Copyright (c) 2000 Theodore Beale. All rights reserved.
It guess it might surprise you that even though I'm a Marine myself, I'm not a big fan of women in the military. Really, I'm not. I don't know what those Sisterhood whackos were thinking when they talked the politicians into twisting the Army's arm to clear us for combat ops. I'm not talking about ops like the comtrol I'm doing either, I mean the straight-up foxhole business where you're hauling a rifle around out there on the front lines.
Almost everybody who was ever in the armed forces knew that stupid policy was just a disaster waiting to happen, of course, and all the Pentagon spin in the world couldn't save it after the 162nd was hit by Syrian regulars on the Golan. I hope a few of those turnip brains in the Defense Department took it in the keester for that one - it's not like anyone in the real world ever thought the Rome Addendum was going to hold up forever.
Oh, you covered that? How interesting. And you seriously thought it was the real deal? My, oh my, you media types never change. You believe anything anyone tells you with a straight face, don't you. That's just sad.
Anyhow, I guess the pencil necks must have thought the flashpoint would be over in East Jerusalem, but they forgot that the Arabs usually have to team up in order to get their nerve together for another whack at the Zionists. Fortunately, the Israeli's never put much faith in the, oh, what was that silly name they were calling them again? Right, "American Amazons". Thank you. Well, without the Israelis, it would have been a lot worse. But it was embarrassing seeing our finest ladies in full retreat from a jumped-up gang of third-raters, and when CNN showed those horrible pictures of those poor girls' naked bodies being strung up on display for the cameras, well, that was the end of that particular experiment.
Thank goodness for that! After the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs resigned, all the chickenpoop generals who just a few weeks before had been bragging about how their girls were trained and vicious killers were back to beating their chests about the need to keep women out of harms way. What a bunch of hypocrites. I feel terrible and sometimes I think part of it was my fault, except I know that it wasn't. Not really.
Why do I say that? Well, once they gave me that medal, you know, a lot of people used it as an excuse to prove we were just as good in combat as men. But most of them who did that just don't understand how things work in the field these days. I wasn't fighting anyone, I was just doing what I had to do to save my guys. Maybe it's a maternal instinct or something, I don't know, like the mama bear thing.
Sure, I'd be happy to tell you about it. It's funny how no one ever bothers to ask what really happened, they just focus on the medal and all the historic nonsense about implications and whatever. But no one ever tries to be a hero, at least I don't think so, it's just that you do what needs to be done, and sometimes, when it's all over, people think you did something special.
Did you cover the war in Switzerland, by the way? No? Okay, well, just so you're clear on things, I was with the Second Marines, with Captain Gorman's Bravo Company. The Swiss voted to pull out of the Union about three weeks before we flew over to Europe, but the Euros managed to sneak in ten divisions just before we landed. The original plan was for us to debark near the French border, but Geneva was captured on the first day, so we were diverted to the Lugano airport, which is about thirty kilometers north of the Italian border.
It was crazy. Half the Swiss were collaborating with the Euros, and the other half were up in arms. And I mean literally up in arms, because those people have more guns per capita than a Chicago drug gang. It was mostly older stuff, but it would make a hole in you all the same. Light machine guns, anti-tank rockets, even some SAMs, and they kept this stuff in their houses! It was insane, but that was why they were able to tie up so many EU troops for as long as they did.
The local militia kept the pressure off us, which saved our fannies since we were pretty much sitting ducks. The President sent us in under some strict fire-only-if-fired-upon rules, and we were really unhappy about that. You can't shoot back when you're dead. Fortunately, the part of Switzerland we landed in is rabidly anti-EU, and it wasn't long before the Swiss turned one of their mountain compounds over to us to keep us out of harms way. You should try to see one if you get the chance. The engineering is impressive, and it's funny to see how growing up in a neighborhood of fascists seems to spark their creativity. I guess a little paranoia goes a long way.
We didn't actually go into action for another two weeks, until after Lausanne got torched. That was the last straw for the President, and we received our orders only a few hours later. Since the Italian Alpini who were supposed to be invading the south were still sitting in Milano, we were sent north to where the action was. People make fun of the Alpini sometimes and maybe they have more good looks than sense, but I met a few of them after the war and I liked them. They're not stupid. It's a lot easier to drink cappucino and pick up girls in your snazzy uniform than it is to climb mountains with Swiss snipers picking off your buddies.
