It took five minutes for Judge March to assure me that if I chose to enlist, then quit the army, he would have my ass.
Then the recruiting sergeant and I sat on a bench, in a courthouse hallway awash in disinfectant smell. He spoke up to be heard while the whines of handcuffed crack heads echoed off puke pink marble walls. “You sign here, here, and here, Jason. Then we’ll talk about branch preference.”
Branch, schmanch. My preference was that Judge March didn’t jail me with mother-rapers and father-stabbers and throw away the key. I took the pen, signed, and eyed the sergeant’s chest. Ribbons, silver jump wings. He actually looked pretty wick.
I pointed the pen at his badge, long and skinny and powder blue, with an old-fashioned musket stamped in the middle. “What’s that one?”
“Only one that matters. CIB. Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Means you’ve seen combat.”
“You have to be Infantry to get it?”
He shook his head. “You have to see combat. But the way to do that’s Infantry.”
“Isn’t that like marching and stuff?”
“Everybody marches. Infantry marches for a reason. It’s my branch. The Queen of Battle.”
He really did look wick with his beret tucked under his shoulder loop. Unless the army had a sex-and-rock ‘n’roll branch, it was all olive drab to me. And I liked hiking as much as the next Coloradan. I checked the “Infantry” box and the sarge and the Queen and I shared a special moment. The moment lasted as long as it took for him to tear off and fold my yellow copies.
I had a month to jerk off before my orders said report for Basic. The only foster family that would take me were the Ryans. Mr. Ryan spent hours in the yard watching his trees. He’d planted them around the turn of the century, and they’d grown old and brittle like him. Their leaves fell after the dust darkened the sky.
Every Sunday morning Mrs. Ryan clicked down their walk in high heels and off to church while Mr. Ryan hunkered in their living room glued to the pregame. They seemed very normal.
Mrs. Ryan held a turn-of-the-century-style bowl, probably virgin plastic, across the kitchen table. “More peas, Jason? They’re the last of the fresh. From tomorrow it’s all frozen.” She wrinkled her brow. “After that I don’t know.”
I shook my head. She poked the peas at Mr. Ryan.
He grunted and kept watching TV. Yeah, TV. The dust in the atmosphere was screwing up holo signals, but the land lines from Cablevision days were still buried in place. So if you had an old cathode-ray-tube television box—and what the Ryans didn’t have only the Smithsonian did—you could still watch news.
TV’s like a holo, only flat. You get used to it.
The anchorman asked a professor, “Ganymede?”
The professor wagged a pointer at a studio holo, hanging over the desk between them, of a slow-rotating rock. “Jupiter’s largest moon. Bigger than our moon yet with less gravity than Earth. The only other place in the solar system with liquid water. Of course, Ganymede’s is in a layer far below its surface. This image was taken by the Galileo Probe thirty-seven years ago, in two thousand. Ganymede looks hard edged. It had no surrounding halo back then. No atmosphere but wisps of released ozone and oxygen.” He spun his chair and pointed at the twin to the image alongside the first. The twin had blurred edges. “This telescopic image is a week old. Voila ! Atmosphere!”
“And that means, Doctor?”
“These aliens have set up a forward base on Ganymede. They’ve generated an atmosphere for an entire world.”
“And what does that tell us?” The anchorman knit his brow.
“They covet a world with water and an atmosphere. Which is why these Projectiles are being fired at us instead of nuclear warheads. Precisely large enough to slowly strangle us but clean and small enough to allow Earth to escape true ‘Nuclear Winter.’”
“They don’t want permanendy damaged goods?”
The TV professor nodded.
Mr. Ryan waved his fork. “So fly the Marines up there! They’ll permanently damage some goods!”
Mr. Ryan was very upset about his trees. But the human race couldn’t fly a gerbil to Jupiter. We hadn’t had the hardware or the will to send a person as far as our own moon since the 1970s, much less attack some super-race that could air-condition a whole planet.
“Walter, two wrongs don’t make a right.” Mrs. Ryan tweezed individual peas into Tupperware like pearls.
Mr. Ryan clamped his jaw as he’d done it for a lifetime.
The anchorman faced the screen. “When we return. Military unpreparedness. Worse than Pearl Harbor?”
