Warzone: Nemesis: A Novel of Mars (24 page)

Our driver, Corporal Heily gave us our travel rules. “You are not to ask or reveal your real names to anyone in this van. We will be eating in the van when we do eat. I’ll go into the establishment and order our food “to go.” You will not get out. Stretch breaks will be done on desert highways when there’s no traffic. We will have bathroom breaks at small gas stations along the way. When we stop, do your business and get back in the van. You are not allowed to wander around or talk with civilians. I’ll do all of the talking. If you can’t avoid a civilian, keep the conversation short and respectful.” Our driver was not very talkative; he only spoke when he had to, and nothing more. I got to know the men that rode with me in the van, as much as you can without real names, that is. We were all either marines or sailors. We all had one thing in common. We were not ready to quit fighting communists. You might say we all had some unfinished business.

Twenty-two hours later we arrived at an undisclosed location somewhere in the New Mexico desert. We’d passed barbed wire and private property signs about fifty miles back. We pulled up to a group of barracks and stopped. The driver left us alone in the bus without saying a word. About a minute later, a door opened and a very large black man in a uniform I didn’t recognize stuck his head into the bus. He started screaming at the top of his lungs in the most intimidating way imaginable. “You sorry excuse for human beings, get out of my bus! No! You are not human beings, you are whale crap, and it is my duty to my country to make sure each and every one of you fails this training! MOVE IT! MOVE IT! MOVE IT!” Everyone was trying to get out at once. There were four exits: two front doors, side sliding door and a rear door. We looked like a bunch of cockroaches surprised by someone turning the light on at night. When we finally got out, we were made to fall into formation.

The man that startled us out of the van was even more intimidating as he stalked up and down our line, sizing us up and eyeing us with contempt. “My name is Master Sergeant Darkside. You are training for a nameless elite force of the United States of America which has no affiliation with the five military branches, to fight communists. You are never to speak of this unit in public. As far as the American public knows, you are all dead, and as such, I can do anything I want with you. I’m your Senior Drill Instructor! You will refer to me as Senior Drill Instructor or Sir! Each time you address me you will start with sir and end with sir! I am not your friend! My last class had a seventy percent dropout rate, but I’m on a learning curve right now.” He smiled for a moment as his eyes shone with appreciation for his own accomplishment. “This time I expect to wash out more of you, maybe all of you, as you are much more pitiful than the last class. This class is twelve weeks long. If there is any defect or weakness in you, I will find it. I will exploit it with every mean and evil trick I have at my disposal.” His eyes bored holes into me with that last remark “If I wash out all of you, I get to spend the rest of the training session chasing women and drinking beer in southern California… and working on my suntan.”

He paused to see if anyone cracked a smile thinking of a man so black talking about getting a tan. I was fairly petrified and his joke didn’t faze me one bit. “Anyone who is unusually stubborn that tries to deprive me of my liberty will suffer. There are two other instructors, Sergeant First Class Ironsides and Staff Sergeant Iron Fist. We are to be obeyed without question. You will not talk back, make excuses, or let down your teammates. We turn the lights out at twenty-two hundred each night. Before we turn the lights on at zero four hundred each morning, you will hit the floor and begin dressing. You will eat your meals without talking, keep your sleeping area clean and orderly and make your bed each morning after dressing. You will be taught how to make a proper bed, and I better never see a wrinkle or crease in the sheets or blankets. You are not to tell any of the other trainees your real name, or ask theirs. You will be identified in the following manner.” He pointed to each man in turn and said, “Jones, Smith, Williams, Carter, Holmes, Lewis, White, Black, Green, and Brown.” (I was now Smith) “You are to join the rest of the trainees that arrived yesterday. Line up, single file and report to the quartermaster to receive your gear and uniforms.”

I was issued a seabag and two new khaki uniforms. They marched us to the barracks, ordered us to put on one of the uniforms and instructed us to pack the contents of our seabag in the footlocker at the foot our beds. Once we were in uniform, MSG Darkside spoke once more. “You are to report to the armory to receive your training rifle. The armory is the last building on the left. MOVE IT! MOVE IT! MOVE IT!”

