The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  “There are five, and only five, reasons to train,” he told us. “These are selection, development, conditioning, skill training, and testing of doctrine and equipment. Of these, skill training is the easiest, and possibly the least important. Still, the best training does all these things at once.

  “When…if, you become centurions, you will be in a position to select among the troops you lead. What do you select for?” He looked straight at me.

  I sniffed the blood back, stood up, and quoted from the book, which was actually a doctoral thesis funded by Carrera, so I later learned. “Sergeant Major, we will select people for three considerations. Firstly, we select who will be made a leader. Then we select—and get rid of—those who ought not be retained in uniform in any capacity. Of the remainder, the bulk of your troops, you select who should do which jobs, get which training, be assigned to which of your subunits.”

  “Good, Candidate Fuentes, good.” He turned his attention back to the class as a whole. I sat down.

  “Now it is impossible to do a proper job of selection in a peacetime environment, unless your training in peace simulates war very closely. The things many other armies use—connections, wealth, degrees, to some extent IQ scores, and so forth—are not merely poor indicators of the ability to lead in combat, there is reason to believe that some—connections and degrees, especially—are adverse indicators. I tend to believe that.

  “So your training must be hard, painful, miserable, and—to a degree—dangerous. At the bare minimum, your training must have the appearance of being dangerous. Your soldiers must believe it is dangerous.”

  Martinez gave a tiny smile, then pulled out from under his podium a whip. He rotated it in his hands, to show it to us, while continuing to speak. “Based on the above, it would seem that simply flogging your troops once a day with a cat-o-nine tails would meet the requirements. Obviously, this is not so. Training must be exciting, interesting, more fun than pain filled, and—and this is very important—it must give your soldiers a sense of having accomplished something, of having won a victory or—if they lose—at least of having given a worthy effort. Besides, we want and need conscientious adrenaline junkies, not masochists.”

  I raised my hand. When Martinez waved the whip at me, I stood to attention. My voice sounded funny even to me as I asked, “Sergeant Major. Does that mean that we should take our troops out for…oh, adventures; white water rafting, scuba diving, things like that?”

  He dropped the whip back underneath the podium, then nodded as if he agreed. Somehow, I didn’t think he did. He then said, “Good question. No. That sort of activity doesn’t hurt, precisely. But it doesn’t help all that much either; certainly not enough for the effort and expense. And there is a danger that, if you try to do these things, you may well lose sight of your responsibility to make all of your training exercises adventurous.”

  I wasn’t quite satisfied. “What about team building, Sergeant Major?”

  “If you can’t build enough adventure to aid team building into normal tactical training and social affairs, Candidate Fuentes, I suggest you find another job. And stop dripping on the floor.”

  I sat down, wiping my red-stained face as I did.

  “Development,” he continued, “is concerned with building upon those conscious intellectual and moral factors a soldier must have. I speak here of judgment—human, technical, and tactical; of determination and courage—physical and moral. I mean all those things that are, or can be, consciously learned.

  “Remember, though, that while you can teach a monkey to load an artillery piece, you will never teach him to stop picking fleas off his body and eating them. You cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear; you cannot make an idiot a genius; you cannot make a coward a hero, except in the newspapers and in some other nations’ high political offices.”

  That got him a laugh.

  “Conditioning is closely related to development, in some ways almost a subset of it. To some extent, they overlap as equals. We condition our soldiers—leaders, too—in the unconscious attributes of a soldier. This includes conditioning him to accept pain and discomfort, generally through physical training and harsh field training. We condition them to obedience, being very careful not to overdo it. We condition their bodies to health and strength. We condition against hardships by chopping off food, water, and rest without notice.

  “One area where conditioning and development overlap is courage, where we first condition against fear by repeatedly placing the soldier in apparent or real danger, then develop the ability to use that reduced vulnerability to fear to allow the soldier to willingly place himself in greater, quite likely avoidable, danger, the better to do his combat job.

  “Discipline is another area where conditioning and development overlap, though differently from courage. We could impose discipline purely from above. This would be conditioning. It would also destroy initiative, one of the few areas where our poor country enjoys an advantage over her likely enemy. Therefore, we partly condition discipline: ‘Don’t do this’; while developing self-discipline through encouraging initiative: ‘Do what needs doing, as best you see it, now.’ It’s a tricky art; one that will probably take some time and practice for you to master.”

  Martinez pulled a knife out from under the podium and threw it at the back wall. We all turned to look. Sure as hell, the thing was quivering almost dead center of a bull’s-eye target there on the back wall. It was at least fifteen meters away.

  He looked at it, shook his head, and tsked. I guess he wasn’t quite satisfied with the throw. He muttered, sotto voce, something about, “getting old.”

  “Skill training.” Martinez sighed, still shaking his head. “A great general of Old Earth, Napoleon, once observed, to paraphrase, that moral factors are three times more important than material ones. Skills are material factors.

