Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

“Thank you for what you did, Sarge. You didn’t have to put your ass on the line for me. Shit, I’m just a Private with three months in the battalion. You have a whole lot more to lose than I do.”

“Don’t talk out of your ass, Grayson,” she says, and gives me a hard glare. “There’s nobody in the squad worth less than anyone else. You pick up a rifle and stand your watch, you’re one of us, and it doesn’t matter how many stripes you have on your sleeve. Shit, look at Unwerth—he’s a Major, and any of you grunts are worth ten of his kind.”

“Yeah, well, he still has lunch with the battalion commander, and we don’t.”

Sergeant Fallon laughs out loud.

“Let me tell you something about the boss,” she says. “He’s an Infantry grunt. He was actually a sergeant before he went to OCS. And he can’t fucking stand Major Unwerth. Thinks he’s just a ticket puncher, which is right on the money, of course.”

“Ticket puncher?”

“Those are the guys who go up the chain of command and collect promotion points along the way. When they get a field command, they lead from the rear. And when they’ve gotten just the bare minimum time in a combat command to be eligible for the next promotion, they get themselves transferred out. When I got into the battalion, Major Unwerth was First Lieutenant Unwerth, and he was my platoon leader. Best officer the SRA had at Dalian, I tell you that.”

“Is that when you punched him out?” I grin. The story is legend in the battalion, of course, and like all Army stories, it exists in a hundred different variants, each one doubtlessly exaggerated. The mildest versions have Sergeant Fallon storming into the company CP and butt-stroking the platoon leader with her rifle in front of the company commander and the battalion XO.

“Well,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I’m under orders from the boss not to tell that story to anyone, least of all to the junior enlisted. Let’s just say that he made a bunch of bad calls, and he’s lucky he’s still sucking down air.”

Sergeant Fallon folds the leg of her hospital pants back over the metal of her new lower leg. She never wastes a movement. All her actions are always efficient and to the point. I watch as she folds the bottom of the pants leg exactly three times, tugging the completed fold once to make sure there are no wrinkles in it.

How much can one person push their luck? I wonder. She’s survived a lot of dangerous missions, collected a Medal of Honor along the way, and never even thought about quitting, even when she had full retirement offered to her on a silver platter. They blow off half her leg, and she shrugs and goes back to work a few weeks later. This is her job, and she will do it until they shoot something off the medics can’t replace. I know I’m not cut from the same cloth as Major Unwerth, but I also know that I am not made from the same stuff as Sergeant Fallon.

“I hate to leave the squad short,” I say.

She looks up and smiles at me. Sergeant Fallon’s smiles are so rare that she looks like a completely different person for a moment.

“Don’t even worry about that, Grayson,” she says. “They’ll send a few new guys fresh out of Basic. If you can get the Army by the balls and make them give you what you want, you have to take the opportunity, because that only happens once in a blue moon. The screwing usually goes the other way.”

“I just don’t want the squad to think I’m bailing on them, Sarge.”

“They won’t,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I’ll let them know what went down.”

We look at each other across the table. Something strange has happened since Saturday. She’s still my sergeant, and I’m still her private, but somehow our relationship has changed. We’re still as far apart in rank and position as we were before we dropped into Detroit, but on a certain level, we’re equals. In a way, I feel closer to her than to anyone else, even Halley.

“I’ll miss them,” I say. “I’ll miss Stratton. He was a trip.”

“He was, wasn’t he?” Sergeant Fallon smiles again. “Always running that mouth of his, making jokes about everything and everyone. I’ll miss the cocky little bastard. He was a good guy.”

We sit in silence for a while. Sergeant Fallon studies her untouched mug of coffee, while I look at the smooth plastic surface of the table and stare at the spot where my coffee would sit, had I ordered any.

At the end of the week, I am bored to tears. There’s only so much network watching my brain can endure before I want to stick a fork into my ear. The only things that keep me sane are my daily chats with Sergeant Fallon down in the chow lounge, and the messages I’m exchanging with Halley and my squad mates. I learn that Halley passed her first flight on the right-hand seat with flying colors. The right seat is where the pilot-in-command of a drop ship sits, an arrangement that is the opposite of any other ship class in the arsenal. Apparently, she’s a natural with a Wasp.

I also learn that Stratton and Paterson are being buried in their hometowns this weekend. Stratton is from SeaTacVan, Seattle-Tacoma-Vancouver, and Paterson grew up in some small city on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s TA tradition that the squad mates of a fallen trooper provide the honor guard, and the squad leader heads the funeral detail, but Sergeant Fallon is still in rehab, so Battalion is going to send the platoon leader instead, Lieutenant Weaving. Most of the squad is still on light duty, but everybody opted to go anyway. Stratton was my best friend in the squad, and I would have liked the chance to tell his folks how well we got along from the start, and how he had made me feel at ease when I came into the squad. It’s the kind of thing I figure I would want to know if my son went off to join the service, and came home in a coffin two years later.

On Friday, just before lunch, the door to my room opens again, and Major Unwerth walks in, immaculately dressed in his ironed Class A smock.

“At ease,” he says as he enters the room. I am fit enough to do push-ups once again, but I wouldn’t have snapped to attention for him anyway, but he just said the phrase on autopilot anyway, saving both of us a great deal of discomfort.

He walks up next to my bed, hat tucked underneath his arm. I look up at him and pointedly close my PDP. I was in the middle of composing a message to Halley, and I’m mildly irritated at the interruption, but Major Unwerth still has my fate in his hands, so there’s a great deal of anxiety mixed in with the irritation. I am, however, determined not to show this prick any more weakness, so I merely meet his disapproving gaze with what I hope is a neutral expression.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. “I got you an inter-service transfer to the Navy.”

I feel a sudden buoyancy in my stomach, and it’s pretty clear that I can’t quite keep the sudden relief out of my face, because Major Unwerth gives me a grim smile.

“However, there are some things you won’t like. For starters, your time-in-service counter will reset. That means you’ll start with the Navy as if you had just finished Basic. Your service time with the 365th won’t count towards your sixty-two-month obligation, or promotion eligibility.”

He’s correct—I don’t like that part at all—but he’s setting the terms, and I have a strong feeling that those aren’t up for negotiation if I want to get out of TA and into space.

“Also, you’ll be going into Neural Networks. That specialty is marked Urgent Occupational Need, so once you finish tech school, you’ll be locked into that job for the duration of your first enlistment period.”

I try to recall my knowledge of the TA Neural Network guys, and all I can remember is that it involves sitting on a chair in front of a NN admin console. It doesn’t sound at all like exciting or challenging work, but I already know that this is my only way into the Navy right now, so I just nod my head.