“First to fight, sir!” the plebes dutifully chanted, the last time they would yell the company motto.
Some party. Trace thought as she executed a right face and double-timed through the salley port to the left of Washington Hall into Central Area. Beast had been any 5 thing but fun. From her original squad of twelve new cadets, there were only eight left, the other four opting out of the excitement and returning to the civilian world. Trace herself had more than once seriously considered the lure of a civilian college where women — hell, human beings-were a bit more appreciated.
She joined the horde of green-clad first-year cadets scrambling like ants through the large pile of duffle bags, searching for the one with her name on it. Finding it, she was briefly flustered as to how to handle both the duffle bag and the rucksack on her back. She got a classmate to balance the duffle bag on top of the rucksack, bowing her head forward and almost pushing her to the ground. She slowly made her way out of Central Area, staggering toward the academic year company to which she had been assigned.
“What are you looking at, beanhead?” a voice exploded in her ear as she made her way up the ramp to New South Area.
“No excuse, sir!” Trace automatically snapped as she screeched to a halt, eyes locked straight ahead, or to be more accurate, given the weight on her back, straight downward.
With only four approved answers—“yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir; sir, may I make a statement”—her conversational options were somewhat limited. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make out the highly shined low quarters of an upperclassman edging up.
“Your damn right, no excuse, beanhead,” the voice growled. An acne-faced man with the yellow shield on his collar denoting a second year cadet — a “yearling” in Academy slang — looked her up and down.
“You’re a mess, miss. You call those boots shined?”
“Ah, lighten up, Greg,” a deep voice spoke from behind her left shoulder.
“They just got back from Lake Frederick.
How do you expect her boots to be shined?”
Trace kept her eyes straight to the front, as the cadet who had stopped her flushed red in the face and looked past her.
“Mind your own business. Boomer.” He turned back to her.
“What company are you going to, miss?”
“I-1, sir.”
“You mean India-One, don’t you?” the upperclassman corrected, using the proper military term.
“Yes, sir.”
“Outstanding,” he purred.
“I’m in I-1, so we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other. You know what they call it I-1. don’t you?”
Trace considered the potential traps that question entailed, weighed it against the vague constraints of the honor code, and finally answered: “Yes, sir.”
“And what’s that?”
Trace felt the. sweat pouring down her back, adding to the wetness already there from the long hike back.
“Inferno-One, sir.”
“Damn right, miss”—he leaned forward and his hand pulled aside the strap of her rucksack and he read her nametag.
“Miss. Trace. Inferno-One. We’re not like those party people over in 4th Regiment. The heat is on now and it’s only going to get hotter.
This is the 1st Regiment, and you’d better get your act together in a hurry. I will remember you. Next time I see you. those boots had better be spit shined
“Yes, sir.”
The shoes turned and headed away down the ramp. Trace took another step and her knees buckled, the duffle bag sliding off her back, slamming into the ground, while she caught herself from smashing her face into the concrete ramp at the last second.
“Better leave that here, dump your ruck in your room, and come back for it,” the deep voice suggested.
She quickly scrambled to her feet and locked up at attention.
“I can handle it, sir.”
The upperclassman named Boomer chuckled and wagged a finger at her: “Ah, now, now. Is that one of your four answers?”
Trace flushed, her head spinning from the heat and mental and physical exhaustion.
“No, sir.”
“I know they tried to brainwash all the common sense out of your head during Beast, but you’re going to need to turn your brain back on now to survive. They can harass you all they want, but that isn’t going to get you kicked out of here. Flunk a course or two, though, and you’ll be out of here in a heartbeat. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Boomer moved in front of her, his dark eyes finally meeting hers. “One other thing, miss. The secret to survival as a plebe is to become invisible. And as a woman you aren’t going to be able to do that. You might have in Beast, but in your academic company you’re only going to have three or four other female classmates. You’re going to be a shit magnet Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” A bead of sweat was agonizingly making its way down her nose toward the tip, but Trace stayed locked in a rigid position of attention.
“You’ve already got someone’s attention in your company and it’ll only get worse. But the bottom line is, they can’t do nothing to you. You may think they can, and it may sure seem like they are, but they really can’t do anything to you unless you let it get to you. They can scream all they want, and waste your time up until 2000 every evening, but after that they have to let you study and that’s what you have to concentrate on. In other words, decide real quick what’s bullshit and what’s real and don’t let the bullshit get you down. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s a lot of people like Greg, but that doesn’t mean you have to let them get to you, or that you have to become one.
Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right.” He chuckled and his deep voice attempted to get serious.
“Now get out of my sight, beanhead. Move.
Move. Move!”
Trace never forgot those words of advice in the following months. In retrospect she wondered if she would have made it if Boomer hadn’t taken the time and effort to talk to her that day. At the time she had simply thought he was being nice. It was only after she’d been further indoctrinated into the Academy system did she realize that Boomer had been perilously close to being unprofessional by being nice to her.
Nice was not a trait extolled in the Blue Book that ruled cadets’ lives.
Leaning back in her chair. Trace stretched out shoulder muscles sore from her time at the keyboard. She had short dark hair, framing a thin, tanned face out of which two dark eyes blazed behind steel-rim glasses. Her fatigue shirt hung limply over the back of the chair and her camouflage pants were un bloused from the highly shined jungle boots. Trace was slender, one of the few women who looked good in the male-designed Army-issue battle dress uniform, which was actually to her disadvantage among her peers and the Officers’ Wives Club and had proved to be disastrous when it came to a particular high-ranking male officer.
In 1992 the sudden opening of combat flight slots to female pilots had seemed to Trace as a particular stroke of luck. She’d just served in the Gulf War piloting a UH-60 Blackhawk air ambulance with the 82nd Airborne Division and had received a Bronze Star for valor when she’d flown a rescue mission for a team of Navy SEALS pinned down on the first day of the ground war.
Her excellent record and her skills as a pilot had garnered her a slot as one of the first three women to go through Apache flight training.
Her husband, John, had not been thrilled with the idea. He was a classmate and they had married in the excitement and fear of graduation. He wanted the two of them to settle down with concurrent tours at graduate school and then back to the Military Academy as instructors. But Trace had loved flying too much and insisted on the opportunity that presented itself.
Trace had fallen in love with the powerful attack helicopter and graduated at the top of her class, despite subtle — and not-so-subtle — attempts on the part of both her male peers and instructors to sabotage her invasion of their aerial domain.