Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

Then she reaches across the table and holds out her hand.

“You’re not in my squad anymore. You’re not even TA anymore, technically speaking, so we can just go by first names now. I’m Briana.”

I take her hand and shake it.

“Andrew, but you knew that already.”

It’s a bit weird to think of her as Briana instead of Sergeant Fallon . A week ago, addressing her by that name would have been inappropriate chumminess and borderline insubordination. Now we’re just two people, no longer bound by the complex rules dictated by military tradition and protocol.

Still, a part of me will never stop thinking of her as my sergeant. She’s the toughest, most competent, and most even-handed soldier I’ve known, and she runs her squad as a strict meritocracy. If only a tenth of the military consisted of people like Sergeant Fallon, we would have kicked the SRA off of every inhabited celestial body between Earth and Zeta Reticuli fifty years ago already. As things stand, we’re weighed down by people like Major Unwerth, who coast through the system doing only the expected minimum. If a military is the reflection of the society it serves, it’s amazing that the Commonwealth is still at the top of the food chain on Terra. Even with all the dead wood in our ranks, we have been able to hold the line against the SRA, and the dozens of regional powers in the Middle East and the Pacific Rim that are short on resources and long on grievances with their neighbors.

“I hope I’ll see you again,” I say. “Can I stay in touch through MilNet?”

“Of course,” she says. “And when you get to take your leave, and you end up coming back Earthside for a week or two to visit the folks, stop by at Shughart and drop in on the squad, okay?”

“You can count on it,” I reply, even though I know that if I come back to Terra on leave, I’ll make a very wide berth around the old homestead.

“Space,” she says, in a tone that suggests the idea is the dumbest one she’s heard in weeks. “You couldn’t pay me enough to be a Navy puke, that’s for sure.”

“You’ve never wanted to get off Earth?”

“Hell, no.” She picks up her plastic coffee mug and takes a sip.

“Months at a time, in a big-ass titanium cylinder without windows, getting fat on Navy chow, and the only combat grunts on board are freakin’ Jarheads? No, thank you. I’ll stay on this over-populated ball of shit and slug it out with the Chinese and the Indians, thank you very much. There are still some decent patches of ground left on Terra, you know.”

“Yeah, I do,” I say, remembering the pristine little middle-class town near NACRD Orem, with its manicured trees and lawns, and the clean, snow-capped mountains rising up in the distance. “I just don’t think I’ll ever get a shot at living on one, not on this planet.”

“So you’ll try for twenty years and a spot on a colony ship?”

I shrug in response.

“Colony life is hard, Andrew. You think people are only nasty and mean and violent in the PRCs? You take a thousand of our best and finest, put ‘em on a colony ship, fly ‘em out past the Thirty, and drop ‘em on a newly terraformed pebble by themselves, and you’ll see all the shit attitudes from Terra popping up in short order. You’ll have the slackers, the self-righteous, the social engineers, the power-grabbers, the religious fruitbats, and three months of peace before people gang up in tribes again and start messing with each other’s shit. You think people like Unwerth only make it in the military? I’ve seen dozens of guys just like him in the civilian world. Imagine some jackass like him as your colony administrator, and the next arbitrating body is a few light years away. Some of those outer colonies only get a visit from the Navy once or twice a year, and then it’s some old frigate dropping off supplies and checking satellites before skipping the hell out of the system again as fast as they can unload their hold. You get your patch of land, but you’re truly on your own, at the ass end of the known galaxy.”

She pauses and takes another sip before shaking her head once more.

“That kind of isolation fucks with people’s heads, knowing that you’re so far away from the rest of humanity that your local sun can go nova, and it’ll take a generation before someone on Terra can see the event with a telescope. And then there’s the environment. You could end up in a place where ten below is considered a heat wave. Other places, you have three quarters of the local year without a sunrise, or a sunset.”

I don’t quite know how to answer. Everything she says is true, of course. The colonies are not exactly vacation resorts, despite the fact that the government has to hold lotteries for spots on the colony ships. Just like the military, there are always a hundred times more applicants than slots. Still, there are only a handful of colonies whose population has even broken the million mark, and the idea of sharing a whole planet with a tenth of the number of people living in the Greater Boston area is something I can barely wrap my head around.

“I’ll put up with a few months of darkness if I don’t have to wear another bad air mask for the rest of my life,” I finally reply.

Sergeant Fallon gives me a smile that looks a lot like the ones my mom used to give me whenever I said something charmingly innocent and utterly ridiculous as a little kid.

“There’s no perfect place, you know. You always end up trading one kind of shit for another. Me, I’ll stick with the shit I know.”

“Well,” I say, “I’m sick of this shit, and I want to try a different kind for a change.”

We both laugh. I don’t want to think about the fact that I won’t see her again after today. I’ve laughed more in the last two months than I did in the two years before joining the service. My squad mates are the closest thing I’ve ever had to siblings, and if I have one regret about jumping ship and joining the Navy, it’s giving up my new circle of friends. I’m sure I’ll make new friends in the Navy, but I’ll be the new guy all over again, the one who has to prove himself.

“Well, I hope it works out for you,” she says. “Getting what you want is a rare event in the military, especially at our pay grades. Make the most of it.”

“I will,” I say. “And if I hear some jarhead talking shit about the TA, I promise I’ll pick a fight.”

Sergeant Fallon chuckles in approval.

“You better,” she says. “And just to make sure you don’t forget where you’re coming from, I’m going to make sure they put you in for the Combat Drop Badge. You wear that on your Navy uniform, you might as well have a tattoo on your forehead that says, ‘I am a former TA grunt.’”

The Combat Drop Badge is awarded to line troopers after their first drop involving hostile fire. What exactly constitutes hostile fire is up to the discretion of the battalion commander. Some unit COs set the bar rather low, and count drops where the lead drop ship may have taken a round or two of small arms fire, but the commanding officer of the 365th AIB has higher standards. Still, I have no doubt that anyone who can bend the battalion S2 over a barrel like that would also be able to make good on that promise and have the battalion award the CDB to a private with two battle drops.

“I think you’ve done enough for me, Sarge,” I say. Even though I wouldn’t mind a CDB above my left breast pocket, I don’t want Sergeant Fallon to push her luck with the brass. That Medal of Honor can only get her so much credit with the CO before he decides that she would serve the TA better as a recruiter in some forsaken office in northern Manitoba.

“You shut the hell up, and when that badge comes your way in the inter-service mail, you pin it on your Navy smock, and you show those desk moppers and console jockeys that you are a combat grunt.”