I think that was the only time I ever impressed Sergeant Zim, even faintly. His eyebrows went up an eighth of an inch and his eyes widened slightly. "So? You were extraordinarily fortunate." He added, "When you answer his letter—if you don't mind—you might say that Ship's Sergeant Zim sends his respects."
"Yes, sir. Oh... I think maybe he sent you a message, sir."
"What?"
"Uh, I'm not certain." I took out the letter, read just: " ‘ -- if you should happen to run across any of my former mates, give them my warmest greetings.' Is that for you, sir?"
Zim pondered it, his eyes looking through me, somewhere else. "Eh? Yes, it is. For me among others. Thanks very much." Then suddenly it was over and he said briskly, "Nine minutes to parade. And you still have to shower and change. On the bounce, soldier."
The young recruit is silly -- ‘e
thinks o' suicide.
‘E's lost ‘is gutter-devil; ‘e ‘asin't
got ‘is pride;
But day by day they kicks ‘im,
which ‘elps ‘im on a bit,
Till ‘e finds ‘isself one mornin'
with a full an' proper kit.
Gettin' clear o' dirtiness, gettin'
done with mess,
Gettin' shut o' doin' things
rather-more-or-less.
Rudyard Kipling
I'm not going to talk much more about my boot training. Mostly it was simply work, but I was squared away—enough said.
But I do want to mention a little about powered suits, partly because I was fascinated by them and also because that was what led me into trouble. No complaints—I rated what I got.
An M. I. lives by his suit the way a K-9 man lives by and with and on his doggie partner. Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves "mobile infantry" instead of just "infantry." (The other half are the spaceships that drop us and the capsules we drop in.) Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence ("intelligence" in the military meaning; a man in a suit can be just as stupid as anybody else only he had better not be), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability.
A suit isn't a space suit—although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor—although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn't a tank—but a single M. I. private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted if anybody was silly enough to put tanks against M. I. A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in (like burning down a house to get one flea!). Contrariwise we can do many things that no ship—air, submersible, or space—can do.
"There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time -- we've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.
We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!"
Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, and force it to surrender or die -- without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there. I wouldn't know; I'm not a genius, I'm an M. I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job and I might be some help on it, too.
Maybe someday they'll get everything nice and tidy and we'll have that thing we sing about, when "we ain't a-gonna study war no more." Maybe. Maybe the same day the leopard will take off his spots and get a job as a Jersey cow, too. But again, I wouldn't know; I am not a professor of cosmo-politics; I'm an M. I. When the government sends me, I go. In between, I catch a lot of sack time.
But, while they have not yet built a machine to replace us, they've surely thought up some honeys to help us. The suit, in particular.
