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CHAPTER 4

MY SQUAD WAS IN THE BEST SHAPE, SO IT WAS up to us to carry the burden of the fight. We put out every round we could. Both of my men with grenade launchers popped RPGs into the enemy positions as quickly as they could, Kiervauna working clockwise, Razor working counterclockwise. The rest of us kept our fingers on rifle triggers, spreading long bursts at the enemy positions. For maybe twenty seconds, my squad was the only one firing against the IFers. Then we picked up a little help from the survivors in the other squads.

It was only then that Kiervauna took time to launch a pair of grenades toward the camouflaged site at the center of the enemy positions. Kiervauna was an artist with a grenade launcher. Both his RPGs hit the tent directly, ripping through the camouflage netting and the fabric beneath. I hadn’t seen anyone move away from that tent, but I might not have noticed if they had.

Once we were fully engaged, it didn’t take long before the volume of enemy fire diminished drastically. After three minutes, Tonio radioed for me to work my squad closer to the perimeter while the people left in second and third squads provided covering fire.

We moved slowly, using fire-and-maneuver tactics, with two or three men advancing while the rest of the squadprovided covering fire. As close to the enemy perimeter as we were, that was a very slow procedure, allowing us to advance only two or three yards at a time, spread along a squad front thirty yards wide. The biggest break we got was that we put down the enemy grenadiers quickly. All we had to worry about was rifle fire—not that automatic rifle fire isn’t enough to worry about.

Eighty yards out, I held up our advance. There was no way to get closer without losing half my men. I told Tonio that we were stopping, and he okayed my decision. From eighty yards, Kiervauna and Slash could put their RPGs down with the precision of sharpshooters with rifles. Four minutes later, the ranking survivor of the IFer unit raised a white flag. There were only four IFers left alive and unwounded of the fifty who had been there at the start of the fight.

T HE WAY THINGS WORKED OUT, THAT WAS THE only fighting our platoon did on Durestal. Not long after dawn, the commander of the IFer army of occupation surrendered.

Our regiment did not exactly cover itself with glory on Durestal. A company from 1st Battalion had mistakenly put a company from 2nd Battalion under fire during the final battle. By the time they got the mistake sorted out, we had twenty men killed by friendly fire and another thirty wounded. The rest of Ranger Battalion hadn’t fared any better than B Company. A lot of things went wrong, like on that exercise on Earth.

“There’s gonna be a lot of finger-pointing when we get home,” Tonio told me that afternoon. Our wounded had been treated and returned to duty—except for one porracci who had lost both legs to a grenade. The dead had been retrieved and ferried up to the ships for the voyage home. Ranger Battalion had assembled near where we landed originally. The rest of 1st Combined Regiment was being assembled ten miles away.

The units that had been on Durestal all along took care of the surrendered IFer units—and liberated the Alliance soldiers who had been taken prisoner during the first attempt to take the world back. Not many POWs had survived, but we didn’t know that yet. There was some hope that they had simply been moved to another IF world. It wasn’t until the interrogations of the occupation force had gone on for quite a few hours before we learned that most of the POWs had been killed.

“You think the finger-pointing will wait till we get home?” I asked. “One’ll get you five that it’s started already.”

Tonio shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he conceded, “but it’ll really hit the fan when we get home.” He hesitated, frowning. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a big shake-up in command. General Ransom might get the sack, maybe even some of the battalion commanders. The brass have to have a scapegoat.”

Like what they did to Captain Fusik after the Bunyan Rebellion, I thought, knowing that Tonio was thinking the same thing. “It was one of Wellman’s companies that screwed up, firing on our own people,” I said, as much to myself as to Tonio. I shook my head. “Much as I hate him, I hate to see something like that happen to anyone even more.”

