle with the enlisted grunts in the mess hall.

We watch as the Marines walk over to the food counter. They each pull a tray from the stack to the left of the counter, and insert themselves into the line, cutting in front of the TA troopers lined up for chow. There’s some grumbling in the ranks, but there are only ten or twelve TA troopers in the line, and the Marines are at least two squads strong.

“I don’t know about you guys,” Jackson says, “but all of a sudden, I really feel like having some dessert.”

We grin at each other.

“Right there with you,” Stratton says. “Let’s go grab some pie or something.”

We all push back our chairs and get up.

All around us, fellow TA troopers catch on, and get out of their seats as well. Jackson strides to the head of the line, her meal tray in both hands. As she passes the line of Marines, some of them size her up. Jackson is tall and wiry, and she looks more like a soccer coach than a combat grunt. She cuts in front of the lead Marine just as he’s about to put a dessert plate onto his tray, and then snatches the plate out of his hands. The Marine stares at her, dumbfounded, as she puts the plate onto her own tray.

“TA ain’t done eating yet,” she informs the Marine. “The lesser services don’t eat ’til the real soldiers are finished.”