Mr. Ryan clicked off the TV box. “I’ll just read the paper.”
They were actually publishing daily news on paper again. The Greens didn’t bitch since the trees were already dying.
Mr. Ryan turned to me. “What branch did you pick?”
“The Queen of Battle.” It sounded so cool.
“Christ on a crutch! Not In fantry?”
Uh-oh. “The sergeant recommended it.”
“I was in sales. You always push the shit first. Besides, if we ever win this war, it’ll be the rocket jocks that do it.”
Actually, I’d thought of that. The United Nations Space Force was already up and running. But you had to be a math brain like Metzger to get in. My verbal test scores were so high that I had to sit through weekly counseling about the tragedy of underachievement. However, I C-minus’d precalc and took the Computer-Repair-Shop low road junior year. Even though it split up Metzger and me for the first time since third grade.
Mr. Ryan shook his head. “Infantry. You better spend next month getting in shape.”
I spent next month dropping Prozac to forget Mom, drinking up my signing bonus on a fake ID, sleeping and downloading porn. The rest of the time I wasted.
The day before I shipped out I went down to the recruiting office to pick up my travel allowance. A guy in Space Force cadet uniform was coming out. Khaki jumpsuit, high boots, royal blue neck scarf. Even through the gloom, that looked wick.
“Wander!”
It was Metzger. His face reddened. “I heard you, uh, signed up after…”
Metzger was sort of my best friend, but we hadn’t spoken since I got suspended after my monstrous homeroom assault
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. What could he say? It wasn’t his fault that he still had parents and a life. I don’t know if I’d have called him up if the situation had been reversed. Mom would have said adolescent males form dysfunctional friendships and told me to forget about it
I said, “So check you out! I thought only delinquents with a court order could enlist without graduating.”
“If you score high enough and your parents consent, you take ROTC while you finish high school. After graduation…” He put his hands together and swooped them toward the sky.
Already the military was shooting missiles up from Earth, swatting away some Projectiles. But within months Interceptors, really updated space shuttles, would patrol space between here and the moon. It was going to be a holofantasy come true. Metzger succeeded at everything.
But on hologames he was the best anybody had ever seen. They said game reflexes were success predictors for an Interceptor pilot.
“So whadya get, Wander? Rotary-Wing Flight School?” Metzger acted like an adult, sometimes. Tactful. We both knew I couldn’t do rocket-science math. Helicopter gun ships were the next-sexiest thing.
I flipped his blue braided shoulder cord with a finger. “Flight school’s for pussies.”
“So? What, then?”
Two girls walked by. The blonde looked Metzger up and down and whispered behind her hand to her friend.
He grinned.
Girls always looked at Metzger like that. Now he was Luke Skywalker, too. I rolled my eyes, then squinted at the gray sun. “Infantry.”
“Infantry.” He blinked. “That’s good. Really” He looked off at bare trees. “So. When do you go?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“I guess you’ve been getting in shape.”
“Naturally.”
“We gotta get drunk tonight.”
In next morning’s darkness I slouched, hungover, in the airport lounge and watched the transport parked outside the window. It squatted on its landing gear, its floodlit paint as gray as every dawn had been since the war began.
I’d never seen a propeller plane except in a museum. But jet engines sucked in so much Projectile-impact dust they chewed up their own insides. Two jumbo jets had crashed, so the commercial fleet got grounded and became parked aluminum scrap. Airports these days were all military.
The dust ate propellers, too, but they’d rigged filters for prop planes so the old, mothballed crates could operate. Filter bags hung under the four engine nacelles like udders.
I rubbed my throbbing temples. Metzger and I had bought beer, driven out to the country, kidnapped a goat, and let it loose in the school cafeteria. Metzger’s idea, as always. Roguish daring was another trait prized in fighter pilots.
I turned to the guy beside me, who looked as hungover as I felt. “You think that old cow’s safe to fly?”
Big and black, he sprawled, like the other fifty of us enlistees, across a departure-lounge chair.
He scowled. “Cow? A Hercules? The C-130 was an outstanding ship in her day!”
Another gung ho letter-and-number spouter. These recruits actually wanted to enlist. I was the only sane one.
