Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment

“You want to keep up,” he says. The way he words the statement makes clear that it’s not a suggestion.

Sergeant Gau’s pace is not particularly fast, but after ten minutes, my sides are hurting, and my stomach bounces up and down like a badly balanced counterweight. We’re groaning and coughing as we try to keep pace with Sergeant Gau. He’s running in fatigues and combat boots, and not even breathing hard.

After thirty minutes, the first members of the platoon stagger to the side of the road and puke out their dinners in hot chunks. I can feel the bile in the back of my throat as my stomach wants to follow suit, but I manage to keep a lid on things.

Then Sergeant Gau slows down to a walk once more. He gestures for the platoon to turn around, and then he has us gather around the three recruits who are now standing doubled over by the curb, straddling puddles of puke. The smell of fresh vomit triggers a new wave of nausea in my head, and I fall out to barf the contents of my stomach into the gutter.

As I finish retching, I notice that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take the smell. Half the platoon is busy adding to the stinking soup that’s now filling the gutter by the side of the road.

“Lesson learned, I trust,” Sergeant Gau says, without any mirth.

Back in the platoon bay, Sergeant Gau has us stand at attention in front of our lockers once more. It’s hard to look dignified with vomit on your clothing.

“Good enough for today,” he says. “If you’re wondering why none of you have washed out yet, the answer is simple. You have not begun your training yet, so we have not given you much of a chance to screw up. That will change tomorrow morning, precisely at 0430 hours. Right now, you have ten minutes for personal maintenance in the head at the end of the platoon bay. At precisely 2100 hours, you will line up before your lockers again, and you will be wearing your issued sleepwear. Execute.”

The bathroom is one large room, with toilets on one wall, shower bays on the other, and a circular arrangement of stainless steel sinks in the middle of the room. There isn’t much space for privacy. Neither toilets nor showers have doors or partitions.

We wash up and change into our issue pajamas as ordered. The male and female versions look exactly alike, shapeless blue things that don’t look martial at all. When everyone is assembled in the center aisle as directed by Sergeant Gau, we look like a bunch of overgrown orphans lining up for a bowl of soup.

“Rack time,” Sergeant Gau announces after giving the platoon a cursory inspection.

“You will climb into your bunks. There will be no conversation once the lights are out. If there is an emergency, one of you will knock on the door of the Senior Drill Instructor, where I will be sleeping tonight instead of in my quarters with my wife. Don’t bother me unless one of you is bleeding from the eyes.”

When we’re in our bunks, the scratchy military-issue blankets wrapped around us, the LEDs on the ceiling dim slowly until they are extinguished. The room is dark, and all I can hear is the breathing of my fellow recruits, and the humming of the environmental system that keeps the room at sixty-eight degrees and filters out all the junk in the atmosphere. We’re a long way from any of the Metroplexes, but with Chicagoland, Los Angeles-San Diego-Tijuana and Greater New York all topping fifty million these days, there are few parts of the country where you don’t need environmental conditioning.

My bunkmate leans over the edge of her bed, and I can just barely see the outline of her head in the near-total darkness.

“This is not so bad,” she whispers.

“Except for the puking part,” I whisper back, and she chuckles softly.

At precisely 0430 hours, the ceiling LEDs turn on abruptly, and Sergeant Gau strides into the platoon bay.

“Out of bed, now ,” he shouts without preamble. “Do your business, wash up, and get dressed in your greens-and-blues. That’s the kind of clothing with the spots on it. If you need help, check your PDP for ‘UNIFORM, COMBAT, INDIVIDUAL.’ Morning inspection is at 0455, so get a move on.”

Twenty minutes later, we’re all dressed and lined up in front of our lockers. If Sergeant Gau is pleased at all with the fact that we’re ready five minutes ahead of time, he doesn’t show it. There’s a window set into the wall of the senior drill instructor’s office, and I can see that he’s fully aware of the platoon all lined up and waiting for inspection, but he doesn’t come out of the office again until the clock at the head of the room says 04:55.

We march off to breakfast. It’s only our third meal in the military, but the tables that were thrown together by coincidence on the first day are already coalescing into firm little groups. Our table of six has reconvened at every meal so far. There’s me, and my bunk mate Halley. There’s Ricci, the thin kid with the acne-scarred face and the silly chin beard, and Hamilton, an athletic-looking girl with long, blond hair. Then there’s Cunningham, who is covered in tattoos, and who was wearing a buzz cut long before she decided to join up. Lastly, there’s Garcia, a dark-eyed guy who never speaks unless you ask him a direct question. Halley is from Vancouver, Ricci from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and Hamilton is from Utah. Cunningham signed up in some forsaken farm town in Tennessee, and Garcia merely shakes his head when you ask him about his hometown.

“What branch would you pick if you could?” Ricci asks us over scrambled eggs and toast.

“Shit,” Halley laughs. “I’ll be glad if I make it through Basic. They can post me into any branch they want.”

“Come on,” Ricci prods. “Everybody has a preference.”

Halley shovels another forkful of eggs into her mouth and shrugs before answering.

“I don’t know, honestly. They’ll decide what we’re good for at the end of Basic. I wouldn’t mind something to drive or fly, though. Marine drop ship pilot, maybe, or armor crewman.”

“What about you?” I ask Ricci.

“I want Navy,” he says. “Coasting around in a starship. Not having to run around and get shot at. I’ll do anything, seriously. Mop decks, clean toilets, whatever.”

“You’ll end up in the Marines,” Halley tells him. “Or worse, they’ll put you into the Army.”

Our knowledge of the military branches is mostly limited to a number of self-contradictory shows on the networks, and the promotional vids they played for us at the recruiting office when they were convinced that they couldn’t talk us out of joining up.

The Navy owns the heavy gear, the starships that jump between the Colonies and provide the heavy firepower in territorial disputes, and the Marines are the boots on the ground in the Colonies. The Navy is considered a choice assignment, with the candidates for fleet service going to Fleet School on Luna right after boot camp. With close to five hundred colonized worlds to garrison and defend, the Marines have the most slots available, so that’s where most of us are likely to end up.

The Territorial Army is for anyone who doesn’t make the cut for the other two branches. Those are the grunts who keep civil order in the NAC on Earth itself, who slog it out with any of a hundred other nation-states. Army grunts don’t get to travel in spaceships and defend colonies; they are the garbage haulers of the Armed Forces. The TA has to deal with the armies of all the belligerents on Earth, including the ones too poor or backward for colonial expansion. The TA is also the government’s main tool to deal with violent strife in the NAC itself. It’s dangerous to jump onto a new planet or defend a new colony settlement against an invasion of Sino-Russian marines, but it’s a whole different level of danger to have your drop ship land you in the middle of a Public Residence Cluster in civil unrest, with five million people around you in various states of agitation and discontent.