by Andrew Beery
My arms were burning. My lungs were burning. Standing at parade rest was agony but I would not bend. “Senior Drill Sergeant Harris, this recruit is of the opinion that you do not refer to him as a Marine because he has not EARNED the privilege of being called a Marine!”
“Outstanding answer soldier! There may be hope for you yet. Fall in.”
That was the first time Senior Drill Sergeant said anything even remotely nice to me. There would not be many such occasions, so I cherished this one greatly.
***
Towards the end of our first week we lost our first recruit. His nickname was Dash and to be honest I was surprised he made it as far as he did. He was strong enough and fast enough but every time there was a loud noise his first instinct was to… Dash. In a way, I was sad to see him wash out because his heart was in the right place, he just wasn’t emotionally suited to being a Marine. I spoke to him before he rang the bell.
“Mike,” that was his real name, we called him Dash for obvious reasons… “I want you to know that I respect you for having the guts to try something that you knew up front was going to be difficult. There are not a lot of guys who would not have had the nads to do that. I hope to serve with you in the future.”
“Come on AG,” he said. “I’m out. What the hell am I going to do now? You and I won’t be serving together unless you take a part time job at a diner.”
“Stow that soldier!” I barked. “You have a lot to offer the GCP. You’re smart and fast and strong. You may not be cut out to be a Marine but there are plenty of places you could be a real asset. Think about it. That’s all I ask. Promise me that.”
He shook his head… not in denial, but in frustration.
Later that day I asked to speak with Senior Drill Sergeant Harris. He had an open floor policy. You could speak to him any time we were not drilling, in his office… while doing pushups. It tended to keep such conversations short and infrequent.
“Senior Drill Sergeant Harris,” I said as I assumed the position and began to pump out pushups at a steady pace I could keep up for hours. “I have a concern about one of the soldiers Drill Sergeant.”
This got his attention. “Go on recruit,” he prompted.
“Drill Sergeant, it has to do with recruit Mike Zimmerman.”
“Former recruit Mike Zimmerman,” the Drill corrected.
“Yes, Drill Sergeant. Drill Sergeant the man would have made a lousy Marine. But he could still make an excellent soldier in the GCP.”
Senior Drill Sergeant Harris adjusted a control on his desk. Suddenly the gravity jumped to a full two Gs. I must have grunted because the bastard asked “What was that Recruit Stone?”
“Drill Sergeant,” I gasped as I continue to pump out pushups under two full gravities, “This recruit requests that a note be placed in Mike Zimmerman’s service jacket indicating he could be a real asset to another branch of the service, Drill Sergeant.”
The bastard of a Senior Drill Sergeant turned the effective gravity up another few percent. My arms were on fire but I would not quit.
“And why would I do that Recruit Stone?”
“Because you are a Marine Drill Sergeant… and Marines do the right thing.”
“Yes we do recruit.” He turned the gravity plating down to a standard one G.
My arms were toast and it was all I could do just to hold myself up. He saw that I was no longer doing pushups and he smiled.
“Give me one more pushup then assume parade rest.”
It took everything I had… plus some… but I did as he requested. While standing at parade rest I shook like a leaf from fatigue.
“Recruit Stone, as surprising as this may sound to you, I have been doing this for a while. The note you so eloquently requested is already in Ziggy’s file. My question to you is this, why are you here? Why come in here and risk my wrath for a man who washed out?”
I didn’t really have an answer for him. I had been asking myself the same question ever since I had decided to approach the Senior Drill. I suspected it might have been a lingering side effect of having been dropped on my head as a baby.
“Senior Drill Sergeant, I think I would want somebody to do the same for me should the roles be reversed.”
“Oh, are you thinking of quitting?”
“NEVER SENIOR DRILL SERGENT HARRIS! THE WORK QUIT IS NOT IN THIS RECRUIT’S VOCABULARY.”