JUST BECAUSE THE FIGHTING WAS OVER ON Durestal didn’t mean we could count on heading back to Earth the next day. It might have happened that way, but it didn’t. Since 1st Combined Regiment had come in only for the last scene, we got stuck with a lot of the cleanup afterward. We took part in the search for casualties, trying to make sure that all friendly bodies were retrieved. We looked for IFer ammunition dumps. We confiscated weapons and electronics from the IFer dead and prisoners. We also searched for Alliance equipment, to make sure nothing was left behind that could be put to any use. Evengear that was too badly damaged to use could be recycled, and that was important—not for protecting the ecology of Durestal but for the practical reason that it’s cheaper to recycle metals and composites than it is to find and process raw materials.

A secondary mission was to help the divotect residents start to rebuild their infrastructure. They had lost 15 percent of their population to the IFers and to the fighting during the two Alliance invasions. Power plants had been destroyed, buildings had been destroyed or damaged, and many food replicators had been damaged or confiscated by the IFer occupation force. Until they could get more help from Divo—the homeworld of their species—they needed all the assistance we could give them.

The fight to liberate Durestal had been over for twelve days before 1st Combined Regiment left. General Ransom was relieved of command five minutes after he stepped ashore at Fort Campbell. Somehow, Lieutenant Colonel Josiah Wellman escaped the axe.

THREE DAYS LATER, WE FELL OUT IN DRESS UNIforms for a full regimental formation to meet our new commanding officer. Brigadier General Montgomery Jones had never commanded any troops but human, but he had spent the past three months on the staff of the Combined General Staff of the Grand Alliance. He had gone along on one combat campaign as an observer attached to a ghuroh regiment. He had also been on one other campaign and acquitted himself well. The rumor mill had given us some information about Jones. He was supposed to be a strict disciplinarian, but he had shown a cool head in combat. A few men I talked to who had served under him in peacetime said they respected him.

Jones was six feet, eight inches tall and looked as if he had just stepped out of a recruiting poster. He looked as starched as his dress uniform. He didn’t say a lot—and nothing that I couldn’t have guessed he would say. It wasa standard new commander speech. We were going to train hard and when the time came we would fight hard and acquit ourselves as honorably as we had in our first two combat assignments. He would be hard but fair. Blah, blah, blah. He made a ten-minute speech feel as if it took an hour to deliver.

“Well, what did you think of our fearless leader?” Robbie McGraw asked, after we had been dismissed.

“I’ll reserve judgment,” I said. “And so should you. He’s got a good reputation. No matter what, he’s the boss now. Maybe a new hand at the top will get us past all the foul-ups.”

Robbie snorted. “He’s a cardboard cutout, Sarge. Give him a uniform without starch, and he’d melt into his boots.”

“I don’t know that, and neither do you,” I said, making my voice firmer. Even if I agreed with Robbie, I would have had to stick up for Jones. It’s up to the sergeants and junior officers to make sure a new CO has a chance to prove himself. We’ve got to make sure the grunts don’t screw it all up—because that would screw us all, not just the man on top. “Give the man a chance. Don’t go undermining everything at the start.”

Robbie stared at me for about twenty seconds. Then he walked away. Obviously, he wasn’t going to surrender his opinions because of what I said. Well, I understood his attitude. I’ve been the same way most of my life.

THE NEXT MORNING GENERAL JONES SCORED points—in my book, at least. He relieved Wellman of command of 1st Battalion and put him back on the regimental staff, this time as the operations officer. Technically, it was a lateral transfer, not a demotion, but I enjoyed the thought that Wellman had to take it as a reprimand. It was one of his companies that had caused those friendly-fire casualties on Durestal.

That same day the regiment went straight into an intensive training regimen. There was going to be no grace period after a combat mission, no weeks put aside for furloughs and passes, no waiting for our dead to be replaced or for the last of our wounded to get back to duty. Jones did not even give us until the next Monday to start training at the start of a week.

