It was a frustrating experience, I had to admit - and frighteningly realistic. There was no way to hide the fact that we couldn't stay forever, so the locals were reluctant to help us. One man begged me to give him a black eye, giving him an excuse for betraying the local den of insurgents; another came very close to being killed when he visited our FOB, posing as the owner, then used what he saw to call mortar fire down on our position. I kept reminding myself that the locals were merely looking out for themselves, and that I would probably do the same in their position, but it was hard not to loathe them. They were siding with insurgents who would conscript their sons, rape their daughters and take their crops, rather than marines who would die to save them from their enemies. How could I not dislike them ... and come to disbelieve everything they said?
We were moved on two weeks later, where we undertook harassment operations against an enemy armoured column that intended to strike our flanks; we fired antitank missiles at the leaders, sniped at the infantrymen accompanying them and bugged out before they found their range and returned fire. It was a better exercise than working with the locals, I decided, although I had my doubts about its value. Would we actually need to know how to fight tanks when they were rarely used by anyone, save the Empire? No one else would risk using them when orbiting starships could pick them out and drop hammers on their heads before they got into attack range.
“You might be surprised,” Southard said, when I asked. “You have no idea of some of the shit that goes on out there.”
He moved us on, again, a week after a series of sniping exercises. This took us to a large hill, covered in trees and bushes that provided ample cover to an enemy force. We eyed it with tired eyes, wondering just what was waiting for us. We’d seen too much to doubt that we would be pushed to the limits, once again.
“The enemy has occupied the hill and is using it as a base of operations,” Southard informed us, shortly. “Higher command has decreed the capture of the hill, rather than pounding it into the dust from orbit. They believe that a show of military skill will lead to the enemy surrendering. Your mission is to capture the hill, capturing or killing ever last enemy fighter.”
Joker scowled. “Surely pounding the hill into rubble would be a sufficient show of force.”
Southard gave him a nasty look. “One; we wouldn't know which of the enemy commanders we killed, so there are genuine military reasons to take the hill by infantry assault,” he said. “Two; you will certainly receive orders like this when you go into active service, so it is actually a realistic scenario.”
“He didn't give you push-ups,” I muttered, as the Drill Instructor turned away. “This must be bad.”
“Looks that way,” Joker agreed.
“You have twenty minutes to plan your offensive,” Southard informed us. “And then you have two hours to take the hill. Stalker ... you’re in command.”
“I think he heard you,” Joker whispered.
“I think I heard you too,” Southard said, deadpan.
We shared tired smiles, then I sent Sif and Blackmon to survey the terrain while I read through the briefing notes. For once, there was hardly any data; the only thing we knew for sure was that the enemy had moved a sizable force, at least six hundred men, onto the hill and camped out. Given a couple of weeks, which they’d had, they could have dug trenches, established a network of bunkers, set up communications wires (which are much harder to knock out than radios, as they don’t emit detectable signals) and taken any number of precautions. They wouldn't have lasted long if someone had ordered an orbital bombardment, but that seemed to be off the table.
“We have no helicopters or aircraft,” I said. It didn't look as though the operation was considered very important. A single platoon against six hundred? We’d be outnumbered so badly I doubted our training would make much difference. “Merely a handful of long-range guns.”
“Maybe you should request reinforcements,” Joker said. Bloodnok nodded in agreement. “It could be part of the test.”
But Southard disagreed. “You have only a platoon, Stalker,” he said. “Make the most of it.”
I looked back at the hill and swore. The reports from the snipers were coming back and they didn't sound good. Enemy forces - the BLA seemed to be a hydra; no matter how many heads we cut off they kept coming back - were dug into the hillside, daring us to advance against them. It didn't look as though there were any weak points, save one ... and it was so blatantly obvious it practically had to be a trap. Maybe I was meant to demonstrate moral courage and refuse the mission. Technically, I did have that authority ...
... But it would be too much like giving up.
“Very well,” I said, finally. There were only five minutes left to sort out the plan, but with some fiddling I could make arrangements while we moved into position. “This is what we’re going to do. The gunners are going to plaster the hill with shells, aimed at disrupting as much of the enemy position as possible. Sif and Blackmon will take up sniping positions and pick off any enemy who shows his face. The rest of us are going to advance forward under cover of shellfire, taking out any surviving enemy positions as we pass. If we need additional fire support, we'll call it in from the reserve gunners. Any questions?”
None of them looked enthusiastic, I had to admit. I didn't feel very enthusiastic either. If we’d had reinforcements, we might have been able to take the hill without hammering it with the guns; if we’d had helicopters, we might have been able to drop down to the hillside under cover of darkness and capture or kill the enemy leadership. But all we had was a battery of guns, our rifles and a number of grenades. It didn't seem like enough, somehow.
“The guns may run out of shells,” Bloodnok pointed out. “They have only a few thousand rounds.”