Senior Drill Sergeant Harris looked at me for several minutes. I did not flinch. “No, I suppose it is not,” he said. “Dismissed Recruit Stone.”
On the last day of week one we got another surprise. One of the other Drills, a woman by the name of Staff Sergeant Baldwin came into our Billets. I was tired of running laps in 2G around the exercise track so I made it my business to encourage my fellow trainees to square their stuff away the second they were done using it. That way we were always inspection-ready. It turned out to be a good move on my training platoon.
“Recruit Stone, front and center POST!”
I quickly raced to her position and assumed the ‘At Attention’ stance: chin up, chest out, shoulders back, stomach in.
“Recruit Stone. By order of the Marine Training Commandant, effective this date, you are promoted to acting Ensign. You are authorized to promote one soldier to acting sergeant and one soldier to acting corporal. Everyone else remains a private. You have ten minutes to get acquainted with your command before you will run them to the mess hall were you will all enjoy a steak dinner.” With this she saluted me.
I was dumbfounded. She continued to hold her salute until another recruit named JJ coughed slightly and wiggled his right hand. Catching on, I crisply saluted her back. If Drill Sergeant Baldwin was pissed that I had not immediately returned her salute, she gave no indication of it. She handed me three arm bands and then executed a perfect about face and marched out of our billets.
The room exploded in a rush of excited voices. I’d like to think it was for me but I knew it was the prospect of real meal and not the retextured soy that they had been feeding us for the last week.
“Time?” I shouted.
“16:51”
I was excited by the promotion but I was also well aware that I had just been handed a huge target and asked to paste it on my back. With great responsibility came great reward and great risk. My first task was to promote a couple of my bunk mates. I tried to be objective based on knowing these guys and gals for only a week.
“Recruit Jeremy James Hammond, front and center POST!” I yelled.
JJ responded by lumbering over like the great ape he was and stood at something that only vaguely resembled attention.
“Recruit Hammond, by the power vested in me by Drill Sergeant Baldwin, and because I don’t have the common sense God granted a fly, I now promote you to the rank of Acting Sergeant. Ramirez that makes you the corporal.”
Chapter 4: Boot Camp – Week Two
The steak dinner was delicious. It included Texas toast, a massive baked potato complete with both butter and, if you wanted it, sour crème. The steak was a lab grown ribeye with just the right amount of synthetic marbling. Much to my surprise we were given a full thirty minutes to enjoy this feast. It seemed too good to be true and as was often the case, it was. Five minutes before we were to have our plates policed up, the Senior Drill stood up and announced we needed to hurry up and finish because he was going to introduce us to some new safety equipment after dinner.
Now I had only been a recruit for seven days but even I knew that a Drill Sergeant suggesting anything was tantamount to an order. I wolfed down the last of my steak and potatoes… and hurried my tray to the automated recycler.
Once outside, the Drills took us on a leisurely five kilometer run. Acting Sergeant Hammond took the questionable opportunity to point out that his ‘mum’ always said you should never do strenuous physical activity after eating a big meal. The end result was a lengthy discussion involving a concern on the Senior Drills part that Jeremy James Hammond might accidently confuse Se
nior Drill Sergeant Harris with his mum… and in point of fact, since he was obviously a momma’s boy that said recruit might indeed attempt to suckle at the Senior Drill’s breast… a state of affairs that the Senior Drill would find deeply disturbing… so disturbing in fact that the Drills had us all drop and give them fifty. Later I spoke with JJ and encouraged him, in the future, to keep his thoughts to himself. I would learn over the course of many years of enduring friendship that this was, at best, a forlorn hope.
The safety equipment turned out to be a Mark Three sealable breather. It was what the Marines were using for gas masks these days. We were shown how to don the mask and instructed to do so. At this point, the Drills walked out of the classroom and sealed the door hatch.
