P.D. 948
Emily’s Personal Journal
At Victorian Fleet Training Facility on Aberdeen
Another three weeks without an entry. I can only plead exhaustion. Years of sedentary living did not get me ready for this! Some days I think they intend to run us to death, then other times they throw us into a four day combat maneuver where we are lucky to get three hours of sleep a night. Funny, everyone gets real macho about staying awake for thirty hours straight, but the fatigue kicks in. People start making mistakes, tripping, forgetting to bring extra battery packs for their rifle. “Friendly fire” incidents go up. We actually had one recruit fall asleep while he was on a night march and walk into a tree. Broke his nose. Sergeant Kaelin field-packed it with toilet paper and made him continue for the rest of the maneuver. “If the soldier is combat effective, he fights,” he told us. “The mission comes first.” On the other hand, maybe if the soldier were allowed a little more sleep, he wouldn’t walk into trees. Dream on, Emily.
Other lessons as well. Every day they select one of us to be a squad leader, platoon leader or company leader. No training or instructions on how to be a leader, just, “You’re it. Take this position” or “Hold this hill.” As my statistics professor would have said, the results are ‘variable.’ What is interesting, though, is how quickly you learn who is good and who isn’t. First lesson: The bad ones get more of us killed than the good ones. Second lesson: the tough, swaggering guys often can’t plan their way out of a paper bag. No feints, no maneuver, no psychology, just charge straight in and damn the torpedoes, or machine guns, or whatever. Enormous casualties. Sometimes they take their objective, more often not. When they do win there seems to be a perverse pride that they won the battle despite the dire losses suffered by their men. Stupid, just stupid. And God help us if the idiot wins like this, it makes him more prone to do it again in the future. Foolhardy bravery + lack of imagination = disaster.
Which brings me back to Grant Skiffington, the Admiral’s son. I know he is smart enough to plan a decent, imaginative attack, but he doesn’t bother. He just likes to fight and isn’t too concerned with actually winning. He doesn’t seem to care much if people get wounded (which hurts like a sonofabitch). After one skirmish I told him he was a jerk and that a lot of his people had been killed for nothing (he didn’t even take the objective). He laughed and called over one of the FOFs. “How you feeling?” he asked the guy. “Fine,” replied the soldier. Then Skiffington leaned over to me and said sotto voce, “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Tuttle; he’s not really dead.” Then he laughed and walked away. I told Cookie about it and she said I should have shot him in the ass. “He feel some pain then, girlie. He most certainly will.” Cookie is ambivalent about Skiffington. She admires him for his ferocity in battle, but doesn’t like the casualties. “He’ll take the hill that needs takin’ real bad, but he might be the only one left standin’.” Sergeant Kaelin just shakes his head and asks Skiffington if he can really be that stupid. He’s not, of course.
Sergeant Kaelin still hasn’t picked me to lead the Company in any significant maneuver. Getting nervous.