It was hard to believe that just three years earlier she’d been a high school teacher. Business and Econ, her only responsibility a roomful of disinterested eleventh graders in Oak Lawn, Illinois. It was a working-class area, the kind of area that the military had always fed on: patriotic kids without a lot of options. So when the war heated up, Oak Lawn sent its share to all three services, and Ms. Moody was one of the teachers who encouraged them, making her a friend to the recruiters that periodically swept through the halls giving away ARMY OF ONE T-shirts and promises of upward mobility, college tuition, and adventure.
At first, like most of the teachers, she was conflicted about sending the kids away. Even though she believed deeply that it was the right thing, she knew many of them would end up in harm’s way, and some of them would end up hurt, or even dead. Many of the teachers quietly discouraged kids from joining for just that reason, although they soon learned to keep their mouths shut about any doubts they had. Teachers were public employees, and public employees who were labeled as unpatriotic soon found their careers limited. Especially as the enemy had one success after another in the Pacific, and the war seemed to close in on them all.
But as time went on, Moody began to actually envy those kids. The war consumed all the media, and it was clear, as the Alliance coalesced in a last-ditch effort to defeat Typhon, that democracy itself was at stake. Many of her former students were in the fight, doing something about it. They would come back to school occasionally, with their uniforms and their ribbons, and sometimes even with their wounds, and she could see it in their eyes: their lives had purpose in a way that hers did not. Meanwhile she continued to count textbooks and teach supply and demand, the Laffer curve, and price elasticity.
Finally, one day, a Navy recruiter lingered in her room after giving the standard pitch to her kids, and they struck up a conversation about officer programs. She fit the criteria, he enthusiastically told her: she was young, single, a college graduate. She found herself surprised as she listened, surprised at how right it all felt. She gave herself one more day to think about it, and then she drove down to the recruiting office, sandwiched between the Department of Motor Vehicles and a Laundromat, and volunteered to be a US Naval Officer. Over the next few days, she filled out a stack of forms with her personal information, took a short medical exam and a basic math test. The fantasy grew in her mind with each step: military glory, exotic ports of call, her own return to Oak Lawn in uniform, an example to all.
One week later, the Navy rejected her.
The embarrassed recruiter was flabbergasted. He tried his best to assuage her, afraid it would turn her against the entire recruiting program, of which she had become Oak Lawn High School’s biggest supporter. He attributed it to an unusually good month for officer program recruiting, her lack of a technical degree, some kind of glitch in her application. He asked her repeatedly if perhaps she had something dark in her past that would have come to light in the initial background check, perhaps a youthful DUI or a shoplifting arrest. He finally left her alone in her classroom when it became clear that she now regarded his shoulder boards and ribbons as an insult, a reminder of her rejection.
For two weeks she simmered about it. The school year ended, and she resigned herself to a life in her small classroom, perhaps inspiring her students toward adventure, or maybe even glory, but never tasting it herself. Perhaps after the war and retirement, she thought, she could take a budget trip to Europe and see Rome or Paris.
Then one day as she sat at her desk in an empty classroom, compiling another semester of grades, a stranger walked into her room.
“Ms. Moody?” he said with a smile. “I’m Chad Walker. I’m a recruiter with the Alliance.” He handed her a business card that had no rank or title, just a name, phone number, and email address. And he wore no uniform, just a tasteful dark suit. She invited him to sit down. He somehow managed to look perfectly comfortable in the undersized desk — chair combo right in front of her.
The Alliance needed officers, too, he told her. Men and women who would work alongside the traditional military. People like her were desperately needed. “And I believe,” he said, looking her right in the eye, “that you would thrive as a military officer.”
“Would I have a military rank?” she asked. “A normal uniform? Could I do any job in the military?”
Walker answered yes to all her questions. You’ll have all the same opportunities as a traditional military officer, he assured her. The war effort, and recent legislation, guarantees it.
“So what’s the difference between being an officer in the Alliance and being an officer in the regular Navy?”
Barely any difference at all, he said with a chuckle. If you ascend high enough, you would eventually end up working at Alliance headquarters, rather than at the Pentagon. But in the trenches, you’ll be a military officer, with the same privileges and responsibilities.
She said yes before he left her classroom.
There was a background check again, and another skills test. While the Navy had asked her math questions, the Alliance asked her political questions, and she wasn’t always sure what answer they wanted to hear. Did she always vote? Had she ever run for office? Could she name the five original member countries of the Alliance? Could she name its current commander? Did she believe that every nation could function as a democracy? She sweated over the answers, desperate not to feel the sting of rejection again.
Two weeks after her physical, she got a congratulatory letter and her orders. She would begin basic orientation at the Alliance Training Center in the countryside west of Baltimore in one month. The orders contained a list of items she was to bring with her to training, and what not to bring: “minimal” cosmetics were allowed. Playing cards were not. The congratulatory letter was from the Alliance Commander, whose name, she saw, she had gotten incorrect on the entrance exam. She resigned from the Oak Lawn school district the next day.
Chad Walker was right about one thing: Moody did thrive as a military officer. She found an athleticism she never knew she had during training, excelling on the obstacle course, the daily runs, and the hand-to-hand combat sessions. She learned to her surprise that she was still a very good swimmer, her best sport in high school, cutting through the water so efficiently that she lost herself in the process, swimming laps until she lost count and had to pull herself exhausted up the ladder. The order and rigor of military life came easily to her; she was one of those people the military has always coveted, a person who found great comfort in being part of a system.
“Systems” was a keyword in her Alliance training, a shorthand for the simplified block diagrams they used to explain everything. The entire submarine was reduced to three blocks labeled CONTROL, WEAPONS, and PROPULSION. Turn a page and propulsion was reduced to blocks of PRIMARY and SECONDARY. One more page and the primary system was turned into blocks of NUCLEAR REACTOR, MAIN COOLANT PUMPS, and STEAM GENERATORS. Occasionally they would drag in an actual engineer who would show them photographs of pumps, breakers, and pipes, but it all looked drab and undramatic, indistinguishable blobs covered in wires and lime-green insulation, objects whose appearance seemed unworthy of their exalted positions and titles on the block diagrams. The reactor itself, the holy grail of the ship, the block that touched in some way every other block of every other diagram, looked like a large steel trash can penetrated by a dozen ordinary-looking pipes. After studying its characteristics and the nearly magical process of nuclear fission, seeing what a real reactor looked like filled Moody with the exact same flavor of disappointment she’d felt when she lost her virginity.