Like a Soldier: a 2300 Military Short Story
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Like A Soldier -A 2300AD Military Short Story- 1 Part I Earth In the beginning I shall starting this tale from the beginning, as all good stories should. I was born in Leeds, part of the West Riding Metroplex that stretches along the folds of the eastern side of the Pennine Hills of England. Although my family were not at all God fearing atheists I was christened James Henry Anderson in a small rural church not far from the city. My family was a fairly typical one for the time, my father held down two jobs and my mother one. I also had an elder brother, with whom it is fair to say I didn't get along. We lived in a crowded high-rise in Headingly, which was handily placed for my father's main job at the University of Leeds. My childhood was reassuringly average. School, sports and the usual brushes with those fine fellows in the West Yorkshire Constabulary. I was never a particularly good student, but I had the talent to make up for my lack of application. My real forte was in sports, rugby mainly (traditional League) but I dabbled in others, and in languages. My mother was of Flemish extraction and had insisted on a multi- lingual household, so I could happily bullshit in a scattering of major European languages. My last years of secondary schooling at Allwoodly Grammar coincided with the outbreak of the Kafer War and the fighting around Eta Bootis. Like most of my classmates I day dreamed of joining the Tanstaafl Free Legion and combing the alien forests of Aurore hunting down the Kafers. Real life documentaries have a lot to answer for! Unlike almost all of my classmates though, it wasn't a phase I grew out of. My family had never really had any military connections or inclinations, although my mother had done auxiliary national service in France in her youth. My father's side of the family was resolutely non- military, although certain parts had a recidivist bolshie spirit that had seen several distant cousins jailed on Crater for taking part in strike actions. At the time military service was looked down upon by many people as being a last resort, and was indeed the last major employment group which still recruited non-graduates. My decision to join the army was not an easy one to make, but as a 19 year old I could obtain a Tertiary Education Deferment certificate. The TED allowed non-graduates to join the army for up to three years, after which I could then leave and go to a civilian university or had to study for a qualification within the army's ranks. To be honest the chance of three years away from home, away from study and earning a real wage was a major spur for me, as it is for most of the army's younger recruits. The Armed Forces Careers Office in Leeds City Centre is an imposing and impressive sight, once past the drab, crumbling exterior that is. Inside it is dominated by slick displays from each of the services vying to attract the eye of the potential recruit. Sophisticated simulators vie with 3D movies, backed by old fashioned hard sell by a variety of immaculately uniformed servicemen. Like many I found that the army was the only service a non-graduate could join without being assigned to three years of scut work. I went with an open and relatively informed mind, knowing that an infantry post was likely to be what I ended up with. 'Well then son, which regiment do you want to join?' asked the Sergeant in the interview room. This had me slightly stumped, 'Er... the Yorkshire Regiment?' A friend of the family had served with this local unit before and had marked my card. 'The Yorkies?' mused the sergeant theatrically, 'a good unit, but the thing is lad you will probably end up serving for three years in Warminster and never get out of Britain.' He drummed his fingers on the desk, 'A lad like you would really want to use the time to get off-world, see the colonies… Do you know that my unit's Second Battalion is deployed on Aurore as we speak?' The man had managed to speak all of the magic recruiting keywords in two sentences, he had me hooked. 2 'Why what regiment is that?' I asked naively. He reached into his drawer and pulled something out and tossed it onto the desk, it was a maroon beret. 'Why lad, the Parachute Regiment!' It took several videos, a book and a week of further consideration for me to realise it but from that moment my fate was sealed and linked to the Paras. It wasn’t until later in training I found out the recruiting sergeant was also several thousand pounds richer thanks to a bonus paid for getting me into his regiment. The Hill I arrived at the Parachute Regiment Depot in Aldershot with a crowd of other apprehensive hopefuls on a coach from the bus station. We all looked so young and nervous. I later found out that the Paras had the largest proportion of young soldiers in the army. Aldershot was a depressing place, a showpiece for 22nd century institutional architecture. The Shot had been nuked by the Russians in the last millennium and to my eye could have done with another dose of the treatment. The training was gentle at first, mostly fitness work for the kids from the Metroplexes. I was relatively well off but others fell back, doomed to repeat the basic work again and again. The army had been under pressure in parliament to cut back the wastage of recruits in training and were throwing out only the very worst. But many quit on their own, obviously they had been taken in by the recruitment literature and not expected the pre-dawn starts. Most had been surprised by the pace of the work, conditioned by movies to expect to jog about the camp singing like the Americans, or moseying around in the Foreign Legion way. The lung-bursting cross country runs and brutal beasting sessions had come as a bit of a shock. Once the initial fitness phase had finished we got straight into the serious stuff. Tactics, weapons, more fitness, route marches but surprisingly little foot drill. 'Parachute Regiment fights, it doesn't fucking mince about!' was the answer I got when I asked why that was. We 'kids' were also joined by some older recruits at this stage who were a real mixed bunch. One of whom was a lanky Lancastrian lad who'd just been thrown out of the Foreign Legion for brawling after just three weeks of training. He had no real teeth and little conversation but was a tough, wiry little sod and the instructors approved of and tolerated his violent streak. Some others were foreigners from across the Commonwealth on and off-Earth, drawn by rumours of British intervention in the War. Training was tough and seemed to involve an inordinate amount of being wet and cold. We did things from the basics; we mastered old fashioned map and compass work before progressing to satellite nav aids. We all became marksmen with old fashioned iron sights and conventional rifles before moving onto gyro-stabilised gauss guns. And all through it we marched and marched across country, our classic Bergen backpacks almost becoming part of us. In camp we ran, 'Parachute Regiment runs! It doesn't fucking mince about!' We were soon as lean as greyhounds, in spite of the mounds of army food of dubious nutritional value we shovelled down at every opportunity. We learnt the history of the Regiment. From the mythical early years of D-Day and Arnhem, through the end of the 2nd Empire to the Falkland Islands. The 3rd World War vied with the establishment of the 3rd Empire, or New Commonwealth, as we should call it, for our attention. We were lectured by soldiers freshly returned from the French Arm on the progress of the war; we actually listened in those classes! We were soon full to the brim with information, weapons, tactics, signals, logistics - you name it, and the instructors were not above waking us in the middle of the night on exercise to test our knowledge either. The testing four weeks of P Company came and went, but wasn't the part of training most feared by the recruits. That was ‘The Hill’, or Section Battle Test Phase, every day for a week we moved from our harbour position above Catterick and were forced marched to a hill beyond Bellerby. Where we were told an enemy OP was located, and we attacked up it, once cleared we would come under simulated artillery fire and extract off the Hill. We'd run about six miles and set up a snap ambush, then we'd go and do it again, the sheer mindless repetition really knocked it out of you, but by now nobody was quitting who wasn't injured. Your mates wouldn't let you. What the Hill taught us was to be able to turn on the aggression even when you were on your last legs. 3 Parachute training was great, we did static-line drops, night jumps and even basic freefall jumps. It was all done on an RAF base and the discipline was so relaxed we could have almost have been on holiday. Then it was back to Aldershot to do some intensive foot drill in preparation for the final passing out parade, 'Parachute Regiment doesn't mince, but when it does mince it fucking does it properly!' My folks turned up to watch and I hope it was a proud day for them, myself I was a bit distracted as I had found out I was to be posted to the 6th Battalion out on the French Arm.