We all lined up and marched in quick time to the armory. We met SSG Iron Fist there, who handed each of us a cadet’s training rifle that weighed about the same as a sniper rifle, with a rifle strap and a fake sniper scope. “Okay ladies, this is my sniper rifle. I had better never see you without it. You will carry it during all of your training. You will keep one hand on it while you eat, and it will be placed next to your bed while you sleep. DO NOT lose my rifle! There will be hell to pay if you do! The reason that this isn’t a real rifle is that we don’t give a real rifle to little sissy girls. You have to prove that you are a man before that will ever happen. I seriously doubt any of you will ever get a real rifle.”

He stopped speaking, and suddenly a look of unbelief emerged on his face, as though he was in charge of the worst bunch of idiots alive. “What’re you looking at? Fall in, in front of the building!” he screamed.

After we fell out, he eyed us like an eagle looking at a mouse. “That rifle is your companion. The day that I catch you without hand on it or its sling, you are through. You will even do push-ups with one hand on the rifle. The only exceptions are when you are asleep or in the shower. When showering, it had better be just outside the shower, but don’t let it get wet! The proper placement of your rifle when you sleep, and until you are dressed is against the wall, within three feet of you at all times. You will find my favorite form of character building, or in most of your cases, washing you out, is to run. Run, run, run.” For the first time he smiled and I knew we were in trouble. “There are twenty trainees that arrived yesterday, nearly as sorry as you are. We will now join them. Fall in, single file, double time.”

We followed him to the end of the compound where a class of twenty men was still doing pushups from when he walked away and left them. He ordered them to fall in with us, and we started running. Considering this was a desert, he seemed to be holding back from what he would have done in a milder climate. Even so, it was brutal. I was acclimated to jungle humidity, and this was a stark contrast. We ran, then we walked and then we ran some more. We stopped to get some shade every once in a while, but the instructors made good use of the time by lecturing us on communism and freedom. When they decided we were up to it again, there was more running and walking, running and walking.

On the second day, we were joined by another sixteen trainees. By the end of the second week, they adding rock climbing and repelling with a sixty-pound backpack to the routine, with ropes and climbing gear. I began to notice a pattern. They ran us very hard early in the morning and just before dark, when it was cooler. During the heat of the day, we did physical training or pt inside of the main training building, or on the shaded side of a mountain.

We had a weird setup with the instructors. Two of them were
pushers
, who seemed to delight in torturing us in any way they could, but SFC Ironsides was the
encourager
. The encourager’s job was to try to get the trainees to keep going, appealing to their sense of teamwork and honor. He would say, “If you quit, you’ll let your teammates down. You don’t want to be a quitter, do you?” The idea was for the pushers to push us past what we thought we were capable of, and the encourager would help us draw on anything else we had left. Even with the encouragement, by week four we were down to thirty trainees.

Normally you at least had the personal pride of knowing you were training for the Marine Corps Force Recon, Navy SEALs, or Army Rangers. In those elite units, while the instructors were tearing your pride down, you were developing another sense of pride in what you were training to become. It was not so in this case. The ones who washed out were never to know what they washed out of. This way they couldn’t reveal anything about the organization. I knew nothing other than I was training to fight communists.

If I left, I would be resurrected “from the dead” and discharged. I was sure there was a bumper crop of ex-military pilots competing for jobs with the major airlines, with the war in ‘Nam winding down. Besides, even if I didn’t know where we were going, the idea of continuing the unfinished business with the communists had hooked me. I was here to stay. I was determined that they couldn’t kill me and anything short of that couldn’t stop me.

Then it happened. During week six of the training, one of the trainees known as Green, collapsed. The instructors sent us on a light duty drill with SFC Ironsides, our encourager, while they took him to a medic. It was later learned that he’d died from a congenital heart defect that he had from birth that no one had caught in the physicals. The stakes had now been raised. SFC Ironsides gave us the news about Green. He said it was a tragedy, but it couldn’t have been foreseen. He told us to take heart. Our class would be getting a strenuous physical examination before we resumed training. All of us were examined again from head to toe by a new doctor and pronounced fit to resume. I’d convinced myself that they would have to run me off or kill me to make me quit. Now I was unsure about whether or not I could die in training.