I stayed at the BatOps center we'd set up under Mount San Salvatore with the other comtrollers. Switzerland's network is very good, with a rock-solid infrastructure almost as good as the one we were used to back home, so Major Cummings figured we could better support the boys from where we were. A lost connection can be rehooked, but it's hard to replace your comtrols once a bomb wipes them out. I was pretty happy about his decision, as you can imagine. When the enemy has air superiority, there's nothing like about a million tons of rock over your head!
The boys had to go about eighty kilometers north to hold the San Gottardo pass against two divisions of French troops that were working their way up the RhÛne. I think the Union generals were planning to use them to trap the Swiss regulars who were still holding Zurich against the Germans. Most of the French Swiss were pro-Euro, so we knew the French would move through Vaud and Zermatt without much trouble. The major was just hoping we'd get to the pass before them.
And we got there first, although not without losing twelve men when the convoy was strafed in the Lepontines. None of mine, thank God! It could have been a lot worse, but either the Euros weren't being very smart about using their air or they were worried about those Bearcats our Navy friends had sitting on their carriers in the Adriatic. They were too far away to give us close support, unfortunately, but they were near enough to keep the Euros on their toes.
The boys weren't blind, though. We had our RATs up, and combined with the regular reports we were getting from Swiss intel, we had a good idea of what was going on and where the enemy was. But the RATs were the best; they were small enough that they were hard to see, harder to hit, and their direct satellite links meant we could stay patched into the boys' battlesuits as long as we could keep one of the little guys flying somewhere over their heads.
The boys didn't have much time to get dug in, but they did manage to hook up with a company of Swiss militia guarding the pass. The Captain said they were pretty happy to see us, which you can understand. But you have to hand it to them, they were all set to take on two divisions of regulars with or without us.
One of the local girls told me this story once, and I'm sure it isn't true, but it's still a pretty good one. During World War Two, there was this Nazi general who was talking to one of his Swiss counterparts sometime after the fall of France. The Swiss had told the Nazis that they had six hundred thousand men under arms waiting for a German invasion, and the Nazi general wanted to know what the Swiss general thought he would do with his men considering that the Nazis had an army of one point two million men ready to send across the border. They say the Swiss general thought about it for a second, then told the German, "Obviously we will have to shoot twice."
That sounds too good to be true, but you know, Hitler never did invade Switzerland. I guess even he had more sense than those power-mad Fourth Reichniks in Brussels.
You're right, I'm sorry, I did get off on a bit of a tangent there. Well, getting back to what happened at the pass… we didn't get dug in, but we saw them coming, and Captain Gorman decided to pull a little surprise out of his hat. You see, we can operate at night almost as well as we can in the daytime, thanks to our technology. When you consider that our enemies don't have all our little toys and tricks, then you can see why we like to fight at night. Here, let me explain a little bit, otherwise nothing's going to make sense to you.
I can't tell you exactly how everything works, you understand, but you should know that while everyone gets excited about the hardware, the software is really what we depend on. Yes, you're right, the BOCCI software. It stands for Battle Operations Combat Communication Interface system, but we usually call it CeeCee. There's a lot of different programs that make up the system, but there's five primary components that we really depend on. The scan interpolator is the most important piece, since it ID's potentials and probables and maps them on a 3D map which we can download to the boys. No, we don't do it real-time, that puts too much of a drain on the system and everything slows down. Processors are fast these days, but they're not that fast! Reality is what, sixty million polygons a second?
Anyhow, once the shooting starts, we're basically directing traffic. Go here, kill that, watch out for this, that, or the other thing. Each comtrol is responsible for his own platoon, but we're equipped to handle a company of thirty-six if we have to. And since we have a better idea of what's going on than anyone else, we have an acting rank of captain when we're live in the BatOps. Some of the old school grunts don't like that much, but nobody who's been through a real firefight questions the system. Things move so fast; there's not always time to relay orders through the platoon leader.
