CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Marine OTC, Arsenault
Everything about Commander Ben Venue, Deputy Director of Training, was “well rounded.” He’d done just about everything a Marine could do from boot camp to embassy duty with a few wars in between, and he had the scars and medals to prove it. He was short, stocky, muscular; ham-fisted and hairy, except on his head. And he had a voice like a foghorn.
As soon as Brigadier Beemer had given his brief Welcome Aboard speech, Commander Ben Venue stepped to the podium.
“People,” he told the assembled candidates, “all the time you’ve been in the Corps, and some of you have been in all day, you’ve heard that OTC is a goddamned ‘finishing school,’ a pussy-farted place where you learn ‘which fork to use and how to hold your pinkie out while drinking tea from a china cup.’ Well, I’m gonna tell ya something, my children, that is pure bullshit.” He paused and looked at the hundreds of eager faces staring back at him. “Pure, unadulterated bullshit, people!” he thundered. “Let me tell you now, I’ve been shot at and missed, shit at and hit; I’ve humped my ass through jungles, deserts, city streets where every sumbitch on a rooftop had me in his sights, I’ve done it all, people, all.” He tapped his left eye and his right leg. “These are the fruits of modern medical science, people. I’ve spent more time in the hospital recovering from wounds than many of you have in whorehouses on the fringes of Human Space, and I can tell from looking at you that’s where most of you’ll want to be in a few days hence, but not here.” A nervous titter ran through the assembled candidates.
“You think I’m kidding? Okay.” He shifted his weight and leaned on the podium, extending a stubby forefinger at his audience. “You want to know something? I don’t have nightmares about the combat I’ve seen. I don’t wake up screaming because of the phantom pains in my artificial leg, no-no-no, my babies, nope. I wake up in the middle of the night in pure terror because I’ve just dreamed I was back in zero month at OTC!” His words, amplified by the sound system, echoed through the huge auditorium.
Commander Venue stood there silently for a long time as if waiting for his words to sink in. “All right,” he continued calmly, “relax. Today you’re going to hear from all the department heads, and you’ll get the full orientation on what we expect of you here at OTC. You’ll be released early to go back to your quarters. My advice to you is to get a good night’s rest, because at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow, zero month starts. Zero month, as many of you know, is intended to separate the wheat from the chaff and to remind all of you what it’s like to be an infantryman in this Corps. Some of you, I know, have been through the mill and you’re pretty tough customers already; others have had pretty soft duty since boot camp. Zero month will toughen the toughest among you. A lot of you won’t make it, but remember this: if you don’t make it, it’s because your buddies let you down out there. Pull together, people!
“One final thing. Don’t expect a break if you make it through zero month. After that is nine months of academic and practical exercises, and if you make it through all this shit, you’ll be qualified to command Marines. ‘Finishing school’ my ass. You get through here and ain’t nothing ever gonna seem impossible to you from then on.”
He turned and stalked off the stage.
Manny Ubrik turned to Daly and said, “Whew! He must have been talking about me when he made that remark about some of us having soft duty! The hardest training I’ve had in years was what Gunny Dubois gave us, back on Solden, and that was a while back. Damn, Jak, I ain’t lookin’ forward to this zero month malarkey!”
“Ah, Manny, relax! We’ll make it through. We’ll help each other along. It’ll be a snap!”
It wasn’t.
Zero Month, Marine OTC
Zero month was divided into three phases. The first phase took place on the OTC campus and at nearby training areas and was designed first to assess, and then to develop, each candidate’s military skills and physical and mental endurance. The candidates ran everywhere. Sit-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups tortured them even in their dreams, when they did dream, which was seldom because they slept the dreamless coma of the physically exhausted. When they weren’t running obstacle courses and enduring twenty-kilometer forced marches with full kit, they practiced squad and platoon combat operations, land navigation, and patrol techniques. And, of course, practical demonstration of marksmanship skills with all types of infantry assault weapons.
No exception was made for gender. If the female candidates were able to keep up, they were kept on. But even Jak Daly, who arrived in excellent physical condition, found himself straining at times to keep up the murderous pace. Partly that was because he spent a lot of his energy helping other candidates, especially during the marches and patrols. The most grateful recipient of this help was Manny Ubrik, who honestly acknowledged he would not have made it without Daly at his side. Plenty of candidates did not make it.
