Not For Glory by Joel Rosenberg Page A

see you before you leave, sir," he said. "Whether it's with me or without me."
    "Very well."
    Wordless, he limped off, pressing his hand to his side. At the door, the medicians with Suki hustled him into a wheelchair and rolled him out of sight.
    The stream of wounded ended, to be replaced by the rest of the shuttle's human cargo.
    I nodded. In the back of my head I'd been keeping a running—or is that limping?—count of the wounded.
    Everything can be reduced to numbers. We see six men screaming in pain, lying on the ground, or lying white-faced, eyes distant and unfocused, too far gone to cry. Next to them, we see one man lying dead, and we turn that into a statistic: Metzadan casualties run about five or six injuries to one death. I'd counted two hundred and twelve injured men coming off the shuttle; deaths would run thirty-five and a third, statistically speaking.
    There's something special in the face of a soldier getting off a troop carrier; it's the kind of relief you can see in combat when the shot hits the next man.
    I made it home, it says. As I always knew I would.
    The survivor guilt hits later.
    The stream of khaki-clad men thinned, then ended, and there was a still moment before he appeared in the door, looking good, but haggard.
    My baby brother. Ari Hanavi. When we played as boys, all of us called him the General, even then. We always knew Ari was going to wear stars someday, if he lived. Real stars, not the phony ones the inspector-general wears.
    When I was a boy, the generals I saw and heard about—except for Uncle Shimon—were all stern, strong-jawed types. The sort of man who you just know could have been a master private if he had only decided to refuse promotion. I've since learned that that's not always true. One of the best generals I've ever met looks more like a shopkeeper than a soldier. Uncle Shimon always looks like an unmade bed.
    But my brother fits the stereotype, at least on the outside. And he carried the double oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel on his shoulder like they were a pair of stars.
    He paused a moment in the hatch, spotted me, then bounded down the stairs two at a time, apparently not having to readjust himself to Metzada's 120 percent of the standard gravity the transports keep. His knapsack was on his back, and the ancient IMI Desert Eagle he always uses as a sidearm—he may as well carry a handgun; he's a lousy shot, anyway—was in a snapped-down holster at his hip. His hand strayed to tighten his web gunbelt; Ari may have been ready for the heavy gee of home, but his gunbelt wasn't.
    Ari always makes a fetish of carrying his own gear. I think that's a rebellion against Uncle Shimon, who always went into battle carrying nothing more than a notepad and a few spare stylos. There's something to be said for doing it your own way, no matter what that way is.
    Behind him, loaders closed the skipshuttle's hatches and pulled the rolling stairways away, shooing all of us toward the doors.
    He extended his hand as we walked toward the nearest door. His handshake was firm and warm. The only injury that I could see was on his left hand, and that covered by a clean bandage.
    He dismissed my look of concern with a quick pursing of his lips.
    "I see you made it," I said.
    He shook his head, dismissing that. "Problem." He was still in general-officer mode. "We had some men captured by the Legion. They caught a platoon assault group during a sweep."
    "And?"
    "Some legionnaires decided to make Haim Elazar talk. They cut off his hands."
    I nodded. About the only other way a man can lose both of his hands without getting killed is in bomb-disposal work.
    "They hacked them off," Ari said. "For practice. For fun."
    "What happened to the platoon?"
    He smiled. "A very pretty diversion and rescue. We got all the live ones out. 'The Legion may be tough—' "
    " '—but they're still dumb.' "
    The French Foreign Legion is still, after all these centuries, an army of moderately well-trained