A small ceremonial contingent of American Marines remained, passing back and forth between Fleet and the Presidential Guard. They were the only Terran forces under the sole and direct command of a country that wore battle armor. America, with not only tremendous economic clout but equally great military renown, was the only country with an off-planet credit high enough to afford the incredibly expensive suits.
«Yes, sir,» said O'Neal with a characteristic frown. «An actual Marine Gunny, long, long service. He's a hippie.»
«Hippie?»
«What they call a Vietnam vet. Real old timer.»
«Well, I suppose us hippies will have to talk over old times,» said the commander with a smile.
«Jesus, sir!» said Mike, looking at the apparently teenage colonel in surprise. «You're for real?»
«I took a company of the One-Oh-One into Happy Valley in Vietnam,» said the colonel with a suppressed shudder at the memory. «I started off as a butter bar with the One-Eighty-Seventh.»
«Hmmm. Well, at least I won't have to explain who Janis Joplin is.»
«It is damn strange, isn't it?» said the commander, tossing another piece of «I-Love-Me» claptrap into a box. «How the hell do you separate the wheat from the chaff? The regimental commander is forty years younger than me. When I was retiring he was a second lieutenant. I'm glad I didn't know him; I can imagine what my memories of him would do to our relationship.»
«What about his memories of you, sir? Can you imagine if you wrote him a bad OER back when?»
«However, like your first sergeant . . .»
«He's a Marine,» said O'Neal with a chuckle. «Yes, sir, I know. Well, as long as we don't have to take any beaches everything should be fine. Actually I kind of prefer a Marine for this.»
Colonel Hanson looked at him quizzically as he dropped the last plaque into the box. «Pourquois?»
Mike suddenly looked grim as he held up the cigar with his own querying expression. At a nod he lit it with a Zippo emblazoned with a black panther on a rock. Drawing in a series of puffs he said, «Well, sir . . .» puff, «the Airborne has a tradition,» puff, puff, «of in and out. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am.» Puff. «Also, the Airborne tradition is, practically, for hit and run.» Deep draw, puff. «Hmmm, El Sol Imperials. Damn hard to find, what with the shortages.» He dropped the affectation with a sudden intensity, stabbing the cigar as if to drive in the points.
«This situation is much more like the Marine tradition, especially the tradition of World War II and Korea. Take a hard objective. Hold it against all comers, against human-wave attacks with critical shortages and damn little support. Hold at all cost and die to the last stinking soldier if necessary, killing as many as humanly possible the whole time. No retreat, no surrender, no quarter. Sir.»
Mike had a sudden vision of a narrow clay street with towering skyscrapers to either side. The street was packed with yellow centaurs, the horse-sized invaders in a bayonet to boma-blade battle with a beleaguered German panzer grenadier division. The bodies of the Posleen and Germans were piled in mounds, blocking his way. Their red and yellow bloods had commingled and an orange river was flowing into the alien sea.
He tilted his head down and fiddled for a moment with his cigar as he struggled to throw off the flashback. «Damn, it went out.»
Colonel Hanson dropped into his swivel chair as Mike pulled the Zippo back out. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a pack of Marlboro Reds. It had taken him years to break the habit, but the Galactics had a pill to do that now and besides they had eliminated cancer, heart disease and emphysema for military personnel so . . . «You okay, Captain?» he asked as he tapped out a coffin nail.
«Yes, sir. I am just peachy-keen,» said Mike, meeting his eye steadily.
«I . . . we cannot afford a shell-shocked commander.»
«Sir, I'm not shell-shocked,» disagreed O'Neal, against the cacophony of internal voices. «What I am is one of the damn few people you are going to meet short of Barwhon or Diess who is prepared, mentally, for this invasion. I had gamed it for thousands of hours, before Diess. Diess was, so to speak, just the icing on the cake. When you get your AID you can cross-check me on it.» He took a pull on the cigar. Since Diess he had been hitting both tobacco and alcohol kind of hard. One of these days it was gonna catch up with him. «This war is going to be a form of hell, sir, for every single American. The shit just doesn't get any deeper than this.»
Colonel Hanson nodded thoughtfully. That made a lot of sense. «Which brings us to the here and now. Now that I have that obnoxious oaf cleared out of my headquarters, what's the situation? The G-1 didn't even know the players and he had no ideas about ACS equipment, but he did say the supply situation is as confused as could be expected. Who are the acting staff? And since this headquarters seems to be absolutely empty, where the fuck are they?» he concluded.
«Major Stidwell was acting as his own G-3, sir, since that was his slot anyway. Actually, he was doubling up on everything except the –4.»
«Maybe I should have given him the benefit of the doubt if he was that overwhelmed,» the colonel mused.
«Actually, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, sir. The only reason there is an S-4 is that we got sent a supply officer, a mustang L-T, to the assistant –4 slot. Otherwise, Major My-Lot-In-Life-Is-To-Micromanage Stidwell would undoubtedly have taken that slot as well.»
«Oh,» said the colonel with a grimace.
«We also have a full set of captains as company commanders, sir, any of whom could have taken a second hat if Stidwell was overwhelmed. We're better off than the Line and Guard units from the point of view of company-grade officers.
«However, if he made the decisions he could be absolutely sure that they were the right decisions,» the captain said with a snort. «God knows what decisions might have been made by mere captains that did not have his years of experience. They might have, oh, 'taken excessive initiative with the training schedule,' or, God forbid, 'begun ACS training before all the meetings about how to implement it were completed.' «
«If I remember my recent history, you have been there and done that as well, haven't you?» said the colonel neutrally.
«Yes, sir, I have,» said O'Neal with instant seriousness. «As a matter of fact, he was trying very hard to have me court-martialed for insubordination.»
«Were you insubordinate?» asked the new commander, wondering what sort of answer he would get. He shouldn't have wondered.
«Sir, I disobeyed not one direct order, but so many I can't begin to count,» O'Neal stated definitively.
«Why?»
«I did not think anyone would dare court-martial me, sir, and if it was disobey them or have my company die in combat it was a no-brainer.»
«Why would they have died?» asked Hanson.
«Sir, he was starting training exactly as they did with the Two Falcon on Diess. Yes, sir, I have been there and done that before and I was not going to do it again; that was an oath I swore on the souls of my dead. We had, have, a critical suit shortage, the unit has not received its issue and only a few of the troops, ones transferred from other ACS units, have them. So he wanted everyone to memorize all the parts to the suits, do Posleen flash cards, and all the rest of that. In other words, bore them to death. What I tried to explain to him was that I obtained a shit-load of Milspecs, VR glasses for training, through . . . some secondary channels.» Mike cleared his throat and took a puff of his cigar.