So as I said, Captain Gorman decided that the last thing the Frenchies would be expecting was for us to hit them. They outnumbered us about twenty to one, and as far as we knew, they didn't even know we were there. They'd taken a fair number of casualties already, but almost all of them were to snipers. The Swiss like to plink from a distance, which makes sense in the mountains, but that's a tactic which doesn't work so well when you're supposed to hold a specific position. The Major liked the idea, and since Captain Gorman came up with it, Bravo got tabbed for the assault.
I had most of the terrain mapped out ahead of time, thanks to my RATs, so I napped all day to make sure I'd be fresh and ready. Once night fell, it wasn't hard to find the Frenchies. RAT eyes are multi-wave, and in those cold mountains, it was a piece of cake to map out all of the bad boys once they settled down for the night. Even if I didn't have CeeCee to do it for me, I think I could have mapped all the data myself if I'd had the time. There's not so many things that match the size and heat signal of a human body, and those Euros didn't even seem to be equipped with body masks.
Stacy lost one of her RATs to a hotshot rifleman, but no one even fired at any of my three. I don't think the Frenchis even knew what they were, to tell the truth. Bravo infiltrated early, but the Captain waited until oh two hundred to hit them. And we hit them hard. Boy, did we hit them hard.
It was brutal, but on the screens, it was beautiful too. One minute, there's nothing but orange glows on the heat screen and red probables on the scan map, and just a few of them are moving, then you hear the Captain shouting "Go-go-go" in your ear and the color just explodes. There's these stacatto green flashes where our boys are firing, and hot white splashes that are the explosions from rockets and grenades or whatever. Then the reds on the scan map go purple as the interpolator starts picking up kills, or they start to shimmer and split into yellow potentials as the troops wake up and start moving.
I can't even describe what it's like. I don't remember breathing, or thinking. You just react, trying to keep up with all the data that's flooding in through your eyes and your ears. You're trying to keep one eye on your boys' vitals, another one on the scan map, another one on the heat screen… you get the picture. Meanwhile, you've got your left earphone filled with the traffic from the platoon net, and the right one is full of BatOps chatter.
It might sound strange to you, but I tell you, you never feel quite as alive as you do in the BatOps once the shooting starts. It's like running on a treadmill that just keeps speeding up. It's really different than the drills, because you know those green lights are your boys, and those red lights are the bad guys trying to snuff them out. And you deal with the overload, you just deal with it, because it's your job to keep those green lights glowing!
Things went great at first. I could see from the zoom map that Captain Gorman was directing our attack right through the heart of the lead division's encampment. Kind of risky, but that was his style. And it wasn't as dangerous as it sounds, because we couldn't afford to just sit there and hope they couldn't find any artillery or air support. Most of the company hit the center, but the Captain had two squads off to the right flank, I think they were two of Britney's, she sits next to me, and they didn't do much more than make noise, but they managed to make the attack look a lot bigger than it was.
The purple count was going up fast with every pass of the interpolater, and every time we saw a group of reds start gathering, we'd direct a fireteam towards it to break them up. They just couldn't get organized. More and more reds were going yellow and scattering off toward the edges, the rear elements were obviously panicking, and I started to think the whole division might break and run.
Then everything shut down. I mean everything! Well, we still had a voice connect, but we lost everything else. My windows went black at the same time everyone else's did, and for a second, there was just this big silence in the BatOps. Then Captain Thompson, he's our commander, started screaming, "what the hell is going on?" and everyone started shouting at the same time but no one knew what was happening. Some people thought an EMP had gone off, and Stacy, she sat next to me on the other side, she started crying and saying something about a tactical nuke. That was silly, though, because we were still talking to our guys. Plus, even the Frenchies aren't dumb enough to light off something like that in the middle of their own troops.
The boys were trying to keep it together, but you could tell from the sound of their voices that they were scared. They weren't used to being cut off like this, and even though they were trained for it, the reality was a lot different than the drills. They still had their nightvision, but now they were pretty much surrounded by a whole lot of Euros without anyone to look out for them or tell them where the next attack was coming from. Lieutenant Chavez, my platoon leader, was telling our guys to hold tight and that we'd be right back online any minute, but he didn't know, he was just trying to keep them from losing it. And he kept them together too, even though the Euros realized that we weren't coming at them anymore, and it wasn't long before they regrouped and counterattacked.
