Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

The launcher’s bark drowns out the crowd for a brief moment. In the confines of the building’s concrete overhang, it’s loud enough for my helmet’s audio filter to kick in and turn me temporarily deaf to save my hearing. In front of me, there’s a sudden gap in the ranks of the charging crowd. There’s nobody left standing within thirty yards of the grenade launcher’s muzzle.

I open the launcher and reload with another buckshot grenade, my fingers performing the action seemingly on autopilot. The crowd directly in front of me scatters to get out of my line of fire, streaming to the left and right, and presses in on my squad mates instead.

Hansen and Stratton follow my lead and fire buckshot grenades as well, and the street in front of us turns into a madhouse. The crowd is now close enough for the lead rioters to reach out and grab our rifles, which some of them try to do. Someone tries to seize Baker’s M-66, and gets a five-round burst in return. I watch in morbid fascination as the armor-piercing flechette rounds pass through the unlucky rioter and into the man behind him. Both of them go down, but there are more coming, and the mass of people in front of us is simply overwhelming.

To my left, a group of shouting rioters come around the concrete pillar I’m using for cover. One of them carries a clunky-looking handgun. He sees me, and raises his gun just as I bring the rifle up to my shoulder and press the trigger.

There’s a mighty shove coming from my right, and suddenly I find myself on my back and skidding across the pavement. I bring my rifle up and turn to face my attackers. Someone seizes the muzzle of my M-66. As I feel the rifle getting wrenched out of my hands, I trigger the grenade launcher with the buckshot round in it. The attacker lets go of my rifle as he catches the full blast of the grenade, four thousand spherical pieces of shrapnel that are spread out to a merely fist-sized group at this range. His midsection erupts into a bloody mush, splattering blood and tissue onto the face shield of my helmet.

Around me, there’s the stuttering of fire from multiple M-66 rifles in fully automatic mode. Next to me, three or four people are on top of Corporal Baker. One of them has seized Baker’s rifle, and he swings it around to bring the muzzle to bear on Stratton, who is struggling with his own pack of rioters a few feet away. I aim my own rifle without thinking, and shoot the rifle-wielding rioter in the back. The rest of Baker’s attackers are busy trying to pin the Corporal to the ground, and I pluck them off his back with single shots one by one. Baker scrambles to his feet, looks around, and then picks up his weapon.

“Who’s firing live rounds? Who’s firing live rounds? ”

The shout comes over the all-platoon channel. It sounds like our platoon leader, who is holding down one of the not-so-busy corners on the other side of the building with Third or Fourth Squad.

“Bravo One, we need you over here,” Sergeant Fallon toggles back. “We’re getting our asses kicked, in case you haven’t noticed.”

The tactical display is lousy with red carets. We are surrounded by a few hundred very pissed-off rioters. I’m out of buckshot grenades, and the magazine in my rifle is almost empty. I eject the disposable magazine block, and pull another one out of the pouch on my harness with clumsy fingers. It takes me three tries to line up the new magazine with the well at the bottom rear of my rifle. In training, my reloads are always smooth, but right now, it feels like threading a needle with winter gloves. I slap the magazine home and smack the bolt release with my palm. The bolt of the rifle snaps forward and chambers a fresh round, and the little counter on the lower left corner of my tactical display changes from “31” to “249”. The computer keeps track of my rifle’s ammunition status, to let me know when it’s time to reload, and to tell my squad leader through the TacLink when I’m running low. What it doesn’t monitor is how scared I am, how many times my armor has been struck, how much I feel like puking, and how badly I want to be back at the base right about now.

I pick out a new target, sight my rifle, and shoot. Then again, and again. There’s no shortage of targets out there. I have stopped thinking of them as people. They’re just silhouettes in my gun sight now, one squeeze of the trigger each. Our squad is huddled together in a cluster, everybody covering a sector in front, just like in training. For a few moments, all I hear is the steady chatter of our rifles, spitting out death at a few thousand rounds per minute. We fire our rifles methodically, steadily, like we’re in a live-fire exercise at the base range at Fort Shughart.

And then the natives have had enough.

The remaining rioters must have changed their minds about the odds, because the forward surge of the crowd suddenly dissipates, and with it all the angry energy that has motivated the leading ranks to charge soldiers in modern battle armor with nothing but ancient small arms and home-made hand grenades. The formerly amorphous mass of people turns into hundreds of individuals scattering in as many different directions, anywhere but toward the muzzles of our rifles.

I take a ragged breath. It feels like I haven’t filled my lungs properly since the shooting started. I look around to see all of my squad mates still standing, weapons at the ready, and scores of bodies on the street before us. There’s a layer of white stuff in front of our position that looks like a dusting of snow on the ground, and it takes me a moment to realize that those are the discarded plastic sabots of our flechette rounds, stripped from the tungsten darts after leaving the barrels.

Ten yards to our right, the grunts from Third Squad come around the corner of the building at a run, with the platoon leader in front. Lieutenant Weaving takes one look around, and flips up the visor on his helmet.

“Holy shit, people. That’s going to look awful on the Network news.”

Sergeant Fallon starts a response on the squad channel, then catches herself, and walks over to Lieutenant Weaving. When she’s in front of him, she flips up her helmet visor as well.

“Something wrong with your TacLink, Lieutenant?”

“Negative,” he replies.

“Well, you may want to get it checked out when we get back, seeing how it failed to show you the five hundred people trying to overrun us.”

Lieutenant Weaving’s posture tenses, but then there’s a sound like a piece of hail hitting a tin roof, and he stumbles sideways and falls over. A sharp crack rolls across the street, the report of a high-powered rifle.

“Sniper,” three or four of us call out at the same time over the squad channel, and everybody ducks for cover. Sergeant Fallon bends over and grabs Lieutenant Weaving by the arm to drag him to safety.

“Little help here,” she says. I leave the relative safety of my concrete pillar, dash over to her position, and grab the lieutenant’s other arm. Together, we drag his limp bulk over to another concrete pillar.

“Ell-tee is down,” Sergeant Fallon toggles into the platoon channel. “Valkyrie Six-One, this is Bravo One-One. Get your ship down in front of the building for a medevac, pronto.”

“Valkyrie Six-One, copy. ETA two minutes,” I hear in response. Valkyrie is the call sign for our drop ship flight, and Six-One is our platoon’s ship.

“Pop me some smoke, and find that sniper,” Sergeant Fallon orders. Priest and Paterson pull smoke grenades out of their harnesses and throw them into the street in front of our position.

The distant rifle cracks again. There’s a puff of concrete dust as it smacks into the pillar in front of us.

“Shoot the fuck back already,” Sergeant Fallon says.