Excerpt: Colonial Tales

I enlisted because of a girl.
At 24.
Needless to say, in the long years I have since spent in the Corps, the amount of ribbing I’ve received over that particular fact has been… awe-inspiring. That’s the way it goes with Marines. We’re absolutely merciless when it comes to embarrassing the hell out of our squadmates – preferably in public spaces, hopefully even in front of members of the opposite sex. You get special olive green browny points for that.
Of course, while your fellow Marines are happy to tear your dignity to shreds at the drop of a hat, they’ll pile up – sometimes literally – on any outsider who thinks he can do the same with impunity. After all, it’s okay to take crap from other Marines, but you sure as hell ain’t gonna take none from civilians, corporate rats, or – and the mind recoils in horror at the very thought – from some Space Squid on R&R.
That’s the second thing I learned from joining the Corps. That once you’re a Marine, you can count on the others, absolutely and without conditions, in any circumstances; they’ll be there to back you up in the thickest of shit storms. Once you join the Corps, you’re part of something, something big and strong as steel, and deadly as a fine sword, and yet strangely warm and comforting at times. Oddly enough, it was precisely what I needed, although I didn’t know it when I signed up.
Of course, that didn’t quite register right away. For the first thing I learned upon reaching Camp Dvorak was that Drill Instructors are not human. They are demi-Gods from the dawn of time, with awesome powers and all-encompassing knowledge, capable of fearsome prowess if they didn’t choose to devote their time to train worthless scum like us to be Marines; their mighty boots make the earth quake, and the roar of their voice, like the Horns of Ragnarok, can split the skies asunder. And when one of them threatens to unscrew your head to do terrible things down your neck, you’d better take him at his word, because the bastard’s quite likely to be serious about it.

But on that day, in that slightly anachronistic bus in Northern Germany, arriving at the main USCM Recruitment and Training base in Europe, I didn’t know even that yet. I was 24, heart-broken, suffering from a hangover of epic proportions, and starting to have the slightest pang of… not quite regret, but at least puzzlement, as to why on Earth I wasn’t in my comfortable bed in Toulouse, or in his native, sunny Gascogne.
The regret, the bitter self-recrimination, the mental ass-kicking, the “Mais que diable allais-je donc faire dans cette galere?” would all come soon after, following the first painful contact with the sweet melodic voice of our instructors. A hint, if you are planning on enlisting at some point: no matter how hungover you are, don’t groan when a DI screams in your ear. It’s like a muleta to a bull, they’re guaranteed to pounce when they hear it.
I will gloss over the four months of unadulterated hell that followed. Basic Marine training has always been gruelling, and in this space-faring era of ours, even the lowliest grunts have to be able to jump, run, shoot, carry heavy loads, and operate or repair high-tech gizmos under pounding artillery barrages. Which means that not only are the DIs subjecting your body to every kind of legal torture they can think of, as well as systematically trampling on your ego and dignity, but they’re also making sure that your ample spare time is filled to the brim with schematics, theoretical lectures about everything from basic electronics to FTL travel, star charts with accompanying files on planetary conditions, and so on and so forth until you finally ache all over so badly you can feel each individual muscle, bone and neuron.
Many would-be Marines fail because of the physical side of things. Others can’t take the mental abuse, don’t have the frame of mind for military life. But nowadays, most fail because they simply don’t have the technical savvy that a good rifleman needs to survive the battlefield. The old stereotype of the dumb brute – never really true outside of the Army proper, of course – is long gone, as each and every graduated private is certified on equipment civilians would take a couple of years to get a licence for. Of course, there are some strange exceptions to that. Later on, one of my squadmates was an absolute genius with electronic equipment – I swear he could intercept a laser-beam transmission with a wire coat hanger and a transistor stuck in a turnip; at the same time, he had to read out loud any word of more than two syllables. Go figure.
My ‘advanced’ age turned out to be an advantage there. I was, after all, college-educated, even though I’d mucked around so much with my majors I couldn’t claim to be either the technical or the literary type; but at least I was more than passingly familiar with most concepts touched upon. Consequently I got top marks on pretty much all the theoretical stuff, and since I was generous with my help it made me a few friends. And the Devil knows I needed friends, because while I muddled through the physical side with a somewhat average level of competency, the mental pounding almost broke me. Not that I’m weak or wimpy in general, but at the time, I was a sodden mess, a total disgrace to mankind in general and manly men in particular. All that, because of a girl.
Sad, innit?

But, thanks to the support, gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle prodding of fellow recruits, I pulled through, with my bones intact, my ego reshaped into something that could slot into the Space Green Machine, and my mind not only whole, but full of many new and interesting facts, like how to strip down and re-assemble an M-41 in under a minute, what is the blast radius of a SADAR round, and how many 2LTs it takes to screw in a light bulb. Along the way I acquired a few nicknames, Frenchy being the obvious and most used one, and I made a few solid friendships, the kind that last a lifetime. I also acquired a certain swagger, at least once I graduated. That feeling of being state of the bad-ass art, as the phrase already went, would last exactly until I reached my first assignment (Nene 246, also known as 52 Tau Ceti II, home to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment of the 3rd Marine Brigade), when the real Marines and Vets already on station would take care to, and delight in, teaching me the difference between theory and practice…