Every single private in his training company regretted the dumb luck or deity’s curse that landed us there. Every day, hell, every minute of the training cycle we regretted it.
Later, when we entered combat for the first time we—those of us that survived at least—discovered it was our good fortune that we had Drill Sergeant Fortuna teach us our trade. As tough as he was, as much hell we thought we endured, we discovered it was just a pittance of what our war offered.
Drill Sergeant Fortuna knew this, and he did his damndest to prepare us. That giant prick saved countless lives with his training methods and damn all drill sergeants that didn’t follow his example and methods.
-(o)-
Our company was strapped into the transit chairs that lined the wall of our troop bay. CFSSF—that is, the Coalition of Free Systems Space Forces—regulations mandated it when a Space Forces vehicle was making most maneuvers, and especially when making passage through a Long Distance Transit Gate, or as most of us called them, a Jump Hole.
The CFSSF Murphy TT-07 Troop Transport was the vehicle on which we were hitching a ride. The Murph was the first troop transport through the gate after the fighting vehicles. That was because we were the first troops to hit the planet Creech and take it back from the Pythans.
Three infantry divisions made up the primary attack force. In addition to the organic support units within our divisions, we had elements from numerous other branches within the service. Armor, air defense, combat engineers, military police, logistics, medical, and a whole lot more.
A standard troop transport vehicle could haul one infantry regiment and all their gear. An infantry regiment was just shy of three-thousand troops, three regiments made up a brigade, and two brigades were a division. That means it took six troop transports to haul just the grunts that made up a division. Don’t ask me how many troop transports it took to carry the whole force. That was Space Forces business.
-(o)-
Grunts. That’s an old, old, term for infantry. It could mean high praise or be used as an insult. Drill Sergeant Fortuna used it as both, and sometimes in the same utterance.
We received our training on Astra, and we came from places all across Coalition space.
Initially we were sent to a reception company for in-processing, then a group of us who were destined for infantry training were formed into a twenty-troop platoon and sent to our training company.
We were the first platoon to report and were there for a week before the other three platoons showed up. It wasn’t so bad. The Platoon Drill Sergeants were strict, but fair, and in the week we were waiting on the others the drill sergeants taught us many of the tricks of being a recruit. As I said, it wasn’t too bad, but that came to an end when training officially began and we met our Company Drill Sergeant, the training devil incarnate, John S. Fortuna.
Drill Sergeant Fortuna made it clear where we stood right from the start. We stood in four ranks of twenty soldiers per, processing packets in hand, when he first addressed us.
“I am Company Drill Sergeant Fortuna,” came the first words we ever heard him bellow. It was like shockwave of an explosion striking our eardrums. “You are my training company. Mine! Not Land Forces’, not the Coalition’s, you belong to Drill Sergeant Fortuna.”
Someone in the formation laughed. It was the one and only time it happened.
“That’s one,” Fortuna said. His voice sounded deadly. “Each cycle gets one, and that’s yours. From now on, they count. You fuck up, you pay. Someone near you fucks up, you pay. Some days the dragon eats you, and some days you get eaten by the dragon. I’m the fucking dragon. Anyone not understand that?”
Not a one of us had guts enough to say a word.
He paced back and forth like a caged cat. “My job is to turn wriggling civilians into soldiers. Sounds simple enough, but pudknockers like you make it difficult. It’s hardwired into you, and I’m the electrician that’ll fix that deficiency in your character.
“Training command sends me the duds, the mentally deficient, and the problem children. They do this because I have a reputation for being a miracle worker, and that’s exactly what it’s going to take to turn you slags into something serviceable.
“So let’s take a step on my path to sainthood together. Put your neat little packets on the concrete beside you,” he said calmly. We did, and as soon as we were back at attention, he exploded.
“Give me twenty fucking pushups right now! Now! Now! NOW!”
That was as cordial as our relationship with Sergeant Fortuna would be for a very long time.
Nothing we did was good enough. If we met training manual standards, we were called “substandard” because we didn’t meet Fortuna standards. If we passed a test according to the book, we were told we failed because we didn’t do it according to the Book of Fortuna. Land Forces had their standards and Drill Sergeant Fortuna had his. Land Forces standards meant nothing, Fortuna’s were everything. If anyone in Land Forces didn’t like it, not one of them had guts enough to tell him any different.
At the end of the first week, all eighty of us were convinced we’d been sent to hell or had mistakenly been placed in Land Forces’ first penal battalion.
Nothing escaped his attention. He could spot a scuff on a boot from fifty meters away, an insignia one millimeter off center at five. He’d detect a floor polish blemish under a bunk before he walked into the barracks. He could hear someone march out of step and identify who committed the offense without looking.
Anyone who faced his verbal tirades had nightmares for weeks, and not a soul in the company avoided his ass-chewings. I won’t mention what happened to those that cried in Fortuna’s sight. The term war-crime comes to mind. Most of us were smart enough to cry in private.
Those that chose to complain to higher authority about Fortuna’s conduct received special attention from Fortuna after they found out that the higher authorities were also afraid of the man. The whiners came to believe that abuse was their new lifestyle, and for a time it was.
