Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

I feel blind and dumb when I am out of the battle armor.
    The rifle is linked to the computer as well. It doesn’t aim or sight itself, but it does everything else automatically. Whenever I aim the rifle at a target, the computer selects the right burst length and cadence for the threat. My rifle doesn’t spit out any actual flechettes, but there’s a hydraulic feedback system built into the butt end that simulates the recoil of live firing. To make the illusion complete, there’s a sound module that gives off a report.
    Advancing with a squad and engaging other squads on the mock battlefields of the training facility is a strangely intoxicating experience. We’re training for war, and I know that the enemy out in the real world is going to shoot high-density flechettes and explosives at me instead of harmless beams, but so far, it all feels like a very exciting sort of sporting competition. The squads square up against each other in training, and we win or lose matches, just like in high school. There’s even the customary locker room bragging in the showers after the training rounds, with gloating winners and sulking losers. Nobody dies, or gets hurt, except for a few bruises here and there. The battle armor gives off a bit of a zap when you’re “hit” by enemy fire, but it’s not really painful, just unpleasant, like brushing your hand against a stripped low-voltage wire.
    We’re just past the halfway point of Basic, and there are twenty-seven of us left. We have lost thirteen recruits in six and a half weeks. In the first week, it was just the linebacker who decided to quit in the middle of our first run, but since then, the pace of washouts has accelerated. Nine have left voluntarily, and the other four were ejected by our drill instructors for failure to follow orders, or failure to meet standards. Our mess table has lost one member--Cunningham, the girl with the tattoos and the buzzcut. She made it to the third week, and then decided that she’d had enough of Sergeant Riley singling her out for extra sessions on the quarterdeck. One evening in Week Three, she just tossed her PDP onto her bunk, and walked out of the platoon bay. We went off to a class on chemical warfare, and when we returned to get ready for dinner, her bunk was stripped, and her locker emptied out. They never empty a recruit’s locker when the platoon is present, but they never wait around, either.
     
    We’re in the Urban Warfare Training Facility, a mock-up of a generic East Asian city block. It’s situated in the brushy desert on the outskirts of the base, and getting there is a training exercise in itself. We’re on Day Three of our Urban Warfare exercise, and every day, we’ve been ready and in full battle gear by 0530 in the morning. Every day, we’ve marched the twenty miles through the desert to the UWTF, encumbered with battle armor, rifles, fully stuffed backpacks, and three-gallon hydration bladders. The march to the UWTF takes two and a half hours at Sergeant Fallon’s pace, which is a march that’s somewhere between a fast walk and a slow trot.
    Our platoon is down to three squads of nine now. Every time we lose recruits, they shuffle the squads around to keep each squad at roughly the same headcount, and now we’re too few to fill out a full platoon of four squads. On this exercise, I am the leader of my fire team of four recruits, and my squad leader is Ricci. We’re one of the two attacking squads, and the defending squad is positioned in defensive spots up ahead in the “city”. The squad leader of the defending squad is Halley, my bunk mate.
    Ricci makes a lousy squad leader. Twice now, our squad has been chewed up by the defending squad, and twice, the instructors have reset the exercise and ordered us to do it again. Ricci does not deviate from his plan, which involves leapfrogging from doorway to doorway on the main road. Ricci doesn’t want to play infantry, and it shows. He’s aggressive where he should