Now I'd made my first drop, and I'd fought my first action. I'd fought several, in fact - I was a full-fledged Marine. My crimes were gone, pardoned away in exchange for my service. I could go back to Earth when I mustered out if I wanted to, and I would be free from any consequences of my past. But even then, Earth was already starting to seem like something far away and long ago. I didn't realize it at the time, but the concept of home was changing for me.
We'd been on one mission that particularly made an impression on me. Three of our troopers were out on patrol, and they ended up cut off by superior enemy forces. The lieutenant didn't hesitate - he mustered the whole platoon and we scrambled out to try to link up and get them back home. The Captain was in on it too, sending a group of snipers and a heavy weapons team from base Delta-3 to assist us. We fought for four hours, the lieutenant pushing us relentlessly the entire time. In the end we broke through, but too late to save them. They were all lost.
The mood was somber when we got back to base. We were in a profession where people got killed - there was no way around that. Yet we mourned every one of them, and every trooper in the platoon wondered how he'd failed, what he could have done differently. I felt the loss too, and the futility of our fruitless, costly fight to save them. But then I realized it wasn't fruitless. Mathematically it was, of course. Had we abandoned them we would have had three casualties instead of the eight we ended up with. But combat isn't decided solely by numbers or equations; it is a test of morale, of the willingness of men and women to fight, sometimes under impossible conditions. Those three Marines died on that plateau, but they were never abandoned by their comrades. They knew to the last that their brothers and sisters were fighting to reach them…and the troops struggling to break through saw how the Corps treats its own. If it was them next time, trapped and cut off, they knew at least that they would not be cut loose, that no officer was going to make a cold blooded decision that they were expendable. The Corps stood by its own…wherever, whenever, whatever the cost.
I'd been on-planet for five months, and I wasn't one of the new guys anymore. Combat on Tombstone wasn't cheap, and we'd lost eighteen of our fifty since we'd landed. Half of them were wounded, all thanks to the armor's impressive repair and trauma control mechanisms. Our suits were a hell of a lot better than the Caliphate's in that regard – their nanotech was way behind ours. In a place like this, a wound was pretty much a death sentence for one of them.
We evac'd the wounded on the transport that brought us replacements. We had eighteen fresh new faces wandering around the base, and I was in the unfamiliar territory of mentoring the new people. Somewhere in five months of serving in hell I'd become not quite a veteran, but at least seasoned. I knew my way around this miserable planet and how to survive its many hazards, and I was determined that none of these 18 newbs would go out and get themselves killed doing something stupid. Others had done that for me, and some of those people were now dead or shipping out to the hospital on Armstrong. It was my turn, my debt to start repaying.
We'd just celebrated the new year…the new Earth year, of course. A year on Tombstone was only 61 Terran days, and just over 20 of the 73 hour local days. I'd never celebrated the new year before I'd become a Marine, but we had a nice little party in base Delta-4 and welcomed the new additions to the platoon. Six of them were experienced and were transferring from other units or the hospital. The rest were fresh from Camp Puller, the class that was half a year behind mine.
There was a lull in the action as the new Earth year began. Both sides were building up and replacing losses, and while we did frequent patrols there was little action. There was one interesting thing, though. We managed to intercept and decode a Caliphate message that gave the exact arrival date of their next convoy. I'd been with the patrol that caught the transmission, and we were pretty excited for a while. Taking out a couple hundred of their troops while they were still in the launch bays would save us a lot of trouble down here. But in the end nothing came of it. Alliance Gov considered engaging enemy forces in space to be an unacceptable escalation. Neither side had attacked the other's naval forces, and they weren't looking to start now. Everyone knew that full-scale war was coming, but nobody was ready for it yet. It was frustrating fighting a war that you weren’t allowed to win, but there was nothing we could do about that.
I ended up going out on patrols with most of the new people. The lieutenant was insistent that the fresh arrivals pair up with a more senior private any time they went outside. It was something that stuck with me years later when I was in command of various units. You want to keep your new people under the command of the most experienced non-coms available, of course. But it really helps to have them paired off with an experienced private, regardless of how good a team or squad leader they have. Human psychology is complex thing, and there are considerable differences in how a person interacts with a command figure and how they function with a peer at their own level.
Chapter 6
This was shaping up to be a significant battle. It started small, just two patrols running into each other. They exchanged some fire, and that would have been the end of it, but neither side backed down. The Caliphate sent in reinforcements and pushed back our forces, taking the main ridge.
It looked like worthless ground to us, but the captain wasn’t going to give it up without a fight, and we got the orders to suit up. We were the farthest away, and when we got there the entire company was formed up, covering a front stretching over five kilometers. They had already counter-attacked and retaken the ridge when we arrived, and we fed into the line, allowing the units that had taken losses to condense their frontages.
The ridge was named after the megacorp that claimed the mining rights in the area. McCraw Resources was a huge mining concern that had a number of places named after it, including an entire planet on the Rim. It was one of several Alliance companies mining on Tombstone, though the only difference between them was which Corporate Magnate managers got the richest. A McCraw may have started the company centuries ago, but now it was basically owned by the government, just like all the megacorps. The Magnates who ran it stole what they could, but in the end they answered to Alliance Gov.
We dug into our new positions, and the lieutenant directed the placement of our SAWs and SHWs. He was very careful about arranging them to maximize their fields of fire and also to provide mutual support. Any enemy attack against one of our heavy weapons would come under fire from at least two others. It made an impression on me how he obsessed over the placements himself rather than just ordering the teams to deploy. That stuck with me years later when I was in his position. I’ve always believed that low-level heavy weapons are a huge key to victory, and that belief started that day.
The enemy had fallen back but not withdrawn entirely. They’d fortified another ridge about five klicks north, and it didn’t look like they were planning to leave. Their position didn’t look quite as good as ours, but it was strong enough to discourage an attack, at least until we were heavily reinforced. We exchanged sporadic long-ranged fire, but it was mostly quiet for about six hours, with occasional excitement when someone got careless and was picked off by long-ranged fire.
It’s hard to stay alert for hour after hour, especially when nothing much is happening. The suit can keep you pumped up on stimulants, but you have to be careful and save that for when you really need it. Otherwise you end up strung out, and you lose as much effectiveness as you gain. But you still have to stay sharp. Snipers can pick off a target at five klicks, no problem, and we’d lost two people already because they let their guard down. Newbs were particularly vulnerable, but I’ve seen veterans lose their focus for a few seconds too, and that’s long enough to get scragged.