It was terrible. Just awful. I've never felt that helpless, just sitting there listening to my boys take incoming fire. I couldn't call for air support, for reinforcements, nothing. I asked Ricky, that's Lieutenant Chavez, if he thought they could withdraw, but the French were already in close contact and he didn't think that was possible. They were Marines, he said, and if they were going to go down, they'd do it fighting, not running. Semper fi! I almost started to cry myself when he said that.
Someone yelled that Riley was hit, and then Williams, the machine gunner, took a stray round in the hand. Everyone was just firing wildly, both my guys and the Euros, and I finally had to take off my headphones and think a second. What I realized, once my head cleared, was that our connection was still live. It was CeeCee that was crashed, not the OS or the netlink. It was easy to check that out too; what I did was fire up the Oxygen channel on Netstar eight point five. We weren't supposed to have personal software on the system, but you know, everybody did. I even remember what was on, it was that talk show with that nice old black lady.
So I knew it couldn't be the network, and that was when I remembered that CeeCee was designed around a Netstar core. An old core too, because everything the military has is about ten years out of date. I couldn't remember if it was Netstar three or four, but I was sure it was a few versions ago, back when the commlink had a tendency to freeze up. I knew what the solution was right away, to replace the old commlink with the new one.
Of course, there were about a million files in there, and I had no idea which one was the right one. And even if I did get the right one, who knows what else it might screw up. But things couldn't get any worse, my boys were dying out there, and when I looked around the BatOps, I could see no one else had any ideas. Captain Thompson looked like he was about to have a stroke, and most of the comtrols were crying or just staring helplessly at their keyboards.
So I just copied my whole Netstar directory over CeeCee's communications subdirectory. I shut my machine down, waited a second, and fired it back up again. I tell you, I've never been so happy as when I saw that stupid yellow logo swirling in front of my face, and it took me about ten seconds to get my earphones back on and log on to my boys. My RATs were still up, of course, since they go on autofly if they lose connection, and of all CeeCee's components, only the zoom screen wasn't working. Damn Microsoft! Maybe it wasn't their fault, but you'll never convince me. If it rains, it's their fault, as far as I'm concerned.
Since no one else was up, I took over the battalion net and started directing traffic. The French counterattack was centered on Bravo, so I just herded them back in a fighting withdrawal then guided Alpha and Charlie to spots where they could concentrate fire and keep the Euros from staying in contact with my guys. I almost started crying when I glanced at the vitals screen, because eight of the boys were hit and three were already dead. And Ricky was one of the KIAs. He must have been hit right after I went off the air. He was a real Marine. Without him, that whole platoon would have been wiped out for sure. He's the one who should have got the medal. I keep thinking that if I'd been faster, maybe I could have saved him, but I guess you never know.
And that's about it. The scanner said we killed almost two hundred French troops that night, and it's usually pretty close to accurate. A lot closer than the count the guys come up with anyhow, which is always at least three times too high. But however many it was, it sure put a scare into those Euros. They pulled back in a hurry, and didn't dare to come that way again. I guess they'll be pretty embarrassed if they ever find out how many men they were running from.
We got into a few more skirmishes after that, and later on we saw some heavy fighting with the Germans when the siege of Zurich was finally broken. That was pretty rough, but it was nothing like that awful night when we went offline.
The medal? I still think that was a mistake. I mean, sure, maybe I did save Bravo Company, but the way the reporters made it sound, you'd think I went in there with an M-86 and took on those two divisions of Euros all by myself. I don't think anyone realized that I wasn't ever within fifty miles of the shooting. Crazy, isn't it? But it's a nice little souvenir, and it reminds me of Ricky. He was a great guy, he was. Always smiling, always polite, and not so bad-looking either.
What am I doing now? Well, I didn't re-up, I guess you knew that. I love my country, and I'm proud to be a Marine, but once I understood how things worked around here, I decided I could best serve my country by taking the job they offered me at Microsoft. Testing bugs.