“Saddle up, ladies!” The corporal from the plane was more fanatic than the recruits. We fifty stood, stretched, groaned, and drooled. If milling around could win a war, we were going to kick ass.
We boarded and took off. The Hercules’ saving grace, besides not crashing, was that it was as loud as riding in a trash barrel rolling across cobblestones. None of the gung ho crowd disturbed my misery. We landed twice to change filter bags, then hit the runway—not a figure of speech—for the last time around noon, local time, wherever local was.
“Saddle up, ladies! Welcome to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania!”
That sounded civilized. Not Greenland or the jungle or someplace.
The plane’s back ramp dropped, and Antarctica whistled in. By the time they ran us down the ramp and lined us up in four rows on the runway’s cracked, weedy asphalt my teeth chattered so hard my eyeballs ratded. Pennsylvania wasn’t so civilized.
“Platoon! Atten- shun !”
I’d watched enough holoremastered war movies to know that meant stand straight and still. Like your mommy stood you up against the doorjamb to mark your height with a pencil. What crapola.
Wind scraped curled leaves across snow as it carried away the last Hercules exhaust fumes. Somebody coughed.
I stared straight ahead. Indiantown Gap was snow-dusted hills carpeted with the gray, leafless hardwood forest a pine-sniffing Coloradan seldom saw.
I said to the big black guy from the airport, “We should’ve joined the Hawaiian army.”
He laughed.
It wasn’t my best laugh line. Once, while he lunched with a cheerleader, I made Metzger snort milk out his nose.
“What’s your name, trainee?” The voice boomed behind me and hair stood on my neck.
“Me, sir?”
“Sir? Commissioned officers are addressed as ‘sir!’” He stepped around in front of me and stared into my eyes, so close that I thought he’d poke my forehead with his brown, Smokey Bear hat brim. He was leather-faced and so old that the hair fuzz above his ears was gray. Like his eyes. They were colder than Indiantown Gap.
“I am Senior Drill Sergeant Ord and am so addressed! Name?” A spit bead arced from his mouth. It froze before it hit my chin and ricocheted away like a foul tip.
“W-Wander, Drill Sergeant!”
“Trainee Wander.” He paused. He was talking loud, so everybody could hear, even over the wind.
I bet he pulled this routine with every incoming group. And some poor dweeb—me—was made an example. Maybe I rolled my eyes at the thought.
“At the position of attention, you may blink, swallow, and breathe! Not joke, roll your eyes, and dance the macarena!”
The what? I shook in the wind like an out-of-tune Pontiac.
He turned away, hands clasped behind his back. “The platoon will move out of this mild breeze and indoors as soon as you assume the position of attention, Wander.”
I could feel the hatred of every frozen-ass person on that asphalt. It was so unfair. I couldn’t stand still. Shivering was an involuntary reflex. I hadn’t done a thing. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have talked.
I was freezing inside my ski fleece. Drill Sergeant Ord wore just an olive drab, starched-cotton uniform shirt and pants Moused over laced boots that shone like glass. And that fool hat. But he strolled back and form like he was poolside.
It was probably three minutes but felt like thirty until my body went numb and motionless.
Ord faced us, hands behind his back, and rocked on his boots. “Very well. When I dismiss this platoon, you will shoulder your gear, face right, and move out smartly to the quartermaster building.” He pointed at a whitewashed shed on the horizon. It was probably four hundred yards away but looked like it was in the next county.
Somebody whimpered.
“There you will receive a hot meal and be issued uniforms, including field jackets with liners. These you will find to be the finest cold-weather protection ever devised.”
Somebody whispered, “Dear God, let’s go!”
Ord seemed not to hear. “They are provided to you at no small expense by this country’s taxpayers, whom you are privileged to defend.”
The wind howled.
Somebody whined through clenched teeth. “My dick’s frozen, or I’d pee my pants.” If he did, we’d all be trying to warm our hands off the steam.
Ord ignored all these other whisperers. I’d bet the taxpayers would be pissed if they knew they were paying Ord to pick on an orphan who got railroaded into the army.
“Dis-missed!”
Evidently, “move out smartly” was army talk for “stampede.” If I’d known what came next, I’d have run the opposite way.