Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment

Ten sixty-six is the date of the Battle of Hastings. I file the number of my platoon away in my brain. I briefly wonder if the platoon numbers are assigned consecutively, and when they started counting. Are we the one thousand sixty sixth group of recruits this decade, this year, or this month? With a dropout rate of fifty percent, how many platoons have to cycle through boot camp in one year to keep the NAC forces staffed?

Sergeant Gau produces a stack of papers and drops it onto the desk of the recruit directly in front of him.

“You will take one form off the top of the stack, and then pass the stack to the recruit next to you. You will place the form on the table and leave it closed until I tell you to open it.”

The stack of forms makes its way around the room. When it arrives at my desk, I peel off the top form, and pass the stack to the right. It feels strangely liberating to do precisely as instructed. I don’t have to worry about displeasing the sergeant as long as I follow his orders exactly. For now, I resolve to not even scratch my nose unless being ordered by someone with chevrons on their collar.

“You will take your pens and fill out the forms in front of you. When you are finished, you will place the cap back on your pen and put it on top of the completed form. Execute.”

It’s administrative paperwork, which seems redundant at this point. After I signed my application for enlistment back at the recruiting office, I spent many hours at the processing station, filling out stacks of forms with all kinds of information. When you live in a Public Residence Cluster, the government knows everything about you including your DNA profile by the time you’re a month old, but the civil and military bureaucracies apparently don’t talk to each other very much.

So I fill out the forms in front of me, entering the metrics of my existence for the thousandth time in my life.

The last page is a contract, five dense paragraphs of legal language, and I read over it briefly. It’s the same information they gave us back at the recruiting office. Once upon a time, the job of the recruiter was to entice potential recruits into signing up for service by emphasizing the benefits and downplaying the drawbacks of military service, but that is no longer the case. Now, they hardly talk about benefits at all. Everybody knows you’ll get fed, and that there’s a real bank account and a Certificate of Service if you make it through your enlistment term. Now they try to discourage as many people as possible from signing up by describing all the drawbacks of service. I have no doubt that there’s a monthly quota for turning away people before they sign an application for enlistment.

At the end of my term, the account will be activated, with the accrued balance of sixty-two paychecks available for withdrawal. If I die before the term of enlistment is up, all the money in my account flows back to the government, as reimbursement for the cost of my training and equipment.

I sign the contract. This is why I am here, after all—to get out of the PRC and have a shot at a real bank account. I don’t care what they do with the money if I die. Until I have that certificate of service in my hand, that money is an abstraction anyway, just a bunch of numbers in a database.

When everyone is finished, Sergeant Gau has one of our number collect the forms and deposit them on the lectern at the front of the room.

“Congratulations,” Sergeant Gau says. “As of this moment, you are officially members of the Armed Forces of the North American Commonwealth. Be advised that this status is probationary until you graduate from Basic Training.”

There’s no ceremony, no oath of service, no pomp or ritual. You sign a form, and you’re a soldier. It’s a bit of a letdown, but at least they’re consistent in that respect.

We spend most of the first day standing around and waiting for stuff to happen. There’s another medical inspection, a pair of doctors looking at an entire platoon, so it takes almost three hours for all of us to be examined. We get a quick scan and a blood check, to make sure we didn’t engage in any last-minute chemical excesses. Then we get a series of shots, six different injectors that are administered in quick succession. I suppose I should be curious about the kind of stuff they’re injecting into my system, but I find that I don’t care. It’s not like they’d let me refuse the shots, anyway.

After the medical examination, Sergeant Gau leads us over to another building, where we stand in formation and watch other platoons filing into the door one by one. The other platoons are wearing uniforms, baggy fatigues in a mottled green-blue pattern that looks it would stick out just about anywhere.

“Mealtime,” Sergeant Gau announces, and these words produce the first smiles I’ve seen on my fellow recruits since we got here early in the morning.

“We will enter the chow hall single file. You will grab a tray from the stack by the start of the chow line. You may help yourself to anything you see without asking permission. When you have finished loading up your tray, you will find a table and seat yourself. Once you are seated, you will eat your meal. You may converse with your fellow recruits while you are seated. When I call your platoon number, you will finish your meal, stop your conversations, return the trays to the collection racks by the door, and line up in front of the chow hall again.”

Most of us haven’t had anything to eat since we left for the in-processing stations back home. I’m hungry, and I can tell by the sudden eagerness in the ranks of the platoon that I’m not alone.

“A word to the wise,” Sergeant Gau says before leading us into the chow hall. “Don’t make it a habit to overeat. You’ll end up puking your guts out once the physical conditioning starts. I advise you to keep that appetite in check.”

The dining hall is already abuzz with muted conversation between the recruits who have claimed tables before Platoon 1066, but we keep our silence as we stand in line to fill our trays. Still, we can look around and make incredulous and excited faces at each other, and we do. There are big metal trays of food behind the glass partition between the chow hall and the kitchen, and I’ve never seen or smelled anything this good in my whole life.

The stuff on the trays in front of us is real. I can see mashed potatoes, sliced meat with gravy, noodles, and rice. I have to exert considerable self-control to not grab my tray and skip ahead to the end of the line, where I can see donuts, slices of pie, and some sort of fruit cobbler. It’s probably just the sudden olfactory overload, but I am sure I can smell the chocolate frosting on the donuts all the way at the front of the line.

We all load up our trays with too much food. I take a salad, a bowl of soup that has vegetables and chunks of chicken floating in it, a heaping serving of mashed potatoes, and two pieces of meat. At the end of the chow line, I have to shift the food on my tray around to make space for a pair of donuts and a slice of apple pie. When I look back at the line behind me, I see very few trays that are loaded up less than mine.

I find a seat on one of the long tables in the chow hall, and dig into my food as soon as my butt hits the chair. We’re permitted to talk now, but for the first few minutes, we’re all too busy filling our mouths with food.

“I could get used to this,” one of the recruits at the table finally says. He’s a reed-thin guy with acne scars and a scraggly chin beard.

“They’ll make you shave that off,” I say, indicating the location of his beard on my own chin, and he shrugs.

“They feed me like this every day, they can fucking shave off every hair on my body if they want.”