A white smoke-like vapor filled the room. I knew from being on the wrong side of the law on several occasions that this was CS gas… chlorobenzylidene malonitrile. It was not lethal but you didn’t want to breathe it. All of a sudden the steak dinner made much more sense. You sadistic bastards, I thought to myself. I forced myself to carefully hyperventilate. The idea was to get as much clean air into my system as I could because if my guess was right we would be taking our breathers off soon.
I hate it when I’m right. Of course Jesus had failed to properly seal his mask so he was already choking on the burning fumes. Based on the number of other people gaging I knew he was not alone.
“Use your hands to push your mask into place” I yelled. “Then exhale as hard as you can to clear the mask.”
I needn’t have bothered. The next words we heard were “Remove your masks!”
***
I spent the next several days learning what it was to be responsible for more than just myself. I have to say, being the guy in charge is highly overrated.
We were scheduled for our first live weapons training this week. To get us ready for this august event, we needed to make a trip through medical. The purpose of this visit was to get a basic commlink embedded near the base of our skull and at the same time receive our initial load of combat nanites. These nanites would interface with both our newly implanted commlinks as well as the weapons we would be issued.
Another, perhaps even more important function of these nanites, was the fact that they were programmed to keep us alive… or at very least revivable… in the case of injury. I was a big fan of this aspect of my new little buddies because as I got to know the soldiers under my nominal command I came to realize it would be a while before I trusted them with live weapons.
Corporal Ramirez was a prime example of what I was concerned about. The man was a mountain of meat. He was a sure shot with a laser-tag rifle. If Vancouver or Hollywood put out a casting call for a Marine to play Lewis Burwell Puller, a.k.a. ‘Chesty’, in a new holovid… Ramirez would be the guy they cast. But hand the man grenade, even a fake one, and all hell broke loose.
He dropped the first one after pulling the pin. The second time around he managed to hold onto the grenade… and threw the pin. The third and final time around he managed to throw the grenade with everything he had. The grenade flew in generally the right direction before hitting a rock with so much force that it bounced and rolled most of the way back to the dugout we were throwing from. Had any of these been a live grenade the very least we would have had to deal with was a set of busted eardrums. I needed to make sure my guys and gals had a full load of medical nanites in them if they were going to be around Ramirez.
As the Acting Officer in Charge of our training platoon it was my responsibility to get each of my soldiers to medical; while at the same time insuring that our platoon fulfilled its various training missions. The Drill Sergeants on the other hand seemed intent on making the situation impossible.
I was told that I could split my platoon up but that each group would need to have one NCO. Since I only had one sergeant and one corporal that meant I could only have two groups. It seemed simple enough.
I split the platoon into two squads. Acting Sergeant JJ Hammond took half the recruits which worked out to eight guys and six gals. Corporal Ramirez took the other half. Our training task for the morning (after the first of our 10K runs) was to carry the components of a breaching bridge from the supply depot to a staging site. A class that was four weeks ahead of ours would be needing the parts to build the bridge as part of their training later in the morning.
Normally a series of gravity carts would be pulled behind an Armored Attack Vehicle (AAV) but the ‘enemy’ had destroyed all the AAVs so we had to hump the components the six kilometers to their destination.
I looked at the inventory of items we had to move. It seemed that there would be no problem moving it in the time frame allowed with half the platoon. Part of me was saying… this will be easy… and another part was saying… not a chance in hell bucko! I wish I would learn how to listen to the correct half but alas I am, and have always been, the eternal optimist.
Since New Parris Island was only about two kilometers across at its widest point this meant that we would have to cross it several times with our load. There was a real possibility that we could get bored but fortunately we had the Drills whose mission in life seemed to be keeping ours interesting.
About one and a half kilometers into our mission we began to take fire. Our first clue this was happening was when Private McDullis took a kinetic round dead center in his passive body armor. It knocked him back a good four feet. He looked down at his chest and saw the digital display flag him as dead. Per his standing orders (pun intended) he immediately fell to the ground as a casualty.
