Terms of Enlistment Quotes

“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.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“Action beats reaction most of the time.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“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.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“When he says “jump,” the entire battalion is usually in midair before asking for an altitude parameter.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“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.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“The alley is a hundred yards from the stranded drop ship. It takes our gaggle of armor-clad troopers and entourage thirty seconds to cover the distance. When we reach the mouth of the alley, I look back over my shoulder. Sergeant Fallon and Stratton are dashing out of the rear hatch, and I drop to one knee and exchange the MARS launcher for the rifle to cover their run. Next to me, Hansen crouches down, rifle pointed downrange. Beyond the drop ship, on the other side of the intersection, there’s some movement in the shadows of the building overhangs as the local crowd advances on the drop ship again, more cautious than before.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“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.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“The ribbons and badges on a Class A uniform are a soldier’s business card, and this major’s card says “pencil pusher.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“heavy”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“They came to kill us, and we killed them instead, and I don’t feel any remorse about that.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“The defending squad got a little too cocky on that third run. They were trapped in their own fighting positions because they didn’t secure the back door, and because they didn’t leave themselves a way out. The attacking squad kept the initiative and used the isolation between the defenders to take them down with local fire superiority.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“There’s only so much Network watching my brain can endure before I want to stick a fork into my ear.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“There’s no perfect place, you know. You always end up trading one kind of shit for another.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“I feel like a cog in a machine, but that’s one part of the military I don’t mind. 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.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“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.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“civil rights are not exactly the first thing on your mind when someone fires a gun in your direction.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“Once upon a time, the job of the recruiter was to entice potential recruits into signing up for service by emphasizing the benefits and downplaying the drawbacks of military service, but that is no longer the case. Now they hardly talk about benefits at all. Everybody knows you’ll get fed and that there’s a real bank account and a certificate of service if you make it through your enlistment term. Now they try to discourage as many people as possible from signing up by describing all the drawbacks of service. I have no doubt that there’s a monthly quota for turning away people before they sign an application for enlistment.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“or hide if whatever makes up the ceiling of the bunker proves inadequate to hold the weight of an eighty-foot-tall creature stepping on it. I briefly wonder how much they must weigh, but then decide that I’d”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“flicker briefly. I can hear an eerie groaning sound, and deduce that a good part of the building structure overhead is collapsing on top of us. Then the first jolt is followed by another, this one even more bone rattling, and it sounds like the Chinese just dropped a thermobaric artillery shell into the hallway just outside the shelter’s hatch. Most of the marines hit the deck, shouting and cursing. Halley and I crouch down and look up at the ceiling. The shelter is a square room, maybe thirty by thirty feet, and largely devoid of furniture. There’s a comms console on a table in the back of the room, and the walls are lined with metal benches that are bolted to the concrete floor. There’s another door near”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“that stick for ten hours straight is a bit of a bear.” “How long has it been”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“Ugly, ain’t it?” Commander”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“briefly. When they come back on, all the storage banks in the NNC fall silent at once. I’ve never been in this room without hearing the drone of the cooling elements for the storage banks, and the lack of background noise is ominous. “I think your shit just broke,” Halley says flatly. “Yeah, no kidding,” I reply. My admin deck is still running, and the local telemetry is still up, but the link to the hangar bay systems is gone. The neural network of a warship is terrifically resilient, backup data links on top of backup links, but now I can’t see anything beyond the local telemetry range, half a deck in either direction. Something big just broke, and the Versailles is dying. If the link had gone down twenty seconds earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to verify the presence of the drop ship on the flight deck, much less activate the refueling sequence. “Let’s get out of here while we still can,” I say.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“I spend my watches in the NNC, ready”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“lights.   CHAPTER 19 I wake up to the sensation of cool air hitting my face.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“When your ship breaks, you’re supposed to find a pod, launch away,”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“who coast through the system doing only the”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“I feel like crying for the first time in many years, and there’s nobody in the room to witness it, so I give in to the urge and let the tears come freely. In the afternoon, I go back down to the chow lounge to see if Sergeant Fallon is around. I spot her in a corner by one of the projection windows, flexing her right knee and looking at her lower leg. When she sees me approaching, she smirks and raps her knuckles on her new shin, which has the dull gleam of anodized metal. “Titanium alloy,” she says as I sit down in the chair across the table from her. “Feels weird, but it’s much stronger than the old leg. Maybe I should have the other one replaced, too.” “That was fast. Didn’t they just fit you for that yesterday?” “Day before yesterday. They bumped me to the top of the spare-parts queue. I’ll have to suffer some dog-and-pony show with a few people from Army Times in return.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“Grayson with so much as a weekend curfew, you might”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“carries in the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. She uncaps the pen with a flick of her thumb and presses the pointy end right against the major’s throat. Then she brings her face close to Major Unwerth’s, until their noses almost touch. “Listen up, fuckhead,” she says. Her voice is so infused with anger that it comes out as a hoarse growl. “That man over there is one of mine. He dragged me through half a mile of hostile territory. If I ever hear you talking to him again like he’s some green recruit who overstayed his weekend leave, I will tear out your trachea and piss down your neck. Is that understood?” I can see Major Unwerth’s throat move under the tip of the pen as he swallows. There’s naked fear in his eyes now, and the sight of it gives me intense satisfaction. Part of me wants Sergeant Fallon to drive the barrel of that pen right through his throat. Finally, he gives an almost imperceptible nod. Sergeant Fallon releases him and drops the pen in front of him. Her face is contorted with disgust, as if she has just cleaned out a latrine with her bare hands.”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment

“Rack time,” Sergeant Gau announces after giving the platoon a cursory inspection. “You will climb into your bunks. There will be no conversation once the lights are out. If there is an emergency, one of you will”
― Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment