In the Valley (22 page)

“Your leadership was to bring you to the schoolhouse at 1300 hours, exactly, prepared for instruction.” He paced, working himself up. It was fine theater. “You arrived late, at 1304 hours. You arrived unprepared, without the correct halo feeds.

“Every one of you has failed. But the people who are responsible for your failure are standing in front of you.” He paused. “Now
they
will punish you, not me.”

He turned to the two officer candidates and gave a simple order. “Smoke them. You have five minutes.”

Paul’s arms were trembling from holding himself in the push-up position while the officer had been addressing them. He looked at the two candidates, one of whom looked like he might cry. You better not cry, thought Paul. Crying would result in a feeding frenzy by the instructors.

A voice sounded from behind him, pitched low so (hopefully) the instructor would not hear: “Get this bullshit over with!”

Without batting an eye, the instructor said, “Bukowski—front and center!”

Uh-oh, thought Paul, someone forgot about the recruit halos they had been reissued! Paul had felt sick when he had received his during in-processing. Recruit halos were bad juju. And yes, once again he had to line up his icons in the center of his visual. He hated that.

Bukowski got up and raced to the front of the formation; then he braced stiffly to the position of attention. The instructor gestured for the candidate who didn’t look like she was going to break down to join the platoon. He wanted the guy who looked like he was going to cry to break. With a relieved
expression on her face, the candidate who had been “fired” as platoon sergeant raced to join the rest of the candidates on the ground.

“It looks like we have a new platoon sergeant!” enthused the officer. “Now, Candidate Bukowski, smoke your platoon!”

Bukowski proceeded to do just that. “One, two, three, fo’!” Bukowski, without batting an eye, thoroughly smoked his fellow candidates.

In the background, the dick officer intoned, in a mock-serious voice, “Candidates, the mistakes you make in battle will cost your men’s lives! Embrace the opportunities for leadership that we, the cadre of the Officer Candidates School—”

Paul tuned the dick officer out. The instructor finally shut up after the prescribed five minutes of smoking. With aching bodies, Paul’s platoon filed into the schoolhouse.

Impromptu, situation-based changes were one method that the leadership positions were swapped out at OCS. Another method was via a formal change-of-command ceremony held nightly, right before evening chow.

Paul thought that the evening, formal command changes were a real hoot. During the leadership exchange, the entire battalion would be lined up, with companies abreast. The training cadre would stand up front and read the new leaders they had selected from an old-fashioned paper list. They did this to heighten the tension, of course—no sneak peeks on halos.

Leadership positions, while a chance to shine at OCS, were also a chance to wash out of the program. Paul, like every other candidate, would stand there on pins and needles to see whether his name was called.

The worst positions were company sergeant first, battalion major sergeant, or company commander. One thing the leadership lottery at OCS did for the
candidates was to give them a real sense for who the most important people were in a battalion organization and which spots were the most sensitive.

The candidates found out that the toughest positions were sergeant firsts and major sergeants. They were the hardest-working guys and gals. And the person held accountable for his people’s failures seemed to always be the company commander.

Perversely, one of the easiest leadership roles in OCS was the platoon leader, the role that the candidates would fulfill upon graduation.

OCS reinforced a belief that Paul had always had: While second lieutenants were expendable, sergeants were the real backbone of the force. And sergeants looked for guidance from the company commander because that was from whom the lieutenants got their guidance.

Of course, Paul also knew that a good lieutenant was worth his weight in gold—and, like gold, was just as rare. Paul meant to be a good LT, and not one of those guys who was always hiding in the air conditioning somewhere.

First, though, he had to make it through OCS. Paul, while he had been a good trooper of the line, was by no means guaranteed to make it through the school.

There had been a guy that Paul had figured would make a good officer. He was a strong soldier, excellent at PT, and seemingly imperturbable. After the guy had had a shot at platoon sergeant, however, he was visibly shaken. Two days later he requested dismissal. He was gone, just like that.

To Paul, that was another difference between basic and OCS. In basic, you had to commit a major offense, such as shooting an instructor, to get sent home. It was just plain hard to fail. At OCS, all you had to do was ask, and you were gone. By the end of the second week, the battalion had been consolidated into two companies from the original three.

Oddly enough, the event that seemed to get rid of the most candidates was the land-navigation exercise, with its ancient lensatic compasses and maps.

Admittedly, Paul had a leg up on his fellow candidates there. Back on Old Earth, his father had been fond of taking him out into the woods around home and camping. What was different about their camping jaunts was that his father would make Paul leave his halo at home—Father always said that an assist from a halo didn’t give a person a proper understanding of the forest. With the halo’s built-in homing, map imaging, graphical, and entertainment tool on hand, field craft was a cinch.

Father had been right, as he so often was. Sometimes Paul had hated it when his father would get out the old-fashioned paper map and his shopworn compass to find a good fishing hole, but at OCS, he loved his father for his stick-in-the-mud ways. Paul knew that it was his father’s influence that had helped him to pass the test.

The reason the force still taught compass navigation was simple: what if suited soldiers were dealing with a force-on-force enemy who found a way to degrade or disable mil-grade halos? Paul thought that was a bit far-fetched because the mil-grade halos had a lot of redundancy built into them, but he supposed it could happen.

Without the halo, a suited soldier no longer had a suit; however, he or she could still fight. Suited soldiers were still wearing trauma-weave cams, and they could take their weapons off their suits. The M-74 rifle was not an electronic tool, and it had backup iron sights. Also, every unit Paul had been in had always listed a lensatic compass as one of the soldier’s basic issue items.

