Now, three months in, we'd had a few more rounds of fresh meat come through the platoon, and seen them replace people we'd befriended—we knew how the platoon felt when we came to take someone else's place. We had the same reaction: Until you fight, you're just taking up space. Most fresh meat clued in, understood, and toughed out the first few days until we saw some action.
Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender, however, was having none of this. From the moment he showed up, he had been ingratiating himself to the platoon, visiting each member personally and attempting to establish a deep, personal relationship. It was annoying. "It's like he's campaigning for something," Alan complained, and this was not far off. A lifetime of running for office will do that to you. You just don't know when to shut it off.
Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender also had a lifetime of assuming people were passionately interested in what it was he had to say, which is why he wouldn't ever shut up, even when no one appeared to be listening. So when he was opining wildly on the CDF's problems in mess hall, he was essentially talking to himself. Be that as it may, his statement was provocative enough to get a rise out of Viveros, with whom I was lunching.
"Excuse me?" she said. "Would you mind repeating that last bit?"
"I said, I think the problem with the CDF is not that it's not a good fighting force, but that it's too easy to use," Bender repeated.
"Really," Viveros said. "This I have to hear."
"It's simple, really," Bender said, and shifted into a position that I immediately recognized from pictures of him back on Earth—hands out and slightly curved inward, as if to grasp the concept he was illuminating, in order to give it to others. Now that I was on the receiving end of the movement, I realized how condescending it was. "There's no doubt the Colonial Defense Forces are an extremely capable fighting force. But in a very real sense, that's not the issue. The issue is—what are we doing to avoid its use? Are there times when the CDF has been deployed where intensive diplomatic efforts might not have yielded better results?"
"You must have missed the speech I got," I said. "You know, the one about it not being a perfect universe and competition for real estate in the universe being fast and furious."
"Oh, I heard it," Bender said. "I just don't know that I believe it. There are how many stars in this galaxy? A hundred billion or so? Most of which have a system of planets of some sort. The real estate is functionally infinite. No, I think the real issue here may be that the reason we use force when we deal with other intelligent alien species is that force is the easiest thing to use. It's fast, it's straightforward, and compared to the complexities of diplomacy, it's simple. You either hold a piece of land or you don't. As opposed to diplomacy, which is intellectually a much more difficult enterprise."
Viveros glanced over to me, and then back to Bender. "You think what we're doing is simple?"
"No, no." Bender smiled and held up a hand placatingly. "I said simple relative to diplomacy. If I give you a gun and tell you to take a hill from its inhabitants, the situation is relatively simple. But if I tell you to go to the inhabitants and negotiate a settlement that allows you to acquire that hill, there's a lot going on—what do you do with the current inhabitants, how are they compensated, what rights do they continue to have regarding the hill, and so on."
"Assuming the hill people don't just shoot you as you drop by, diplomatic pouch in hand," I said.
Bender smiled at me and pointed vigorously. "See, that's exactly it. We assume that our opposite numbers have the same warlike perspective as we do. But what if—what if—the door was opened to diplomacy, even just a crack? Would not any intelligent, sentient species choose to walk through that door? Let's take, for example, the Whaid people. We're about to war on them, aren't we?"
Indeed we were. The Whaidians and humans had been circling each other for more than a decade, fighting over the Earnhardt system, which featured three planets habitable to both our people. Systems with multiple inhabitable planets were fairly rare. The Whaidians were tenacious but also relatively weak; their network of planets was small and most of their industry was still concentrated on their home world. Since the Whaid would not take the hint and stay out of the Earnhardt system, the plan was to skip to Whaid space, smash their spaceport and major industrial zones, and set their expansionary capabilities back a couple of decades or so. The 233rd would be part of the task force that was set to land in their capital city and tear the place up a bit; we were to avoid killing civilians when we could, but otherwise knock a few holes in their parliament houses and religious gathering centers and so on. There was no industrial advantage to doing this, but it sends the message that we can mess with them anytime, just because we feel like it. It shakes them up.
"What about them?" Viveros asked.
"Well, I've done a little research into these people," Bender said. "They've got a remarkable culture, you know. Their highest art form is a form of mass chant that's like a Gregorian round—they'll get an entire city full of Whaidians and start chanting. It's said you can hear the chant for dozens of klicks, and the chants can go on for hours."
"So?"
"So, this is a culture we should be celebrating and exploring, not bottling up on its planet simply because they're in our way. Have the Colonials even attempted to reach a peace with these people? I see no record of an attempt. I think we should make an attempt. Maybe an attempt could be made by us."
Viveros snorted. "Negotiating a treaty is a little beyond our orders, Bender."
"In my first term as senator, I went to Northern Ireland as part of a trade junket and ended up extracting a peace treaty from the Catholics and the Protestants. I didn't have the authority to make an agreement, and it caused a huge controversy back in the States. But when an opportunity for peace arises, we must take it," Bender said.
"I remember that," I said. "That was right before the bloodiest marching season in two centuries. Not a very successful peace agreement."
"That wasn't the fault of the agreement," Bender said, somewhat defensively. "Some drugged-out Catholic kid threw a grenade into an Orangemen's march, and it was all over after that."
"Damn real live people, getting in the way of your peaceful ideals," I said.
"Look, I already said diplomacy wasn't easy," Bender said. "But I think that ultimately we have more to gain by trying to work with these people than we have by trying to wipe them out. It's an option that should at least be on the table."
"Thanks for the seminar, Bender," Viveros said. "Now if you'll yield the floor, I have two points to make here. The first is that until you fight, what you know or what you think you know out here means shit to me and to everyone else. This isn't Northern Ireland, it's not Washington, DC, and it's not planet Earth. When you joined up, you joined up as a soldier, and you better remember that. Second, no matter what you think, Private, your responsibility right now isn't to the universe or to humanity at large—it's to me, your squadmates, your platoon and to the CDF. When you're given an order, you'll follow it. If you go beyond the scope of your orders, you're going to have to answer to me. Do you get me?"
Bender regarded Viveros somewhat coolly. "Much evil has been done under the guise of 'just following orders,'" he said. "I hope we never have to find ourselves using the same excuse."