We bounced around a bunch of answers for most of the semester, but in the end I think I understood. They were honest with us for a few reasons. First, we were all misfits in Earth culture anyway, but what I hadn't known was that every recruit inducted into the Corps was also in the top quintile of intelligence in the population. Not many of us were going to have a propaganda-induced belief in the system. If we're going to figure it out anyway, or at least partially figure it out, why not just tell us?
But it was deeper than that. The reason they taught us all of this was so we could truly figure out the answer to the second question, "Why do we fight?" Sure, you could go with the argument they'd make back on Earth, that whatever faults our system had, it had saved humanity from extinction. That was good enough for engineers and administrators willing to tow the line to hold onto their marginally comfortable lifestyle. But most of us had suffered on the underside of that system, often in conditions that left us relatively unafraid of extinction.
So why do we fight? We all thought we had the answer to that from the first time we blasted out of a ship and put our lives in the hands of the men and women strapped in beside us. We fight for each other. That's definitely part of the answer, but it isn't the whole thing. Certainly, having decided to fight we do so for our comrades in arms, those who share the mud, blood, and hardship with us. If my brother and sisters are going in, I'm going in. No questions…no ifs, ands, or buts.
But that's a private's answer. Yes, I'm going if my comrades go, but why do any of us do it? Not so the politicians can maintain their power and privilege, certainly. Sure, you can make an argument that the system back home, deeply flawed though it may be, was superior to some anarchic, post-apocalyptic horror, but that isn't the answer either. Not for us. For many of us that nightmare had been home.
We fight for these colonists. Because they are brave and daring and deserve to be protected. Because they are the future. Because the societies they create, small and struggling that they may be, are far superior to the clusterfuck back on Earth, and they are the one thing that gives us hope for a future, for a better system…for one truly worth fighting for.
The colonists are also us, it turns out. Ninety-seven percent of retiring military personnel choose to settle on a colony world. In fact, less than one in three ever return to Earth, even for a visit. The colonial militias of most of the worlds are leavened with retired combat veterans who settled there. This was by government design in the early days, when a system of military settlers was crucial to defending colony worlds, and it simply continued because it worked for all parties.
So here I was, a man who'd seen his family destroyed by the government; who'd crawled through the rubble-strewn streets as a child, eating rats to survive; who hated and despised the political leaders back home. Here it was, in Military Psychology and Motivational Studies class that I realized I actually did have a country, and one worth fighting for too.
Not that mess I left, but the promising and vulnerable infant that had sprung from the dying body of Earth. Those miners on Carson's World, where I made my first assault and marveled at the courage of the colonists who stood up to armored infantry and held them at bay until we arrived. The inhabitants of Columbia, who dug trenches and built defenses and finally grabbed whatever weapons they had and fought alongside us to save their world. The inhabitants who were now trying to rebuild their pleasant community around the radioactive dead zones and other scars of war.
The training at the Academy was definitely not what I expected. I was surprised by all the soul-searching philosophy. In the end, though, I think I understood the reasoning behind it all.
As a private I had no responsibility other than to do my duty and fight like hell. A corporal or sergeant does command others who may live or die as a result of his orders, but typically he is with them and shares their fate closely.
An officer, on the other hand, commands a larger number of troops deployed over a greater distance. Where a sergeant might follow orders and lead a squad in a suicidal attack, an officer may have to command a squad to make that charge, knowing he is sending them to their deaths while he remains at a safe distance.
A good officer has to love and care about his troops, while also being ready and willing to commit them to whatever is necessary, even if most of them won't come back. Even if none of them will come back. And having done so, the officer must stay focused on the rest of the battle without losing any intensity or concentration. Reflection, guilt, and self-loathing had to wait until everyone was safely back aboard ship. The officer needed a clearer picture of what we fight for so he could reconcile why he was sending those troops into a hopeless place.
There was also a lot of training on strategy and tactics of course, and there was military history. Lots of military history. We studied the tactics of every conflict from the Punic Wars on. We reviewed the campaigns of Napoleon and close order squad deployments in the Second Frontier War. I've wondered at the probabilities that took me from gutter rat in the badlands of the Bronx to an expert in Gustavus Aldolphus' volley fire techniques.
I did well with all of the classroom training, and I aced all the exams. But the coursework was only part of the program. There was physical development as well, and if I thought the basic training regimen was tough it's just because I'd had no idea at the time how badly they tortured cadets. We ran and climbed and swam. We did survival marches and pushed ourselves to the limits of endurance, braving heat, cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Officers in the Corps did what they commanded their troops to do, and they led by example.
The Academy was located on a breathtakingly beautiful world called Arcadia, the third planet in the Wolf 359 system. Half a dozen small island continents were dotted across two main oceans. The temperate zones were covered in massive forests of what appeared to be close relatives of Earth pines, though the Arcadian versions were 100 meters high. The windswept, rocky coastlines were dotted with settlements that seemed perfectly blended into the terrain.
The campus itself was situated on a small peninsula along the western ocean, about 100 kilometers from the capital city, also called Arcadia. The buildings were modern and well-equipped, but they were designed to resemble older structures. The exteriors were mostly covered in the gray native fieldstone, and the buildings were connected by stone pathways winding through neatly tended gardens and clumps of woods.
The western edge of the campus ran along a rocky cliff about 20 meters above the crashing surf, and the commandant's office and a number of other buildings were situated along the edge of the cliff with breathtaking ocean views.
We spent plenty of time on the idyllic grounds of the campus, but we also saw our fair share of the planet as well, especially its least accessible, most inhospitable corners. We did training exercises in the arctic northern wastes, conducting war games across the glaciers, without scanners, in blizzards that reduced visibility to two meters or less. We baked in the hot equatorial sun building a makeshift fort to prove we'd been paying attention in combat engineering class.
We did endless computer war game simulations, but we also got out into the field and moved real troops around, mostly local militia pretending to be regulars. As a veteran of Achilles and Columbia I had more experience commanding troops in the field than most of the other cadets. Those two campaigns had the dubious distinction of the highest casualty rates of any in the war so far. I'd seen a lot of my commanding officers taken out, moving me up the chain of command too quickly for comfort.