“DROP AND SEEK COVER!” I yelled. My helmet had a HUD display. We really hadn’t had a lot of time to practice with it yet but I had spent what little free time I had in the evenings reading the tech manual on it. After a few attempts I managed to turn on its friend-foe imager. Sadly everything it saw was flagged as a friend. I could see the snipper positions and began to fire in their general direction with my play-pointer which was the only weapon they would allow us to carry at the moment.
“Bloody Hell Sir… What are you firing at? I don’t see a damned thing!” JJ bellowed from the hole he had managed to find. Did I mention before he was British?
It occurred to me that I was probably the only one using my ‘Heads-Up-Display.’ I tapped a control and took control of the HUDs for the entire platoon. As a guy, I hated to admit it, but reading manuals sometimes helped.
“WOooo!” I heard several of the platoon yell as their displays went live.
I started firing again at the guys firing at us. Kinetic rounds kept hitting the dirt near our position. Now understand, lunar dust is like talcum powder. It fine and once it stirs up into the air it can take a while to settle out.
“I only see friendlies,” Ramirez yelled.
“If they are firing at you they are not friendlies!” I yelled back.
“How do we know for sure?”
I gritted my teeth. We would get killed arguing about this. Suddenly inspiration hit. It’s rare but it does happen upon occasion. I pressed the HUD’s audio interface. “Computer, flag all shooters not within twenty feet of my present position as hostiles.”
Immediately four green icons turned red. “Take’em out boys!” I yelled. Thirty toy-pointers immediately converged on the four snipers. Their icons on our HUDs soon disappeared.
I was feeling pretty good about myself. The Senior Drill Sergeant must have been psychic because his ever-cheerful voice came over my commlink a few seconds later.
“Ensign, give me a sit-rep on your progress with your platoon’s medical workup.”
“Crap!” I said out loud.
“I see… situation normal, all fouled up. Address it Ensign… or I will demote you and promote someone who can, Harris out.”
“FORM UP!” I yelled at the platoon.
I had planned to use the entire platoon to carry the breaching bridge until we got near the medical center and then split off Ramirez’s squad… sending them to medical and continuing on with the other half
of the platoon with myself and the corporal. That wouldn’t work now. While half the platoon was enough to carry the bridge; it would not be enough to carry the bridge and provide sniper cover. I needed a new plan.
“Jesus!” I yelled while trying to find him on my HUD.
“Over here, Sir.”
“Grab Jones and Westin… pick up McDullis and head over to medical. As soon as medical is done with you double time it back to whatever our current position is. Hand your Corporal stripes to the next group of four with the same orders.”
“You’re demoting me already?”
“Negative. I’m just shuffling my NCOs to get the mission accomplished. If you can avoid screwing up too badly you’ll get your stripes back by the end of the day.”
I knew based on the instructions I had received regarding the time it would take to process each of the soldiers through medical that it was going to be tight getting all of my platoon through before the exercise ended. That said, it was a good plan. It could work if everything went smoothly. Translation: I had zero expectation that things would go smoothly and that I would be successful with the current plan.
The problem was, I had two things stacked against me… well three if you counted the sadistic Drills that were intent on throwing up obstacle after obstacle. First, no plan ever survived contact with the enemy and second, the only member of my platoon I could absolutely count on to perform as expected was a guy named Murphy.
We got to within two klicks of our destination before we ran into our next problem. There was an electric fence between us and our destination. Now understand, we had just been on this chunk of real estate thirty minutes ago and I can assure you… there was no electric fence.
“JJ go take a team of two and check that out. The rest of you drop your load and start scanning the area. I can’t believe this is anything other than a trap.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth then the first kinetic rounds started hitting the dirt near us. One hit a rock near my hand and shattered. A metal shard managed to penetrate the Kevlar weave of my protective training BDU. It put a hole in my arm. It felt like someone had stuck a hot poker in my bicep.