Now, not every unit really trained soldiers on how to actually use the compass. And that fact was made abundantly clear during the land-navigation final exercise.

At the exercise, each soldier was given a map and a compass. They were then issued a set of coordinates to ten points on the map. To pass, each soldier had to accurately plot and find seven of the ten points.

One would think it would be easy, right? Not so fast.

First off, the exercise was timed and started in the evening and ran into the night. So no matter how fast the candidates went through the points, at least three or four of the points would have to be found in total darkness. This particular aspect of the test tended to favor the quick, as the points were a real bear to find at night.

Secondly, the points were twenty-by-twenty-centimeter pieces of dull brown metal with a punch ticket on them. When the candidate found the punch ticket, he punched his card, shot a bearing to his next point, and set out at as rapid a pace as feasible. The points weren’t easy to see, especially at night.

Finally, the points were sometimes set close together and could easily be confused. True, points that were close together were always on a terrain feature that would distinguish them (if the candidate marked the points right), but sometimes they were in sight of one another, and the uncertainty caused much confusion and mental anguish.

If a candidate picked the wrong point, it would throw all the points off that came after it.

To Paul’s disbelief, the land-navigation test managed to chop fully one-fourth of his class away at the end of their first phase of training. That made for a one-third total attrition rate among the students for the first phase of training alone.

Another third of the class managed to melt away after the field-trials portion of OCS, which was at the end of the second phase of training. For three weeks the candidates lived in the field and did nothing but “situational exercises” and conduct training classes on various aspects of field craft. The instructors would deliberately choose the weakest students to conduct the classes and lead the field problems. This may have seemed cruel to the outside observer, but it served two purposes.

First, and most obviously, this selection tended to weed out the weak. If a candidate had made it through the land-navigation test and hazing of the first phase, he could still be grossly deficient in basic soldiering skills. Or, most importantly, the candidate could be weak in people skills.

Secondly, those who did have good people skills but were a little weak in soldiering skills had full opportunity to come up to snuff on their skills by being forced to lead the instruction in basic soldiering tasks. Paul had noticed over the years that nothing makes you an expert in a particular task like being forced to prepare and conduct training in front of your peers.

So to Paul’s way of thinking, OCS was a cruel but necessary test for those who sought to lead soldiers in an unforgiving school like combat. The students who made it through the first two phases of OCS were likely to graduate. After the second phase, the cadre switched over to a mentoring, as opposed to adversarial, relationship with the candidates.

The last phase of Officer Candidate School was the graduation exercise, a two-week-long field problem conducted exclusively by the candidates.

The candidates were assembled onto the much-loved parade field in front of the barracks to load into the ground-cars that would carry them to the final exercise of OCS. Paul couldn’t help but notice that there was only a company of candidates, about 120 people, remaining. Fully two-thirds of the men and women who had come to this course hadn’t made it to this point.

Holy shit, Paul thought, that’s a lot of soldiers who washed out. And then he loaded on to the truck, confident that he would make it through.

The final exercise went by in a blur for Paul. It was one ambush after another, one patrol through Mumbai’s ferns after another patrol. Paul hadn’t done so many suitless maneuvers since basic, and he knew he hadn’t done so many then either.

His feet were a mass of blisters and callouses; he could tighten his belt farther than it had ever tightened. He served as company sergeant first in the attack; he served as platoon leader and company commander in the defense.

In short, he worked hard and learned a hell of a lot. By the time of the final assault, with the company’s M-241s and M-74s crackling, he was ready to be an officer of the line.

Paul had secretly loved OCS. When they pinned his second lieutenant’s pips on him at graduation, Paul was proud as a peacock. He only wished his parents could see it.

G
od was Paul glad his parents were a far distance from this hellhole called Juneau. In a few hours, Third Battalion, 215th Juneau Army Brigade and his beloved Second Company was going to move toward their assault positions on the Baradna Valley.

There were more ground-cars and soldiers at Camp Kill-a-Guy than Paul had ever seen there, and they were all headed to one place, the Baradna Valley. The operation was the culmination of a month’s planning and the fulfillment of the wishes of FORSCOMJUN and the provincial governor.

The government in Jade, the world capital, was also tracking this operation. It was a big deal, and Paul and his merry crew were about to kick this party off.

The Baradna Valley was located off the main provincial highway about seventy klicks to the south of Pul-i-Irmohk and Camp Kill-a-Guy. The valley looked from the air like a long, snaky, topographical feature that ran west from the highway to the east. It terminated in a three-valley system that Mighty Mike had dubbed “the Chickenfoot.” The nickname stuck.

Team 1.69 was about to learn all about the Baradna Valley and that never-to-be-damned-enough Chickenfoot.

The Baradna Valley, ingeniously named after the Baradna River that had formed the valley in previous eons, had been home to some disturbing and violent dissident activity for a long time. The only reason the bad guys in the valley had never been dealt with earlier had been the previous disarray of the Juneau Army in this sector.

Well, the whole reason a series of Force Military Advisor Teams had been sent to Pashtun Province of Juneau 3 had been to firm up and professionalize the Juneau Army. Each successive team, of which Paul’s Team 1.69 was the latest iteration, had worked on one small aspect of the Third Battalion’s operations and training. Now, higher thought Third Battalion was up to the task of pacifying the Baradna Valley.