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This is the place where I grew up. I’ve never been outside the Boston metroplex.
It feels strangely liberating to do precisely as instructed. I don’t have to worry about displeasing the sergeant as long as I follow his orders exactly.
When you live in a Public Residence Cluster, the government knows everything about you, including your DNA profile by the time you’re a month old, but the civil and military bureaucracies apparently don’t talk to each other very much.
There’s no ceremony, no oath of service, no pomp or ritual. You sign a form, and you’re a soldier. It’s a bit of a letdown, but at least they’re consistent in that respect.
Part of me wants the predictability of my old life back. When I woke up at home, I knew exactly what the day would bring. When I wake up tomorrow morning, I have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s liberating, but it’s also scary as hell.
There’s me and my bunkmate Halley. There’s Ricci, the thin kid with the acne-scarred face and the silly chin beard, and Hamilton, an athletic-looking girl with long blond hair. Then there’s Cunningham, who is covered in tattoos, and who was wearing a buzz cut long before she decided to join up. Lastly, there’s Garcia, a dark-eyed guy who never speaks unless you ask him a direct question.
When you do exactly as you’re told, and you’re neither the best nor the worst at any task, you can disappear in the crowd and have a small measure of solitude.
Together, the rifle and the armor turn me into something different, something more advanced than the sum of myself and the technology in which I am wrapped.
Being on the attack is a crappy task. The defenders know you’re coming, and you have to put yourself out into the open to come to where they are. You do, however, have the initiative.
This is the military, and nobody gives a shit about what we want. We take what we’re served, and we ask for seconds, and that’s the way it goes.”
Hansen introduces the rest of the squad to me one by one. Phillips is a tall, freckle-faced guy with wiry red hair and glasses with little circular lenses. Jackson is an equally tall and thin black girl. She wears interesting tattoos under her eyes, some sort of tribal pattern. Stratton is a steel-jawed recruiting poster model who would look terribly intimidating in his perfection if he wasn’t the shortest member of the squad by half a head. Lastly, there’s Paterson, whose buzz cut doesn’t quite conceal the fact that he’s going bald already.
It feels a bit like high school, only with guns and uniforms, and instead of learning trigonometry or North American history, we learn better ways to kill people and blow up their stuff.
The military is tribal to the core.
Your battalion or regiment is your clan, your company is your extended family, your platoon is your immediate family, and your squad is your household. Like every family, we have our internal quarrels, but when some outsider picks a fight with one of us, we close rank.
“The next time your comrades get into a fight, you jump in and help out, you understand? If they can’t count on you when they’re getting pushed around by a bunch of jarheads, they won’t be able to count on you when they’re under fire.”
civil rights are not exactly the first thing on your mind when someone fires a gun in your direction.
The ribbons and badges on a Class A uniform are a soldier’s business card, and this major’s card says “pencil pusher.”
I recall all the news I’ve ever seen in the PRC, back when I lived with Mom. If they downplay all the bad stuff like this to keep the pot from boiling over, we must be in much worse shape than I thought.
And seriously, what the hell are we good for in civilian life? I spent the last eleven years as a combat grunt. I know small-unit tactics. I know how to blow up shit and kill people. Can you see me working as a commissary clerk somewhere?” “No, I can’t,” I say. “You’d scare the fuck out of the civilians.” “That’s no longer our world, Grayson.”
Half the things we do in the military are tedious, boring, or dangerous, but at least we’re alive enough to feel boredom or fear. In the PRC, you have no contrast in emotions. You just wake up every day and feel as inert as the bed you woke up in, just a chunk of public property that’ll be broken down and recycled once it falls into disrepair.
“Ticket puncher?” “Those are the guys who go up the chain of command and collect promotion points along the way. When they get a field command, they lead from the rear. And when they’ve gotten just the bare minimum time in a combat command to be eligible for the next promotion, they get themselves transferred out.
“There’s no perfect place, you know. You always end up trading one kind of shit for another. Me, I’ll stick with the shit I know.”
I admit to myself for the first time that I’ll miss the place just a little—not the place where I grew up, the smelly urban mess that is my home city, but the concept of Earth itself, all the places that may have kept me from wanting to go into space, if only I’d had the chance to see them with my own eyes.
With the level of computer integration on the ship, I have no doubt that CIC was aware of the network status the moment the update finished, but this is the military, and everything has to have its proper procedure and ritual, like a kabuki theater with uniforms.
