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.
10
The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots …
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 would 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.
However, nobody asked my opinion at the time; I was told. Quite aside from the impossibility of dragging the troops home in view of our treaty obligations and what it would do to the colony planets in the Federation and to our allies, we were awfully busy doing something else, to wit: carrying the war to the Bugs. I suppose I noticed the destruction of B.A. much less than most civilians did. We were already a couple of parsecs away under Cherenkov drive and the news didn’t reach us until we got it from another ship after we came out of drive.
I remember thinking, “Gosh, that’s terrible!” and feeling sorry for the one Porteño in the ship. But B.A. wasn’t my home and Terra was a long way off and I was very busy, as the attack on Klendathu, the Bugs’ home planet, was mounted immediately after that and we spent the time to rendezvous strapped in our bunks, doped and unconscious, with the internal-gravity field of the Valley Forge off, to save power and give greater speed.