By the end of the week, we were down to twenty-two trainees. The death of Green was disheartening to some. Each man knew he could die in training, and the washout rate increased.

Once the pushers were convinced we were fit and that we weren’t going to die on them, they turned up the pressure. Now we were able to run all of the time, except for the hottest part of the day. The order of each morning was to perform a circus, which was doing PT until you collapsed, which we despised. There didn’t seem to be a minimum standard for us; we just had to give one hundred percent. It was their job to push us to the limit and beyond. At first I thought they were trying to transform us into supermen. It became clear to me that the goal was to keep the ones who couldn’t accept failure as an option, who would see the possibilities and not the obstacles. In short, they wanted men who were physically and mentally tough, who could get the job done.

By week ten, it became apparent that if I were going to finish, I had to be able to ignore my body’s protest for lack of proper food, sleep, and water. I had to force it to function on autopilot. Every part of my physical being cried out for rest and it seemed I functioned at times asleep on my feet. Like the myth about earwigs that bored into a man’s ear and then into his brain, the desire for a big, fat, greasy cheeseburger had burrowed itself into my mind and would not leave. I had to push thoughts of pleasant food out of my mind or I feared I’d go insane.

Early one morning I was doing pushups. I noticed a scorpion crawling in a direct line toward me. By now, though, I was more scared of MSG Darkside than that scorpion. Even so, I believed that if I were stung I might end up back home, or at least set back to another class. Not willing to repeat the last ten weeks if I could help it, I stopped at the top of the upstroke of a push up.

“Sir, Senior Drill Instructor, there’s a scorpion crawling toward my hand, sir.”

MSG Darkside walked briskly toward the scorpion scarcely four inches from my left hand and crushed it with his boot. He looked at me, still frozen in the upstroke of a push up and screamed at the top of his lungs.

“You worthless piece of whale crap, did anyone tell you to quit doing pushups? On your feet!” SSG Iron Fist took over his class while MSG Darkside took me on my very own circus. He pushed me outside until it was too hot, and then pushed me in the shade and indoors. When the sun grew low in the sky, he pushed me outside some more. When I was about to collapse on my feet, MSG Darkside ordered me to attention. He got right in my face. “Why are you here!” his scream held the force of cannon fire aimed at my resolve, and splitting my ears. You are taking up valuable space in this class that could be used to train someone that’s a real man. You will never make it. Why are you torturing yourself? Go ahead and quit. You and I both know you want to.”

“Sir, Senior Drill Instructor, no sir!” He spent a good ten minutes trying to convince me I was worthless, and that all of my pain was going to be for naught because he was going to wash me out anyway. I dug in and tried to ignore every word, but my body was almost to the point of breaking. Finally, he dismissed me.

I was too tired to eat that night, so I skipped supper, showered and fell into bed. Zero four hundred came very early, and I nearly didn’t get out of bed before the light switch clicked on. Now my error of not forcing myself to eat was catching up with me. I almost couldn’t make it through my morning PT before breakfast. Breakfast was too little, too late, and I devoured it like a ravening wolf. “Brown” was watching me and knew what was happening. We’d become very tight during training, and even though he was very hungry, he slipped some extra toast under the table to me. My eyes searched his, imploring if he was sure and he nodded. Giving him an appreciative look, I stuffed the toast into my mouth. I was determined that I’d pay him back. He was now more than a trainee. He was my brother. It took determination to overcome the setback of not eating anything the night before.

Within two days, I seemed to be back to normal, if normal is being exhausted, starving and running on reserves. We started doing daily drills carrying a man across our shoulders. We carried him until we were unable to carry him any longer, then we switched. The idea of not leaving a man behind was drilled into us. Individuals were washed out. They were training teams. By the end of week ten, we were down to twelve trainees.