“Then we may have to pull back and admit defeat,” I said, grimly. It would get me in deeper shit than simply refusing the mission, but at least we would have tried. “We move in five minutes.”
I couldn't help feeling nervous as we slipped as close as we dared to the hill. There was no sign that the enemy had deployed a line of pickets, or even a handful of sensors, but it worried me. If they were good, they might even be watching us through telescopes; low-tech, impossible to detect and next to impossible to stop. Sif and Blackmon might see the watchers and take them out ... or they might not. The more I looked at the operation, the less I liked it - and it was my plan.
Fuck it, I thought.
“Fire,” I ordered.
The gunners opened fire. We hit the deck as the shells screamed down and exploded, peppering in the hillside with giant explosions. It seemed unlikely that anything could survive, but we knew from bitter experience that even a relatively small degree of protection could save the targets from anything less than a direct hit. The ground shook madly as the first hail of shells hammered the hill, a handful of incendiary shells setting light to the undergrowth and creating a problem I should have thought of: smoke. Flames roared through the undergrowth, stripping the enemy positions of cover.
“Go,” I ordered, as the gunners walked their shells up the hill. It would hopefully keep the enemy too busy to notice us as we slipped forward. “Don’t stop for anything.”
We ran forward; Squad One taking the lead, with the other two squads taking the rear. I watched carefully as we reached the bottom of the hill, then advanced rapidly up the remains of a stream that had run down from high overhead. It wasn't a perfect trench, but it would give us some cover if - when - the enemy launched a counterattack. Sif and Blackmon kept up a running commentary in our ears as they sniped enemy soldiers, making it harder for them to see us coming. I saw the opening of a bunker, ideally positioned within the hillside, and tossed a grenade inside. The resulting explosion set off a chain of secondary explosions that blew the bunker to pieces and threw debris everywhere.
“Must have been some shells stored in there,” Joker commented.
I shrugged. There was no time to talk, not now. We kept running
forward, shooting enemy soldiers wherever we saw them, until we threw ourselves down as a machine gun opened fire on our position. Bullets splashed down around us, tearing up the mud; I cursed as Sif reported she couldn't see the gunner to take him out. He was keeping his head down, which was lucky; he could have wiped us out if he’d adjusted his position by a handful of millimetres. Still, we couldn't rely on him staying where he was indefinitely. I called the gunners and told them to load a seeker round while Joker illuminated the machine gun nest with a laser pointer. The resulting explosion wiped the machine gun out of existence, but triggered two more. I called down more fire as I hastily reassessed the situation. If there had been more of us ...
... But there weren't.
“Squad One, take the left,” I ordered. I might have blundered badly, but the situation was not beyond repair. “Squad Two, take the right. Let them think they have us pinned down.”
Bloodnok snorted. “They don’t?”
I ignored his sally as I issued orders to the gunners, then crawled to the left, keeping my head in the mud. A handful of enemy positions were smashed as a new wave of shells crashed down, giving us a moment to inch forward and seize the heights. Moments later, I saw a line of enemy soldiers emerging from yet another hidden bunker; they’d hidden underground when the shelling had begun, then returned to retake the positions before it was too late. And they were too closely intermingled with us to risk calling down more fire ...
“Grenades,” I snapped. There was no point in trying gas - by now, the BLA would have secured immunisation jabs for themselves - but HE would make their lives miserable. I threw one into the mass of soldiers while Joker and Moriarty hurled two more further into the bunker. In confined spaces, the effect would be even more devastating. “Get a lid on that bunker, now!”
Joker ran forward ... and fell, under a hail of fire from high overhead. I didn't have more than a second to mourn his loss before the unseen gunners swept their weapons over me. Squad One was wiped out moments later, leaving Squad Two the sole target of enemy fire. And there weren’t enough of them to push forward before it was too late.
My radio buzzed. “END EX,” Southard said. He sounded calm, too calm. I’d have preferred him shouting at me. “I say again, END EX. Return to deployment zone.”
“Aye, sir,” I acknowledged, as I rose to my feet. I’d been pinged, all right; I’d ‘died’ before, but this was particularly humiliating. I had a feeling I was in very deep shit. “We’re on our way.”
Southard was waiting for us as we returned to the deployment zone. “Perhaps you could tell me,” he said, “just what went wrong?”
“I screwed up,” I said.
“And did I ask you to talk?” Southard asked. “Sif. What went wrong?”
Sif hesitated, noticeably. “We attacked with insufficient force,” she said, after a moment that was really too long to escape Southard’s attention. “And we didn't have the power to keep the enemy suppressed before it was too late.”
I felt a glimmer of pity. Southard had deliberately placed her in a nasty position, giving her the choice between backing me up, which would have made her look like an idiot, or betraying me. I really wouldn't have complained - I certainly couldn't have complained - if she’d blamed everything on me. It had been my fault, after all.
