Star Corps (9 page)

“Sir—” he began, wondering how to explain.

“I think you're a goddamn Aztie secessionist, maggot, trying to hide your Latino name.”

The sheer unfairness of the charge surged up in his throat and mind like an unfolding blossom. “Sir—”

“I think you're trying to be something you're not. I think you're an Aztie trying to infiltrate
my
Corps—”

“That's not true!”

“Hit the deck, maggot!”
Sewicki exploded.
“Fifty push-ups!”

“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”

Face burning, John dropped to hands and toes and began chugging off the repetitions. As Sewicki pounced on another victim farther down the line, the other sergeant loomed over him, counting him down. His Marine career, he decided, was off to a very rocky start. It wasn't that he thought the Garroway name would buy him any favors, exactly, but he sure hadn't figured on it buying him any trouble.

He'd only reached fifteen, arms trembling, when Sergeant Heller swatted him on the back of his head and barked, “On your feet, recruit!” Sewicki was leading the rest of the group off to a building behind the paved area at a dead run, and he had to scramble to catch up, jogging through the humid night.

By now he was beginning to wonder if he would
ever
catch up.

The building was a featureless gray cinder-block structure, unadorned and almost unfurnished, save for a desk with a nano labeler operated by a bored-looking civilian. As the recruits filed in, the civilian touched each on the back of the left hand with the wand. Within seconds the numeral 1099 began gleaming from each recruit's hand in self-luminous neon-orange light.

“That,” Sewicki told them, “is the number of your recruit
training company, Company 1099. It
is
your address. It
is
who you are and where you are in the training schedule. You
will
be required to memorize it!”

Next, they filed past a large, plastic bin beneath the hawk-sharp gaze of Heller and Sewicki, dropping into it everything the two sergeants considered to be “contraband.” Most of what they collected were handheld electronics and microcircuit jewelry, hummers, sensory stims, and the like.

A few of the more expensive units were sealed in plastic with the recruit's name, to be returned to him after he left boot camp. Most, though, went into the bin, along with a growing pile of gum, candy, pornoholo cards, prophylactic pills, analgesics, wakers, sleepers, memmers, magazine sheets, and disposable personal comms. One recruit, a bulky, heavy-set guy who claimed to be from Texas, surrendered a bowie knife he had strapped to his leg, claiming with a broad, easy drawl that he was an experienced knife fighter and that he'd heard Marines could choose their own
personal
blades.

Sewicki held out a hand. “Hand it over, recruit,” he said with a dark and surprising gentleness, “or I will
take
it from you, and I might accidentally break an arm doing it.” The recruit looked like he was going to argue but then appeared to think better of it, much to John's relief. He knew that one troublemaker could make it hell for the entire company, and he didn't like the idea of his comfort depending on what some hypertestosteroned commando wannabe with more bravado than brains thought was a cool idea.

John had nothing on him but a wadded-up sheet of magazine card, e-loaded with the latest issues of
Newtimes
and
Wicca Today
, that he'd picked up at the skyport in San Diego to read on the trip. He tossed it into the bin with the rest of the trash, thinking of the gesture as a symbolic break with his civilian past. Whatever Sewicki said, he was a
Marine
now, at very long last.

After that they were told to sit on the linoleum tile floor and were given more facts to memorize.

“Listen up, all of you. You are not yet Marines, but you are no longer civilians. Your lives are no longer governed by the Constitution of the United States, which all of you have sworn to uphold and protect, but by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“During the next few weeks, you
will
become familiar with the UCMJ, but for now you will memorize only three articles of that document. Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits absence without leave. Article 91 prohibits disobedience to any lawful order. Article 93 prohibits disrespect to any senior officer. Now feed 'em back to me! Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits absence without leave!”

The recruits repeated the phrase in a ragged, partly mumbled chorus, barely intelligible among the echoes from the bare concrete walls.

“I think I just heard a freaking mouse squeak,” Sewicki yelled, cupping his right hand to his ear. “
What
did you maggots say?”

They repeated the article, stronger this time, and more in unison.

“Again!”

Half an hour later, the three UCMJ articles still ringing in their ears, they were brought to attention and run back into the night, this time to another building nearby. There, a trio of bored-looking civilians buzzed flat palm depilators over their scalps, leaving them completely bald as the discarded hair piled up on the floor to ankle depth. John had just begun to recognize some of the other members of the recruit platoon by sight…and now all were transformed into curiously subhuman-looking creatures with glazed eyes and hairless scalps gleaming in the overhead fluorescents.

As he stood at attention waiting for his turn with the bar
ber, he decided that he could accept most of what was happening philosophically, though his run-in with Sewicki earlier still rankled. The stories he'd heard about boot camp were proving to be fairly accurate. The name-calling and constant, shouted verbal harassment didn't bother him. He'd heard that in the old days, a couple of centuries back, drill instructors had actually been forbidden to hit their men, to use racial or personal slurs, even to swear in front of them or call them names.

That had been an ideologically charged era, a scrap of ancient history when the Corps had been forced by circumstance and a fast-changing American culture to adopt a politically correct attitude requiring that recruits be handled with gentleness, understanding, and respect.

“
Damn
you, maggot! Get those eyeballs off of me
now
if you want to keep them!”

Those days were long gone now. The purpose of boot camp had always been to reduce all incoming recruits to a common level, break them of their civilian habits and attitudes, and rebuild them as Marines. The breaking had begun the moment they'd stumbled off the bus, and it was proceeding apace, with no sign of letup.