Age was not a factor either. The oldest candidate was a gunnery sergeant in his fifties, a scarred, implacably tough Marine NCO who never fell behind in anything. He was in the same company as Daly and Ubrik, but in another platoon, though all the candidates in the brigade got to know him by reputation if not sight. So thoroughly noncommissioned was this man, Gunnery Sergeant Folsom Braddocks, that the tactical officers had difficulty remembering to call him “Candidate,” the obligatory form of address for the budding officers in OTC, and often, to the suppressed grins of all within hearing, called him “Gunny.” And even the foulmouthed Lieutenant Stiltskein was afraid to address him as anything but “Candidate Braddocks.” Rumor had it that he was sent to OTC to get rid of him because he was such a hard-shell and independent-minded Old Corps NCO.
The youngest candidate was a petite lance corporal of only twenty-five named Beverly Nasaw, who was assigned to the same platoon as Daly and Ubrik. On the range she fired a “possible,” a perfect score, with the infantry blaster, only one of three Marines in the entire brigade who achieved that remarkable feat. Daly admired Beverly’s modesty, endurance, fortitude, and can-do spirit; she was always ready to pitch in when someone needed help. During breaks and hurried meals the two fell into an easy camaraderie, and Jak used those occasions to try to persuade Beverly to volunteer for Force Reconnaissance duty. She’d make a great counterpoint to the Queen of Killers, the soulless Bella Dwan. Daly began looking forward to liberty, when maybe he could get to know Beverly better. He had started thinking she would turn into the kind of ensign he himself wanted to be.
And then there was the ubiquitous Lieutenant Stiltskein, “Rumple,” as he was known at first; but by the end of the initial phase everyone was calling him by other, less printable, names. Lieutenant Rumple never seemed to tire and he was everywhere, screaming and cursing at the candidates even when they were performing the physical exercises properly. Compared to Rumple, not even the physically fit were fit; the man’s endurance was phenomenal. The candidates came to hate Lieutenant Stiltskein, but at the same time they were in complete awe of the man. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they moved to the second phase of zero month and left Rumple behind at Main Side.
Phase two took place in a swamp forty kilometers from OTC. The candidates got there on foot. That phase was designed to test the candidates under conditions of extreme mental and physical stress through practical exercises in extended platoon-level patrol operations in an extremely hostile physical environment. Throughout they were subjected to constant harassment by “aggressor” forces laying ambushes, sniper attacks, and frequent nightly perimeter probes. Nobody got much sleep during that phase. And there was one fatality. A candidate drowned during an expedient stream-crossing exercise. After an attempt to recover the woman’s body failed, the instructor asked Daly, who was acting platoon commander at the time, what to do next. It was Beverly who had disappeared into the fast-moving torrent. Without hesitation Daly responded, “Continue the mission, sir.” Beverly’s badly decomposed body was only recovered weeks later by a special graves registration team on loan to OTC from one of the army schools.
Phase three took place in the mountains. For that phase the candidates enjoyed the luxury of being airlifted into a mountain range about one hundred kilometers from Oceanside. Once there they practiced squad and platoon operations in a mountain environment, learning about knots, belays, anchor points, rope management, and the fundamentals of climbing and rappelling. During the following exercises they performed patrol missions requiring the use of their newfound mountaineering skills. When the phase was finished, they performed an extended, one-hundred-kilometer route march back to the OTC campus. For that event they were joined by the indestructible Lieutenant Rumple Stiltskein. That worthy, totally unfazed by the heat and the pace, ran up and down the company column, screaming imprecations at the foot-weary Marines. Several candidates admitted later they had actually contemplated landing a rifle butt on the back of the lieutenant’s head. Suddenly Gunny Braddocks’s powerful voice, from near the end of the column where the dust was thickest, began reciting an irreverent cadence ditty.
“Had a cook in Company C
“Sent him off to OTC.
“And all that fool [rest one count] learned to do
“Was [rest one count] boil water and burn the stew!”
Braddocks had a large repertoire of cadence calls and he went through them all. As they got more irreverent—and dirtier—and they spread through the column to the lead platoon, the weary candidates’ feet seemed to move faster, their packs grew lighter, and their weapons hung easier off their sore shoulders.
By the time the march was over, several candidates in Daly’s platoon swore they’d actually seen old Rumple smile.