But that rock wall is even tougher without a suit, tackled with lines and pitons. I didn’t really see what use alpine drill was to a cap trooper but I had learned to keep my mouth shut and try to learn what they shoved at us. I learned it and it wasn’t too hard. If anybody had told me, a year earlier, that I could go up a solid chunk of rock, as flat and as perpendicular as a blank wall of a building, using only a hammer, some silly little steel pins, and a chunk of clothesline, I would have laughed in his face; I’m a sea-level type. Correction: I was a sea-level type. There had been some changes made.
Just how much I had changed I began to find out. At Camp Sergeant Spooky Smith we had liberty—to go to town, I mean. Oh, we had “liberty” after the first month at Camp Currie, too. This meant that, on a Sunday afternoon, if you weren’t in the duty platoon, you could check out at the orderly tent and walk just as far away from camp as you wished, bearing in mind that you had to be back for evening muster. But there was nothing within walking distance, if you don’t count jack rabbits—no girls, no theaters, no dance halls, et cetera.
Nevertheless, liberty, even at Camp Currie, was no mean privilege; sometimes it can be very important indeed to be able to go so far away that you can’t see a tent, a sergeant, nor even the ugly faces of your best friends among the boots…not have to be on the bounce about anything, have time to take out your soul and look at it. You could lose that privilege in several degrees; you could be restricted to camp…or you could be restricted to your own company street, which meant that you couldn’t go to the library nor to what was misleadingly called the “recreation” tent (mostly some parcheesi sets and similar wild excitements)…or you could be under close restriction, required to stay in your tent when your presence was not required elsewhere.
This last sort didn’t mean much in itself since it was usually added to extra duty so demanding that you didn’t have any time in your tent other than for sleep anyhow; it was a decoration added like a cherry on top of a dish of ice cream to notify you and the world that you had pulled not some everyday goof-off but something unbecoming of a member of the M.I. and were thereby unfit to associate with other troopers until you had washed away the stain.
But at Camp Spooky we could go into town—duty status, conduct status, etc., permitting. Shuttles ran to Vancouver every Sunday morning, right after divine services (which were moved up to thirty minutes after breakfast) and came back again just before supper and again just before taps. The instructors could even spend Saturday night in town, or cop a three-day pass, duty permitting.
I had no more than stepped out of the shuttle, my first pass, than I realized in part that I had changed. Johnnie didn’t fit in any longer. Civilian life, I mean. It all seemed amazingly complex and unbelievably untidy.
I’m not running down Vancouver. It’s a beautiful city in a lovely setting; the people are charming and they are used to having the M.I. in town and they make a trooper welcome. There is a social center for us downtown, where they have dances for us every week and see to it that junior hostesses are on hand to dance with, and senior hostesses to make sure that a shy boy (me, to my amazement—but you try a few months with nothing female around but lady jack rabbits) gets introduced and has a partner’s feet to step on.
But I didn’t go to the social center that first pass. Mostly I stood around and gawked—at beautiful buildings, at display windows filled with all manner of unnecessary things (and not a weapon among them), at all those people running around, or even strolling, doing exactly as they pleased and no two of them dressed alike—and at girls.
Especially at girls. I hadn’t realized just how wonderful they were. Look, I’ve approved of girls from the time I first noticed that the difference was more than just that they dress differently. So far as I remember I never did go through that period boys are supposed to go through when they know that girls are different but dislike them; I’ve always liked girls.
But that day I realized that I had long been taking them for granted.
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don’t walk. At least not what we do when we talk. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s much more complex and utterly delightful. They don’t move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions…and all of it graceful.
I might have been standing there yet if a policeman hadn’t come by. He sized us up and said, “Howdy, boys. Enjoying yourselves?”
I quickly read the ribbons on his chest and was impressed. “Yes, sir!”
“You don’t have to say ‘sir’ to me. Not much to do here. Why don’t you go to the hospitality center?” He gave us the address, pointed the direction and we started that way—Pat Leivy, “Kitten” Smith, and myself. He called after us, “Have a good time, boys…and stay out of trouble.” Which was exactly what Sergeant Zim had said to us as we climbed into the shuttle.
But we didn’t go there. Pat Leivy had lived in Seattle when he was a small boy and wanted to take a look at his old home town. He had money and offered to pay our shuttle fares if we would go with him. I didn’t mind and it was all right; shuttles ran every twenty minutes and our passes were not restricted to Vancouver. Smith decided to go along, too.
Seattle wasn’t so very different from Vancouver and the girls were just as plentiful; I enjoyed it. But Seattle wasn’t quite as used to having M.I. around in droves and we picked a poor spot to eat dinner, one where we weren’t quite so welcome—a bar-restaurant, down by the docks.
Now, look, we weren’t drinking. Well, Kitten Smith had had one repeat one beer with his dinner but he was never anything but friendly and nice. That is how he got his name; the first time we had hand-to-hand combat drill Corporal Jones had said to him disgustedly: “A kitten would have hit me harder than that!” The nickname stuck.