As far as we could tell, Fortuna never slept, never took a day off. He was ever present and always intolerable.
Amazingly, we all survived the first two months of running, road marches, pushups, sit-ups, running, road marches, barracks maintenance, rifle drills, running, road marches, drill and ceremony, regulations, running, road marches, unarmed combat, barracks inspections, running, road marches, and everything else that made up those eight weeks.
Even though we made it to advanced training, Fortuna demanded more. Always more. We never did anything to his satisfaction. Nothing was ever good enough, it could always be done better, he insisted.
Our hatred of the man grew.
-(o)-
When the Murph completed the jump, it took some time for the fleet of space vehicles to reorganize and join with the other vehicles that came in by navigation lane. Jumping is not an exact science, at least that was what the Murph’s crew always said.
The Pythans knew we were coming as soon as we popped up in system. There was no hiding in space. Our job was to assault the planet and secure it before the Pythans could send a relief force. If they did, it would mean a space battle as well as a harder fight for us groundside. To prevent such an occurrence, that meant we had to hit hard, hit fast, and hit where the enemy was. Our attack was aimed right at the gut of the Pythan ground forces and our division was delivering the first punch.
Before our attack could start, we had to get there first. Before we could get there, the Space Forces combat vehicles had to clear the system of whatever Pythan space forces might be lurking.
Once accomplished, the attack craft would go to work. Air defenses would be targeted first, then they’d go after other targets, but this, just like our ground assault, would be tricky because the Pythans occupied ground where there was a mass of Coalition civilians.
-(o)-
Advanced training was almost exclusively infantry training. Weapons first, then tactics. Most of our time was
spent at weapons ranges or on field exercises, and during most of those ranges and exercises, Fortuna made it abundantly clear that he was better than us through repeated demonstrations of his superiority. He would outshoot us at the range. Outmarch us, outfox and outthink us in the field.
“Bam! You’re dead,” he would yell when he’d mock kill us in one fashion or another.
“You couldn’t hit the side of a barn from the inside,” he would say when he would outscore us at the range.
Every time he would follow it up with, “If your opponent has someone like me, you know what will happen. You’ll all die. If they have a bunch of me’s, then we’re fucked, ‘cause you guys will lose. You’ll lose the fight, you’ll lose the war, you’ll lose your life, and your families get to become Pythans!”
Then one sunny day it happened, one of us bested him. Rifle Range 7, long-range shooting, it was me. Beat him by two points. He spewed a storm of curse words, some of which we’d never heard before. He poked a finger millimeters from my face and told me it was a fluke, that I got lucky, that it would never happen again.
That made me angry, not scared like I would have been weeks before. I swore to myself it would happen again, and the next visit to Range 7 it did happen again. This time four of us bested him, with me on top by two points again, four better than Fortuna. He cursed an even bigger storm that time, but the mask slipped a little. For a fraction of a second I saw it in his eyes… he was proud of us.
The days of Fortuna finding tiny blemishes and trivial mistakes were gone. They were gone because those deficiencies no longer occurred. We came to realize he was teaching us to pay attention to detail. Those tiny blemishes meant something, things that small and minor can kill you in the hostile environment of war, and if you couldn’t handle such tasks in a peaceful barracks, you certainly wouldn’t in combat. We learned that doing it the right way, every time, in everything, maximized our odds of staying alive and more importantly, winning the fight.
By the last week of infantry training, we were beating him more often than he beat us. We were good, very good, in every aspect of soldiering. From spit-and-polish drill-and-ceremony, to shit-in-a-cathole-and-blow-the-fuck-out-of-whatever-target-anyone-in-this-damned-universe-threw-at-us exercises.
-(o)-
The Space Forces crew on the Murph told us the fight in space was all but over. That meant it would be our turn next.
Captain Connolly, our company commander, made it official a few hours after the scuttlebutt made its rounds. The difference was that scuttlebutt is wrong at least half the time, Connolly almost never was. We were going to war.
The concept of a planetside assault from space is a simple one: Troops aboard a space vehicle get on landing craft that take them from space to the planet’s surface where the soldiers accomplish their mission or die trying.
In practice, it was the same, but the details were what made it complicated.
First thing was predeployment weapons and equipment checks. Everything had to be ready to go and everybody had to account for every piece of gear. Once planetside, we weren’t getting back to the Murph for a long while, so if we forgot something it was considered lost.
We had performed check after check up to that point, but this one was the last before we packed up and boarded the landing craft. Inevitably, some soldiers had missing gear.
“Happens every damned time,” First Sergeant Wolf grumbled as he stalked the troop bay.
Our squad leader, Squad Sergeant Vagrant, was happy because we were good to go. Private Sharkey had a tendency to be one of those guys that had items turn up missing, but not that day.
Sharkey was a rifleman, same as me. Each infantry squad had four soldiers who carried the designation of riflemen, two per team. SSG Vagrant led Team 1, and Sergeant Parker led Team 2.
In addition to a pair of riflemen, each team had a machine gunner and an assistant gunner, with the AG serving as a rifleman when he wasn’t feeding or spotting for the machine gun.