“So,” Southard said, after a chilling moment. “Stalker. Do you agree with her?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I made a set of mistakes that lead to our defeat.”
“And to the loss of an entire platoon of troopers,” Southard said. “Defeats are one thing Stalker; they do happen, even if the propaganda department tries to convince people they don’t. But having an entire platoon wiped out takes it from defeat to debacle. Where did you go wrong?”
I had a nasty feeling I knew the answer. “Sir,” I said. “I should have refused the mission.”
Southard’s eyebrows quirked upwards. “You would have defied an order from the highest commanding officer on the planet?”
“The order was impossible to carry out,” I said. I knew that now; hell, even before, I’d known the mission would be very difficult. “We needed more firepower, more deployable forces and more ... well, more everything. A full company could have attacked from several different directions, forcing the enemy to spread their defences wide; a flight of drones could have called down fire on the bunkers, targeting them for precision missile strikes that would have saved the advancing forces from being surprised.”
I paused. “Or we could just have flattened the hill from orbit.”
“Yes, we could have done,” Southard said. He stepped back, as if he were addressing us all, but I knew he was speaking to me. “There are two forms of courage in this world. It takes a certain kind of courage to advance against enemy fire, true, but it takes another kind to refuse orders that will lead to certain defeat. You should have refused your orders, Stalker; indeed, you had a duty to refuse those orders.
“We’re very capable soldiers, but we are not gods. Nor are we superhuman. You could not have won the battle with the forces you had on hand, no matter what you did. In hundreds of years of operations, no one has ever won. The only winning move, as the saying goes, was not to play.”
I wasn't sure I believed him, at least not at first. I hated the idea of giving up; there was a part of me that believed, despite everything that had happened, that there was a solution. And yet, I knew I’d blundered badly. It wasn't until much later, really, that I came to terms with the idea that some battles were unwinnable and the only realistic option was to go to ground and reform for the next round.
“You will, of course, be expected to discuss - fully - the reasons for your failure,” Southard added, after his words had sunk in. “Why didn’t you refuse your orders?”
“Because ... because I thought we could do it,” I said. It wasn't a complete answer; we’d been told, time and time again, that disobeying a legitimate order was a court martial offense. And yet, a suicidal order ... was it really legitimate? Would there come a time when we might have to hold a position against impossible odds to save the rest of the force? “And I was wrong.”
“Yes, you were,” Southard said. I knew he knew what I’d been thinking. “You were wrong, Stalker, and your troops paid the price.”
He looked at the rest of the troops. “You were free with your opinions,” he added. “But the opinion you didn't put forward was a suggestion that the mission was impossible. You’re not being trained to be dunderheaded guardsmen, but marines. You should have raised objections if you believed it was an impossible task.”
I winced. It wouldn't have been easy for anyone to stand up and say so, not in front of the rest of us. But that too, perhaps, required a special form of courage.
“You’ll all be tested,” Southard said, quietly. “And I hope you will learn something from this experience. Because the next time may not be quite so obviously unwinnable.”
And, with that, he marched us back to the tents.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Marine Corps was, perhaps, the only military service where refusing orders, no matter how suicidal, was seen as acceptable. No other service would tolerate open insubordination; a CO who refused to carry out an operation would be rapidly relieved of command and earmarked for an immediate field court martial. The sentence, of course, would be death. It would not matter, indeed, if the operation failed spectacularly; the accused would probably take the blame, even though he had tried to stop the operation.
This may not explain all the problems facing the Empire in its final decades. But it certainly explains why the military was so unable to handle them.
-Professor Leo Caesius
No one gave me a hard time over my failure.
Well, no one apart from myself. I was mad. I’d screwed up; my mistake had led to the death of everyone in my platoon. Never mind that the deaths were simulated; the exercise had been stunningly realistic and they would have died, for real, if we’d been in act
ual combat. I should have declined the mission, or requested reinforcements; instead, I’d lacked the courage to admit that the mission was impossible.
Time went by, of course; we had hundreds of other training sessions, some designed - as we had been warned - to be impossible with what we had on hand. Learning to recognise those was difficult; we ended up appointing a trooper to serve as a devil’s advocate and enumerate all the reasons we shouldn't attempt the mission. It didn't always work, but at least it prepared us for the tasks facing us. By the time we geared up for the Crucible, we thought we were as close to ready as possible.
“This is the final obstacle before you earn your Rifleman’s Tab,” Southard said, as we gathered outside the gate. It was dark - they’d woken us at 2am - and the gate was lit up, the only source of light in sight. Some wag had written ‘abandon all hope, all ye who enter here’ above the gate, warning us that we could expect nothing but hell inside. “It defeats half of the platoons who step inside, forcing them to either break up and reform or recycle the individual platoon members to newer units. Some of you may die inside. Is there any of you who wants to back out at the final hurdle?”
First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11) Page 27