  “I think this is mathematically suspect. At one level, every one of the five factors that go into first class training are equal. That is to say, if your troops are effectively zeros in any one area, then they are zeros overall. This is because the factors and attributes cannot be added up to find the truth, as a statistician might. Instead, they must be multiplied by each other. Soldiers with absolute, even suicidal, courage but zero military skills have little value except in giving their enemies useful marksmanship training by becoming targets. Look up the Zulu impis at the Battle of Ulundi. On the other hand, soldiers with perfect skills but no courage would run away long before they have a chance to use their superior technical skills. I can’t give you an example of this because I have never found a case of an army being so stupid as to put all its faith into its people’s skills.

  “However, Napoleon was right in this: moral factors are three times harder to develop in the troops than mere physical and mental skills are. They are, therefore, only about a third as likely to be adequate in a given military force, unless three times the effort is expended on them.

  “You can, to some extent, develop moral faculties through skill training. Teaching a soldier how to blow through barbed wire with explosives is skill training. Having him do it while cringing nearby in a shallow crater, as the explosive goes off, builds his moral faculties, too. Training a soldier to rush from position to position quickly is a useful skill. Having a sniper shoot very near him as he does so also builds his moral power.

  “There is also a useful moral power that comes simply with being able to do something important properly, like shooting and hitting what you shoot at, for example. Self-confidence, if not entirely misplaced, has its value. Take that with a grain of salt, however. All the courses and books in the world on building self-esteem are largely exercises in learning how to be a bad judge of character.

  “Testing of doctrine and equipment? Simply this: if your peacetime training doesn’t identify weaknesses in both, you and your soldiers will bleed in war. You might even lose. For this reason, again, your peacetime training must simulate war as exactly as you can make it do so
.”

  * * *

  Most of our time was not spent in lectures. Lectures are a nice adjunct, but they’re not enough in themselves. Instead, we learned to do by doing.

  One of the major jobs for a centurion is to manage time, find time, create time. This is a problem in any army. It’s even tougher for us, with so little time to train the reservists and militia compared to how much training they really needed. Maybe one of Joan of Arc’s pikemen didn’t need a lot of training. Our riflewomen would.

  You might think that this is all very easy: make a schedule and stick to it. We do make schedules, of course, sometimes quite elaborate ones. The next time I see one of those work out as planned will be the first time. It’s the merest truth; the more carefully you plan, the more effort seniors put into supervising, the less efficient the use of time.

  So, amidst everything else we had to do in Centurion Candidate School—classes, physical training, beating the crap out of each other, inspections, field exercises, in short, right in there with every eighteen hour day—every one of us had to teach every other one about one new skill, technique or trick every week. We first had to teach ourselves, of course, skills like emplacing and recovering mines (tricky, that last), identifying friendly and foreign tanks, first aid, what have you. God help the candidate who failed to reach and teach everybody. And no time was scheduled for it, we had to find our own in every trivial bit of slack in the training schedule. Mandatory Opportunity Training, or MOT, they called it.

  This was, by the way, about twice the MOT burden men had. Oh, they had to do the same basic thing. But each man only had to deal with his own squad, nine or ten other candidates. I, on the other hand, had to hunt down all nineteen of the others every week, using every spare moment.

  If I failed, if the cadre found just that one candidate that I hadn’t managed to get to, we all got punished. Severely.

  Though the worst punishment was in failing your sisters.

  Unfair? Maybe. Then again, maybe it’s the straitjacket put on us by society, maybe it’s genetic, but we—women, I mean—are much more comfortable with order and rules, law and regulations, schedules and such. Men chafe under rules; are much more at home with chaos and disorder than we are. Men loathe regulations. Since war is chaos and no one has yet found a way to change that (and no one ever will), we were potentially at a grave disadvantage compared to men.

  MOT wasn’t a big thing, really, though it was a big pain. It wasn’t even about teaching or learning the tasks. It was all about learning to make time, deal with chaos, and watch out for each other.

  Though we run most of our own training now, we’ve never stopped using this technique. In some ways, number of tasks to teach, for example, we’ve made it even harder.

  * * *

  We had no great number of feminists left in the tercio. It was funny, but, while feminists had volunteered for the Tercio Amazona in larger numbers than their representation among the populace, they had not succeeded in anything like the same ratio. Whether this was because they objected to the harsh treatment, or they were strong only in their wants and not in their wills, or—and there had maybe been a couple of these—they had joined not to make the legion stronger for battle but weaker, I don’t know. Suffice it to say that most of those who made it through Basic, and all but a handful of those who had made it through Cazador School were actually more traditionally minded women, country girls, most of them, used to hard work and few amenities. I was almost the only pure city girl to have made it so far.

  Even so, it was hard not to have picked up some of the viewpoints of modern feminism, the women of our country are not that old fashioned. All of us believed in equal pay for equal work, for example. I rather suspected that the few real feminists among us would not have accepted the corollary; that unequal work should receive unequal pay. I’m not sure I did myself. By that logic, because our units were larger, we ought to have been paid less. Work isn’t everything, though, to a fighting force. As long as we would fight equally, I thought, and still think, we should be paid equally. I believe that was Duque Carrera’s viewpoint as well.