We were 3rd Squad, 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Regiment of First Brigade. Threes all across the board damn near.
First Brigade of 1st Division was going to be the first wave to hit Creech, the most populated planet taken by our enemy. Our job was to hit the main Pythan ground force in the city of Fitzroy, and pin the Pythans down while the rest of the Coalition units landed. With Coalition civilians in the combat zone, our briefings said it would be dicey, which we took to mean our civvies were going to get it right in the teeth.
-(o)-
When we finished Advanced Training we went to Paladium to join the 1st Division, but not before we were sent off by Drill Sergeant Fortuna.
We were in a line formation, eighty newly minted soldiers in perfect uniforms standing sharp and proud on the concrete training area in front of the barracks.
He said to us, “I wish I had another two months to turn you grunts into decent soldiers, but there’s a war on and the Land Forces need cannon fodder yesterday. You’ll do in that role. You slags ain’t the worst recruits I ever had, but you’d make the top five. I performed a damned miracle getting you where you are now in just four months, so when you say your prayers before you go to bed each night, you thank me for all I did for you, and thank whoever else you pray to for providing my glorious self to be the man to handhold you these last four months.” He said the last sentence in one breath.
He slowly walked down the line and looked each one of us in the eye before he came to stand dead center in front of the formation. He looked upon us as soldiers now, we knew that.
“Company. A-ten-Huh!” he bellowed.
In perfect unison, eighty soldiers came to attention.
“Sloppy, very sloppy,” Fortuna said.
He looked up and down the line once more, and all eighty of us caught a slight upturning of his lips. We concluded that was his version of a smile.
“Company. Dis-Missed!”
Most of us shook the hands of those standing near us and patted one another on the back in celebration. Fortuna let that go on for thirty seconds or so.
“Get the fuck off my training area!” he said pointing to the entry. “I got quality recruits coming in, and I don’t need them seeing a sorry bunch of pudknockers conducting a circle jerk. Move!”
I swore then that if I ever met the bastard again I’d punch him in the face and then buy him a beer. Later, after realizing the value of what he taught us, I revised that, and decided I’d replace the punch with a handshake, he deserved no less.
Our training company made transit together and reported to 1st Division’s Headquarters. There was no time for a pass or leave. There was a war on. We were assigned to several different companies within the same battalion, with six of us ending up in the same squad: Blaine, Ford, Porcello, Sharkey, Terry, and me. SSG Vagrant, our new squad sergeant, was not happy. Six newbies did not sit well with him, but we changed his mind quickly enough.
We six were welcomed to our new unit by Platoon Sergeant Vandoren and First Lieutenant Parra and were told we’d be run ragged getting up to speed.
The entire division was training up for deployment. Rumor had it we were going to be retaking one of the Coalition planets the Pythans now occupied, a rumor that proved to be true.
We spent long days doing much the same thing as we did in training, ranges and refresher courses mostly. I did well enough on the rifle ranges that I was designated as Rifleman(Precision), and issued the rifle that went with it. It was basically an accurized version of the LF18A2 standard infantry rifle with better optics.
As we meshed with our new unit and as our deployment date neared, the entire division moved on to field exercises.
Many of the new members of the 1st Division struggled, but not those of us trained by Sergeant Fortuna. We were trained to his level, and that level meant we could hang with any infantry there was, even if we were fresh out of training.
The final field exercise was an old 1st Division tradition. Long-servi
ng and grizzled soldiers, troops who had soldiered for a decade or more, would conduct defensive operations against new soldiers. They called it a Grumbler and Newb skirmish, terms whose origin was lost to all of us. We new troops were of course the Newbs, and we knew no one expected us to prevail, as the experienced troops always won.
The skirmishes were small training exercises, generally held within companies or battalions. No night vision, no artillery or air support simulators either, just simple infantry on infantry.
For many of us, soldiers trained by Fortuna and drill sergeants cut from the same cloth, we weren’t going to concede defeat or go down quietly. We intended to go down fighting, exactly as our training had drilled into us.
My five squad mates and I were assigned to a company for the exercise, and in our ad hoc platoon there were twelve of us from Fortuna’s training company.
Our company was tasked with capturing a hilltop command post. When we saw the hill, we could tell the playing field tilted heavily in the defenders favor.
The young 2nd Lieutenant that led our company decided our only chance was to attack at night, and seeing as both sides had equal numbers, our chances of success were low.
The lieutenant’s plan was for us to assault the hill from four directions, with one of the platoons acting as a decoy to draw the defenders away from most of the perimeter, then the other three platoons would attack. Most of us thought it was a plan destined to fail.
My platoon was the decoy. We attacked as planned and within minutes half the platoon was shot dead according to the rules of the game, meaning that when the beams fired from the training weapons scored a hit, the victim’s weapon ceased functioning and a high-pitched alarm sounded from the gear each soldier wore.
I was with a group of eight soldiers in a defilade, a fold in the ground that kept us out of the line of fire, out of the light of the flares around the curve of the hill, and out of sight from the Grumblers on top of the hill. Four of us were Fortuna trainees, Sharkey, Blaine, Porcello, and me.
Conflict: The Pythan War, Invasion Page 27