We were the only uniforms in the place; most of the other customers were merchant marine sailors—Seattle handles an awful lot of surface tonnage. I hadn’t known it at the time but merchant sailors don’t like us. Part of it has to do with the fact that their guilds have tried and tried to get their trade classed as equivalent to Federal Service, without success—but I understand that some of it goes way back in history, centuries.
There were some young fellows there, too, about our age—the right age to serve a term, only they weren’t—long-haired and sloppy and kind of dirty-looking. Well, say about the way I looked, I suppose, before I joined up.
Presently we started noticing that at the table behind us, two of these young twerps and two merchant sailors (to judge by clothes) were passing remarks that were intended for us to overhear. I won’t try to repeat them.
We didn’t say anything. Presently, when the remarks were even more personal and the laughs louder and everybody else in the place was keeping quiet and listening, Kitten whispered to me, “Let’s get out of here.”
I caught Pat Leivy’s eye; he nodded. We had no score to settle; it was one of those pay-as-you-get-it places. We got up and left.
They followed us out.
Pat whispered to me, “Watch it.” We kept on walking, didn’t look back.
They charged us.
I gave my man a side-neck chop as I pivoted and let him fall past me, swung to help my mates. But it was over. Four in, four down. Kitten had handled two of them and Pat had sort of wrapped the other one around a lamppost from throwing him a little too hard.
Somebody, the proprietor I guess, must have called the police as soon as we stood up to leave, since they arrived almost at once while we were still standing around wondering what to do with the meat—two policemen; it was that sort of a neighborhood.
The senior of them wanted us to prefer charges, but none of us was willing—Zim had told us to “stay out of trouble.” Kitten looked blank and about fifteen years old and said, “I guess they stumbled.”
“So I see,” agreed the police officer and toed a knife away from the outflung hand of my man, put it against the curb and b
roke the blade. “Well, you boys had better run along…farther uptown.”
We left. I was glad that neither Pat nor Kitten wanted to make anything of it. It’s a mighty serious thing, a civilian assaulting a member of the Armed Forces, but what the deuce?—the books balanced. They jumped us, they got their lumps. All even.
But it’s a good thing we never go on pass armed…and have been trained to disable without killing. Because every bit of it happened by reflex. I didn’t believe that they would jump us until they already had, and I didn’t do any thinking at all until it was over.
But that’s how I learned for the first time just how much I had changed.
We walked back to the station and caught a shuttle to Vancouver.
We started practice drops as soon as we moved to Camp Spooky—a platoon at a time, in rotation (a full platoon, that is—a company), would shuttle down to the field north of Walla Walla, go aboard, space, make a drop, go through an exercise, and home on a beacon. A day’s work. With eight companies that gave us not quite a drop each week, and then it gave us a little more than a drop each week as attrition continued, whereupon the drops got tougher—over mountains, into the arctic ice, into the Australian desert, and, before we graduated, onto the face of the Moon, where your capsule is placed only a hundred feet up and explodes as it ejects—and you have to look sharp and land with only your suit (no air, no parachute) and a bad landing can spill your air and kill you.
Some of the attrition was from casualties, deaths or injuries, and some of it was just from refusing to enter the capsule—which some did, and that was that; they weren’t even chewed out; they were just motioned aside and that night they were paid off. Even a man who had made several drops might get the panic and refuse…and the instructors were just gentle with him, treated him the way you do a friend who is ill and won’t get well.
I never quite refused to enter the capsule—but I certainly learned about the shakes. I always got them, I was scared silly every time. I still am.
But you’re not a cap trooper unless you drop.
They tell a story, probably not true, about a cap trooper who was sight-seeing in Paris. He visited Les Invalides, looked down at Napoleon’s coffin and said to a French guard there: “Who’s he?”
The Frenchman was properly scandalized. “Monsieur does not know? This is the tomb of Napoleon! Napoleon Bonaparte—the greatest soldier who ever lived!”
The cap trooper thought about it. Then he asked, “So? Where were his drops?”
It is almost certainly not true, because there is a big sign outside there that tells you exactly who Napoleon was. But that is how cap troopers feel about it.
Eventually we graduated.
I can see that I’ve left out almost everything. Not a word about most of our weapons, nothing about the time we dropped everything and fought a forest fire for three days, no mention of the practice alert that was a real one, only we didn’t know it until it was over, nor about the day the cook tent blew away—in fact not any mention of weather and, believe me, weather is important to a doughboy, rain and mud especially. But though weather is important while it happens it seems to me to be pretty dull to look back on. You can take descriptions of most any sort of weather out of an almanac and stick them in just anywhere; they’ll probably fit.
The regiment had started with 2009 men; we graduated 187—of the others, fourteen were dead (one executed and his name struck) and the rest resigned, dropped, transferred, medical discharge, etc. Major Malloy made a short speech, we each got a certificate, we passed in review for the last time, and the regiment was disbanded, its colors to be cased until they would be needed (three weeks later) to tell another couple of thousand civilians that they were an outfit, not a mob.
