Джон Ринго - The Last Centurion

So. Grew up on a farm. Maximum suckage once a year picking rocks. (Another essay.) Went to college (UM, Farmington) on a football scholarship. Got cut sophomore year.

Dad had a college fund for me but . . . Well, if I dipped into it for, you know, tuition and books it really cut into my discretionary income. The insurance for a twenty-year-old on a Mustang GT-175 is not cheap. And buying the ladies nice dinners tends to get you laid more than McDonalds dinners do. I did not want my discretionary income tapped.

ROTC was just sitting there. Most of my family had been Navy. (Don't laugh. I think most of the Navy is crewed by Midwesterners.) But there wasn't a Navy ROTC program. So I went Army.

Okay, yes, there was a war on. But, again, I did the math. Death rates in that war were pretty much on a par with death rates during previous peacetimes. Don't believe me? Check the figures yourself, I'm not going to hold your hand. But it's true. And death rates among combat forces were not significantly higher than in the Navy . Being at sea is an inherently dangerous process. Lots of people die from accidents. Most of the people dying in the Army were from accidents.

And . . . Oh, hell. Yes, okay. I did have a "desire to serve in combat." Call me stupid. My life, my choice. I wanted to go over and fight. Look, I was twelve when those bastards hit the Twin Towers. I watched those clips over and over just like the rest of you. I knew I didn't want to cruise around on a ship. I wanted to fight. Insert appropriate lines from "Alice's Restaurant" here.

So I went ROTC. Got my degree and my brown bars the same day. Went off to Infantry Officer Basic Course. Which sucked . At the time it was my definition of suckage.

Got sent to the 3rd ID in Savannah. Which wasn't a bad place to be for a junior officer with a decent stipend from my shares in the corporation. All I had to do was put up with the bullshit aspects of the Army for six years, go get my Masters in Agronomy and I'd be manager on one of the satellite farms until Dad retired. I was shooting for the mixed crop farms near Hanska. The walleye fishing on Lake Hanska was great and we owned a couple of cottages over there. And since the Hanska manager was in charge of ensuring the upkeep of the cottages . . .

And then we did our first deployment. And, oh, hell, I enjoyed it. Yes, I lost two troops to sniper fire, James Adamson and Litel Compson. They were good guys, both of them. Damned fine troops. I could talk about both of them all day.

But we were doing a tough job in a tough environment. Even with the support of the Iranian government, there were lots of people who really wanted the mullahs back in power. Not going to do an essay on that, this is about the Time of Suckage. We did our job and as a guy in charge of making sure that everything went right, well, for a first deployment I didn't do too bad. Farmers are planners; the CO and my platoon sergeant (Sergeant First Class Clovalle (pronounced "Clo-Vail") Freeman) didn't have to tell me about planning to prevent piss poor performance. And, hell, I always got along with people. I liked my troops and vice versa. Mostly. There's always a few assholes.

But for a first time deployment as a cherry LT I didn't do too bad. And my OER more or less said the same thing. (Actually, it sounded like I was fucking Napoleon but the decent ones always do. That got explained to me in detail.)

I was doing good work and doing it well. Frankly, that first deployment made me rethink the whole Hanska Plan.

Back we went to Savannah. I got promoted to 1LT and went off to Advanced Course. It sucked but not as bad as IOBC. Then I went to Ranger School and got a new appreciation for maximal suckage. (Edit by wife: The author of this is too humble to admit he got Distinguished Honor Graduate in Infantry Officer's Advanced Course and Honor Graduate in Ranger's School. He's an idiot but I love him.) Oh, sure, I like a challenge as much as the next over-testosteroned young idiot. But Ranger School wasn't a challenge in any way except staying awake. It was just suckage, day in and day out.

Oh, yeah, and I went to Jump School right after IOAC. Forgot about that until I remembered the maximally suck jumps in Ranger's School. Jump School, these days, just tries to suck.

When I got back we were getting ready for another deployment. I was too senior for a line platoon, it wasn't time to rotate the Mortar Platoon leader and I was too junior for XO. So I got stuck in battalion in the S-3 (Operations) shop.

There are jokes about Fobbits. Those are the guys who stay in the Forward Operations Base. Dude, all I'll say is that I'd much rather be out doing patrols than stuck in the fucking FOB. FOB duty is boring and stressful. There are more PTSD cases among Fobbits than line troops.

(Of course, most Fobbits are REMFs who wanted to avoid being shot at so they got a job that didn't involve shooting. There was one MI guy who had a nervous breakdown about once a week and had to go get "counseled" in a rear area. Smart guy, seemed to really want to do the job, just did not have the constitution for it. Can't even call him a coward, just . . . didn't have the constitution.)

Not being out where you could actually do something was the worst part. No, the worst part was constantly having to work with Fobbits. No, the worst part was the S-3 who was a dick and incompetent to boot. No, the worst part . . . Damn, there are so many worst parts. The tour was maximum suck. Hanska here I come.

Back at Savannah we're doing all the shit that soldiers do when they're not fighting. I'm still in the 3 shop (new S-3 thank God and Major Clark was a real mentor during this period, wish we'd had him in Afghanistan) and we're in charge of making sure everybody gets trained back up to standard. Look, sure, combat experience is important and there are things you learn in combat you can't learn anywhere else. But . . . There are things you forget in combat, too. Things that you could have used. But guys build up a small skill-set that works to carry them through. Getting them to learn a couple more skills on top of that skill-set is a good thing.

Okay, and we had to fill in all the fucking check boxes of some Pentagon weanie who'd sort of heard there was a war on but needed to justify his existence by creating check boxes for us to fill. Yes, that's a lot of it.

And we had a big part in making sure all the equipment that had gotten fucked up on deployment got unfucked. That was mostly my stuff and Jesus there was a lot of stuff to unfuck. And find. And then admit had disappeared and do reams of paperwork explaining why it had disappeared. I'd say "in triplicate" but most of it was electronic. We had to file in triplicate, though. Thank God I had a clerk for that. Rusty was a fine guy for a Fobbit.

I'd done extra staff time. Either because of that or because the battalion commander liked my winsome good looks I got the battalion Scout Platoon. Honestly, with the way that we worked it wasn't much different from having a line platoon. But the battalion had started to use the Scouts as sort of an integral special operations unit. When there was a high value operation to perform (like capturing a particularly bad boy) and the fucking SEALs or Rangers or Delta or SF were otherwise busy sharpening their knives or taking pictures of themselves doing push-ups we got to kick the door.

It was a very hoowah fucking time for me. We went back to the Sandbox, this time to Iraq which was still having trouble over by Syria, and we got to kick a lot of doors. The "real" spec-ops guys were busy in Iran and Afghanistan. They didn't care that various Sunni countries (Cough! Cough! Saudi Arabia! Cough! Cough! Syria!) were still funneling weapons, money and personnel into Iraq. The news cameras were all in Iran so naturally that's where SOCOM went.