Jay Allan - Tombstone

By the time I got to Tombstone, I was a different person. Marine training is long, longer than anything I’ve ever heard of for any military organization. Part of that is because our wars are complex. No uneducated conscript can survive on a 23rd century battlefield. The suite of weapons and equipment we utilize is extensive, and it takes considerable effort to master. But the Marine program is as much about evolving the individual as teaching him to shoot and walk around in armor, and that is what really takes time.

I adapted well and really excelled at training. I’d never felt a part of anything meaningful, and when I had the opportunity to join a team that truly worked together, I jumped at it. Some of the others in my trainee class took longer. Many of them had even worse backgrounds, and they’d sunk deeper into depravity than I had. Bitterness and hatred hadn’t entirely consumed me as it had with some of them. I was an outlaw, yes, but never a bloodthirsty one. I stole to survive, and later to live comfortably, but my crew didn’t murder the people we robbed. I'd killed the supervisor, but he had abused me for some time, and I was sure he had been responsible for my father's death. Some of the others in my class at Camp Puller were real hardcases, broken people who had been driven to do some truly horrible things to survive and to lash back at the world. It took time to repair that kind of psychic damage, and that’s part of the reason Marine training is six years.

Now I'd made my first drop, and I'd fought my first action. I'd fought several, in fact - I was a full-fledged Marine. My crimes were gone, pardoned away in exchange for my service. I could go back to Earth when I mustered out if I wanted to, and I would be free from any consequences of my past. But even then, Earth was already starting to seem like something far away and long ago. I didn't realize it at the time, but the concept of home was changing for me.

We'd been on one mission that particularly made an impression on me. Three of our troopers were out on patrol, and they ended up cut off by superior enemy forces. The lieutenant didn't hesitate - he mustered the whole platoon and we scrambled out to try to link up and get them back home. The Captain was in on it too, sending a group of snipers and a heavy weapons team from base Delta-3 to assist us. We fought for four hours, the lieutenant pushing us relentlessly the entire time. In the end we broke through, but too late to save them. They were all lost.

The mood was somber when we got back to base. We were in a profession where people got killed - there was no way around that. Yet we mourned every one of them, and every trooper in the platoon wondered how he'd failed, what he could have done differently. I felt the loss too, and the futility of our fruitless, costly fight to save them. But then I realized it wasn't fruitless. Mathematically it was, of course. Had we abandoned them we would have had three casualties instead of the eight we ended up with. But combat isn't decided solely by numbers or equations; it is a test of morale, of the willingness of men and women to fight, sometimes under impossible conditions. Those three Marines died on that plateau, but they were never abandoned by their comrades. They knew to the last that their brothers and sisters were fighting to reach them…and the troops struggling to break through saw how the Corps treats its own. If it was them next time, trapped and cut off, they knew at least that they would not be cut loose, that no officer was going to make a cold blooded decision that they were expendable. The Corps stood by its own…wherever, whenever, whatever the cost.

I'd been on-planet for five months, and I wasn't one of the new guys anymore. Combat on Tombstone wasn't cheap, and we'd lost eighteen of our fifty since we'd landed. Half of them were wounded, all thanks to the armor's impressive repair and trauma control mechanisms. Our suits were a hell of a lot better than the Caliphate's in that regard – their nanotech was way behind ours. In a place like this, a wound was pretty much a death sentence for one of them.

We evac'd the wounded on the transport that brought us replacements. We had eighteen fresh new faces wandering around the base, and I was in the unfamiliar territory of mentoring the new people. Somewhere in five months of serving in hell I'd become not quite a veteran, but at least seasoned. I knew my way around this miserable planet and how to survive its many hazards, and I was determined that none of these 18 newbs would go out and get themselves killed doing something stupid. Others had done that for me, and some of those people were now dead or shipping out to the hospital on Armstrong. It was my turn, my debt to start repaying.

We'd just celebrated the new year…the new Earth year, of course. A year on Tombstone was only 61 Terran days, and just over 20 of the 73 hour local days. I'd never celebrated the new year before I'd become a Marine, but we had a nice little party in base Delta-4 and welcomed the new additions to the platoon. Six of them were experienced and were transferring from other units or the hospital. The rest were fresh from Camp Puller, the class that was half a year behind mine.

There was a lull in the action as the new Earth year began. Both sides were building up and replacing losses, and while we did frequent patrols there was little action. There was one interesting thing, though. We managed to intercept and decode a Caliphate message that gave the exact arrival date of their next convoy. I'd been with the patrol that caught the transmission, and we were pretty excited for a while. Taking out a couple hundred of their troops while they were still in the launch bays would save us a lot of trouble down here. But in the end nothing came of it. Alliance Gov considered engaging enemy forces in space to be an unacceptable escalation. Neither side had attacked the other's naval forces, and they weren't looking to start now. Everyone knew that full-scale war was coming, but nobody was ready for it yet. It was frustrating fighting a war that you weren’t allowed to win, but there was nothing we could do about that.

I ended up going out on patrols with most of the new people. The lieutenant was insistent that the fresh arrivals pair up with a more senior private any time they went outside. It was something that stuck with me years later when I was in command of various units. You want to keep your new people under the command of the most experienced non-coms available, of course. But it really helps to have them paired off with an experienced private, regardless of how good a team or squad leader they have. Human psychology is complex thing, and there are considerable differences in how a person interacts with a command figure and how they function with a peer at their own level.

This was shaping up to be a significant battle. It started small, just two patrols running into each other. They exchanged some fire, and that would have been the end of it, but neither side backed down. The Caliphate sent in reinforcements and pushed back our forces, taking the main ridge.

It looked like worthless ground to us, but the captain wasn’t going to give it up without a fight, and we got the orders to suit up. We were the farthest away, and when we got there the entire company was formed up, covering a front stretching over five kilometers. They had already counter-attacked and retaken the ridge when we arrived, and we fed into the line, allowing the units that had taken losses to condense their frontages.