It took all of twenty seconds for John's longish brown hair to join the furry blanket on the floor. After that they ran to yet another building, this time to pass through a web of laser light while computers measured his body, then to receive a seabag and pass down a line of tables where still more bored civilians dropped item after item of clothing and gear into the bags as the recruits held them open and sergeants bellowed for them to move it up, move it up. The gear they were issued included everything from “Mk. 101 cleaning kit, M-2120, laser rifle, for care of” to “shoes, shower” to “cream, facial depilatory.” Uniform items included multiple sets of underwear, shorts, T-shirts, socks, shoes, work caps, and the ubiquitous utilities known as BDUs—battle dress uniforms—all but the underwear and shoes in the same shade of basic olive drab.

The sun was just coming up over the broad, silver-limned reach of the Atlantic Ocean when at last they were run into their barracks, exhausted, dazed, and drenched with sweat. Their course took them past a transients' barracks, where young men leaned out of open windows with hoots, wolf whistles, catcalls, and cheerful cries of, “Man, you maggots are in a
world
of
shit!
”

Home for the next several days was a receiving barracks, a long, narrow room with ancient wooden floors, lined with beds stacked two high, each bunk separated from the next in line by a gray double locker.

Here, the recruits were again assembled on the floor, where they were given a long and detailed lesson in the strange and alien new language they were now required to use. It was not a floor, but a
deck
; not a ceiling, but an
overhead
; not a door, but a
hatch
; not stairs, but a
ladder
, not a bed, but a
rack
. You didn't wear pants, you wore
trousers
; you didn't wear a hat, but a
cover
. Upstairs was
topside
; downstairs was
below deck
. This area where they were assembled was the
squad bay
. The area just outside the drill instructor's office at the far end of the room was the
quarterdeck
. A room was a
compartment
. The bathroom was the
head
. Left was
port
, right was
starboard
.

It seemed as though the Marines had a different name for everything, and the Goddess help anyone who forgot or slipped into his old patterns of civilian speech.

The drilling continued for another hour, followed by a session where they were assigned racks and gently instructed in how to lay out, fold, and stow the clothing and gear they'd been issued. Next, they were ordered to strip, and with shower clogs on their feet, a towel in the left hand and soap in the right, were marched to the head. “Let's go, ladies, anytime you're ready! Close it up! Close it up! Nuts to butts! Make the guy in front of you
smile!
”

Showering was done, literally, by the numbers, with Sergeant Heller looking on from behind a glass window in the bulkhead above the shower pit and barking orders over a
needlemike. “
First!
Place your towels on the overhead bars.
Next!
Take your positions on the footprints painted on the deck! Reach up with your right hands! Grasp the shower chain and pull down, while standing in the stream!” Shrieks, groans, and giggles accompanied the icy torrent. “Belay that racket in there! No one told you to talk! One! Two! Three! Four! Five!
Release
the shower chain! Now! Lather up the soap and wash your head and face! Reach up with your right arm and grasp the shower chain. Pull down and rinse off. One! Two! Three!
Release
the chain!…”

It was a bizarre experience for John. The shower facility was downright primitive, with cold water dumped on their heads when they yanked on the pull chain. No temperature selector.
Bar
soap, for Goddess's sake, instead of a disinfect mixture or dirt solvent or skin cleanser added to the water stream. No sonic wash or infrared bake. No pulsing spray or steam mist, and definitely no civilized ten-minute soak in the hot tub to finish off the ritual. And having someone barking out at them what to wash, when to wash it, and how long to rinse it…

“
Next!
Lather up your right arm…that's your
right
arm, maggot…yes, you! Twelve from the end! Grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse…One! Two! Three!
Release
the chain!…”

They were being treated, he realized, like children…no, worse, like incompetents, like brain-damaged incompetents too slow to understand the simplest command. He could understand the need for this kind of guidance, intellectually, at least, but the process itself was humiliating in the extreme.

“Now lather your crotch. Do
not
be embarrassed. No one is looking. No one would
want
to look, believe me! Lather thoroughly! Now, reach up and grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse…One! Two! Three!
Release
the chain!…”

After showering and drying off, they marched nuts to butts back to the squad bay, where they stood in line, arms stretched out at shoulder level, while Sewicki, Heller, and a
Navy corpsman walked down the line, inspecting each shivering recruit for wounds, cuts, abrasions, bruises, or signs of ringworm or other fungal infections. Only then were they allowed to don for the first time the uniform of their new service…olive drab BDU trousers, T-shirts, and utility covers. The only technical aspect to their garb was in the heavy black boondockers, smartshoes that sighed and hissed as they adjusted themselves to the size and shape of each recruit's feet. There were no sensors in their BDUs, no fitting mechanism, no heaters or coolers, not even a link to a smart-garb channel for weather advice.

John thought about that pile of discarded electronics in the disposal bin. He'd always thought of the Marines as high-tech, with their armored suits and APCs, flier units and M-2120 lasers, combat implants and e-boosters. What they were wearing now was about as back-to-basics as it was possible to get.

Another hour passed as men who'd somehow missed getting vital items of clothing or gear or who'd ended up with extras were sorted out and discrepancies corrected. Civilian clothing was carefully sealed in plastic bags, labeled for storage, and collected. It would be returned when they completed boot camp…or when they washed out and gave up the new uniform.

Only then were they herded once more into ranks, then marched across the parade field outside—no, that was a
grinder
—to the mess hall. John thought at first that he would be too tired to eat, but found instead that he was ravenous. Even when he was eating, though, the constant barrage from Heller and Sewicki never let up. They paced among the tables, continuing the sharp-barked litany of correction, guidance, and downright bullying. “Food is
fuel
. You need
good
fuel to do what we expect you to do. No sliders! No rollers! No goddamn pogey bait!
Good
food, and lots of it! Regulations say
three
thousand
two
hundred calories
per
meal. And you
will
need it!…”