We worked longer and harder than we had since our first period of training as a unit, back on the world code-named Dancer. Our day started before dawn and rarely ended before dark. By the time the sun came up we had already put in an hour of calisthenics and running. We worked six and sometimes seven days a week. At least once a week we went out on night exercises, drilling in even the most basic squad tactics—over and over. There was never a safe time to slough off because we never knew when the general would show up to watch an exercise. Rumors had him in three or four places at a time, and even the logical impossibility of that wasn’t enough to convince some weary soldiers. Raw troops in basic training or in Ranger School don’t work as hard as we did.

What the general did, taking part in the training regimen and closely observing the men under his command, his subordinate officers did as well. No one was spared from the rigors of the training regimen, and it was up to every officer and noncom to ride the men under him. As always, pressure flowed the only way it does in the army, from the top down. Anytime someone made a mistake—however minor—there was someone higher-ranking close enough to pounce. I had to run my men as hard as possible, had to jump on any mistake—fast and hard—just like the people over me were doing. I don’t like taking that kind of heat, and I don’t like holding the torch under other feet.

We got tired and stayed tired. That doesn’t help; zombies make more mistakes. There were no passes to get off base, and we rarely had time to get to one of the on-base clubs to soothe our aches with a beer or two. Tempers flared. Noncoms and junior officers had to sit on any outburst before it could get out of control. In three weeksthere were two suicides in the regiment, and two unsuccessful attempts. Five men went AWOL. At least fifty applied for transfers. The suicides were the only ones who got out for good. Even the AWOLs were returned to the unit once they were captured or surrendered. They weren’t even given the “luxury” of being sent to the stockade.

Brigadier General Montgomery Jones meant business.

IT WASN’T UNTIL JONES HAD BEEN ON THE SCENE a month that we got a weekend off, a day and a half, and then we weren’t allowed passes. Sergeants and above could leave base whenever they weren’t on duty, but most of us chose not to since our men weren’t permitted the same liberty. The few married noncoms whose families lived near base went home. Some hadn’t seen their wives since the night we got back from Durestal. That free weekend, most of us were content to simply catch up on sleep and give aching muscles and joints time to recover. The men in our platoon were too tired to fight—or even to bitch.

“I’m starting to worry,” I told Tonio that Saturday. We were at one of the bars in the NCO club. “Morale hasn’t been this bad since the early days on Dancer.” My opinion of Jones had been going steadily downhill. At the start, I could see riding the regiment hard—for a week or two. It’s something any new commander might do to establish himself, even without the gaffes that had plagued us. But it was well past time to ease up. Jones wouldn’t make us better like this. The suicides alone should have been enough of a clue … even for a general.

“I know,” Tonio said, after glancing around to make certain no one was close enough to overhear. “I’ve heard the captain and Herb saying pretty much the same thing.” Herb was Company Lead Sergeant Herb Deelock, the top noncom in B Company. “But there’s not a damned thing we can do but be as much of a buffer as we can, and try to keep our people from falling completely apart.”

“The way things are now, if they put us into combat, the first casualty would be the general,” I said. “And there’s not a man who would fink on whoever pulled the trigger.”

Tonio was frowning as he took a long drink of beer. He didn’t want to talk about that. There’s probably never been a war where some officers weren’t killed by their own men, and we both knew that, but …

“You think Jones is just out to get himself another star?” I asked when it was clear that Tonio wasn’t going to respond to the previous comment. “Does he want to make major general that badly?”

“I don’t know what he wants,” Tonio said, “and I don’t much care. I just hate to see what he’s doing to the unit. He says we need more training and discipline to get better, then he rides us past the level common sense should tell him is possible. We’re losing ground every day. If we have a major field exercise now, we’re so tired that we’ll screw up worse.”

“And he’ll use that as an excuse to ride us even harder,” I said, when Tonio gave up talking for another drink. “It won’t take much more of that to destroy the unit altogether.”

When the noncoms start talking that way, a unit is already in big trouble. I guess Tonio and I were both too tired to realize that at the time, though.


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Framed