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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.
That means, Recruit Halley, that you had more guys in the defense but that it didn’t matter because they were split up and dispersed too much. They were isolated and neutralized by the attackers in smaller chunks, which is exactly the way it’s supposed to work when you do it right. The fight was four against ten in favor of your squad, but Recruit Grayson’s team fought the whole thing with four against two in his favor. We call that a defeat in detail. Do you understand?” “Yes, sir,” Halley says.
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.
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 ranks.
“We have the best fucking job in the world,” Stratton says with a grin. “Playing with guns, blowing up stuff, picking fights, and getting paid for it. They can keep the space services. I can’t even believe I ever wanted to be in the fucking navy.”
“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.”
The idea of rendering a planet uninhabitable just to pry off a competing species seems ludicrous, but after my experience in Detroit, I know the military is going to do precisely that.