  He came to speak to us, once, as our training neared an end. Sergeant Major Martinez introduced him. As if he needed an introduction. I remember that he smiled at me warmly, and gave me the smallest imaginable wink, when he entered our classroom.

  “Ladies,” he began, and when he said “ladies” he seemed to mean it, “it does my heart much good to see so many of you still here, still in training. I am going to speak to your officer candidates tomorrow. I wanted to speak to you first. You’re frankly more important.

  “To begin, you have been kept somewhat in the dark regarding the details of raising your tercio. That was deliberate. There was no sense making promises that I could not know if I could keep. This was a good thing, as I now know I cannot keep to everything I might have wanted to promise.

  “All of you here today will—almost unquestionably—graduate CCS. That’s the good news. So I have been told that six of the officer candidates will likewise graduate OCS. The bad news is that there are too many of you future centurions for the number of officers: seventeen to six. There are also too few troops for that much leadership. That remains true even with the two hundred and ninety-three new Amazons that have finished Basic since your class and the several hundred still in the fourth class.

  “We also have the problem that none of you is truly an experienced leader. And experience, at your level, counts for a good deal. So…while you will graduate, and while you will receive your centurions’ sticks, you will not be accessed into the force, most of you, as full optios.”

  He raised a hand then to quiet the muttering. “Be patient. We are going to do with you what we do with most of the men, but in a slightly different way. You will—again, most of you—return upon graduation as sergeants and corporals to the six new casernes the legion has built for your tercio. You, like the men, will wear those stripes and a small cloth stick sewn on the sleeve to indicate your status. You will assume your rank as optios and centurions only when your tercio is large enough to justify it. And that will take a couple of years.

  “Tough, isn’t it? Well, if you really are soldiers now, as I’ve been told, then you won’t be complaining so much about your personal perks. If you are going to complain and put yourselves above the country and the legion then you are not soldiers at all. Which will it be?”

  As the question was obviously rhetorical, none of us answered. The muttering died away even so. He had touched a nerve when he suggested we might be selfish about this.

  “Good. What we will have then is six of the most junior officers imaginable, nineteen of you qualified to be—in theory—optios, several score extremely junior NCOs, and about three hundred trained privates.”

  Carrera singled me out, I suspect only because I was the only one with whom he could attach a name to a face. “Candidate Fuentes, do you know everything you need to know to lead a platoon?”

  It was a trick question, of course. If I said I thought I did, I’d being showing far more ignorance than if I admitted, truthfully, that I did not. I sort of ducked the question. “I imagine I know as much as any man in my position.”

  Carrera nodded. “Yup, I have no doubt you do. What would a man in your position, returning to his tercio, have that you do not?”

  I thought furiously for a moment. Then I made a joke, of sorts. “Adult leadership, sir?”

  Carrera nodded with great seriousness. “Yup. A man would leave here, or OCS, with all the tools he needed to begin…provided that he was in company with experienced officers and centurions to teach him the fine points. We don’t have any experienced female officers and centurions to give you, not one. I wish we did. But everything has to start somewhere, and you are the somewhere.

  “Tell me, do you think I should put you under the command of that leftover female tribune…what’s her name?” His fingers wriggled in the air as he searched his brain.

  I offered,
“You mean ‘Claudia,’ sir?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  I couldn’t believe he was serious. “Sir…she’s no kind of officer at all. An overpromoted bureaucrat. It isn’t so much that she doesn’t know the right way…sir, she’s spent a lifetime learning all the wrong ways. By now she’s just too old to relearn. Sir, you can’t! It would be”—I struggled for the right word—“It would be…sabotage!”

  “Can’t and won’t,” he agreed. “But you must have experienced leaders. And I can’t—well, I don’t—trust any straight men in the Force to do that for you. I wouldn’t even entirely trust myself.”

  Oh, shit. I knew what was coming even before he said it.

  “Therefore, the Tercio Gorgidas will provide your command and staff for the next few years.”

  We all groaned.

  “I thought I ought to tell you that myself. Gorgidas has been ordered to provide you with five tribunes of varying grades, a sergeant major, and four centurions. They will form the cadre for the first maniple of Amazonas. That’s not counting those who will continue to run Amazona basic training for the next several years, until there enough of you to do the job.

  “I said maniple, but it will be a different sort of maniple. It will be organized to be able to expand to a full regiment in time. Each of those six soon-to-be OCS graduates I mentioned will start as a platoon leader for one of the platoons. Six of you will become platoon optios. The rest of you will become squad leaders.

  ”None of this is your fault, by the way. We…I…made a mistake. I really didn’t expect nearly so many of you to get this far, so I didn’t plan for it.

  “Platoons? You’ll have six in that first maniple: three infantry, one combat support, one artillery, and one headquarters and support. They’ll run about forty to seventy women each to start with.