I glanced at the colonel. “They make it look good, don’t they,” he muttered.
The computer-created band played stirring martial music while a commentator identified my unit as the group that “annihilated the defenders of a key planet in a conquest that took only four days.”
Only four days, I thought. Four days in hell.
The entire show was over in less than ninety seconds.
“What do you think?” Uxley asked me as the screen went dark.
I felt anger simmering inside me. “A kernel of fact wrapped in a big phony sugar coating,” I said.
He nodded and began to pour his first drink of the evening. “Got to keep the civilians happy, Orion. Got to keep up their morale.”
“Really?”
He looked at me through bloodshot eyes. “Hell, man, most of ’em don’t even realize there’s a war going on unless we show them stuff like this.”
“Then why don’t they show them combat scenes? Why don’t they show some of the tapes our helmet recorders took on Bititu? Then they’d see there’s a war being fought!”
Uxley shook his head. “Don’t want to scare them, Orion. The deep thinkers upstairs, the psychotechs and politicians, they don’t want to upset the civilians with blood and pain. Just tell ’em that we’re winning, but there’s a long haul ahead. Light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what they feed the civilians.”
“Crap,” I said.
“I suppose it is,” Uxley agreed calmly. Then he took a big swallow of whisky. “I believed in this war, Orion. I really believed it was important to fight for the Commonwealth. That’s why I joined up. Volunteered. No one forced me. I left my family as soon as I graduated university and joined the army.”
“What did your family think of that?”
He shrugged, his sorrowful eyes looking into the past. “Father was proud. Mother cried. My sisters thought I was crazy.”
“And now?” I avoided looking at his legs.
“Who knows? Haven’t seen any of them in years. We would hardly recognize each other, I suppose. Too much has happened, we’ve moved too far apart.”
“Wouldn’t you like to go home?”
He gulped at his whisky. “The army’s my home, Orion. I have no other home now. Just the army.”
Another night we got onto the subject of his legs.
“They tried regeneration, but something in my metabolism fouled up the process. These plastic jobs are all right, though. I can get around just fine and they only hurt if I have to be on my feet for more than an hour or so.”
Then he started once again on the story of how he lost his legs.
“Training, Orion,” he told me. “That’s the important thing. Training. It’s not rational to expect a man to stand and fight when he’s being shot at. A sane man would turn and run for safety. Takes training to make him fight.”
“Even our cloned troopers?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. They’re humans. They want to live, cloned or not. Got to train them to stand up to battle, not to run when all hell’s breaking loose on them.”
“And train them to kill,” I said.
“Oh, yes, killing’s an important part of it. No one’s figured out how to win a battle without killing, despite all the scientists and computers.”
“Brigadier, what’s going to happen to my troop?”
“Happen?” He blinked his bleary eyes. “They’ll be reassigned, what else?”
“Don’t they get any time for R and R? Furloughs?”
Uxley sat up straighter in his chair. “You’re talking about troopers, Orion. They were made to fight. That’s what they’re for. They’re not real people, like you and me. We’ve got families and friends and a life back home. They don’t. They’re nothing but soldiers. What would they do with a furlough? They’ve got no place to go, no families, no home except the army.”
“But you said you’ve drifted apart from your family, your home,” I pointed out.
“So what? I’ve still got ’em. They’re still there if I decide to go back to them. You’ve got a family and home, don’t you?”
I wondered what to say, finally decided on, “No, I don’t. I’m—an orphan.”