I was a “trained soldier,” entitled to put “TP” in front of my serial number instead of “RP.” Big day.
The biggest I ever had.
X
The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots…
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787
That is, I thought I was a “trained soldier” until I reported to my ship. Any law against having a wrong opinion?
I see that I didn’t make any mention of how the Terran Federation moved from “peace” to a “state of emergency” and then on into “war.” I didn’t notice it too closely myself. When I enrolled, it was “peace,” the normal condition, at least so people think (who ever expects anything else?). Then, while I was at Currie, it became a “state of emergency” but I still didn’t notice it, as what Corporal Bronski thought about my haircut, uniform, combat drill, and kit was much more important—and what Sergeant Zim thought about such matters was overwhelmingly important. In any case, “emergency” is still “peace.”
“Peace” is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence—unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when “peace” meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it. When I reported to my first outfit, “Willie’s Wildcats,” sometimes known as Company K, Third Regiment, First M.I. Division, and shipped with them in the Valley Forge (with that misleading certificate in my kit), the fighting had already been going on for several years.
The historians can’t seem to settle whether to call this one “The Third Space War” (or the “Fourth”), or whether “The First Interstellar War” fits it better. We just call it “The Bug War” if we call it anything, which we usually don’t, and in any case the historians date the beginning of “war” after the time I joined my first outfit and ship. Everything up to then and still later were “incidents,” “patrols,” or “police actions.” However, you are just as dead if you buy a farm in an “incident” as you are if you buy it in a declared war.
But, to tell the truth, a soldier doesn’t notice a war much more than a civilian does, except his own tiny piece of it and that just on the days it is happening. The rest of the time he is much more concerned with sack time, the vagaries of sergeants, and the chances of wheedling the cook between meals. However, when Kitten Smith and Al Jenkins and I joined them at Luna Base, each of Willies’ Wildcats had made more than one combat drop; they were soldiers and we were not. We weren’t hazed for it—at least I was not—and the sergeants and corporals were amazingly easy to deal with after the calculated frightfulness of instructors.
It took a little while to discover that this comparatively gentle treatment simply meant that we were nobody, hardly worth chewing out, until we had proved in a drop—a real drop—that we might possibly replace real Wildcats who had fought and bought it and whose bunks we now occupied.
Let me tell you how green I was. While the Valley Forge was still at Luna Base, I happened to come across my section leader just as he was about to hit dirt, all slicked up in dress uniform. He was wearing in his left ear lobe a rather small earring, a tiny gold skull beautifully made and under it, instead of the conventional crossed bones of the ancient Jolly Roger design, was a whole bundle of little gold bones, almost too small to see.
Back home, I had always worn earrings and other jewelry when I went out on a date—I had some beautiful ear clips, rubies as big as the end of my little finger which had belonged to my mother’s grandfather. I like jewelry and had rather resented being required to leave it all behind when I went to Basic…but here was a type of jewelry which was apparently okay to wear with uniform. My ears weren’t pierced—my mother didn’t approve of it, for boys—but I could have the jeweler mount it on a clip…and I still had some money left from pay call at graduation and was anxious to spend it before it mildewed. “Unh, Sergeant? Where do you get earrings like that one? Pretty neat.”
He didn’t look scornful, he didn’t even smile. He just said, “You like it?”
“I certainly do!” The plain raw gold pointed up the gold braid and piping of the uniform even better than gems wo
uld have done. I was thinking that a pair would be still handsomer, with just crossbones instead of all that confusion at the bottom. “Does the base PX carry them?”
“No, the PX here never sells them.” He added, “At least I don’t think you’ll ever be able to buy one here—I hope. But I tell you what—when we reach a place where you can buy one of your own, I’ll see to it you know about it. That’s a promise.”
“Uh, thanks!”
“Don’t mention it.”
I saw several of the tiny skulls thereafter, some with more “bones,” some with fewer; my guess had been correct, this was jewelry permitted with uniform, when on pass at least. Then I got my own chance to “buy” one almost immediately thereafter and discovered that the prices were unreasonably high, for such plain ornaments.
It was Operation Bughouse, the First Battle of Klendathu in the history books, soon after Buenos Aires was smeared. It took the loss of B.A. to make the ground-hogs realize that anything was going on, because people who haven’t been out don’t really believe in other planets, not down deep where it counts. I know I hadn’t and I had been space-happy since I was a pup.
But B.A. really stirred up the civilians and inspired loud screams to bring all our forces home, from everywhere—orbit them around the planet practically shoulder to shoulder and interdict the space Terra occupies. This is silly, of course; you don’t win a war by defense but by attack—no “Department of Defense” ever won a war; see the histories. But it seems to be a standard civilian reaction to scream for defensive tactics as soon as they do notice a war. They then want to run the war—like a passenger trying to grab the controls away from the pilot in an emergency.